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(test comment, please ignore, will delete shortly)
The number of comments in these threads is getting fucking ridiculous.
You are not stuck in traffic. You are traffic.
Wouldn’t the idea that sexual selection is important be the perfect memetic weapon?
It’s a fantastic way to convince your enemies to do things that undermine their fitness.
Or even just to make people do whatever stupid shit you can think up. (It’s all social standing and the chicks dig it, never-mind that the reasoning is entirely circular – shhh now… women hate thinking, go and shoot that guy for me.)
That’s a good point.
I mean, it’s fairly obvious that the most important factor in determining how long people will survive is the level of technological advancement and coordination of the society they live in. [And, incidentally, given a certain level of advancement, the main avenues of natural selection are violence from others (or their cars) and demoralization.]
So, if you wanted to convince an enemy to weaken themselves, you would have to (1) convince them not to work so hard on technological advancement (2) seek to undermine social coordination.
I don’t think its any coincidence that most of the pick-up guys were former engineers/ scientists, and it’s certainly no coincidence that the manosphere is populated by people who view society as deeply divided.
We’re under memetic attack.
Did you just reply to yourself and say you had a good point?
Truth above modesty?
You’d have to make sure to convince the women too, though, not just the men – if you try to tell a guy that women love (insert self-destructive behavior here), but the kind of women he’s trying to attract demonstrably disapprove of it, he’s probably going to find that out pretty quickly and stop.
I don’t think so.
I think that the men who have sex with the most women are the ones who want to have sex with the most women. Where there is a will there is a way. Proximity less important now with invention of internet.
Even if you spend your time doing something bad… say playing video games… something that women disapprove of, women will still have sex with you.
So, the trick is, you say something like “Yeah, of course women say they don’t like you playing video games, but secretly they love it! That is exactly why they are having sex with you! After all [ insert bullshit evolutionary psychology here… I don’t know… playing video games demonstrates the manual dexterity that was vital for tool making in the neolithic…?]
So then you’ve got a bunch of guys spending all their time playing video games, convinced that playing video games makes them hot stuff, and convinced that anyone saying anything to the contrary simply proves them right.
But if those guys demonstrably get laid a lot less than other guys just like them who don’t play video games, that’s proof against their hypothesis. (And if they are indeed spending ALL their time playing video games, not doing athletics or earning money, LOLOLOL at the idea that they’ll be getting a lot of sex.) PUAs get an audience because their techniques have been proven to get users more sex, at least with a certain subset of women.
Also, video games are a bad example because they’re fun in and of themselves, so lots of guys will want to play regardless of whether or not it affects their sex lives. To really use sexual selection as a memetic weapon, you have to be able to convince people to do something that they don’t enjoy enough to do for its own sake – and that means it has to bring them demonstrable success with the opposite sex.
It’s quite a rare person whose evidence isn’t dictated by their beliefs.
I think that video games are a great example – doing exercise is fun in-and-of itself too… as is being cool… but a society in which these things are the major focus, is not strong.
Personally, I can’t see any good reason why smoking should attract the opposite sex (except that someone wanted to sell cigarettes) – but the funny thing is that you *make* these things true if you’re sufficiently skilled at manipulation.
“I think that the men who have sex with the most women are the ones who want to have sex with the most women.”
I feel like this fact goes overlooked a lot in discussions of sexual dynamics, game, etc. Regardless of how you look, how much money you make, etc. trying really hard to have sex with a lot of women is probably the number one factor that determines whether a man has sex with a lot of women.
I think there is an erroneous assumption that, because men are naturally more inclined to the “lots of low investment mates rather than one or two high investment mates” strategy, that therefore, what all men, really want, deep down, is to have sex with lots of women. On the one hand, most men, if they could have a lot of consequence-free sex with a lot of women without any effort, probably would. On the other, that does not mean that this isn’t more or less important to different men.
On some level, for example, there is a part of me that would like to have sex with a lot of women. But that part of me is very much in conflict with and quite heavily suppressed by a number of other factors including my desire not to mess up my relationship with my fiancee, the fact that I already have as much sex as I really want to with my fiancee, the fact that, even if my fiancee were really, really okay with me pursuing other women I would not really have the time or energy to do so anyway, etc. etc.
In my early twenties I was more interested in having sex with lots of women and put a fair amount of effort into that. And I had sex with a lot more different women then than I do now (when I only have sex with one woman). Was I more attractive or suave then? I don’t think so. In fact, I think the reverse is true. I now make more money and am more experienced and together and less awkward than I was then. The difference is that I’m not, currently, putting forth a lot of effort to have sex with a lot of women.
There are probably a few very unattractive men who have to put forth a tremendous effort just to find one person who wants to have sex with them. There are also a very few lucky men like Brad Pitt or Tiger Woods who basically have to exert willpower not to have sex with a ton of women. But for the vast majority in the middle, it seems the effort and desire are probably the biggest factor, more than looks, wealth, “game,” etc.
(People might say “well, but when I started game, suddenly I started having sex with a lot more women!” but this is confounded by the fact that attempting to practice “game” is itself a way of putting lots of effort into sleeping with lots of women, which, as said before, is the determining factor).
Countries might say “well, but when we started using rockets instead of airplanes, suddenly we started putting more satellites into orbit”, but this is confounded by the fact that using rockets is itself a way of putting lots of efforts into getting satellites to orbit.
My point is that what matters might simply be the effort, not the nature of the effort.
I don’t know anyone who says “before Game, I spent years not even talking to women! Thanks to Game, I’m sleeping with a new girl every weekend!” Perhaps they exist, but by and large, I’m only familiar with people who say “I struck out all the time, girls wouldn’t even acknowledge my existence, but when I started putting to use the things I learned in PUA bootcamps, I’ve become insanely successful at picking up women.”
Even if they did, though, that still kind of proves the point, doesn’t it?
I just saw a reference to a Vice article (https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/for-women-in-tech-sexual-harassment-is-part-of-the-job) whose lede claims that “New data shows that 60 percent of women in Silicon Valley have experienced sexual harassment.” They provide a link (thank God) to the “study” in question. It is available at http://elephantinthevalley.com/.
I thought you might be interested in this because the “study” is not in fact a study. There is no paper. There are no controls. The study is in fact a survey, conducted primarily (from what I can see) by female employees / executives at investment firms in the Bay Area. Who did they ask? Nobody knows. Their friends? Their acquaintances? The website is now open to anonymous contributions, each of which will surely drive up the “percentage of women in tech” who have experienced discrimination.
I’m pretty upset right now, because I work in tech, and this is an issue which I want to know the truth about. When I heard that there was a study on this particular subject, I thought, “Thank god! I no longer have to just rely on anecdotes!” I wanted to read the paper and see what’d come of it. Come to find that, as is too often the case, the entire enterprise was BS.
Anyways. Enjoy.
On a tangential note. Why is the media so focused on tech firms and harassment and diversity*? Many prestigious media organizations write often about it, e.g. NYT, The Atlantic, etc. Why don’t they focus on other industries as much, or hell, on themselves? Just glancing at the Atlantic’s contributors, makes it seem not very diverse.
*They usually ignore Asians when they talk about diversity.
Because nerds.
GOOG and AAPL are vying for the number one largest company by market capitalization in the US. MSFT is 3. FB and AMZN are in the top ten.
You could argue that market capitalization isn’t the only or best way to measure the importance of a company but it is certainly one valid way of measuring. The tech industry isn’t some scrappy little side show anymore, it’s a major major part of US life. Media scrutiny is entirely expected and appropriate.
I don’t think there’s a good correlation between media scrutiny of a company and market capitalization. E.g. Exxon Mobile and Berkshire Hathaway, and Johnson and Johnson are some of the biggest companies in the world and I’ve rarely seen media stories focused on them, particularly the last two.*
Also, many of the stories are focused on generic Silicon Valley tech culture, they often don’t name individual companies. I’m willing to bet that most companies in SV don’t have anywhere near the market cap rankings that Google and Apple do.
There seem to be trends on what media stories are about when it comes to particular companies or industries. E.g, most stories about Walmart are about low wages and welfare, Monsanto and GMOs and patents, etc. . Why is the tech industry focused on wrt sexual harassment and diversity, why aren’t other industries (with the exception of finance and frat culture) focused on that too? Are all other industries wonderfully diverse and harassment-free?
*When it’s focused on Exxon Mobile it tends to be about pollution or energy concerns, not diversity or sexual harassment.
EDIT: Cargil, America’s largest private company and hugely involved in food production (it alone is responsible for 25% of all grain exports and 22% of the US meat market) barely gets a peep in many news sources. It also operates all around the world.
Yeah, it’s a fashion. You do what everyone else is being successful doing.
One guy wants to bring back isometric, story-based RPGs? Everybody wants to bring back isometric, story-based RPGs!
Some TV shows are really successful with long-form storytelling? Everybody wants to do long-form storytelling!
Somebody’s making money writing about sexual harassment in Silicon Valley? Everybody wants to write about sexual harassment in Silicon Valley!
Because they’re high status, just like STEM. Hence everyone being concerned about women going into STEM, but not men going into early childhood education.
I think this is the paradox where “high status” means low status. Someone who’s actually high status can’t be affected by such accusations.
Because people in the media write what they know, and write what the people they know know. This is a concern to youngish white-collar people in San Francisco and NYC, so the youngish white-collar people in San Francisco and NYC who dominate certain media outlets write about it a lot.
For another example I’ve noticed a LOT of stories about how awful it is that young freelance writers are pushed into doing unpaid work for “exposure”, which is a much more relevant topic inside a newsroom than outside.
Someone on my facebook just posted a rant about how Uber exploits its workers and engages in evil price gouging.
Really? Hasn’t Uber kind of like, won this debate? Speaking of which, isn’t libertarianism just Uber for everything? Why isn’t everyone a libertarian now? The complaints about Uber seem to be mostly “this is way too efficient and affordable for people in the old system to keep doing what they were doing!”
Most of the kind of people who rant about oppression on Facebook don’t actually know any cabbies. I think that explains why they can think cab companies quite literally exploiting drivers with their medallion oligopoly is fairer than drivers competing directly for customers.
To be entirely fair, I do know a handful of drivers in upstate NY who inherited medallions in their cities from before they became million dollar commodities and can drive their own cabs. Even if the system as a whole is evil, I would hate to see those guys lose such huge amounts of money as it comes down.
In the early days Uber played fast and loose with insurance in a hear-no-evil see-no-evil type fashion. That seems to be either going or gone. That was my biggest objection to them. Otherwise they seem mostly fine. I’m not thrilled that they seem to violate certain parts labor law with impunity (i.e. the independent contractor rules)–even if the laws are bad, I think the most likely outcome is a special exception for uber rather than getting them repealed or overturned. That’s not a particularly great outcome. But that’s a fairly minor point as far as I’m concerned.
I don’t think you can extrapolate to uber is good, uber for everything is good. Take for example AirBnB which is often grouped in with uber as part of the deceptively named “sharing economy”. In that case there are a lot more problems than just insurance. I find them to be immoral as well as criminal and a scourge. I think the world, or at least NYC, would be a better place if they never existed.
I’m curious what your issue with AirBnB is (I’ve never used them, but have considered it).
Here in NYC, the majority of AirBnB units for rent are from shady guys that rent apartments in rental buildings with fake names or third party cutouts or the like, list them on AirBnB in violation of both their leases and city law, fill them with tourists that make a ton of noise, throw up in staircases, leave garbage in hallways, etc. It’s very difficult to evict them and when they do they just move on to the next victim building. Sometimes it isn’t a rental building but a condo building, but it’s the same sort of thing.
I don’t care about the risks to AirBnB customers (on either side of the transaction) on the contrary I consider them at best complicit, but the damage to third parties (i.e. me). It is the same old story of making money by uncompensated externalities with a side dish of burning collective social trust through dishonesty and abusing institutions.
“making money by uncompensated externalities with a side dish of burning collective social trust through dishonesty and abusing institutions.”
I think that’s just the NYC rental market in general.
To the extent that Uber is violating independent-contractor rules, those rules are stupid. Working in construction, I’ve seen pretty much every single condition Uber imposes on its drivers being imposed on subcontractors by general contractors, and those would apply where the subcontractor is an individual. In fact, Uber offers its drivers more independence and flexibility than many construction subcontracts.
Wondering how or why the media refer to candidates, topics or other subjects by certain labels?
There are style guides which make recommendations as to what an article should say when referring to all manner of things, including politics and religion.
And even in the much-vaunted neutral American (as against European-style open advocacy) journalism, there are still subtle word-choices that show which side the journalist and/or the paper leans towards:
“Pro-life” and “pro-choice” are the standard pair of labels in neutral commentary on the abortion issue. The Associated Press is severely out of step if some other rule is still in effect.
Indeed, I’m firmly pro-choice myself, and I use “pro-life” for the other side. In general, it is courteous and respectful to use the names or labels that people have chosen for themselves, rather than come up with a more negative term.
Honestly, how so many supposedly smart people can say 36 really stupid things is beyond me.
Well, to be fair, it’s actually just 27 people saying one dumb thing, 4 people saying 2 dumb things and Netanyahu playing a sith lord.
Ironically the Sith Lord is the only one saying anything reasonably intelligent.
The Sith are evil, not stupid.
And the Jedi are good, but stupid?
I would argue that the Jedi aren’t even good.
I’m not sure I’d disagree. At least the Jedi in the prequels are complete derps without redeeming properties.
So what you’re saying is that, from your point of view, it is the Jedi who are evil?
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EvilVersusEvil
Now you see that Evil will always triumph, because Good is dumb.
From my point of view the Jedi are evil.
Can you elaborate on that, Jaskologist?
“The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit.” -Somerset Maugham, kinda
(links added to the original)
Like Scott says above, everyone says stupid things sometimes, especially if you quote them out of context. Not that I expect most of these would be much better even in context. But what is especially funny/depressing is that these quotes weren’t taken out of context for the sake of seeming vapid as Scott originally thought–they are on the forum’s own website and presumably selected to sound intelligent!
What’s worse, they’re selected to sound inspirational. These are the things the movers and shakers, the opinion formers and leaders towards the glorious world of tomorrow are saying and doing, O great public! Take heart and be uplifted!
Apparently as the glorious march onwards to even greater progress continues, I and the rest of my gender will be turned into part of the Internet. Pass me the bottle of Gordon’s London Dry Gin, okay? I am so thrilled by the prospect, I can barely contain myself 🙂
We are Davos, prepare to be assimilated, resistance if futile.
Your culture will be adapted to service us.
I was at least half a dozen quotes down that list before I realized they were serious. Heading the list with “Internet of Women” was probably a bad choice in that regard; I still can’t see that phrase without giggling.
ETA: I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.
Has anyone thought about existential risk from economic stagnation? Suppose the world just reaches a point where people’s ability to discern actions that improve society is always outmatched by rot. How would we know that a slowdown in growth was temporary (or inevitable) or was an existential risk?
This seems important because many other existential risks seem possible to mitigate by reducing economic growth. (Example?) But you have to balance that against the existential risk of stagnation. If we don’t know anything about stagnation risk, then how can we reach conclusions?
related thread
Jane Jacobs wrote about permanent economic stagnation as existential risk, although the word she chose was “nightmare”. See: Cities and the Wealth of Nations.
In what way does stagnation directly lead to the nonexistance of humans?
Indirect ways don’t count–if stagnation means we don’t have the resources to fight off a pandemic disease, pandemic disease is the actual x-risk.
It doesn’t, but unless stagnation also leads to ZPG, increasing population and no gain in productivity or resources makes any number of extinction events more and more likely.
Exponential growth in material wealth or population cannot be sustained at significant levels on a timescale corresponding even to recorded history, never mind species lifespan. 1% growth for 6000 years gives on the order of 10^36 human beings, or 10^38 kg of manflesh, which is coincidentally about the mass of every star within 6000 light-years.
Inability to achieve a long-term average ZPG is an x-risk with or without economic stagnation. But this is true for every other species, and it has been true for humanity for most of its existence, and hasn’t been a problem for any of them. Well, not an x-risk problem. I’m not terribly worried that humanity will become extinct because of the excessive number of living humans.
I was thinking of existential risk the way Nick Bostrom defined it, which includes human extinction, but it also includes humanity failing to reach its potential, or stagnation in a sub-optimal state or equilibrium. If we have reached our full potential, so stagnation is inevitable, then there’s no need to worry about that.
Stagnation doesn’t lead to the nonexistence of humans, but it may lead to the nonexistence of humans-off-Earth, or of transhumans, or of whatever future projects might require a few sextillion humans or smarter-than-humans as prerequisites. “Permanent stagnation” is Bostrom’s second of four existential risk classes.
Actually, I take that back – *serious* stagnation does lead to the nonexistence of humans, eventually. It might take a billion years, when the sun heats up too much and we still haven’t found other options, or ten million years, when an unchanging environment selects for instinct over intelligence and devolves us into something less than human.
https://niskanencenter.org/blog/news/the-collapse-of-rand-paul-and-the-libertarian-moment-that-never-was/
A bit of sobering post-Rand analysis:
“The secret of Trump’s appeal to Paul’s base is that a large segment of the “Ron Paul Revolution” leavened its libertarianism with a pony keg of crazy. Birthers, 9/11 Truthers, a wide assortment of conspiracy theorists (many of whom believe the Federal Reserve to be a modern manifestation of the Illuminati), and naked racists rivaled the number of reasonably sober libertarian-ish voters…”
Even as a huge Ron Paul fan, I have to admit this is the case.
@onyomi:
That’s interesting that you would admit to it. Based on the long conversation we had (wherein your position was, roughly, that the cause of freedom from tyranny would have been best served if the Southern states had been allowed to secede), I would have thought you would have been “state’s rights” Ron Paul guy.
IOW, I wouldn’t have thought you could admit that Ron Paul drew a lot of his support from the white-power types.
What’s to admit to? To use your example, there’s nothing unsavory about being in favor of — to drop some connotational loading — devolution of powers to the state and local levels on grounds of decentralization of power, Constitutional originalism, the laboratories-of-democracy idea, or any number of other motivations, while acknowledging that the same goal might be attractive to less savory characters for their own reasons.
That’s just the nature of politics. In polite company we pretend that no one under our tent is motivated by hate, self-interest, or plain craziness, but in reality there are going to be a bunch of those guys hanging around the back of the crowd no matter what coalition we happen to be talking about. Left, right, libertarian, Green, rationalist, whatever.
@Nornagest:
Ron Paul designed his arguments to appeal to racists and John Birch type conspiracy theorists, which is why he got so much support from them.
State’s rights isn’t really a libertarian appeal or solution. Individual rights is the actual libertarian position. Still, some true libertarians back the state’s rights formulation, and even convince themselves that it isn’t building a coalition with racists and social conservatives who want the state to be free to have a heavy hand.
Trying to get people like that to admit to that the coalition exists runs frequently into a wall of denial and cognitive dissonance
I absolutely agree that this coalition exists, and as I posted below, I think that Ron Paul is one of the “bad guys” with libertarians as the “dupes”.
But the reason people deny it is that usually comes in the form of an obvious attempt at guilt-by-association. It’s exactly the same as how conservatives keep pointing out how Progressives like Margaret Sanger supported eugenics. They often run into a “wall of denial and cognitive dissonance” because the conservatives’ clear goal is to tar modern-day progressives with the same brush.
It’s just easier to say “No, she didn’t!” than “Yeah, but she was wrong and that position has no necessary connection to the rest of her positions, which we support.”
@Vox:
If Margaret Sanger was running for President, or even just “President” of Planned Parenthood today, and was making either overt or covert nods to supporting eugenics, it would be absolutely and completely relevant.
So, I don’t see how Ron Paul’s messages aren’t relevant. He, and his positions, have been very popular in the current libertarian movement
@ HeelBearCub:
The point is not that you can’t legitimately attack these people. The point is that the non-racist libertarians correctly feel a large number of these attacks are intended to paint them as racist, too.
Perhaps Sanger wasn’t the best example. Just the first one that came to mind. (It’s comparable to Barry Goldwater, though, who is often brought up in these kinds of debates. And he didn’t support racism at all, unlike Sanger’s support for eugenics.)
A better example is with feminism. There are crazy feminists who think all male-female sex is rape, since women can’t consent under the patriarchy. And in some sense, reasonable feminists are “fellow travellers” with these people on many issues.
But when anti-feminists harp on and on about these crazy feminists, the reasonable feminists get the impression that they are being tarred as crazy, too. And they don’t exactly enjoy being constantly forced to give public denunciations, any more than non-extremist Muslims like to be forced to denounce ISIS. Being forced to denounce crazy-feminism is insulting in itself because it suggests that it is reasonable to think that you agree with them, and that the presumption is on you to rebut it.
@Vox:
Sure that’s fair. I still think state’s rights is a huge dodge, though. It doesn’t do anything to accomplish Libertarian goals.
But, in any case, if someone says that they are a feminist and that Lorena Bobbit was completely in the right and John should have never gotten his dick back, you don’t expect them to denounce “Stop the Patriarchy” as nut jobs.
In crude (and hopefully funny) terms, that’s sort of the reaction I was having to onyomi.
@ HeelBearCub:
You’ve got one-hundred percent (or at least ninety percent) agreement from me on this one. But I can see how other non-racist libertarians could disagree and for honest reasons.
I myself used to be much more sympathetic to the standard revisionist argument that Lincoln was a horrible tyrant, that the Civil War was a matter of a centralized federal government vs. states’ rights, etc.
One thing this argument ignores is that the southern states were very much in favor of strong federal powers when they were in charge in the 1850s, including a very strong fugitive slave law and federal protection of the right to carry slaves into free territory against the “abuses” of local governments who wanted to free them. Not to mention that, in the “Cornerstone Speech” and other public documents, the Confederate leaders openly expressed their hostility to the principles upon which the American government was founded. And the Civil War was just fucking not about tariffs; I can say I that I definitely never bought that one.
And even so, it’s not exactly cut-and-dried that—granted the Confederacy was completely unjustified in seceding—Lincoln’s policy of refusing to let them go was better in the long run. A lot of people died in the Civil War, and Reconstruction didn’t exactly work. At least not once the North got tired of it and adopted a policy of “cut and run” in the Compromise of 1877.
I am also sympathetic to Timothy Sandefur’s hypothesis that much of libertarian antipathy toward the Civil War is due to a mindset of analogizing it to Vietnam. (And Sandefur adores Lincoln and supports him entirely.)
A bit of a nitpick, but
“One thing this argument ignores is that the southern states were very much in favor of strong federal powers when they were in charge in the 1850s, including a very strong fugitive slave law and federal protection of the right to carry slaves into free territory against the “abuses” of local governments who wanted to free them.”
The fugitive slave law was guaranteed in the constitution. They instituted a new one as a compromise measure in 1850 because the previous one (1793) was no longer was working- it depended on local juries cooperating. The South was acting on the idea that this was something given to them in the constitution and viewed it as the north living up to its end of a bargain, not an extension of state power.
(for those unclear why this was such a big deal, remember that slaves don’t have legal rights so they no longer got jury trials, there were free black living in the north, photographic id and the like didn’t exist and black people covers anyone with a drop of black blood)
The right to carry slaves into any territory is a simple extension of the right to property and yes, this runs into the issue that common law and precedent go in the opposite direction.
@ Samuel Skinner:
Yes, but northern states were trying to engage in nullification and interposition. Indeed, it was working in many places, rendering the fugitive slave law unenforceable there. (Which proves that these aren’t always bad things.) And the south wanted to respond by doing the equivalent of Eisenhower sending the National Guard to Little Rock.
It is a simple extension of the right to property—given that slaves are property like any other (which was not clear as a matter of precedent).
But the argument that the federal courts should protect property rights from abuse by the states is equivalent to arguments that the federal courts should protect the right to contract (as in Lochner), the right to equal protection under the law (as in Brown), or the right to privacy (as in Roe and Lawrence) from abridgment by the states. Now, I’m in favor of all those.
But they are contrary to the concept of unlimited “states’ rights”.
“But they are contrary to the concept of unlimited “states’ rights”.”
I think they used the term differently then. If you take the constitution as a promise between states, then the north failing to live up to its end of the bargain is infringing on your state’s rights. It is however wholly different from how people view state’s rights now and I’m not sure if I’m just over fitting Southerner’s arguments.
@ Samuel Skinner:
I see what you’re saying. Yeah, I was not using states’ rights that way. I was interpreting it more as “the sovereign power of states over affairs within their borders”, not “the right of states to make the federal government force other states to live up their end of the bargain”.
In the fugitive slave law debate, the North was wanting more state sovereignty and to keep the federal government out. While the South was wanting to have the federal government step in and prevent “injustices” and violations of rights carried out by Northern states. You’re right that the South saw these “injustices” as violation of their states’ rights.
However, the Dred Scott decision was not at all a matter of states’ rights. It protected the individual right to own slaves (not mentioned in the Constitution), to be enforced by the federal government against violation by the states.
@ Vox
conservatives keep pointing out how Progressives like Margaret Sanger supported eugenics.
Someday remind me to mention that the usage of the term ‘eugenics’ may have changed somehow sometime. I see a lot of posters talking about ways to get/force smart women to have more children, but neither they nor their opponents call it ‘eugenics’.
/ not up for a long discussion of it now, though /
We are rational enough to recognize The Worst Argument in the World and avoid talking about it when it applies to our favorite past-time: breeding the Kwisatz Haderach.
I’ve asked people why they think a state is the right size for a government, and they never have an answer.
@Nancy:
“State” isn’t a size? “State” isn’t even a reliable description of the kind of political unit?
Basically I’m not sure what question you are asking.
“State” in the sense of an American state– the size varies quite a bit, but they’re all smaller than the federal government. I assume that when someone favors states’ rights, they have a vague idea of size in mind.
I’ve asked people why they think a state is the right size for a government, and they never have an answer.
Well, the average population of a sovereign nation today is 38 million, which is about the size of a large US state.
Of the twelve nations with a population of over 100 million, I believe only the United States, Brazil, and Japan have not in the post-WWII era had armed separatist movements that killed at least ten thousand people in attempts to create what probably would have been viable nations about the size of US states. And on the other side, I am not aware of any successful post-WWII attempt at creating a nation of over 100 million people by fusing together smaller polities (the EU is certainly an attempt at such, but a creaky one).
And at the other end, the list of nations under five million in population seems to be mostly failed states, kleptocracies, and junior members of strong regional blocs.
The thing is, Ron Paul is himself one of those people. He’s not really a libertarian—at the very least not your Cato Institute kind of libertarian. As Sandefur puts it:
The use of the term “doughface” in this context is just delicious.
I want to say about Lew Rockwell and the like, as well as the rather bizarre claim that Ron Paul is not a “real” libertarian:
This reminds me of “Atheism Plus,” which, if I understand correctly, was a weird push to basically expand the definition of atheism to include a whole bunch of other beliefs, like rationalism, feminism, anti-racism, etc. etc. Of course, the case one might make for such a move is that these other views follow logically or necessarily from atheism… in the mind of whoever came up with the idea. But the reality, of course, is that atheism just means you don’t believe in a god or gods. You could not believe in god because you believed the universe floated on the surface of a banana and that banana physics are such as to preclude existence of a god. You would still be an atheist.
Put a little less extremely, I am highly suspicious of any movement to create a more “thick” version of some school of thought–a so-called package deal. This seems only to encourage bad thinking, and is, moreover, just plain rude to people who follow the definitional tenets of a philosophy but who don’t follow someone’s particular, idiosyncratic extrapolation of such.
Ron Paul is a libertarian. He’s also pro-life. “But libertarians are in favor of individual liberty so how can be against abortion?!” someone might cry. But of course, libertarians are not in favor of murder, so if you view abortion as murder then there’s no incompatibility. If you don’t view abortion as murder then you should be a pro-choice libertarian. The non-libertarian view would be “I’m against abortion because I think the state should control reproductive options.”
Gary North believes in a limited government and also happens to the think that the form that government should take is a Christian theocracy. He’s also a libertarian. Ayn Rand believed in a limited government and no god. Also a libertarian. Lew Rockwell believes in limited or no government and also happens to be kind of racist and paranoid. Also a libertarian. Hell, even a slave owner could have been a libertarian. Non-coercion, individual freedom and self-determination are core tenets of libertarianism, but if you define black people as property and not people, then you are not contradicting yourself. The theoretical slave-holding libertarian’s mistake is not in not being a “real” libertarian, but in his definition of who counts as a person. And that is precisely my take on the Civil War: we can say that the South was right on the question of political self-determination but wrong on the question of who should count as a “real” person or independent moral agent.
I’m not saying libertarians can’t do any policing of their own ranks. I am saying we should resist the temptation to smuggle in our own ideas about issues which are really unrelated. And this may in fact mean we have to police against anyone who wants to claim: “libertarianism=non-coercion+lizard people.”
You’re not contradicting yourself, but you’re not a fucking libertarian!
Why not? As I understand it libertarianism is defined simply as a political philosophy valuing individual autonomy, small or limited government and avoidance of coercion. I don’t see anything in there about “oh, and you believe all races are equal moral agents.”
If I said I believe in limited government, individual freedom, and non-coercion… oh and that the sky is green and earthquakes are caused by giant catfish… then would I suddenly not be a libertarian?
You don’t have to believe all races are equal moral agents. You do however have to believe all people have equal legal/political rights. Dump that and you aren’t a libertarian because ‘different political rights based on heredity’ is serfdom, the caste system and the like. What separates that from monarchy with the king having all the rights or feudalism with the nobility having all the rights?
This is a good point, and also raises what I think is the interesting question of whether or not it’s logically possible to have a libertarian monarchy. Let’s imagine, for example, that we have an absolute monarchy, but the monarch happens to believe that extremely low taxes and light regulation and respect for property rights are the way to go. In a way I think we have to call that a libertarian monarchy.
Ironically, the ethics by which I derive my own libertarianism would preclude a libertarian monarchy because I am a libertarian first on deontological grounds and utilitarian grounds second. And my ethics say that wearing a special hat or being born a particular race or caste do not imbue you with special rights.
But there are other libertarians who are libertarians first and foremost for utilitarian/practical reasons: they don’t think non-libertarianism is inherently evil, just that it so happens libertarianism works better. They would say that if having a king who believes in low taxes produces the best results then that’s the best way to go. I think David Friedman is more of this type. Further, whereas my ethical view implies anarcho-capitalism, many other libertarians are “minarchists” believing a small government is defensible or necessary. I think Gary Johnson falls into this category. Am I going to say that David Freeman and Gary Johnson are not “real” libertarians? Of course not.
Similarly, if you had some plausible justification for your low-tax, low-regulation, property right-respecting king–say divine right theory or something–then I don’t think it would be correct for me to say this king is not a “real” libertarian. It is even conceivable that a libertarian king would provide/impose a more libertarian system for/on his subjects than they themselves would arrive at under anarchy. We can’t say the king and his system aren’t “really” libertarian. Instead, the right mode of attack in this case would be to attack divine right theory.
Enlightened Despotism? Sure that is a thing, but that is only restricting subjects political rights. Their legal rights are the same; if they aren’t guaranteed legal rights, the monarch could simply seize their property at any time which doesn’t mesh with libertarianism. There needs to be a check on power because philosopher-king doesn’t translate effectively into the real world.
A libertarian has to believe all people have equals rights, sure, but why couldn’t they just play with the definition of “people” to exclude certain races? Personhood is a terribly thorny issue, and it’s not like we claim that libertarians are obligated to be pro-life.
Because if you can deny rights to people because they are black, the government will simply declare anyone it wants to eliminate is black. And they don’t need to prove it because only whites get rights. Anything that involves people losing rights to become nonpeople that is decided by the government is not a system where you have rights.
I was in a rush when I typed my first comment in response to this thread, but let me elaborate.
There is basically a spectrum here. On the one hand, we could say everyone is a libertarian who wants to call himself one. And at the other extreme, we could say that no one is a real libertarian except that guy who’s right about every application of libertarian principles to every issue. And maybe he doesn’t exist, so there are no real libertarians, only “aspiring libertarians”.
Now, I think we’ve got to use the term in a sensible way, which is somewhere in the middle. We have to define the essential features of libertarianism and say that if you agree with those, you’re a real libertarian, but if you don’t, you’re not.
And I think one essential feature of libertarianism is the belief that no one class of people is naturally entitled to own or rule over any other.
I hate to keep using black people as an example, so let’s change it to the Swiss. It is possible to believe, as Jaskologist says, that the Swiss are not really “people” but in fact are a subhuman race that properly has no rights. And therefore you would think that it is right and proper for actual humans to own or rule over the Swiss.
However, I would say that if you thought this, you would not really be a libertarian. Since the Swiss in fact are people, you do not in fact believe that no one class of people is entitled to own or rule over any other. If you somehow came to this belief honestly, you would be entitled to think of yourself as a libertarian, but you would not really be one, and everyone else would be free to reject you as a real libertarian. Because as far as everyone else is concerned, the term “people” refers not to what you subjectively think of as people, but, you know, actual people. It’s a matter of the content of your beliefs, not the form in which you express them.
***
All of this is basically the same as the fascinatingly senseless debate between “Open Objectivism” vs. “Closed Objectivism” (with which I unfortunately have a lot of experience). The “closed system” people (who are ridiculous, in my opinion) say that if you don’t believe everything Ayn Rand believed on every issue, you’re not entitled to call yourself an Objectivist because then we’d have chaos and everyone who read Atlas Shrugged and got an idea from it would be calling himself one, and this would somehow dilute the message. Some of them say that no living person can validly call himself an Objectivist, only a “student of Objectivism”.
The “open system” people say, no, this is a false dichotomy. There are certain essential features of Objectivism, viz. belief in objective reality, reason, egoism, and capitalism, and if you reject these you’re not an Objectivist, but if you want to revise some of Rand’s theories you may well be. But if you come out for altruism, you’re not an Objectivist, not even if you say “the way I choose to use words, ‘egoism’ means ‘altruism'”.
Instead of either blacks or Swiss, change it to fetuses. By this reasoning, a pro-lifer could equally say that someone who is pro-choice is not really a libertarian because although you came to this belief honestly and subjectively don’t think of fetuses as people, you’re wrong. (Or a vegetarian who thinks that animals count as 1/10 of a person….)
You’re basically saying that a disagreement over facts disqualifies you from being a libertarian, then trying to limit this by saying it only applies to disagreements on facts when the other person is wrong. Of course, limiting it that way doesn’t limit it much at all; everyone thinks their opponents are wrong.
The-Political-School-Of-Thought-Which-Must-Not-Be-Named actually argues that a secure monarch has an incentive to be fairly libertarian, because libertarian policies are the policies that most promote growth. Maybe not perfectly libertarian, but probably closer to that than the world of molasses which democracy leads to. The argument was most famously advanced in the fable of Fnargl.
Fix your second link.
I think my very favorite quote (though it rotates 🙂 ) from The-One-Who-Should-Not-Be-Named is:
“A sufficiently authoritarian government would not try to control what its subjects think, because it would have no reason to care what they think.”
Cue comments about invincible robot armies, etc.
@ Jiro:
Yes, they could, and that sounds absolutely fair to me.
In this case, whether pro-choicers are libertarians depends upon whether fetuses are “people” in the relevant sense. There’s just no getting around the fact that this question has to be answered.
I mean it basically comes down to: is it possible to mistakenly think that you are a libertarian? Is there some objective fact of the matter, or are you one merely if you think you’re one? I say that yes, you can be mistaken. If abortion is murder, it is by far the biggest violation of rights in our time, and those who support it could not properly be termed supporters of human liberty.
There is, of course, a sense in which you’re a “subjective libertarian” if you think you’re supporting human liberty. But in that case, communists are libertarians because they believe capitalism is actually a system of unfreedom, and we can only have true freedom when a dictatorship of the proletariat abolishes these chains.
So do communists hate freedom? They don’t hate what they think freedom is. But in terms of what freedom actually is, yes, they hate it.
What does “what freedom actually means” refer to? What is your definition of freedom?
@ null:
The ability to live, to act in one’s rightful sphere, and to dispose of one’s rightful property without being hindered by physical compulsion by the state or private individuals. With the precise explication of “rightful sphere” and “rightful property” being a very complex question that is the whole concern of political philosophy and impossible to deduce in one step from some little aphorism.
Communism is opposed to freedom because it imposes a totalitarian system of compulsion that deprives people of their rightful property and consequently infringes upon their rightful sphere of action and quite often takes away their lives. Now, of course, communists don’t think it does this. And if they were right about what constitutes rightful property and one’s rightful sphere of action, then communism would be a pro-freedom philosophy.
Lee Atwater strikes again.
A lot of people on the left see this quote as a smoking gun that libertarianism is just disguised racism, but that’s not what Atwater was saying. He was a campaign strategist, not a political theorist, saying that racism is no longer considered legitimate, but libertarianism is, and there are still a lot of racist voters who can be attracted with libertarian rhetoric and a sprinkling of wink-wink-nudge-nudge.
@BBA:
But it tells you that your prior probability of racism for people espousing libertarian philosophy should be higher. And as the article onyomi linked to points out, the true libertarians are quite small in number. The Ron Paul revolution wasn’t made up of mostly true believers.
Collapsing my response to a bunch of different points into one post:
I am in favor of secession and states’ rights, but for me that is not a code word for racism. It’s based on my belief in the right not to participate in a political organization one doesn’t want to participate in and the historical fact that decentralized, local powers tend to work better and are less likely to result in tyranny (compare Singapore, Hong Kong, Monaco, Renaissance Italian City States to the USSR and PRC…). I know that governors and mayors can be just as corrupt and incompetent as presidents, but their incompetence does less damage and they face more competition for citizens; as with everything else, the best way to insure governments don’t suck is to make them compete, which decentralization of power does.
Ron Paul is a libertarian. If he’s hiding anything it’s that he’s an anarchocapitalist. I’ve listened to him speak a lot and I never heard him make any arguments which sounded “designed” to appeal to conspiracy theorists and/or racists. It’s just that, because of some of the issues he touched on which no one else did (our own foreign policy creating terrorists who hate us; the federal reserve, for example), he became a bit of a lightning rod for a certain segment of crazies (9/11 Truthers, “States Rights”-as-code-for-racism people, etc. etc.)
Also, Ron Paul has made more new libertarians than anyone since Ayn Rand, so there’s absolutely no way he is a net negative for the libertarian movement.
If there was a mistake it might have been Paul Sr’s failure to distance himself from the conspiracy theory segment. But it’s very understandable: when you have a nascent movement that seems like it may have some momentum are you going to start saying “get out here–we don’t want people with your weird beliefs messing up our movement!”? After all, you might even get some of the crazies to come around to more reasonable views (in reality, probably not, seems to be the disappointing result). So he played that game where you don’t actually come out and say “no, no, no, 9/11 wasn’t an inside job!” You don’t actually say anything to support the crazies, but you don’t say anything to intentionally scare them off, either.
They see a wink and nudge where there is none and assume Ron Paul is their guy. Ron Paul, for his part, doesn’t say “I’m not winking and nudging!” Now most of these people see winking and nudging coming from Trump and not Rand, meaning that Rand’s attempt to go more mainstream, which was intended to give him the best of both worlds, seems instead to have given him neither (that said, to look on the bright side, Rand may have succeeded in injecting more libertarianish ideas into the mainstream at the same time as he allowed the crazies to move on to Trump; since libertarians want libertarianism to become more “respectable” and don’t want it associated with lizard people, this may be a long-term positive).
Still not sure whether that was a mistake, but there’s no denying in retrospect that Paul Sr’s failure to distance himself from the crazies did create the illusion of more popular support for libertarianism than really existed. On the left, Occupy Wall Street’s failure to denounce the left-wing crazies which gravitated toward them may have created a similar illusion that there was a strong appetite for major overhaul of the financial system.
Of course, some of my own views would be viewed as “kooky” by the political mainstream, but at least my support of Ron and Rand Paul was not of the sort which just evaporated when someone with big, orange hair came along saying something kookier.
Ok, so a question for the Rand fans: what were the major policy differences between him and Cruz or Rubio?
From my perspective, they all seem pretty close on issues that matter to me. I can see preferring one to the others, but it doesn’t really seem like a defeat as long as the actual winner is one of that trio.
Not much a Rand fan, so take it for what it is worth, but I think the biggest difference is in foreign policy. Rand is pretty strictly non-interventionist. That’s a big Paul family tradition. Ted Cruz on the other hand said “we will utterly destroy ISIS. We will carpet bomb them into oblivion. I don’t know if sand can glow in the dark, but we’re going to find out.” I can’t find quite as good a quote for Rubio, but it’s pretty clear what’s going on with this one: “I disagree with voices in my own party who argue we should not engage at all. Who warn we should heed the words of John Quincy Adams not to go ‘abroad, in search of monsters to destroy,'” said Rubio. “I disagree, because all around us we see the human face of America’s influence in the world.”
Cruz is actually *relatively* non interventionist. That quote sounds dramatic, but it’s actually a way of saying “We’re going to continue the current strategy against ISIS and not commit ground troops” while making sure no one can present it as “weak”. Rubio speaks more reasonably on foreign policy but he’s actually *much* more hawkish.
I agree with brad. Rubio is 100% neoconservative interventionist. Although he’s embraced the hawkish rhetoric, Cruz isn’t actually as interventionist as most of the Republican party, but he’s still moreso than Paul.
I think you would like Timothy Sandefur’s essay “How Libertarians Ought to Think about the U.S. Civil War”.
First of all, it is just not true that states had the legal right to secede unilaterally under the Constitution, and Sandefur spends a good deal of time refuting that. But of course, it doesn’t matter if they had the legal right to secede if they were engaged in a legitimate act of revolution. There is a right to revolution that supersedes all positive state-made law, a right to overthrow the government or secede from it in the name of protecting individual rights. But the Confederacy certainly wasn’t rebelling to protect individual rights; they were doing so to protect slavery.
Moreover, the president has a legal duty to enforce the law and uphold the Constitution. so not only did the Confederacy have no moral or legal right to rebel, the president had a legal duty to stop them. At best, you can argue that the high cost of the Civil War gave the president a moral right to engage in civil disobedience and refuse to enforce the Constitution—but this is not the usual argument made (and Sandefur does not endorse it).
But I take it that you are talking about secession and states’ rights more in the abstract, as generally preferable.
In that vein, the Renaissance Italian city states are a terrible example for your case, as they were constantly convulsed by the kind of “faction” that the American Founders decried. As were the city states of Ancient Greece.
I’m not denying that there have been oppressive, evil empires. But I think the right to secede has to be taken on a case-by-case basis. All large states are not created equal.
In the actual record of the United States, for instance, the state governments have been far more oppressive of liberty than the federal government, and the more usual function of the federal government has been to lessen their abuses. If you look at the history of slavery, segregation, religious liberty, economic liberty (particularly in the era when the Supreme Court struck down many state laws restricting the right to contract), the liberty of the Chinese and other immigrants, women’s liberty, sexual liberty, the right to privacy, the right to a fair trial, and so on, the federal government—especially the courts—has often stopped worse abuses by the states. It has not been perfect by any means, but it has done a lot to stop local tyranny and prejudices. And when it has oppressed liberty, it’s usually been once the state governments have already been doing the job (see the Chinese Exclusion Act and the New Deal economic intervention).
Or, for instance, look at the European Union. Yes, there are perhaps some excessive bureaucratic regulations, but these are hardly worse (if at all) than the ones imposed by the individual national governments. And the main function of it, which it has actually achieved, has been to promote free trade and free movement across European borders.
I am not arguing for centralized control of everything. You have to distinguish between a centralized system and a federal system. The functions of government ought to be as decentralized and as close to the people as possible. But the main virtue of a federal system, when the federal government has limited and defined powers, is that rights can be protected at the federal level from abuse at the local level. In essence, you carry out the powers of government locally but have a higher level of government to watch over those levels—and restrict as much as possible the domains in which it itself exercises power.
Obviously, the powers of the federal government have grown over time, vastly beyond the bounds of the Constitution. But I don’t think this is due to some inevitable process. I think they have done so because people have been convinced by arguments that it ought to do so. And I am hardly sure that, under the influence of those same ideas, growth in the power of state governments over people’s lives would have been any better, if the Union had been dissolved.
Not to mention that a federal government prevents conflicts among local governments, which is extremely common if you look at the history of Europe or Latin America.
You talk about freedom of movement (which is hugely important, I agree), but federal governments are one of the major things that guarantee that there is freedom of movement. Do you think it is likely that, if the Union had been abolished, the North would have been keen to let the Great Migration of black people to Northern cities happen?
Or look to the example of the European Union: really, one of the main forces behind anti-EU feeling is belief in their “liberty”, on the basis of “states’ rights”, to keep Poles and Romanians out of their country.
I disagree about the EU. There are undeniably things about it that are good – the Schengen zone and the no tariff zone. And yes, without the EU many countries would abandon those. However, some would not and some would possibly go the opposite direction – more economic liberalization. Germany probably would, France probably would not. Now for a country such as Switzerland, joining the EU would make things clearly worse all-round. They are already limited members of Schengen (you still need work visas in Switzerland as an EU national and Romanians, Bulgarians and Croatians have even more restrictive conditions than the rest) and they have zero tariffs with the EU and probably lower tariffs with the rest of the world than the EU.
Also the EU is very problematic in the way it us run. People vote in the national elections for parties, then a coalition forms based on those elections and chooses the government. That government then appoints the EU commissars and the EU president who have the real power. That is several degrees of separation from the voters. Democracy is a quite a crude tool to keep the government in check, especially in populous countries but this is another level. Then there are the europarliament elections few people actually vote in and the europarliament does not really have all that much power anyway.
The argument is not that a federation is always inferior to independent states but that it tends to be because of competition. The people in those states which are run badly and which see their neighbours prosper will want the same and if not, then they can at least emigrate. Also, a vote in a small country is worth much more than a vote in a big one (in the national elections)
Yes, the EU is a mixture of good and bad. There is no reason a country which is already doing better on its own should be forced to join it. (And if someone wants to secede from the EU or the US to set up libertopia, I would be for it.)
And moreover, the system of international law and treaties is just like a very weak form of federalism. If a country is part of the WTO and raises a tariff in violation of agreements, they get sanctions imposed on them. Similar concerns apply to things like the International Criminal Court. This is a limitation on “sovereignty” or “states’ rights” to do anything they please at the whim of the majority.
I’m not saying a system should be totally undemocratic, but it is certainly not true that “the more democratic, the better”. I doubt the EU would be better run if it were more democratic. Or, for instance, by far the most liberty-friendly branch of the U.S. government is the judiciary, which is the least democratic.
Democracy is good insofar as there should be some mechanism to overturn things without war. But direct mob rule isn’t good.
How can they emigrate if the other countries won’t let them immigrate?
Are the Syrians better off being an independent state than being part of France and therefore the EU? Tell it to the people trying to keep out the Syrian refugees. And of course the actual refugees are a small fraction of those who would really prefer not to live in Syria.
And even if a country does have open borders—which very few countries have with one another—there’s still far more hassle involved in moving to another country than moving to another state. For instance, it’s generally fairly easy for Americans to move to Canada as a legal matter, but it’s still a lot more hassle to move from Alabama to Canada than from Alabama to New Hampshire.
***
And this point is almost unfair, but: consider the record of Europe (and Latin America) in regard to liberty and war in the 19th and 20th centuries versus that of the United States. And consider what would have happened to Western Europe in the latter half of the 20th century if the United States had not been there to provide a countervailing force to the Soviet Union.
@Vox:
The problem with undemocratic state-like entities is that while they might work well for a while, if something goes bad you are missing even the crude tools of democracy. Your argument seems to me like “an enlightened dictator is better than democracy” and I agree fully. The problem is that I don’t see anything that would force for example the EU behave to behave like an enlightened dictator or at least a slightly enlightened bureaucrat who still outperforms the mob. In particular cases and particular laws this might as well be true. But in general such top-down structures do not work when the measures go too much against the will of the people. I think that the EU helps Le Pen gain popularity more than anything else. If you force something that people don’t like, eventually there will be a point when they don’t like that enough to vote in someone like Le Pen. And she will do more than just get rid of what the people did not want, cause more damage than what you prevented and you have to start from square one with the liberalization effort. I think it is the same with the attempts to set up something akin to western style of government in places like Afghanistan or Somalia. It does not work in the long term (well, it does not work in the short term there either) and while you might have some success at first, eventually it turns ugly.
Let me reiterate – I would be all hands down for a libertarian(ish) dictator who abolishes a lot of laws, reduces taxes, gets rid of welfare, opens borders, legalizes drugs etc. But I would only support him if I thought that he has a solid means of staying in power and that I have a reason for him to stay reliably libertarian. If the first were not true, he could be overthrown by a communist revolution a few months after coming to power, if the other he could himself become closer to the communists quite soon (and by the way, the EU is quite socialist in a lot of ways, for example its agricultural quotas).
At the same time I am pretty convinced that economic liberalism is the best for pretty much everyone and that if you give the individual voters more power (by making the number of citizens under a government smaller which is best achieved by making the geographical area under that government smaller) and by making the number of jurisdictions higher (by doing the same) and thus fostering competition, the countries will eventually converge towards something quite liberal. And if that happens it will be a natural progression as opposed to a top-down approach and hence it will be much more stable.
International contracts – I think there is a clear distinction there. A country can “secede” from being a part of the WTO for example. A state cannot secede from the United States and it seems really difficult to secede from Spain for example (but hopefully Catalonia will make it eventually). Basically an unquestioned right to secede is all that it comes down to. You are saying that it is something undesirable (if I understand it correctly) because the upper structure can be more liberal than the one that wants to secede. I am saying that while that might be true, it is by and large better to have a practical mechanism for letting them go and let them figure it out on their own instead of letting the steam build up and then exploding. It will never be ideal as long as 100% of the population of a region does not want to secede from the larger country. But save for anarcho-capitalism (which I believe might work, might not, I would definitely like it to work and I think in most ways it probably would) you will always have that.
@ Tibor:
Overall, you make good points, and I don’t want to give the impression that I fundamentally disagree with you.
I probably do have a bias or predilection toward the “enlightened dictator” side of things, but I don’t think it’s just that. What would cause the bureaucrats to behave better than the mob? I think the kinds of things that Bryan Caplan points to in The Myth of the Rational Voter.
The “elite” are more informed. The more informed tend to be more correct. They are not always right, and their power ought to be limited as much as possible, but if the power is going to be given to someone, it’s better to give it to them than to the average guy on the street. For example, economists even when they lean left, don’t tend to support extreme interventionism, or at least have a much better idea of the limits.
One of the major things that Caplan points out is that people are not primarily driven, politically, by any crude idea of their material self-interest. They tend to do things because they think those things are correct. People are driven by ideology, and if you believe that there is such a thing as objective truth about ideology and a tendency toward the progression of it, the elite will be pushed in the right direction.
For instance, take the court system. What drives the judges to actually decide the law on the merits instead of doing what they want to do arbitrarily? Well, you have to argue that what you want to do is what the law actually is. And it’s harder to do this if you’re wrong. It’s harder to convince yourself; it’s harder to convince other people. It’s not impossible (God knows), but it creates a real check on unlimited judicial power. So while the judiciary often upholds abuses of government power which are desired by the majority (unfortunately), they quite often put definite limits on those abuses.
Take the case of John Roberts upholding the individual mandate in Obamacare. For one, many people suspect that the real reason he did so was due to democratic pressure to protect the “legitimacy” of the Court. But he wanted to uphold the individual mandate, and the government argued that this was allowed under the Commerce Clause in an unlimited sort of way. Roberts upheld it, but not under the Commerce Clause; he upheld it as a tax (which was dishonest; it wasn’t a tax). And in upholding it as a tax, he wrote that if the penalty for violating the individual mandate were too high, after a certain point it would no longer be a tax but an unconstitutional fine. So we got a bad result but a much better result than the executive wanted.
Another thing Caplan points out is that, if you look at what the median American voter actually wants and compare it to what he have now due to the power and influence of elites, what we have is much better than the alternative.
This is a fair point, and I think the strongest point. It’s basically the “blowback” argument.
However, I think you have to take it case-by-case. It’s possible that nation-building is not a good idea in Somalia (given the lack of will to stick to it), but “nation-building” by having the federal government stop segregation in Alabama was a good idea.
The EU can’t let its reach exceed its grasp; if it isn’t prepared to stop Le Pen from doing X, then it shouldn’t tell her she can’t do X.
Nevertheless, I think you can compare it again to Alabama. Having the federal government go in did rile people up and got them to vote for George Wallace (“segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!”). However, I am not at all sure that segregation would have ended faster with better feelings on all sides if the federal government had not gone in and riled people up.
I think economic liberalism is best for everyone, but the individual voter does not know it. The average voter is systematically biased against the policies that promote his own interest in this regard. Bryan Caplan’s work is to argue how and why this is so.
I think competition among governments is good. But I’m not sure that competition for citizens is something that “just happens” from the bottom up. Not when people are very much against freedom of movement across borders.
I am by no means saying that an unquestioned legal right to secede is never a good idea. I am not even totally convinced (unlike Sandefur) that the North shouldn’t have let the South go even though they didn’t have a right to secede.
But when you talk about the WTO, sure you can “secede”—but not without consequences. And when global economies become more interdependent, the consequences might be too high to bear. It doesn’t really matter if you have a legal right to secede if it means you’re going to be hit with retaliatory barriers that will destroy your economy.
Also, you don’t have the right to “secede” from much of international law. For instance, fundamental human rights laws have been held to be universally binding and irrevocable: even if you withdraw from the UN and repudiate all international treaties, you can’t commit genocide. And even customary international law has been held to be “once you’re in, you’re in for life”: if you object to a custom in the process of its formation, you’re good, but if you don’t object and later want to opt out, you can’t. (I mean you can’t legally; you can if no one will stop you. But nations are limited by more than naked force.)
Maybe anarcho-capitalism can work. I would hope so.
But the big question is: how do we get from here to there? And I don’t think it will happen by giving all power to sovereign local governments.
The most plausible way I can see something vaguely like it is if international law becomes much more powerful and guarantees people freedom of movement and freedom to be tried in the jurisdiction of one’s choice. At that point, sovereignty might be much less tied to the land and more tied to some kind of genuine “social contract” that you sign with the government you want to represent you. No “government” could try to hold you against your will because it would be sanctioned by all the others.
Very relevant: Don Boudreaux on whether he and Caplan are “elitists”:
I have utter contempt for the political opinions of the average person and only a somewhat better estimate of the opinions of elites. But in their own lives, I think people are qualified to handle their own affairs.
So I think that the powers of government ought to be limited as far as possible because no one is really good at wielding it. But at the same time, the powers that do exist should not be left to the mob to do whatever they want.
Nothing could be worse than to confuse the wisdom of the people in their individual capacities with the wisdom of the people as a collective.
I don’t want anyone to have the power to tell me what religion I can follow. But if my right to religious liberty has to be protected by some government, I’d rather have it in the hands of elites in Washington—drawn from across the whole country—than my neighbors in Alabama.
On the issue of libertarian support for state’s rights …
The obvious argument for it is that migration between states is relatively easy, so you get a Thibaut mechanism—states compete for tax payers by trying to provide a more attractive environment. A second argument is that you get more diversity of law and regulation, which generates information—if one state does something, others can see if it does or doesn’t work and respond accordingly. That’s part of the mechanism that has worked in China, at least by the account in the Coase and Wang book.
A third argument is that, while democracy is unlikely to work well anywhere, it works less badly in smaller polities.
Vox Imp is arguing that without the federal government you have no guarantee of free migration among states or even peace between states. But American libertarians who like states’ rights are not arguing for independent states, they are arguing for a federal system with much less decided at the center, much more decided at the state level. That, I gather, is what Canada currently has. It doesn’t imply leaving states free to block migration from other states or to make war on each other.
@ David Friedman:
You are exactly right that there are two separate issues being considered here: secession vs. extreme decentralization.
And I think even the issue of decentralization can be broken up into decentralization of the carrying out of the legitimate functions of government vs. decentralization of the protection of rights.
We can have laboratories of democracy, but (to use a quote I don’t remember the origins of) laboratories are not allowed to experiment on human subjects without their consent.
I see no reason why we can’t have 50 different police systems which can engage in experiments on how to police efficiently. But it also seems to me that if any of those police departments, say, decide to experiment with beating information out of prisoners, they ought to be stopped by the federal government. And the federal government can tell police departments what they can’t do—violate rights—without trying to micromanage them and tell them every little detail of what they must do.
Freedom of movement is a good check on the most extreme abuses of government. But most people are pretty attached to where they live, and the threshold of “abuses great enough to make me abandon my home” is pretty damn high. It is quite plausible to me that a central government with the power to check local governments can prevent more of these abuses than freedom of movement alone.
For instance, few people are going to move to another state solely because their state bans abortion. You can always drive to another state, right? That doesn’t mean that states ought necessarily to be able to get away with this, or that we will have better outcomes if they do.
If you squint at it right, it looks like the federal government is deciding the position on abortion for the whole country. But that’s not actually what Roe v. Wade does. It actually says: “regulate abortion however you like, and indeed you have wide latitude after the first trimester. Whatever you do, though, you can’t just ban it in the first trimester.”
Or, to take another case, the Supreme Court ruled that the Progressives couldn’t just ban private schooling or homeschooling. They don’t have to do charter schools or vouchers or whatever; they can run public schools. But they can’t tell people: either send your kid to public school or GTFO. (And if that’s dubious, it’s only because the constitutionality of public schooling is itself dubious. I think it violates the establishment clause.)
I think the sphere of government action should be very limited, and within those limits I think state governments should run all or almost all the functions. But when the state governments step outside those bounds, I think the federal government should strike their laws down.
I don’t really want to give the federal executive or legislature more power. But I am definitely okay with giving the judiciary more power. Or having it use more “judicial engagement”, to use the new terminology.
You talk about “Earl Warren in a white hat” but shit, I liked him okay in a black hat, too. Pretty much the only bad thing the courts can do is refuse to strike down bad laws passed and enforced by the other branches. So no matter how bad they are, you’re not any worse than you would have been anyway.
@Vox: I don’t know about Alabama but let’s have a look (I apologize for bringing the country up so often, but I can’t help it, it seems genuinely well-run as far as contemporary countries go) at Switzerland. The interesting thing is that people routinely vote there in referendums against ideas like high taxes for the rich or introducing a minimum wage. The one point where they diverge from liberalism is immigration, there the Swiss rules are pretty strict. On the other hand, about 23% of the population are foreigners who reside and work there. That is above any other European country as far as I know. These strict immigration laws are basically protectionist laws for the Swiss working class (it is much easier to get a working visa for a more qualified position). So are Swiss somehow naturally more liberal than other Europeans (and pretty much everyone around the world)? Maybe a bit, the country was basically founded by people who did not take kindly to being ruled by others and who were good enough at fighting that nobody would dare attack them (the mountains helped too). But I attribute the comparatively outstanding liberalism of Switzerland mainly to two factors:
1. The competition inside of the Swiss confederacy (which is however a de facto federation). There are 26 cantons in the tiny Switzerland. Switzerland’s area is 41 000 square kilometers, USA’s (which only has twice as many “cantons”) is 9 857 000 square kilometers, i.e. you could fit Switzerland into the US about 200 times. The population of the US is about 320 million, Switzerland’s is 8 million. So you have on average less than 310 000 people per canton and 6,4 million per US state. Both have a more or less equal amount of power within their respective federations, but the power of one vote in an average Swiss canton is about 20 times as big as one vote in the US (and I am counting the 23% foreigners into the population, so it is actually even more). So you have a much more concentrated interest which makes obtaining relevant information and making an informed vote much more likely and you also have a bunch of cantons that might (and do) have different rules and which are an hour of driving by car away, often even less than that, which creates a strong incentive (or much stronger than in say France) to govern the canton well because otherwise you might find out that a lot of people (and companies) move to a neighbouring canton instead.
2. The concordance system and direct democracy. The concordance system more or less means that the Swiss executive branch (which consists of 9 councillors on an equal standing, one always has a representative role for a year but otherwise does not have extra power) has to come to an uniform agreement before they take any action. This makes Swiss politics quite slow, but that is IMO an important feature, not a bug. This system is not really a law, but it is explained by the fact that due to the direct democracy mechanism, a sufficiently disagreeing opposition could block and sabotage laws almost indefinitely. People can legislate new laws or abolish old laws directly through referendums, i.e. they get to vote directly on particular issues which again makes their interests more concentrated and provides a larger incentive to get informed.
Of course, even if you somehow magically established the Swiss system everywhere else, it would not work as well because people are not used to it. But if you can get there incrementally, I think it would work pretty well. Sometimes you have strange things in Switzerland though. There was one canton, I forgot which one, where women were not allowed to vote until something like mid 1990s and even then it was only decided by the federal court that this is not within the canton’s rights. But at the same time, I doubt the women in that canton cared about it all that much. If all it takes to change this is to move 50 km to another canton (from which you can visit anyone at home on a 30 minute notice) and you don’t want that, then it probably is not as important for you.
Essentially, the problem I have with a centralized government is that is like putting all your money in one stock. You might be lucky and put your money into the next Google. Or you may put it into Nokia, it looks good at first but then it crashes. If you spread it out, you are less likely to get everything but also less likely to lose everything. And given the way governments work and tend to expand and given how big governments are harder to control than small governments (in terms of population) the chances are that you are buying Nokia.
I don’t consider democracy a value in itself but it is an instrument that can work under certain conditions and on right scales reasonably well and I don’t see any better mechanisms to keep the power of the state at bay otherwise. Constitutions are subject to interpretations as are other holy texts and where there is political will, there even the most bizarre interpretations are possible.
I guess that you might get some weird things the more local you go with power, like the canton which did not allow women to vote (in the canton elections) or maybe Alabama could become a xenophobic segregationist state. These things average out on the national level. But I am not sure they are all that bad after all. Provided that Alabama does not build an iron curtain around its borders to keep its citizens in, those dissatisfied with those rules can move to neighbouring states (again, this works better if the states are geographically much smaller than the US states). And then, if there is a community of dedicated segregationists who stay there, well, I don’t see why they should not be allowed to have their segregationist community. I would not visit, let alone move there but who am I to tell them how they should live? I also imagine you’d get such communities in anarcho-capitalism, although I would also expect most people not to live like this, as I would not expect most states to turn into such places.
The international contracts seem to have an interesting feature – in order for them to work, you need an almost uniform consensus. Laws that almost everyone can agree on actually tend to be quite liberal.
@ Tibor:
I like Switzerland. They have a federal system, which I also like. I am not saying that they have a moral obligation to join the European Union, or that we should have one big world government. Maybe ideally, but in the real world, no.
I suspect that Switzerland’s small government has a lot more to do with its requirements for unanimity, its non-unitary executive (very important!), and its ideological traditions than its direct democracy as such.
When I talk about segregation, I am talking about Jim Crow, state-enforced segregation. Black people were allowed to leave Alabama while this was going on. It wasn’t illegal. It’s just that uprooting and moving yourself is not and will never be a trivial thing. And while there were closer jurisdictions, they ended up having to move much further away to get away from it. After all, it didn’t do them much good to move to Mississippi or Georgia.
The “who am I to judge?” argument—in the context of violation of rights by force—was parodied by Abraham Lincoln as the principle “That if any one man, choose to enslave another, no third man shall be allowed to object.”
I might respond in more detail later to some of your other points.
I also just want to say that the freedom of movement argument (though not entirely invalid) reminds me a lot of the old refrain: “If you don’t like the government, move to Somalia.” Or the anti-liberal version: “If you don’t like it, move to Canada.”
The proper response (to the Canada one, anyway) is: if it gets bad enough, then I will move to Canada. But you don’t have the right to force me out of my home by passing laws that violate my rights.
@Vox: Yeah, I got that you were not saying that Switzerland should join the EU. My point was that Swiss-style government structure seems to lead to the desired results, i.e. more liberalism in a lot of areas. Switzerland is also multicultural and even multilingual although the different cultures and languages are mostly separated by different cantons (but there are also “mixed” cantons and cities). Also, arguably the French, German and Italian Swiss are perhaps culturally closer to each other than blacks and whites are in the US, so maybe Jim Crow would not be entirely impossible in some cantons of an alternative American Switzerland.
Generally, I think that you have some good points. It is good to have an international structure which limits the power of the local governments (in any way as far as I am concerned). It is bad to have such a structure when it merely transfers that power to a more centralized level. It is also easier to keep a a multinational organization in checn when it is a more or less automated system which is unanimously agreed upon and has clearly stated and automatically enacted sanctions – much like the WTO membership. As long as centralization is done this way – by specifying which powers are simply taken from the governments and dissolved in acid – then I am all for centralization. But then the correct strategy seems not the bureaucratic monstrosity which the EU has become but a series of multilateral international contracts. One about the abolition of tariffs, one about free movement of labour and so on.
The question is whether the mechanism can be trusted to actually punish any “heavy-hitters” who break the rules. But that is an even bigger problem with the current EU in which there is a room for political maneuvering so that Germany or France can get away with stuff smaller countries could not (so for example the no bailout rules were completely ignored in case of Greece). It seems like WTO sanctions are more reliable because there is less politicking involved.
@David
” A second argument is that you get more diversity of law and regulation, which generates information—if one state does something, others can see if it does or doesn’t work and respond accordingly”
There’s also plenty of information avabilable from the 199 countries in the world, if you can bear to make use of it.
States within the US are probably subject to far fewer (but still a lot!) confounders than countries around the world.
Thanks for the Sandefur link, very illuminating.
The Lochner-era Supreme Court is a really interesting example, too.
Roderick Long on dangers of centralization and the claim that a bigger central government may be good for imposing liberal values on backwards localities:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aolEZ9kHuw8
@Vox Imp:
You seem to be taking it for granted that if the federal government gets to define rights and impose its definition on the states, the rights it imposes will be better than what the states would have done on their own. Why?
For a counter-example obvious from a libertarian standpoint, consider fair employment and fair housing legislation. That says that people have a right not to be discriminated against in certain ways. That implies that people do not have the right of freedom of association. It prevents a state from defending the right of freedom of association.
Again, you have to distinguish between the federal judiciary on the one hand, and the federal executive and legislature on the other. All the judiciary can do is strike down laws. They can’t make laws. So the worst they can do is uphold what the other branches already passed.
I think the federal government should not and as far as the Constitution is concerned does not have jurisdiction over housing and employment regulations.
The way these laws work is that the federal legislature passes a bill saying that you are not allowed to discriminate in housing or employment. And rather than striking it down, the federal courts uphold it. This may be legally incorrect and harmful: but it’s not as if some “activist judges” on their own somehow put this into effect. Your right not to be discriminated against comes from statute.
I am not advocating federal control over everything, with micromanagement by Washington. I think the federal executive and legislature should have very limited powers and shouldn’t be allowed to set one employment law for the entire country. But if a state government passes an employment law which violates rights—such as preventing people from working for less than a certain wage—then the courts ought to strike it down.
I understand your argument here: if the federal government has the physical power to enforce such a decision, then they have the physical power to enforce the dictates of an unrestrained legislature, too. Sure, that’s correct. But this is true if you have a federal government physically powerful enough to do anything.
And it’s not good when you have a weak central government. Weak government is not the same as small government. Russia had a very weak central government in the 90s, and it led to massive economic chaos, the development of petty fiefdoms everywhere, the proliferation of organized crime, and incredible corruption and hyperinflation since the government couldn’t fund itself except by illegal deals and the printing press. Most Russians considered (and consider it to this day) worse than life under the Soviet Union, and by objective measures they were right. (Subjectively, I guess there was a certain “Wild West” freedom in it.) You of course have a much more sophisticated view of anarchy, but this kind of thing is what the average person thinks of by “anarchy”, and they don’t like it much.
But anyway, that’s a tangent. Maybe we can get rid of the federal government altogether and just have the states be independent states. That would be better than a federal government without the power to do the job it’s supposed to do. You were the one who wanted to talk about decentralization as opposed to secession, however.
My point is: if the federal government has enough physical power to defend the country, to protect freedom of movement, or to whatever minimal job you think a federal government should do, then it also has the physical power to enforce Obamacare and anti-discrimination law against the will of people in any given state. That’s the inevitable story with physical power. If you don’t like it, the only other option is no federal government, not one just strong enough to do good things but too weak to do bad things—such a beast cannot exist.
This is just my judgment from the historical record of the United States. The worst abuses of rights tend to be sectional. Especially in terms of abuses which it is possible to do anything about: obviously, if the whole country shares the same prejudice, you’re screwed anyway.
Overall, I see far more and far worse cases of states trying to do something oppressive but being stopped by the conscience of the rest of the country than I see of states trying to move more toward freedom but being held back by the federal government. I’m not saying the latter don’t exist, but they’re far more minor. And even there it’s more often a question of state governments fighting for their retained privileges than actually fighting for the rights of their citizens.
I don’t exactly consider Jim Crow and the national minimum drinking age to be equivalent evils. The War on Drugs would be a good example if the federal government weren’t currently allowing legalized recreation marijuana in two states.
To put this in more a grand-historical way, since we start off from a low position where liberty and equal rights are limited and extend only to a few, and the direction we want to go in is where they are extensive and extended to everyone, it is more likely to me that holdouts will be bastions of local prejudice than bastions of liberty holding out against tyrannical reaction. Or to look at it another way, if there is objective truth in the sphere of ideas and people can learn from one another, it is more likely (if we are not allowed to consider anything else) that the views of a larger number of people drawn from a wide area are correct than the views of a smaller number of people from a narrow area. (Obviously, intellectual progress is only possible if sometimes individuals and small groups are right and the majority is wrong. But contrarians are more often wrong than right.)
This is not a guarantee or an inevitable dialectical law of history. It is certainly possible to be the correct holdouts fighting the noble rearguard battle against world-enveloping tyranny, and libertarians are familiar with this because they have done a lot of it in the 20th century.
But despite that, I think the principle of “no one group of people is ever allowed to interfere with what another group of people are doing to one another” is more likely to lead to harm than good. I would like to be able to secede and create my own Galt’s Gulch, sure. But if any gang of people were allowed to secede in an area where they formed the majority, and if no one would interfere with what they planned to do to the minority, I don’t think the results would be good.
Not without a system—which may possibly be a very decentralized system that has no “executive” at all to enforce its decisions—of effectively applying physical coercion to these governments to keep them in line.
In a real sense, we already have a system of “competitive dictatorship” where the government can do anything it wants but you can choose what government to live under. It’s the international system of anarchy. Most countries don’t actually keep you from leaving. It’s just that other countries aren’t necessarily any better and aren’t necessarily going to let you in.
” It prevents a state from defending the right of freedom of association.”
Only it doesn’t because
“Freedom of association is the right to join or leave groups of a person’s own choosing, and for the group to take collective action to pursue the interests of members.” (WP)
..however it does prevent the thing it is supposed to prevent, discrimination, which some people *call* freedom of associatiion.
@onyomi:
Fair enough. For what it’s worth, I never meant to say that I thought your support for libertarian principles was coded support for racism. If it came across that way, I apologize. I did think you might deny that many of Ron Paul’s supporters were racists and that many people who support state’s rights are doing so because they think the whole 60s civil rights movement was wrong not in tactic but in objective.
I’m surprised that you think Ron Paul did not make purposeful alliances with various white power, neo-confederate, John Birch, etc. groups and supporters. If I gave you evidence of such would that cause you to update? Or do you think you are already familiar with that evidence?
If it’s the newsletter thing I’d rather see something spoken or written by Ron Paul himself (as opposed to written, most likely, by Lew Rockwell for a magazine to which Ron Paul attached his name) in the last 30 years, ideally something he said or wrote during his 2008 or 2012 campaigns, which are most relevant to the question of whether he actually intended to attract the racists and conspiracy theorists or simply failed to denounce them.
Even from my own libertarian-leaning Red Tribe perspective, “Ron Paul was not a writer of hate literature, merely a publisher of hate literature” doesn’t seem like much of a defense.
I think the fact that these were published almost 40 years ago and he has since repeatedly tried to distance himself from them has got to count for something. Saying “you let something racist be published in your name 40 years ago from which you have repeatedly tried to distance yourself” is very different from saying “you recently said things intended to attract racists to your movement.”
You can make an argument that Ron Paul was okay with attracting racists to libertarianism in the 70s even if he didn’t carefully read everything that was getting published under his name. That doesn’t mean he was still trying to attract them in 2008 and 2012. I never saw him say or write anything during that time period which could be interpreted as such. Maybe he didn’t do enough to denounce the old, socially conservative, sometimes racist-ish branch of libertarianism, but that’s not the same as saying he was trying to win racists and conspiracy theorists to his cause.
@onyomi:
How about this address by Ron Paul to the John Birch Society from 2013 (I think).
That’s not failing to repudiate. It’s not even just winking. It’s outright saying that the John Birch Society has the right of it.
I listened to that whole clip and didn’t hear him say anything racist or to suggest any support for any conspiracy theories. He said a few nice things about the John Birch Society, but that’s only polite when giving a speech at the John Birch Society.
I don’t know much about the history of the John Birch Society, but based on their own website, the wikipedia page, and other, similar sources of public info (that is, how they wish to present themselves) they are just anti-communist, anti-globalist, pro-constitution, etc. They don’t strike me as particularly crazy. I do see some links to other videos of people talking about the Illuminati or whatever at the JBS, but that merely means that at least some of their membership are interested in such things.
And I don’t think anything that even smacks of global elites planning stuff in secret is automatically crazy–think about Bohemian Grove and, indeed, even Davos. Elites do meet and plan, but I’m just a very big believer in “don’t attribute to malice what is adequately explained by stupidity,” and “don’t attribute to a vast conspiracy what is adequately explained by a complex set of bad institutional incentives.”
So the question is, should Ron Paul have rejected an offer to speak at the John Birch Society just because they have also allowed someone to talk about the Illuminati there? I think that if you have some ideology or viewpoint you want to disseminate you should talk to anyone who’s willing to listen, within reason.
I will admit, however, that libertarians, who tend to pride themselves on being principled, rational thinkers, have probably underestimated the degree to which the seeming groundswell of support for libertarianism around 2012 was founded on weird, dumb, confused, or paranoid reasoning rather than a sober evaluation of the moral and practical case for libertarian philosophy. That said, I think any level-headed Republican or Democrat, could he peer into the hearts of his fellow red or blue tribe members, would be shocked at how many people are voting with him for completely stupid reasons.
Paul’s 2008 endorsement of Chuck Baldwin and the theocratic Constitution Party really soured me on him.
Granted, as a non-Christian I’m naturally opposed to Christian theocracy, and at the time I was souring on libertarianism in general, for reasons I don’t really care to get into right now.
@onyomi:
The very first link on the John Birch Societies issues page is about Agenda 21 and how it is the UNs “plan to establish control over all human activity.”
I saw that and it looked kind of conspiracy-ish to me. So I looked up Agenda 21, which I had never heard of, on Wikipedia. It seems to be pretty much what they say it is, no? Like, it’s not a secret, but a real document published by the UN detailing plans for the future of the world. Like the UN in general, I doubt it has or will accomplish much. But it is a real thing, as globalism is a real thing. Ask Woodrow Wilson. Saying Woodrow Wilson wanted globalism isn’t a conspiracy, it’s just a well-known fact. The JBS claims to be anti-globalism, so it follows they should be anti-UN and anti-UN plans.
@onyomi:
Research the history of the John Birch Society. Buckley. Fluoride. They are the original paranoid style conspiracy theorists.
HBC: out of curiosity, do you have any opinion on the Southern Poverty Law Center?
@onyomi:
That feels like an attempt at a distraction? But since you asked I know only a little about SPLC. They seem to have been a necessary organization. The farther we get from entrenched, systematic racism, the less necessary they probably get.
I also know that it is a bete-noire for some on the right. If you are trying to claim that I should view SPLC and JBS equally, I’m open to the argument, but remember that JBS was cast out of the good graces of the conservative coalition because they espoused ideas that were unmoored from reality.
Yes, as you guess, I’m implying that the feelings people on the left and right have about the SPLC may be roughly similar to the feelings they have about the JBS, but reversed.
To me, though it sounds like they may have once had a history fighting for some good causes, the SPLC is a completely unmoored from reality, hate-filled, almost bizarre leftist fringe group. But the impression I get from the many blue tribers who post their links on facebook, etc. is that, from their perspective, SPLC is an organization, which, while it might be a little radical or go overboard from time to time, basically has its heart in the right place and is overall a force for good.
It seems to me that red tribers, myself included, are going to be inclined toward a similar level of leniency when judging the JBS. Plus, the fact that they got denounced by William F Buckley and National Review is practically a badge of honor nowadays. I mean, if I were a libertarian politician and I were asked to give a talk at this place, I’d go. I might expect to encounter a few weirdos babbling about the illuminati, but I’d imagine I might be able to do some good, and I also certainly wouldn’t reject any donations from them. And I feel like most leftist politicians would feel the same about SPLC.
To me, SPLC is just as crazy, on the other side, as JBS is on our side, so when blue tribers start denouncing them for transforming from a group that fights hate groups into a hate group themselves, I will start denouncing JBS for feeding into paranoia that the government is out to get us…
@onyomi:
My view on the SPLC v. the JBS is that the SPLC is crazy partisan, whereas the JBS is just crazy.
I find the SPLC slightly more reliable than the JBS, but only because they still have enough non-crazy to realize there are lines they can’t cross. Within those lines they are just as predictably ridiculous as the JBS.
Or, to put it another way: the JBS are a bunch of conspiracy theorists. The SPLC is an actual conspiracy. (Not a particularly good or secret one.)
What exactly is supposed to be so bad about the SPLC?
Is there someone whom they list as an extremist or a “hate group” who you think is not deserving of that title? That’s my main awareness of them anyway: they expose racists and conspiracy theorists on the extreme “right”.
Looking over their legal case docket, they mainly appear to be engaged in civil rights legislation, much of which I agree with, such as suing the government for its discriminatory treatment of minorities. And the parts that I don’t necessarily agree with (such as trying to sue companies for discrimination against the transgender) make sense given the established law of the land: given that there are protections for race, sex, national origin and many other things, protection for transgender status would seem to follow unless the law is simply being prejudiced against the transgender.
At one point, I had a very negative first impression of them because I’d heard they’d listed the Mises Institute as a “hate group”. But this is not true. They don’t list them as a hate group, although they have had some (in my opinion, well justified) negative coverage of some of the individuals associated with it. For those unfamiliar, the Mises Institute is a libertarian economics group, but it’s full of neo-Confederates and led by Lew Rockwell.
The groups they list as “hate groups” are groups like the KKK, the Council of Conservative Citizens, and so on. Overall, I think their categories of “extremist groups” are pretty reasonable; they have them sorted by ideology here.
Some of them sound a bit iffy until you realize what they’re talking about, like “Radical Traditional Catholicism”. They’re not talking about folks who want the Latin Mass back. They’re talking about sedevacantists who think the pope is a heretic and who reject any form of tolerance for other religions, and the SPLC mainly attacks them for their anti-Semitism, as they hold that the Jews are the “perpetual enemies of Christ”.
They even include a list of black separatist groups (Nation of Islam type stuff) in their categories of extremist hate groups.
I don’t think of the SPLC as crazy conspiracy theorists, I think of them as dishonest demagogues. They do the standard thing where they claim to be about fighting hate, but really only care about hate that comes from the right (and define “hate” very very broadly when looking to the right).
If they applied their own standards evenly, they would have to designate themselves as a hate group, since the FRC shooter was carrying around a map of targets they produced. When last I checked, that shooting didn’t even merit an entry in their database, while offensive graffiti did.
A more analogous group on the left might be LaRouche, or the various conspiracy theories that thrive in black communities, like how the CIA created AIDS.
Vox, there’s Charles Murray: https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/charles-murray
“My view on the SPLC v. the JBS is that the SPLC is crazy partisan, whereas the JBS is just crazy.”
I see them as both crazy in parallel ways: JBS was laboring under the assumption that communists were hiding behind every rock and bush and therefore saw saw communists everywhere, even where they didn’t exist. SPLC is laboring under the assumption that racism and misogyny are everywhere and therefore finds racism and misogyny everywhere it looks.
Only difference is JBS seems to have gotten a little less crazy over time, whereas the opposite is true of SPLC.
Vox, here is the first hit for Mises on the SPLC site. It is in a list of 18 organizations, only 3 of which have the official “hate group” asterisk, although putting “hate” in the URL is pretty suggestive. I don’t see how you can deny that SPLC labels LvMI “extremist.”
“The groups they list as “hate groups” are groups like the KKK, the Council of Conservative Citizens, and so on. Overall, I think their categories of “extremist groups” are pretty reasonable; they have them sorted by ideology here.”
They only list the most obvious examples on the website, though I am pleasantly surprised that they at least list a couple of extremist black groups as well.
I read a magazine they put out while waiting in a doctor’s office once: their definition of “hate group” was very, very expansive. Things like “Promise Keepers,” and, indeed, the Mises Institute (which is very plumbline libertarian and mostly dedicated to Austrian economics), fell under “hate group.” As with their renunciation of Charles Murray, they don’t distinguish between persons and groups genuinely fueled by hate and bigotry and persons and groups which simply espouse a different perspective on race, gender, religion, politics, than they do.
@onyomi:
Much like the chinese cardiologist problem, I feel like if you want to do the forest/trees thing for many/most organizations, its probably possible.
But I don’t see that you can ignore the difference between the SPLC and JBS. SPLC looks for bias against race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, etc. and documents what they find, without making top-level sweeping pronouncements.
JBS says that “The UN is at the hub of a global network working to submerge the independence of all nations in a world government controlled by the elites” and that they have a plan to “establish control over all human activity”. Those aren’t in the same ballpark.
Look at the video attached the Agenda 21 page.
“Agenda 21 is slowly transforming our country from a free and prosperous land of opportunity to a United Nations oblast in which every aspect of our lives is categorized and reorganized to please UN central planners”
Add in the manner in which it delivered, and the fact that is literally the top thing on their issues page, and the picture is not of a organization that has a from grasp on the realities of the world.
The Politician documents the findings of JBS in far greater detail than SPLC ever has.
@ Jaskologist:
Yes, their main focus is on hate that comes from the right. But I don’t think one can validly deduce from that there is something dishonest here, or that they approve of…I don’t know…the Weathermen? ISIS (are they even “left”)? The FRC shooter?
It’s no different from an organization that is dedicated to fighting malaria but doesn’t say anything about AIDS. They do so because they think malaria is the bigger problem, or at least the problem they want to focus on. Not because they approve of AIDS.
And do they really define “hate” that broadly?
You know that is not a fair criticism. They did not produce a map of “targets” wanting or expecting anyone to use it for violence.
Now in some sense, I guess the people at the SPLC “hate” members of the far right, including those at the Family Research Council whose whole job is to spin semi-respectable justifications for discrimination against gays and lesbians. But obviously what they are condemning is unjustified and senseless hatred of innocent people. Not that you can’t condemn Fred Phelps or someone like that.
@ Douglas Knight:
They are not listed as a hate group, as you point out. However, they list them as one of “An array of right-wing foundations and think tanks [that] support efforts to make bigoted and discredited ideas respectable.” And that is one-hundred percent correct of a lot of the material put out by the Mises Institute. They do put out good stuff, too, and there I obviously disagree with the SPLC.
But there is plenty of baseless, conspiratorial historical revisionism (such as the theory that FDR allowed Pearl Harbor to happen), whitewashing of the Confederacy, and just plain racism. The place was the main bastion of the 90s effort to unify “paleolibertarians” and “paleoconservatives” which produced the infamous Ron Paul newsletters discussed elsewhere in this thread.
@ Psmith:
To me it seems appropriate to list Charles Murray on a site like that, since he is one of the main sources contributing a veneer of respectability to a newfound resurgence of “scientific racism”. Especially since, in their view and in the opinion of many others, he is a dishonest peddler of pseudoscience. I am no expert on this area of science, but given that they think he’s wrong, dishonest, and the respectable face of racism, I can absolutely understand why they would list him.
Vox, this seems to tie into the earlier discussion of “what facts must you accept?” Given sufficiently weird falsehoods, we can plausibly infer other falsehoods from them, yes. But it’s just silly to ignore the object level entirely. If the SPLC types believe that Charles Murray is a purveyor of of racist pseudoscience who wishes to grind the faces of the poor, it may be perfectly reasonable for them to classify Charles Murray as whatever the individual equivalent of a hate group is. But their belief that CM is a purveyor etc etc is false–and is so thoroughly false (the man wrote a book advocating basic income!) that it can plausibly be attributed to out-and-out kookiness rather than honest error.
@Psmith:
To put your point more pithily: The SPLC believes in the existence of hate facts, or acts as if it did. That makes them crazy partisan at best and crazy at worst.
@ Psmith:
I don’t agree with the SPLC’s whole worldview. In general, I think they vastly exaggerate the danger posed by “far right” extremist groups. And this promotes a climate of paranoia.
Charles Murray is undoubtedly a purveyor of racist science. Whether it’s pseduoscience or whether it proves racist beliefs to be correct is a question I do not have the expertise to judge, but a large number of people think it is. It’s not a crazy view.
Now, yes, that article is a hit piece on Charles Murray, not a “fair and balanced” presentation of the best case for and against him. But if you’re trying to say the SPLC is a crazy fringe group for writing that style of article, you’re being very selective. You don’t have to look too far for conservative hit pieces on left-wingers.
One area where the article is unfair, as you point out, is that they try to conflate two different racist views: that we should let the lesser races be outcompeted and die, or that we should paternalistically take care of them but also keep them in line. And they try to somehow argue that Murray holds both views at the same time. When in fact, he seems to hold the second, paternalistic, view.
@ Marc Whipple:
It is obviously possible to selectively present facts—with an air of supposed objective neutrality—in order to advance a false narrative.
For instance, you may be familiar with the selective presentation of facts about the Industrial Revolution to advance the view that it was a time of terrible misery caused by capitalism, and that the cure was socialistic intervention by the government.
The people at SPLC believe something similar about the facts put forward by Charles Murray. And I’m not sure they’re wrong.
Of course, as I said above, they are also selectively presenting facts about Murray himself to make him seem worse than he is. I am not saying the SPLC is an exemplar of perfectly objective reporting. The original discussion was whether they were just like the John Birch Society, and they are not.
@Marc Whipple:
SPLC only has one entry for Charles Murrary (which was already been linked above.)
He is listed as an extremist, and the word “hate” doesn’t appear on the page. It’s reasonable to argue that the phrase “racist pseudoscience and misleading statistics” at the top of his bio is wrong. But, since they do make an argument for why his work should be considered to be based on pseudo-science, it does not seem to be warranted to accuse them of saying there are “hate facts”.
@Vox Imperatoris:
Charles Murray is undoubtedly a purveyor of racist science
And I see the SPLC is not the only one that believes in hate facts.
Inferential distance, let me show you it!
I am not sure, to be honest, and I apologize if I should know, what your educational and experiential background is. I do not mean to cast aspersions, especially if you have significant scientific training. But in my mind at least, to a real Sco… I mean, scientist, the term “racist science” is semantically null. If it is racist, it is not science. If it is science, it cannot be racist.
Science may support the preferences and assertions of people with racist beliefs, or it may not. (Usually it does not: sometimes it does.) Science may even be undertaken with the express purpose of supporting the preferences and assertions of people with racist beliefs*. But the resulting science is the science, the resulting facts are the facts. The Universe does not care about ought, it only cares about is.
And before you start, let me unreservedly acknowledge that facts are subject to interpretation. “It’s easy to understand why Americans are so unconcerned about poor people: most of them look just like black people.” Et cetera. I do not dispute that. But the facts, again, are the facts. When you have people openly saying that certain things should not be studied, not because they are not true but because if they are true it would cause offense and pain, we have gone far beyond disputed interpretation.
*For an interesting example of such an endeavor in another field, consider the findings of the Meese Commission versus its actual recommendations to the government. The findings were science: the recommendations were bigoted claptrap. The two had nothing to do with each other.
HBC, they don’t call Murray a Hate Group because he isn’t a group. Instead they call him a “White Nationalist.”
And, no, they don’t make an argument at all. They merely say that his sources are evil. At least The Politician makes an argument.
@ Marc Whipple:
There are, I suppose, at least three definitions of “racism”.
One is, to quote the Merriam-Webster dictionary: “a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race.” That is not a value judgment (I mean, yes it is, but not in the sense you mean. In the strict sense, it is a value judgment to believe that one drug works better than another to cure a disease). But if you believe it, you’re a racist by this very common usage.
Another is (in my own words), “discrimination or preference of any kind of the basis of race.” In this sense, affirmative action is racist.
A third is, “discrimination or violence on the basis of unjustified racial prejudice”.
Now, the third view of racism implies that racism is wrong by definition. Whatever’s true can’t be racist because it’s justified.
But it seems to me that the SPLC are calling Murray racist in the first sense as well as the third sense. That is, they are accusing him of believing as a matter of fact that the black race is genetically inferior to the white race. They also think he believes this because of unjustified racist bias.
It is obviously conceivable that racism in the first sense could be true as a descriptive statement. And if Murray is right, it is true. If racism is true, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the correct policy towards lesser races is extermination or subjugation.
But for the SPLC, the main thing that offends them is Murray’s belief that some races are genetically inferior, and that this is the explanation of a wide number of social problems. I don’t get the impression that they care very much about what his view on what to do about this is. He is famous primarily for his views on these descriptive facts, not the value judgments.
As for them calling Murray a “White Nationalist”, that is obviously unfair. However, the logical explanation is that they have a certain number of “tags” for different “hate ideologies”, and the best fit for him is “white nationalist” because those are the extremist circles where his ideas have the most influence.
@Vox Imperatoris:
Applying Definition #1 to Murray in the context of the SPLC’s activities and goals is a wonderful example of The Worst Argument In the World, or something very like it. While I will not dispute it, I give it short shrift. In fact, in my eyes its shrift is so short as to escape detection by modern science. 🙂
Again, inferential distance. I understand what you are saying: I am unable to make myself believe that it is particularly important or relevant to what I am saying. The SPLC, if pressed, would undoubtedly say that their mission is to fight Type 3 racism. A scholar of linguistics might call someone who studied Type 1 hypotheses (and note that even your Definition#1 says the, whereas I’m guessing that Murray would say a) a racist in good faith. When the SPLC does it, they are not acting in good faith: they are making The Worst Argument In the World.
@Marc Whipple
FWIW this “hate facts” phrase strikes me as the kind of smug, snarky alt-right zinger that’s only useful for preaching to the choir and turns everyone else off. The first page of google results for it does nothing to dispel that impression.
Not trying to police your language, if that’s what you were going for so be it.
@Douglas Knight:
Here is how SPLC defines the ideological bucket they have put Murray in: “White nationalist groups espouse white supremacist or white separatist ideologies, often focusing on the alleged inferiority of nonwhites.”
Murray focuses on the inferiority of non-whites and the superiority of whites, yes? He also advocates separation, (Social Apartheid) from “dysgenic” groups, yes?
Look, I understand that people round here don’t like “bingo” words like “racist” and “white supremacist”. And Murray actually seems to be arguing for something that hails from even farther back, the idea that there is a criminal class destined to be that way from birth which needs to be somehow removed from the population. Vegemite may really be a product of the permanent criminal underclass, but otherwise Australia doesn’t to bear this idea out.
It all hinges on whether Murray is using actual science or pseudo-science though. Do people actually think that “The professional consensus is that the United States has experienced dysgenic pressures throughout either most of the century (the optimists) or all of the century (the pessimists).”?
HBC, you are the one who brought up bingo words. You said that SPLC didn’t call Murray a Hater. Now that I point out what bingo word they did use, you say that you aren’t interested in bingo words.
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If all you know about Charles Murray is from hit pieces, then SPLC sure sounds accurate.
Does he believe in people destined to be an underclass? No, his early book Losing Ground argues the opposite. (And Human Accomplishment argues against people born to be geniuses.) Does he advocate separatism? No, his recent book Coming Apart argues the opposite.
He can hardly advocate separation from dysgenic populations when he finds, in the continuation of your quote, that all populations to be dysgenic.
If you believe SPLC’s lies that Charles Murray advocates “Social Apartheid,” that he has reversed course and advocated the custodial state that he has long predicted as the result of the welfare state, read the article they quote.
@brad:
I appreciate your concern. You’re right, it’s a snarky thing to say. If I offended anyone, I apologize.
That being said, I stand by the underlying concept: facts cannot be insolent, nor can they be prejudiced. They are what they are.
@ Marc Whipple:
Think of it this way: imagine that someone was going around telling blatant lies about the Soviet Union, that they were really far more prosperous than the U.S., that the purges were a myth, that there were no shortages, etc. And he backed all of these assertions up with cherrypicked facts and convincing fabrications.
These are just descriptive facts, right? The guy’s not advocating Communism. He’s just saying that as a matter of fact it’s a superior system.
But you can obviously see how, given that this guy is wrong, he is at least as dangerous a promoter of Communism as someone who goes around giving long rants about “capitalist pig-dogs” without any factual substance. The reason is that the belief that Communism objectively is a superior system is (or, well, was) a major driver of support for Communism.
In the way the SPLC sees things, yes, their goal is to fight Type 3 racism. But a major driver of Type 3 racism is false belief in Type 1 racism. So you can hardly isolate them from one another.
There is an obvious danger in this, right? What if Type 1 racism actually is true after all? Then they weren’t so wise in demonizing people who spread it.
But then the SPLC’s opinion on how to treat minorities—insofar as it has any connection to what they believe to be the facts—is likely to need changing. It’s not exactly obvious that racial minorities ought to be treated the same way regardless of whether Type 1 racism is true. The whole SPLC worldview on what Type 3 racism is and how to fight it is premised upon Type 1 racism’s being false.
And the same of course applies to the first example: what if the Soviet apologist is right after all? Opposition to Communism is based in large degree on the factual premise that it doesn’t work.
@Vox Imperatoris:
And he backed all of these assertions up with cherrypicked facts and convincing fabrications. […] These are just descriptive facts, right?
Whoa. Whoa, whoa, whoa. You lost me right there. No, those are not just descriptive facts. Those are fabrications. Or, if you prefer, lies.
I read the rest of your post, but the conflation of those things put me right back on the other side of the inferential gap. And here’s why: because the way that people who don’t want to believe in unpleasant facts react to them is to allege that they cannot possibly be true, and do their damnedest to find mistakes (or actual fabrications) produced by the person presenting the unpleasant facts and use them to discredit the unpleasant facts. And where are we then?
Right back to The Worst Argument In the World.
To the SLPC they are not making The Worst Argument in the World because they do not believe that Type 1 racism can ever be valid. They aren’t fighting Type 1 to help stop Type 3: they don’t make a distinction in the first place. But that is not science-based argument: that is dogmatic argument.
I already conceded that if you use Definition #1 Murray is a racist. I am likewise willing to concede that if you insert convincing fabrications, you are not doing science. But what it feels like to me when you introduce these things which, to me, are totally irrelevant to what I am arguing about, is that you are not arguing in good faith. I presume that you are, but it’s difficult to have a productive dialogue when each of us just keeps pulling out the other person’s definition and substituting our own.
@Douglas Knight:
“HBC, you are the one who brought up bingo words. You said that SPLC didn’t call Murray a Hater.”
Huh? I was responding to Marc Whipple’s assertion that SPLC was accusing Murray of “hate facts”. To a certain point, I was merely insisting that the bingo words used be the ones actually used by SPLC (while acknowledging that people here don’t like any bingo words.
As to the supposedly existing dysgenic pressures, Murray seems pretty clear that they apply to the “underclass” and not the “elite”. He specifically uses the word underclass and distinguishes it from the rest of the population.
One thing that’s interesting about Charles Murray is his tendency to “flip the script” on progressives. It is a fundamental progressive belief that things like crime, poverty, and drug abuse are caused by social factors out of the control of individuals, and therefore those individuals aren’t really morally responsible for what they do. It’s “there but for the grace of God go I”.
Now, Murray believes the same thing but with genetic factors instead of social factors. However, a curious thing is that many believers in the genetic superiority of one group moralize this. Like, they try to somehow make it an accomplishment of white people that they are genetically superior. Hence “white pride”. Where Murray seems to confuse progressives like those at the SPLC is that he doesn’t believe in “white pride” or anything like that. In his view (quite sensibly, given his premises), it’s not lesser races’ fault that they are lesser, and it’s nothing to be ashamed of.
For instance, take this quote on laziness:
See, most people implicitly believe in free will and hold that laziness is a moral flaw. You have a choice about whether to be lazy, and therefore it’s just if you’re punished for being lazy. Murray doesn’t accept this. It’s not poor people’s fault that they are lazy; it’s a matter of genetics. We shouldn’t blame them for it; we should accept it and treat it like a medical disease.
So in a sense, you might except people like Murray to be allied with the progressives on societal determinism, with it being a gentlemanly internal disagreement on what are the exact causes of this determinism.
But curiously, the social-economic determinists end up allied with the believers in free will because they share a common premise more relevant to politics: that it is possible for those who constitute the underclass to no longer be an underclass if only the right steps are taken. For one side, it’s individual responsibility; for the other, it’s government intervention.
However, the genetic determinists end up being the hated enemies of both because they believe that, essentially, little can be done to change society, as the deterministic factors are immutable, at least during one person’s lifespan.
But as Douglas Knight points out, Murray isn’t one-hundred percent faithful to this because to a large extent he’s also a cultural determinist. If we teach the poor better cultural values, this can help them deal compensate for their genetic inferiority. Yet progressives still dislike this intensely for a couple of reasons: a) they see it as victim-blaming, since the conventional view is that people are responsible for the cultural values they hold, making “black people have a culture of laziness” little better than “black people are poor because they choose to be lazy”; but perhaps more importantly b) the proposed cultural changes move in the exact opposite direction from what progressives think to be the way to make society less oppressive of the poor, and c) they see the cultural arguments rightly or wrongly as just a “code” for racial arguments, making “black people have a culture of laziness” a secret code for “black people are genetically lazy”.
@ Marc Whipple:
…they are purported to be be descriptive facts. Obviously, the SPLC thinks that Murray’s conclusions are fabrications and lies.
Yes, and that’s what progressives think conservatives (and libertarians) are doing. Ever heard the phrase “reality-based community”?
I think you need to put yourself in their shoes. Do you really think that they believe the falsity of Type 1 racist is a literal dogma? Of course not: they think the falsity of it is an obvious empirical fact, proven wrong by long historical experience and in particular the discrediting of eugenics after the defeat of Hitler in WWII, with modern genetics showing that “race” is a social construct.
And there are progressives on their little message boards right now talking about how belief in laissez-faire capitalism is “market fundamentalism” based on nothing more than dogmatic faith in some mystical “invisible hand”. How only the most deluded fanatic could ignore the obvious exploitation of workers in sweatshops in the “Gilded Age” or in the developing world today, and the fact that these things are cured every time pro-union legislation and labor laws are passed. Or could ignore the massive destruction of jobs and cultures wrought by globalization.
I’m not saying there is no objective truth of the matter one way or the other. I am saying that the question of whether Charles Murray ought to be condemned by the SPLC depends on whether he is right. Or at the very least, whether he is a liar.
***
Perhaps I can reformulate one important point of the Communism example that I don’t think came out.
Is it not the case that there are some empirical facts which you hold to be so obvious and important that hearing the denial of them makes you very angry?
If so, you can sympathize.
If not, you are either very fortunate or very unfortunate, but I don’t know which.
I have no idea where you getting that from. It certainly has no resemblance to what Murray says, but neither do I see it in SPLC’s lies, either.
Even if were true that the classes are entirely genetically determined (which Murray argues against over many books), that is a completely separate issue from eu/dysgenics, which is genetic change. Whether one class is getting smarter or dumber is quite independent of whether another is, and both are independent of the relative growth of the classes.
I would like to note that I correctly predicted that the introduction of SPLC would serve as a distraction. We have ceased discussing Ron Paul, the John Birch Society and whether Ron Paul intentionally courts the conspiracy minded. We are completely focused on whether SPLC are (snark) “merely crappy” or “completely evil”. (/snark)
Does anyone want to make the case that SPLCs opinions on, say, Murray are equivalent to the John Birch Societies opinions on Agenda 21?
@ HeelBearCub:
The answer is yes, Ron Paul courts those people, but I think the discussion is played out.
Exactly, might makes right.
@ Douglas Knight:
As an alternative explanation, there is the view of Abraham Lincoln (a view shared by many progressives) that “right makes might”. Nazi Germany was based on a false and destructive view of human nature, and the madness of it led to its own downfall. And only after that downfall could people really see with full clarity how mad it was. (Much like the fall of the Soviet Union.)
But sure, I think progressives’ confidence that Type 1 racism is categorically false is less than one-hundred percent warranted. Along with the vast majority of people’s beliefs about subjects in which they are not experts.
@Vox:
onyomi asked for a specific recent example of Ron Paul courting the people I was talking about, I gave it to him. He said he didn’t know much about JBS but Agenda 21 “seemed real”. That was 2 posts about JBS. And then we have a long, long string about SPLC.
Maybe I should take it as a victory, but man, is it annoying when one provides the asked for thing and the answer is “Hey, look over there!”
Vox, that history is fabricated (another example of might makes right). Eugenics kept going for 25 years after the war and was only tainted by the Hitler association near or after defeat.
@ Douglas Knight:
Do you think that the shame of engaging in a practice made infamous by the Nazis was not a major reason why it was stopped?
The fact that it was tainted by the Hitler connection after his defeat was precisely my point: “here’s your works!” (To use my ironic favorite political cartoon from another time period.) That is, once revealed in all their enormity, the horrors of Nazism showed people the horrendous consequences of the full logical progression of eugenics.
(The point of that cartoon is that the French Revolution discredited Enlightenment rationalism and liberalism. I think unjustifiedly, since the actual abuses of the French revolution were carried out by irrationalist, illiberal, Rousseauian Jacobins who were not at all similar to people like Tom Paine.)
“Maybe I should take it as a victory, but man, is it annoying when one provides the asked for thing and the answer is “Hey, look over there!” ”
It was not a distraction. It was my way of illustrating why people like Ron Paul and, indeed, even myself, may be more charitable to an organization like the JBS than would be a blue tribe member like yourself. The point is, to the extent blue tribe members are charitable about a crazy organization like SPLC, red tribe members are charitable about JBS. What looks “totally nuts” from the other side may just look “a little extreme” to the other side. I’ll certainly admit the history of the JBS is weirder than I originally knew, but based on their superficial self-presentation they didn’t seem so bad to me, as, I imagine, the SPLC doesn’t seem so bad to most blue tribers.
Even if I accept that JBS is a bunch of crazy conspiracy theorists then all this proves is that Ron Paul did not distance himself from crazy conspiracy theorists. That is what I conceded in the first place. But you said he was saying things intended to court racists and conspiracy theorists. I didn’t see Ron Paul saying any such thing. He merely gave a talk at the JBS, as you would probably give a talk at the SPLC if invited. He said, “hey, thanks for inviting me here to the JBS–you guys really do great work–now let me tell you about how much young people love liberty…” He didn’t say “and boy let me tell you about how the UN is trying to take over the world,” and he certainly didn’t say anything racist.
If it seems like I’m fighting too hard on this point, it’s because I watched Ron Paul speak many, many times in the ’08 and ’12 campaigns and all I ever heard him say were good things about the value of liberty, the dangers of an interventionist foreign policy, the problem of federal reserve monetary policy wiping out people’s savings, and so on. To basically smear his legacy by saying he’s not a “real libertarian” or that he was intentionally courting racists is quite offensive to me.
I will totally concede that the 2008 and 2012 Ron Paul movement (as in, not the people he was necessarily out to attract, but the people whom he did, in fact attract) consisted of a greater proportion of weirdos than I originally thought. That was the point of the original post, and I guess showing him talking to JBS adds to it in that sense, as does JBS having a weirder history than I first knew, but I do kind of resent the implication that I was intentionally trying to distract from the issue at hand by my example of the SPLC: it was a completely relevant example intended to to illustrate a point about how different groups appear differently to people on different parts of the political map.
Vox, we can’t discuss causality until we agree on facts. I claimed that your beliefs about facts are wrong and you didn’t notice, but just repeated them.
@onyomi:
In 2011, Ron Paul introduced a bill that would have required that every single bar of gold that the US Treasury holds be manually assayed. Each bar. Every single one. Not a representative sample, backed up by other measures. Not a third party audit of the already existing audits. A hand assay of every single bar.
The embracing of JBS, which is not accidental or one time, I don’t believe, is just one part of a broad pattern.
@ Douglas Knight:
I am confused. What incorrect facts did I repeat?
Were you trying to say that eugenics was only tainted by association with Hitler near or after the defeat of eugenics? I thought you meant near or after the defeat of Hitler.
If you meant the first case, I’m not sure I agree with your assertion. You’re saying that not until 1970 was eugenics tainted by the Hitler association?
If you meant the second case, that’s the one I responded to.
Yes, near the defeat of eugenics. Of course I know that you don’t agree, that’s the whole point.
@ Douglas Knight:
Okay, well, you see how it was ambiguous.
Anyway, do you have an argument or evidence that this is some kind of false revisionist history?
Because I am no expert on this issue, but I took a university course on bioethics and the history thereof (and the changes in standards for consent in medicine and medical research are very closely tied in to the issue of eugenics, since eugenics typically consists of sterilizations performed without consent and/or knowledge), but the Nuremberg Code was emphasized as being very influential. Not in a direct legal way, but as an important factor in making people realize “Hey, uh, if we tried the Nazis for doing this shit, maybe we shouldn’t be doing it ourselves.”
The changes weren’t immediate, but it became a lot harder to defend it as truth, justice, and the American way.
The Nuremberg Code is about human experimentation, not eugenics.
There were no trials for sterilization, only for euthanasia. The Doctors’ Trial was for torture, involuntaray human experimentation, and mass murder. I think it focused on killing foreigners in death camps, especially of the mentally ill and disabled. Aktion T4, euthanasia of Germans in hospitals, was more the subject of German trials (which largely resulted in acquittals or pardons because of the coercion by those in the Doctors’ Trial).
You spent a whole semester with bioethicists and didn’t conclude that their insinuations are negative evidence?
@ Douglas Knight:
I didn’t say or imply that there were trials for sterilization. What was being done in Nazi Germany was obviously far worse than what went on in America.
But the principle that was used against the Nazis—that you cannot perform medical experiments on human beings without their consent—was broadened to include medical procedures of any kind, which invalidates forced sterilization. That is the connection. It’s not a direct connection, but it was an influence.
And the Nuremburg Code is just a specific example I know of. As I understand it, there were many other ways in which Nazism tarnished the image of eugenics. Maybe I am wrong, but so far you haven’t pointed to anything to the contrary.
I’m not sure what that’s supposed to mean. I found my professor (a relatively well-known guy but not a superstar bioethicist) to be pretty reasonable, although I didn’t agree with him on everything.
@ onyomi:
The thing is, Ron Paul’s message is carefully crafted to appeal to two audiences: “mainstream” libertarians, and what I’ll charitably call “paleoconservatives”. He does not say outright racist things, and he mostly refrains even from saying conspiratorial things on national TV. The libertarian level is the surface, respectable level, and the paleoconservative level is the undercurrent.
There are basically two ways to interpret him on this. One is that really he a libertarian, but he finds it necessary to appeal to these paleoconservatives in order to get elected. The other is that his real sympathies lie with the paleoconservatives, but he couches it in talk about liberty in order to be respectable outside his home district. I can see how one would think (and indeed at once time I thought) that he is the first alternative. But I think the facts point toward the view that he is the second.
Now what do I mean by “paleoconservatism”? I mean the views of the kinds of people who Murray Rothbard deliberately courted, who are influential at the Mises Institute, and the Ron Paul’s own friends like Gary North.
North is the most illustrative example because he’s the most extreme (I don’t think Paul is as extreme as him). He is an outright supporter of Christian Dominionism, i.e. Biblical theocracy. He thinks we should basically have the Taliban in America and bring back the Mosaic law in its full brutal force. North uses the language of liberty—and I’m sure thinks of himself as supporting liberty—but what he wants is to exploit libertarianism to weaken the federal government so that local communities can have the “freedom” to impose theocracy without interference.
When Ron Paul complains about “activist judges” interfering with states’ rights, or says that the rights protected in the Bill of Rights are not enforceable against the states, or complains about the separation of church and state being a myth, maybe there’s something that libertarians can vaguely like about this (I don’t know what it is, though). But the main purpose is to signal: “Hey, I think that the state governments should have been allowed to continue enforcing Jim Crow, that local majorities should be allowed to cram their religion down everyone’s throats, and that in all the states ought to be able to preserve their status as white and Christian and promote ‘traditional values’.”
The paleoconservatives’ desire is not to make government smaller; it is to shrink the power of the federal government in order to expand the latitude of the state governments.
It is a cardinal belief of all these paleoconservatives that Lincoln was an evil tyrant, that the Confederacy had the right to secede, that the Civil War was about tariffs, that it wasn’t any of the North’s business to interfere with slavery, and so on. Ron Paul has endorsed all of these beliefs quite openly (for instance, in an interview on Bill Maher’s program).
Paul also shares these paleoconservatives’ open cultural relativism and the belief that not only shouldn’t we forcibly intervene abroad to protect rights (which libertarians may support), we can’t even judge them or condemn the abuses of liberty abroad. Paul is a consistent apologist for regimes like Iran and Russia. It is not a coincidence that he and his sympathizers are often interviewed on networks like Russia Today: that place loves to find every anti-American kook it can to make Russia look better.
This is not helped by his tendency to endorse conspiratorial views of American history, both in regard to domestic and foreign policy. Another one of Ron Paul’s good friends, Andrew Napolitano, who also has “mainstream” libertarian appeal, backs him on these conspiracy theories, not to mention the anti-Lincoln, pro-Confederate stuff.
It’s one thing, and quite unjustified, to say you’re a member of a group just because you spoke to them once. But when you share many of a group’s core positions, you speak to them all the time, and you’re personally friends with a large number of them, it is safe to say that—at the very least—you are courting them. And you are probably one yourself.
More than anything else, there is a basic philosophical difference between the paleoconservatives and the other two main branches of the “libertarian coalition”, and Timothy Sandefur explains it better than I can:
And last quote on this, but more on the nature of the philosophical difference and what should be done:
I think that last paragraph is really important and correct.
There are many problems with this kind of libertarianism which seeks to impose individual rights and freedom on everyone from above by means of some bigger, more cosmopolitan, frankly imperial state which defends individuals against local tyrannies.
1. It’s very unlikely to happen or maintain itself: given human nature and ever-present temptation for politicians to enrich special interests at the expense of the masses and for masses to buy into promises of stuff paid for by other people, as well as diseconomies of scale, etc. etc. it’s just very unlikely that we’re going to elect a libertarian president with a libertarian congress who implements such a system and thereby protects us from all the parochial tyrannies of the states and localities. By far the greatest cost and curtailment of liberty the average US citizen today endures emanates first from the federal government, then from the state government, and finally the local government.
2. I believe in objective morality, and I think this brand of libertarianism is not morally defensible–certainly not more than any other kind of government. The ethical reason why I support libertarianism in the first place is that I think I belong to me and you belong to you. Also, I don’t think voting for somebody or giving them a special title gives them the right to do things other people can’t do. Therefore, if my neighbors all agree to create a neighborhood in which no woman is allowed in without a veil, I have no moral right to stop them from doing that (assuming the women are all there by choice and have also agreed to this state of affairs).
As David Friedman has pointed out many times, there are two sides to libertarianism: the question of whether you should have a government at all/how the a system of governance should come into being and 2, the question of which specific laws and policies people should be made to live by. It is entirely conceivable, for example, that, at a small scale, a group of people would all unanimously agree to live in a community where no drugs and alcohol are allowed. A polity with a sufficiently libertarian policy bent might actually say that no such community is allowed. But I don’t see how any such polity has a right to tell a group of consenting adults how to live, even if their choice of how to live does not maximize individual freedom.
I’m sure Ron Paul supports the brand of libertarianism which says that, if you want to live in a weird religious community with a bunch of strict rules then that’s your prerogative: just don’t try to force that system on anybody else.
This isn’t necessarily moral relativism: as I said, I believe in objective morality. I also think there is such a thing as a cultural practice which is inherently superior or inferior to another. But I also believe it is objectively wrong to use force, violence, coercion, etc. in any case but self defense or very dire need. Assuming they aren’t bothering me, I am not endangered by my neighbors having a weird religious commune, so I’m not justified to use force to stop them living like that. And, of course, while there may be some inherently superior cultural practices, there are a very wide range of what I’d consider equally good cultural practices which may simply work better for different personalities: some people like living a life of austerity in a monastery and praying 5 times a day. Who am I to tell them they’re wrong?
To me, libertarian policies tend to be good, but the manner in which they are arrived at and enforced is even more important. I think an anarcho-capitalist world will tend toward libertarianish policies because those are the ones I predict individuals will be willing to pay to have enforced. A libertarianish system arrived at as a result of absolute cultural respect for the autonomy and freedom of choice and association of the individual is a much more ethically defensible and potentially sustainable, just system than one which is imposed by some sort of enlightened libertarian despot.
As regards the Civil War: I hate talking about the Civil War because if you say anything to imply the South might have been right about any aspect of anything then someone will somehow end up implying that you think slavery is not so bad (not that you would, but you know what I mean).
So let’s take the more inoffensive case of Scotland’s recent, unsuccessful initiative to secede from the UK: to my mind, Scotland was seceding in order to instate more illiberal, unlibertarian policies. Yet I wish they had succeeded and was very glad, at least, that they made the attempt and there was absolutely no question of the UK trying to stop them if they had. Moreover, even if the UK hadn’t agreed in advance to some particular terms, there is no question in my mind that the Scots had the right to secede and that the UK would have been wrong to try to stop them with military force. And, of course, the US was created by seceding from the British Empire and I’m pretty sure nearly all Americans think that was just…
So, isn’t this unfair to those Scots who won’t like the new, more illiberal policies forced on them by their new, smaller government? The solution isn’t less secession but more: if Scotland can secede from the UK, then, logically, any localities, or even any individuals who don’t like the new Scottish regime can secede from that, and so on, until, in a Nozickian thought experiment kind of way, no person is involuntarily forced to participate in any unchosen level of political organization.
And, of course, the smaller “nations” get, the more competition there is among them and the easier it is to move if any local government becomes tyrannical. The places which are badly run will soon empty out until and unless they start implementing rules which citizens like.
In the past, I regarded the SPLC as a reputable organization, but I’d never looked into it too closely and I heard enough occasional criticism to not be completely certain. But this thread has convinced me I was right in the first place, mostly due to the criticisms of SPLC; they strike me as exceptionally weak tea, and if that’s the best the critics can come up with, it makes me suspect that there just isn’t much there to criticize.
@ onyomi:
I don’t think we will elect a libertarian president, either. Nor libertarian governors and mayors.
Moreover, as I have said repeatedly, I am not arguing for a strong president and congress that will run everything from Washington. I am arguing for an engaged federal judiciary that will strike down violations of rights by state governments.
That’s just not true, though. I’ll give you taxes (though state and local taxes are often pretty steep).
But the vast majority of laws that restrict people’s economic and personal freedom are imposed at the state and local level, such as licensing laws, business cartels, drug laws (far more people are imprisoned at the state level in the War on Drugs), mass incarceration and excessive criminalization in general, business regulations of every kind, government interference in education, the most restrictive labor laws, the most restrictive laws cracking down on illegal immigrants, the seizure of property through eminent domain for private use, and so on. And of course until quite recently discriminatory laws against gays and lesbians.
I’m not saying the federal government is all sunshine and rainbows. But the average person has his liberty more restricted by state governments.
You also can’t act as if, had we no federal government and simply 50 independent states, the state governments would be the size they are today. No, they would assume the same functions. Except with 50 sets of borders and no one to protect such things as the right to a lawyer, the right to free speech, the right not to engage in compulsory prayer, the right to privacy, the right to own a gun, and every other right that’s ever been enforced by the federal judiciary against the states.
That’s quite an assumption. “Popular sovereignty” and the right of local communities to “rule themselves” does mean that every person as an individual gets to decide what he does. No, it means the majority gets to vote on what everyone’s going to have to do.
I have no objection if you want to create some little voluntary commune where no woman can enter without a veil, if it’s private property. You can already do that. I have an objection when 51% (or 91%) of the people decide to have their little Taliban, enforce it on the rest, and no one else is supposed to be able to do anything about it.
You’re begging the question if you’re just going to assume it’s voluntary. The whole case I am making is that a federal government is an important thing keeping it voluntary—by striking down uses of state power that violate rights.
(Not that I think the veil example is the most likely sort of thing, but it’s your example.)
You can already do this, if it’s all truly voluntary and on private property. Moreover, it’s one thing to decide you’re not going to allow drugs and alcohol, and that anyone who uses them is no longer allowed in your little commune. It’s quite another to decide you’re going to send anyone who drinks to prison or stone adulterers—but it’s okay because they signed up for it.
The fact that someone might be stupid enough to agree to live by sharia law, doesn’t give some pretended government the right to enforce it on him by violence against his will when he properly tries to back out of it.
More importantly, what about children raised in such restrictive communities? They didn’t consent to it.
There is an enormous difference between allowing individuals to rule themselves and allowing communities to “rule themselves”: i.e. for the strong to have their way with the weak without anyone else allowed to interfere.
But these people do force such systems on other people. And when they do, anyone else has a right to stop them.
Seriously, this is bizarre. No one is saying that you don’t have the right to live in a monastery if you so choose. What I’m saying is that 51% of the people don’t have the right to tax the rest to build a monastery.
What exactly are you imagining a “libertarian despot” to be? New law: “smoke weed erryday” or die? Or, I don’t know, you have to memorize Atlas Shrugged and absolutely no one is allowed to give to charity? I’m not saying anyone should be stopped from doing anything voluntary.
Now, I can imagine some things that have been called “imposing one’s values on others”. Such as in a little place called the South, where they had this wonderful voluntary system in which people of one race agreed to work their whole lives for no pay, in return for the beneficent guidance of their white masters. But these damn Yankees came through and told them how they had to live their lives. Alright, I’ll stop being sarcastic. The entire problem with this little system is that it was not voluntary. In fighting for the “freedom to govern themselves”, the Confederacy were fighting for “the (literally absolute) right of white people to govern black people, without the black people’s consent.”
That is the enormous difference between collective self-determination and individual liberty.
It’s one thing if you want to argue that using retaliatory force to stop abuses of liberty doesn’t work in the long run, that it creates “blowback”, and that tragically it’s better to let abuses like slavery or Indian widow-burning occur than to intervene and stop them. But you’re not even arguing that. Every example in your post suggests that everything local actually is voluntary—and therefore there could obviously be no justification for interfering besides some misplaced desire to tell other consenting adults how to live.
I’m not saying that a federal government is better than perfect anarcho-capitalism. I am saying that just because we abolish the federal government, doesn’t mean we will have anarcho-capitalism. We would even have more liberty but, in my judgment, rather less.
Edit: responding to some points you added in…
They did not have the legal right to secede unilaterally. And as you point out, their whole purpose was to create a less free government, so they didn’t have any sort of legitimate right to revolution, either. No random gang of thugs has the right to secede in order to impose thuggery on everyone else. (I mean, the Scottish government is not that bad, but that’s the principle you’re endorsing.)
And yes, the U.S. government was created by secession—in an act of legitimate revolution to create a more free government. I am not against secession always and everywhere. I am against it when it is not justified.
I would not be against this if it could…work that way.
If you let a less liberal government secede from a more liberal government, what exactly makes you think the less liberal government will be inclined to let people secede from it? Sure, I would be in favor of God granting man the absolute power to secede from any government. But in that case, it would be easier to let him send down angels to run the government.
1. Scottish secession
2. ???
3. Anarcho-capitalism
People do not follow the ideal gas law. I wish they could. But for one, people are rightfully attached to where they live and have the right not to be run out.
Much more importantly, though, why haven’t the bad places already emptied out in the world today? It’s not primarily because they aren’t allowed to leave or find it too expensive to leave. It’s because other places won’t let them in.
Just because you have global Balkanization does not mean you have global libertarianism or competition among countries for citizens. How hard is the U.S. competing for Mexicans? Not to mention that it leaves them weak and vulnerable before the potential enemies who are not going to Balkanize.
@Protagoras
http://harpers.org/blog/2007/11/the-southern-poverty-business-model/
https://harpers.org/blog/2010/03/hate-immigration-and-the-southern-poverty-law-center/
A more accurate title for the “Southern Poverty Law Center” would be the “Scaring Rich Northern Liberals into Buying us Bigger Houses Center.”
@Vox
“I have an objection when 51% (or 91%) of the people decide to have their little Taliban, enforce it on the rest, and no one else is supposed to be able to do anything about it.”
I object to that too. Which is why I’m an anarcho-capitalist. I think every individual has the right to secede from any level of political organization the y don’t want to be a part of. And Ron Paul agrees with that because, as you say, he’s a Rothbardian anarchist at heart.
@ onyomi:
I’m not necessarily an anarcho-capitalist because I am not at all certain that it would work. But if it does work, I support it.
However, that does not mean that states’ rights and secession of governments from other governments is actually a viable path toward anarcho-capitalism. To go back to the case of the Confederacy, so the North lets them secede. Then what? The black people secede from the white people? I don’t think so.
The fact that we (perhaps) ideally ought to let any individual secede from any government, does not mean that in practice, we ought to allow any coercive government to secede from a less bad government.
***
And again, if the question is whether we should have the current system or David Friedman’s ideal, we should have David Friedman’s ideal. But if David Friedman’s ideal is not on the table anytime soon, we’ve got to look at our actual options.
“No, no, no, we don’t need any of this. Let’s just enact libertopia!” “Enact libertopia? Why didn’t I think of that? Make it so!”
“To go back to the case of the Confederacy…”
Let’s not. But to go back to the idea of an independent Scotland: once Scotland has seceded from the UK, what’s keeping any particular region of Scotland which is unhappy with the new Scottish state from seceding and forming an even smaller state? It would be awfully and transparently hypocritical of the new state, recently formed through secession, to prevent some subunit from seceding?
“The fact that we (perhaps) ideally ought to let any individual secede from any government, does not mean that in practice, we ought to allow any coercive government to secede from a less bad government.”
I don’t see how it can be otherwise. You seem to agree that, in principle at least, any individual should be free to secede from any government. If any individual can secede, then it seems rather strange and untenable to yet maintain that a group of individuals could not secede, nor would it be possible for a group of individuals to secede in order to oppress some minority within that group (because it’s already been determined that anyone who’s feeling oppressed can secede to form an even smaller group).
In reality, I’m pretty sure the ideal level of political organization is greater than 1 for nearly everyone but the unabomber, but that I also am not okay, ethically and practically, with forcing anyone to be part of a polity they don’t want to be a part of. The way to arrive at this state of affairs is to allow states to secede from countries, districts from states, cities from districts, neighborhoods from cities, and so on until everyone has decided that the costs of more secession outweigh the benefits of abiding by the decisions of some group.
If you say “individuals can secede, but groups of individuals, i.e. cities and states cannot secede as a group (though I assume you’d be okay if the group secession was unanimous?)” then we seem, ironically, to be no better off than we are now, with each person having exactly two options: “live alone or in a very small group on a flotilla in the middle of the ocean” or “abide by all the city, state, and federal laws which apply to this whole territory I find myself in.” The fact that Seasteading is even an idea shows how desperate people have become–they are actually willing to try option A.
You say that groups of people can go do their own thing on private land right now, but that is just not true. If me and my friends buy a big plot of land somewhere in the US and decide to live on it without leaving or trading with the outside (which we shouldn’t have to limit ourselves to doing in order to be able to use our own property as we see fit, but to take the extreme example), we would still have to abide by all federal, state, and local laws that apply. If we wanted to trade using dollars we would still have to pay taxes. If we tried to mint our own currency we’d eventually get arrested.
By not allowing group secession you foreclose the natural development of a system in which people voluntarily work out their own ideal levels of political organization, and, paradoxically, end up little better off than we are now.
If you will at least allow unanimous group secession–that is, if me and my friends can all agree that we are going to buy a plot of land and live on it together and that once we do that the laws of the US don’t apply to us while we’re there, then that would certainly be better. But, in practice, what I think should happen, and what would, in fact, happen if secession were to become a more common occurrence, is for new states to decide at their founding on the terms of their own potential dissolution–a kind of political organization pre-nup.
@ onyomi:
Are you seriously trying to tell me that, because the SNP supports secession in the case of themselves, then they’re obviously going to support secession in the case of some group of libertarians in one neighborhood of some podunk village?
Because if so, that’s your basic error. The people who support secession now support it on the basis of some Wilsonian idea of the “self-determination of nations”. Of nations. Not of ten libertarians in their backyard.
When the Scottish government secedes, those libertarians are now under the dominion of the Scottish government, and they are not any closer to anarcho-capitalism. The Scottish government is just as jealous of its power as the British government, and it’s not going to let any group break away from it on a whim.
And to them, this is not “transparently hypocritical” because the Scots are a “real nation” with thousands of years of history, and that little group of libertarians are not.
Yes, if any individual can secede, it implies that any group can secede. But it does go the other way around: the principle that certain large groups can secede does not imply that any individual can secede. And neither the Confederacy or the SNP (two very morally different examples, of course) supported the principle that any individual can secede.
Supporting real-world secessionist groups means supporting the folks who think that their nation, or their people is “free” to secede and enact laws to “govern themselves”, which in reality means laws for the majority to govern the minority.
Just because it’s “already been determined” by you in principle that the right to secede goes all the way down, doesn’t mean that if you support secessionist groups, you are closer to that outcome.
For one, this in itself is oppressive. If any polity has the right to make whatever laws it wants to govern the majority, but it’s fine because everyone can leave, that might be okay if consent to join that polity were actually unanimous. But that isn’t how governments work in reality. They control a specific area and govern everyone in that area, whether they like it or not.
Even if I had the right to secede from America, it wouldn’t do me any damn good. The government would just blockade my house, and I would quickly find that “the costs of secession” did not outweigh the “benefits of abiding by the decisions of some group”.
Yes, the federal government does violate your rights, and you can’t voluntarily get out of that. Correct. Unfortunate.
But what you were saying is that local groups ought to be able to enact laws that “restrict rights”, so long as it’s voluntary, such as making all women wear a veil. And I said you can already do that, if it’s voluntary. But local communities can’t decide by majority vote that “we’re a Christian nation, so let’s make everyone support the teaching of Christianity in the public schools.”
I understand that you support group secession because it’s the “natural progression” to complete destruction of the coercive power of the state.
The problem is that it isn’t. There are many reasons that people support secession, besides the genuinely libertarian reasons. There are the Wilsonian reasons, the neo-Confederate reasons, the racist reasons, the “popular sovereignty” reasons, the cultural relativist reasons, and so on. And these people far outnumber the libertarians.
This is the “Ron Paul problem” that started this whole discussion: the pro-secession wing of libertarianism is full of unsavory people who don’t actually support libertarianism but hate the federal government for other reasons. Or who see libertarianism as a means of bringing them closer to their coercive ideal.
For instance, as I already mentioned, Gary North. He thinks of himself as a libertarian, I guess. But he is a literal theocrat. And supporting a system where a group is free to stone adulterers and murder apostates without anyone else being to step in because maybe at the time of its creation it was “voluntary”, is not any form of libertarianism. That’s just arguing for my “liberty” to oppress you.
***
Also, on the question of whether I think people have the right to secede.
I think people have the right to revolution against any government which is restricting their rights, so long as their intent to create a more free society. You do not have the right to overthrow a more free government to create a less free government.
If anarcho-capitalism is actually a workable system, then it means that there is no legitimate purpose of government (at least in the usual sense of the term; the whole anarcho-capitalist “network” is in a real sense a very decentralized government, since you effectively have no choice but to agree to be bound by its polycentric laws). Therefore, all government coercion is unnecessary, and it cannot be justified by right. And you always have the right to revolution against even a minimal night-watchman state.
On the other hand, suppose that anarcho-capitalism does not work. That it devolves into warlordism or local mafias, etc, or that it makes people too weak against foreign invasion, or even (it’s a conceivable case, though I don’t think it likely) that it can’t deal with problems like global warming. In that case, there would be a legitimate need for a night-watchman state to protect life, liberty, and property. And secession from or treason against this state would be impermissible, since it is objectively necessary.
Consent has nothing to do with it. As I’m sure you’re implicitly aware, the theory of government based on consent of the governed is fatally flawed. There are two alternatives: either there is such a thing as “collective consent”, in which case our current government is legitimate because the “the people” elected it. Or else there is only individual consent, in which case government is inherently impossible and we have anarchy.
If government is justified on any basis, this justification necessarily would have to be a justification on a basis independent of consent, because the whole nature of government lies in its power to make you do things without your consent.
“Supporting real-world secessionist groups means supporting the folks who think that their nation, or their people is “free” to secede and enact laws to “govern themselves”, which in reality means laws for the majority to govern the minority.”
I agree that, right now, “good” secession is still very much hamstrung by notions about “a people,” “a nation,” or what have you (the same sort of notion that leads the PRC to claim that they should rule Taiwan–because they say they represent “the Chinese people” or that Taiwan has “always” been a part of China).
But I think considering the case of why China desperately wants to stop Tibet, Xinjiang, and other regions from seceding, as it continues to insist that Taiwan is technically part of China, is instructive. Tibet and Xinjiang are not premium real estate. They do have some mineral wealth and may have some strategic value, but not that many culturally Chinese people actually live there and they are kind of vast wastelands. But I think the reason for persistently holding on to regions that superficially seem like more trouble than they are worth is deeper: if the Tibetans can secede and the Uyghurs can secede, or we even recognize the Taiwanese, then what’s to stop the Hakka from seceding next? The Cantonese? The Wu speakers?
Nation states intuitively and/or consciously recognize that allowing secession of any kind for any reason undermines the foundations of their nation’s legitimacy (and all governments as they currently exist are in danger of being deligitimized since they are ethically illegitimate). Even if they never foresee such an outcome, Scotland seceding would make it easier for Wales to secede–even for Quebec to secede. Initially people may continue to rely on notions of “a people,” but I think this would get weaker and weaker as more and more people would find they can call themselves “a people” if they really want to.
In the case of the US, I previously had a debate here on SSC with some people; don’t recall if you were involved, about the question of whether the US federal government would oppose the secession of say, Texas, with armed force in the way they once opposed the Confederacy. My very strong intuition is no–I don’t think Americans have nearly as much of a regional identity today, and they also are a lot wimpier about honor and all that nonsense, to say nothing of the lack of a super-divisive ethical question like slavery.
Or, if you won’t grant me that the US wouldn’t use military force to oppose the secession of Alaska, or Texas or California, then at least grant me that Texas does have a better chance of peacefully seceding than would a very small group of ranchers in the middle of Oregon, say. And Texas+Arizona+New Mexico+Nevada as a unit, if all their legislatures had a supermajority or something, would have an even better chance at successful secession than just Texas. In other words, given the current state of affairs, a large region within a nation has a better chance of successfully seceding than a small region, a state a better chance than a city, and a city a better chance than a neighborhood or individual.
And each secession makes the next one easier to imagine and harder to oppose because there is a precedent. Say Texas successfully secedes and the residents of Austin and the surrounding area find the government of Texas oppressive. Can they secede from Texas? Maybe. I think they have a much better chance after Texas has seceded from the US than before. Maybe a whole region of Central Texas has to secede before Austin can secede from that region if its residents so choose. Or maybe part of Texas bordering the remaining US votes to secede from the new country of Texas in order to rejoin the US. Also conceivable and, while superficially a vote of confidence in the US government, actually also undermines US federal sovereignty since it emphasizes the mutability of that political unit.
Yes, the idea of natural “nations” and “peoples” with some natural right to govern “themselves” must be undermined for libertarianism to flourish. And nations states know intuitively or consciously that allowing secession is a big threat, arguably the biggest threat to that foundation of legitimacy. As with free speech, there is nothing at all contradictory about saying “I don’t agree with your reasons for seceding, but I’ll fight to the death for your right to do it.”
That is why I think that (within reason) we should strategically support secession almost anywhere and for almost any reason (arguably not any reason; to try to think of something as bad as the Confederacy’s defense of slavery yet which might still happen today, we could imagine some small nation seceding in order that they could continue their practice of mandatory female circumcision or something–but I think that sort of extremely bad case would constitute a very, very small minority of attempts to secede in the world today; plus, the more secession becomes a trend the easier it will be for women to escape from that one awful nation since there are likely ten better neighbors).
Look it up.
Mark Whipple, possibly quoting Charles Murray:
“It’s easy to understand why Americans are so unconcerned about poor people: most of them look just like black people.”
No. The majority of poor people in the US are white. (Probably. I’m not sure where undocumented aliens fit into this.)
Black people are disproportionately poor, but not the majority of poor people. in fact, in the spirit of [citation offered], the proportion of white people (non-Hispanic) who are poor is 10.1% (19.7 million) and the proportion of black people is 26.2% (10.8 million).
But that get’s the chronology completely backwards – JBS didn’t start off with a bunch of nutters ranting about flouride, that happened after Buckley succeeded in convincing the mainstream right of the time that the Society was too aggressive and would necessarily turn to fascism, at which point conformist tendencies set in and even those otherwise sympathetic to the organization refused to have anything to do with it, leaving it as nothing but a shell of its former self.
@nyccine:
Robert Welch believed that Dwight Eisenhower was a conscious communist agent. Buckley denounced JBS as “far removed from common sense”.
I believe JBS was looking for, and seeing, communist plots everywhere back in the 50s before Buckley denounced them. I think their downfall started when a Chicago writer named Jack Mabley published excerpts from “The Politician” a pseudo-secret short book/long letter that attempted to persuade people that Eisenhower was working as a communist agent. This was something that had been sent to Buckley by Welch as well, I believe.
Not sure if you have sourcing for an alternate view?
Right, The Politician is the founding document of JBS, distributed at the first meeting.
@HeelBearCub:
My understanding is that The Politician is a rather long-winded rant about what Welch saw as complete weakness in Eisenhower in dealing with Communists, which broaches the idea of Eisenhower being an active Communist but ultimately settled on him being a useful idiot. Although it’s always possible that’s just cover for his true beliefs.
Accusing the Birch society of paranoia concerning Communist infiltration out to have been put to bed with the release of previously classified documents after the fall of the Soviet Union.
But this isn’t really relevant anyway, since I was responding to your comment to Onyomi to “…research the history of the John Birch Society. Buckley. Fluoride. …” JBS wasn’t the Jim Jones Bunch, as I recall, and precisely how bat-shit insane Robert Welch was or was not doesn’t address my point that the Birch Society had some movers and shakers in the conservative movement of the time until, Buckley, the prototype for the modern cuckservative, had them excommunicated from polite society.
Also, the Birch society claims that their objection to flouride is that it’s an unConstitutional interference in the public’s right to determine how to live their lives, but I’m sure comedies like Dr. Strangelove are a more accurate portrayal of the typical Bircher’s beliefs in the matter.
@Vox Imperatoris:
Don’t do shit like this, especially not when any curious party can just go right to the SPLC’s website and see for themselves what they consider a “hate group” – no, it is not just groups like the KKK, it is literally everyone who disagrees with their worldview. There is no room for arguments over whether homosexuals should be able to enter into marriage, or whether abortion can be considered murder, or whether people have a right to refuse to promote message that their faith finds unconscionable, as far as the SLPC is concerned if you aren’t on “the right side of history,” so to speak, you’re a bigoted POS.
@ nyccine:
Exactly what do you think you’re accomplishing / signifying by using the term “cuckservative”? Except discrediting yourself.
The SPLC does not denounce everyone who disagrees with their worldview as a hate group. They denounce the ones among them which are…hate groups.
The anti-gay groups with the SPLC denounces as hate groups are not simply those who disapprove of homosexuality—like the Catholic Church or something—but organizations that are dedicated to smearing, defaming, and spreading fear about homosexuals, accusing them of being pedophiles, arguing for restrictions on their rights, and even calling for their death in the case of some. They are not denouncing groups that “just want to have a conversation”.
I’m not sure why these groups are any better than the groups that once campaigned against interracial marriage and did so by spreading lies, fear, and hatred against racial minorities.
The SPLC does not condemn anti-abortion organizations as “hate groups”, with the exception of fundamentalist Christian sects that it condemns for other reasons (like the anti-Semitic sedevacantists). They do believe—correctly—that anti-abortion laws are a severe restriction on women’s rights and fight against them.
Nor have they condemned anyone as a hate group for arguing that people have the right to “refuse to promote a message that their faith finds unconscionable”.
He’s making fun of you. Are you somehow missing that?
@ Vox:
“The anti-gay groups with the SPLC denounces as hate groups are not simply those who disapprove of homosexuality…”
Bullshit. Liberty Council isn’t there because they conduct beatdowns on gays in the Tenderloin, they’re on the list because they think homosexuality is disgusting behavior, and say as such. SPLC openly states that the reason they’re on the list because they opposed gay marriage and expanding hate crime laws beyond historical norms. You are lying through your teeth on this one.
“The SPLC does not condemn anti-abortion organizations as “hate groups”, with the exception of fundamentalist Christian sects that it condemns for other reasons (like the anti-Semitic sedevacantists). They do believe—correctly—that anti-abortion laws are a severe restriction on women’s rights and fight against them.”
Thank you for proving my point. You’re going to define any opposition to your world-view as “hate-speech” and thus declare the argument over. I guess I shouldn’t have even wasted my time.
“Or maybe part of Texas bordering the remaining US votes to secede from the new country of Texas in order to rejoin the US.”
This is how West Virginia began, incidentally.
Even though it makes no political sense, I wonder how many Ron Paul supporters are now in the Bernie Sanders coalition. They seem to me like the same group, even though they shouldn’t be.
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/02/ron-paul-ted-cruz-libertarian-218822?cmpid=sf#ixzz3zK8XZBLW
Apparently even Paul himself kind of thinks so.
They both want to end foreign wars and legalize pot. There are a lot of people for whom those are the only issues that matter, never mind that the two candidates have nothing else in common.
I don’t use any drugs or smoke pot myself, but I do care about the drug war because of the disproportionately negative impact it has on American black communities and Central American countries.
The war issue is an especially difficult one because one can make a case that it is the single most important issue because it is not only a huge waste of money, it also directly results in death, both American and foreign. What’s more, it’s an area on which the president can have a relatively direct impact, meaning that having a president who’s good on foreign policy could make up for a lot in my opinion (which is why, despite being conservative/libertarian myself, I’m very glad Obama beat super-hawk McCain).
But I’m also not sure it can make up for everything; I pretty much disagree with Sanders on everything else, and, of course, the Supreme Court justices he’d pick would be atrocious. Though I’d still rather have him as president than Hillary because Hillary is a big government hawk, whereas at least Bernie is a big government dove who speaks his mind. I will still probably vote for the Republican nominee over Hillary or Bernie, though I do worry that Marco Rubio might be George Bush Jr in a sexy new Cuban facade.
Why do you think he would pick particularly bad supreme court justices? I haven’t seen anything from him about this point.
(Edit: Note that he will be constrained by a Republican-controlled congress in his judicial nominees. The best he’ll be able to hope for is someone competent and ideologically semi-neutral.)
I could be wrong, but I just assume that, given his democratic socialist stance on domestic issues, he is not the sort of person who would want the “will of the people” thwarted by a bunch of originalist judges.
Yes, well, most people don’t have a coherent all-encompassing political philosophy. They care about their pet issues, or which candidate they find personally appealing, and that’s it.
@anon:
Judicial appointments these days don’t get filibustered, that’s just not the way things happen, and fears of pushback if his nominees are too ideological are unfounded. “Advice and Consent” has given way to “Elections have consequences” and nowadays it’s taken as a given that it’s the President’s prerogative to fill a vacancy with whomever he chooses, unless he’s putting forward someone clearly unqualified, like when Bush tried to put forward Harriet Myers.
A President Sanders, in a position to nominate a Supreme Court justice, is going to have to do something crazy like a pick a lawblogger, or current law student, in order to not get his nominee through.
@anon:
Sanders is on record saying that a promise to repeal Citizens United is a mandatory qualification for a nomination from him.
This is wrong on multiple levels and gives me what I consider reasonable grounds to believe that his nominees would be awful.
I was just at a Young Americans for Liberty meeting, at which one of the other speakers was Congressman Rohrabacher, whom I knew forty some years ago in the libertarian movement of the time. He now considers himself a conservative/libertarian.
He mentioned that Bernie Sanders was a friend of his, that while they disagreed on lots of issues he thought Sanders was an honest man, in contrast to most candidates.
I can believe that. It’s reported that Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia are close friends, though you’d never know it from their work on the Court.
I have to say, I love this painting featured on Scott’s tumblr, “Truth Coming out of Her Well to Shame Mankind”, by Jean-Léon Gérôme. I wasn’t familiar with him by name, but I definitely recognize a lot of his work. He confirms my heuristic that good painters are featured in Latin textbooks. 😉
Seriously, though, I love the paintings of the Academic artists like William-Adolphe Bouguereau, as well as close predecessors like Jacques-Louis David.
These were the people who died popular and famous when Van Gogh was unknown and derided. And rightly so! It was a better artistic time.
In terms of technical skill, I think Bouguereau is the best painter of all time, or close to it. Though thematically, he was a little too focused on naked women, without any real symbolism.
It’s a good painting, but not as good a painting as “Truth Coming out of Her Well to Shame Mankind” is a title.
I’m not sure mankind has produced a painter who could live up to that title.
Vox Imp – In terms of technical skill, I think Bouguereau is the best painter of all time, or close to it. Though thematically, he was a little too focused on naked women, without any real symbolism.
We just don’t remember any of the old symbolism. There was plenty.
I don’t think that people aspire to change class, any more than most people aspire to change nationality. I’m happy speaking with my (upper) lower class accent, and doing whatever the hell it is that I do that snobs might look down upon.
Also, I don’t know if it’s just because I come from the skilled working class/low level clever-dick level, but I actually feel like me and my people are in every way better than all of you other people who aren’t in with us. If you owe your position to your skill and knowledge, and what you actually *do*, accents aside, I consider you to be one of us. If you owe your position to anything else, you are a joke.
I mean, in order for status to work, doesn’t somebody actually have to give a shit? The upper lowers do not give a shit.
Some people do aspire. Some do not. Those who do not rationalize this decision, just as the strivers justify theirs.
Not to say some justifications aren’t better than others!
I’m a grammar school kid*, so my whole life has been an attempt to seem higher class than I was born. So I’d say this isn’t universal.
*US translation: got into a good school based on exam results not money
I’m from a long line of failed social climbers.
Did Michael Church just wipe his entire blog?
Looks like everything but the comment thread at the “About” page is gone, which would suggest he quickly wiped the archives and left the shell in place for possible future blogging.
The obvious candidate when a blog goes suddenly dark is that a lot of hostile traffic, either hateful commentary or straight-up DOS attack, is coming at it. Or, the blogger’s real-world employer said “knock it off or you’re fired”. Any of which in turn suggest something controversial was said on the blog, or about it. Obviously we can’t see what was said on the blog recently. Google doesn’t seem to be showing any recent controversies around his name. And I certainly hope it wasn’t sparked by discussion of his old essay here.
No: the E1s just wiped Michael Church’s blog. BWA-ha-ha-ha-ha!
OK, curioser and curioser.
Backstory: Church was apparently a major contributor to Quora until being banned last September – allegedly by demand from a key investor, though that’s Church speaking. This was apparently a big deal in Quora, sparking fears of an employee and/or user exodus, though that seems to have been averted. He discussed much of this on his now-deleted blog.
Fast Forward: The wayback machine has a snapshot of Church’s blog from this morning (Feb 3), showing nothing more recent than a post from January 16 about how glad he’s going to be when the next dotcom crash comes. But the snapshot from January 26 has posts through the 22nd, in that case about a piece of fiction he is writing. And Google has a cached copy from February 1st, with a 31 January post specifically discussing an attempt by Quora to unban and re-recruit him and including both their offer and his counteroffer. Also a post from the 27th discussing at length his grievances with Paul Graham,who may or may not be the investor who got him banned from Quora.
So, sometime between January 31 and this morning, something prompts Church and/or WordPress to delete all of Church’s recent posts but leave the rest, and then after this morning Church/Wordpress deleted all the content except for the “About” comment thread. If it was WordPress acting directly they’d probably have scrubbed everything and there wouldn’t be a blog any more.
I’m guessing Quora and/or Graham started getting legal about what Church was saying about them. So depending on where Church classifies Paul Graham, “Cerebal Paul Z” might be on to something…
No links, because why draw E1 fire on SSC? 🙂 You all know how to use Google and Wayback.
What happened to the book discussion? weren’t we supposed to read the supernova story?
Long time reader, first time commenter here.
One of my recurring features on this blog is Scott’s grappling with the empirical evidence on complex and controversial issues — i.e. racial elements of police violence, gun control, illegal immigration & crime.
One issue that I would love to see Scott tackle is campaign finance reform. There seems to be a good deal of empirical work there but it seems like an area that could definitely benefit from a high-level sorting out. While the issue is extremely salient in public discourse (think Bernie, Trump, Larry Lessig), I have not really seen any of the sides approach this issue in a careful empirical way, as compared to the careless Voxsplaining-type analysis that you sometimes see out there.
I’ve not seen many people who seem to care about the empirics of the question. Most people seem interested simply in the principle of the thing or in arguments about factions.
It would be interesting to actually read a bit about what campaign finance looks like. But I doubt there’s much room for “this guy claims X<<Y and cites a study that says XY, and the first study sucks, so the second seems more likely.” Simply because people don’t tent to make factual claims about it.
I’m not sure I agree. It seems to me that the inquiry should go something like this:
1. Does campaign spending actually influence electoral outcomes (and to what extent)?
[As far as I can tell there’s a good amount of empirics on this]
If the answer yes, then that gives a lot of credence to the Sanders/Lessig/Citizens United dissenters’ argument about the appearance of corruption. A next step could be to try to understand who actually contributes and what those contributors are trying to achieve — ideological results or material favors.
If no, that leads to several follow-ups:
a) Even if spending is ineffective, do politicians believe that its effective?
b) If politicians realize that spending is ineffective, why do they spend so much effort soliciting donations?
c) Is the inquiry complete? I.e. are there other factors to consider in figuring out whether campaign donations create an quid-pro-quo relationship?
I think campaign spending is more like advertising budgets – you’re not quite sure if it works or not, and if it works how it works, but you know if you don’t do it you will lose out.
There’s the “spending on the actual cost of running a campaign” which includes salaries for the staff and printing up election posters and paying the rent, utilities, etc. Then there’s the “spending on buying influence and running attack ads” which I presume is the part about corruption.
I know there have been examples on this side of the water of donors running with the hares and hunting with the hounds, making sure to donate to both party X and party Y, or donating to party X when it’s in the ascendant and then switching to party Y when X is waning or unpopular. The quid pro quo is possibly slightly easier to see in the UK, where there’s an accepted and cynical tradition of “bung enough money to the party in power over a reasonable period and you’ll get your knighthood/peerage in one of the Honours lists”, though that doesn’t always work – some people have thrown money at the Tories and not got the gong they thought they deserved.
I’m certain that there is an expectation on the part of donors that, at the very least, “We would prefer party Z to form the next government because they’re business-friendly”. I don’t see that putting a lid on this type of donation much helps the “Sanders/Lessig/Citizens United dissenters” type opponents as the shoe fits just as much on their foot: plainly, to run a modern election campaign, you need a good war chest. And organisations that promote Save The Endangered Underwater Coral Weevil would like a government/administration where there are tough environmental laws which do get enforced, so they want to support a party or candidate likely to share their interests.
If nobody can give large donations, then groups that are pro-(enter progressive cause of your choice) can’t give large donations to favoured candidates either, and that means both they and their preferred candidates will have to rely on the wistful hope that the great unwashed public really care passionately about the Endangered Underwater Coral Weevil and will vote for a candidate likely to hold that cause dear to their heart, with no helping prompting on the part of groups pushing said candidate or paying towards that candidate’s election campaign.
Here in Ireland for the same-sex marriage referendum, the “yes” vote side got large sums donated to various LGBT activist groups by Chuck Feeney’s Atlantic Philanthropies. Coverage of foreign donations (which, by the way, are forbidden under Irish law) reported on donations from US groups to the “No” vote side but conveniently were unaware of the “Yes” side getting funding, or at least believed their claim that “He didn’t donate to this, he just gave money to various groups that coincidentally support this”.
What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. If conservative groups or donors can’t back candidates, then progressive groups can’t do likewise, and I think there are too many loopholes for really determined groups to get around limits on donations, plus the necessity of sourcing large funding to support the parties, to put this genie back in the bottle.
Advertising is a pretty good analogy. As far as I can tell, though, advertising is generally believed to work at least sometimes. So from the standpoint of a corporate executive, devoting some portion of your budget to ads make sense.
Is campaign spending thought to be similarly effective? If yes, then donating to candidates similarly makes sense. If no, then it seems like a waste of money. I guess a good way to reframe it for the audience of this blog would be: from an effective altruism standpoint, does it make sense to donate money (tons and tons of money if you have it) to a candidate that you think is advancing some absolutely critical cause?
Question 1, the answer is yes. What’s more interesting is the correlation. We know it’s not 1.0, or even that close, but is it more or less than 0.5? What confounding factors do you control for?
The next question, assuming that corruption is the main worry, is to what extent do campaign contributions affect policy-making? And that’s harder to tell.
In a broad ideological sense, the answer is probably “not much” – nobody is going to flip from pro-life to pro-abortion, or vice versa, for money; similarly, gun control, and several other hot-button ideological issues. Ideological campaign funders are interested in electing people who already agree with them, not swaying moderates or converting opponents.
However, there are lots of little technical details in various laws which have no real ideological valence, and often not even much empirical support for or against. This is where campaign funding can be important. One example I encountered many years ago: plastic pipe. Using plastic pipe for in-house plumbing is controversial, because it’s much easier to install than metal pipe, and the material is cheaper. This is a direct threat to union plumbers (and even non-union plumbers), as it doesn’t take much specialized knowledge to install it adequately. It *is* less durable, but people manage to f*** up their copper or galvanized pipes through misuse and accident, too. There are claims that the adhesive used on plastic pipe leaches out toxic materials, but that’s disputed, and solder isn’t perfect, either. So if you want the local plumbers’ union to support your campaign for City Council, you have to promise to keep plastic pipe out of the Building Code. And why shouldn’t you? It keeps a few well-paying jobs in town, and it avoids some potentially (but unproven) bad effects. And nobody will notice nor care that people with old lead pipes can’t afford to replumb their houses, because the water company will always add the right chemicals to the water to keep the lead from leaching out.
So what needs examining is how campaign contributions (and organized support by volunteers) turns into policy decisions where there isn’t really a good visible public-interest reason to decide one way or the other.
Oh – California has an interesting variation on this. Various transit improvement and park bond measures are pay-to-play. An organizing group starts working on a bond measure (which has to be approved by the voters). Every group has to contribute so much money or promise so many petition signatures for each million dollars its pet project will require. If your group can’t pony up, your project’s chances go to very near zero for the next four to six years, while the appropriate agencies buy and build the projects that did make it into the bond measure.
One question worth asking is the effect of campaign spending on the reelection of incumbents. An incumbent, unless he has done something that really offends the voters, starts with a big advantage. He has lots of free publicity and lots of opportunities to do favors for people with other people’s money. Incumbents are usually reelected.
I’ve seen the claim that in order to have a chance of defeating an incumbent, the challenger needs to outspend him two to one. I don’t know if it’s true, but it would be an interesting dimension of the question to explore.
I
Well, one could always ask Eric Cantor. Or Jeb Bush right now.
My read is that money matters a lot less than people think. Money in politics just isn’t enough to override ideology, media pressure and the random pitfalls and chance of an election. Trump has spent very little, but without the Paris and San Bernadino attacks, I think he’d be out of the race. The question is who can take advantage of whatever happens in the real world and position themselves in a way that appeals to people, then get the media to put their name out there. You don’t need money for that, although that is the “easy” way to do it.
That seems like an area in which the direction of causality would be incredibly difficult to determine, although I don’t know what the typical empirical methodologies are.
For a very minimal preliminary discussion of some of these issues, see https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/19/plutocracy-isnt-about-money/ .
I’m a longtime political practitioner. I have spent almost 20 years as an elected official, and my record as a candidate in contested primaries and elections is 6-2. I have run for state legislature and city council, but experienced success only at the county level.
I always say that the independent role of money in electoral politics is enormously overrated.
It is not generally possible to buy an election. Shoestring campaigns often beat well-funded campaigns. That doesn’t usually happen, because political donors are attracted to likely success.
If you’re a good candidate for an elected post, under the overall circumstances of the times, your views, your skills, the electorate, the opposition, etc., then there are donors who want to give you money, probably enough to make the race. All you have to do is ask for it.
When two opposing candidates both have at least a threshold amount of resources, enough to put on a plausible campaign, additional money on one side hardly affects the outcome at all.
(Sure, there are a few caveats to that. Multiple competing candidates can raise the threshold of plausibility, and in a drawn-out process, the dollar amount of fundraising can be an important signal to voters and other political actors. Those factors apply to the presidential primaries, but almost never in a one-on-one general election.)
The problem is that the outcome of a contested election is inherently uncertain. Anxiety about this uncertainty is a major motivator of all the political actors. Therefore, a tremendous amount of effort is expended to reduce the uncertainty and assuage the anxiety. That effort costs money — money which primarily serves the needs of the candidate and the inner circle.
My rule of thumb is, the more money a campaign has, the higher the percentage that is wasted. In an effective shoestring campaign, the team has to work much harder and without pay, recruiting volunteers, working in cheap but awkward spaces, and putting limited resources into voter contact. A well-funded campaign has lots of paid staff, high-end catering, a spacious and attractive headquarters, none of which affect the likelihood of winning. When a campaign has too much money, there is a lot of useless polling, to calm everyone’s anxiety, and offer the illusion of knowing what’s going on.
It’s more fun and less work to run a well-funded campaign than a shoestring campaign, especially for the candidate. Hence, the big-money political donors are largely subsidizing the comfort of the candidate, not so much changing the odds of winning.
And that is often the point. It is much cheaper to buy a politician than buy an election. Or, to put it more politely, to buy access to a politician, so that your policy arguments are taken seriously, your recommendations of appointees are given a respectful hearing, etc.
Of course, that’s not the only reason people give money to political campaigns. It could be part of fighting for a cause, or against one. It can make a person feel virtuous and public-spirited, contributing to the political life of the community. It makes the donor an unofficial member of a candidate’s coterie, fostering a sense of belonging, without having to spend any effort stuffing envelopes or making phone calls to uninterested strangers. Even if you don’t have any self-interested goals, people like to be seen as important and well-connected. Give $500 to a campaign, and other candidates will come courting you.
(And every campaign needs at least some money. I’m running for re-election this year myself, as county clerk, and I will be seeking donations of money to support that effort.)
I don’t like the Citizens United decision, but I think its real-world impact will be much less than what many people fear.
“I don’t like the Citizens United decision, but I think its real-world impact will be much less than what many people fear.”
At a tangent … . What a lot of people miss about that decision, in some cases I think deliberately, is that it didn’t change the ability of rich people to spend their own money supporting a candidate or legislation. What it changed was the ability of organizations, such as firms or labor unions, to do so. And even that, I believe, merely restored the situation that had existed a few years earlier, before the legislation restricting such expenditure came in.
And thanks for the interesting inside view of the political process. It sounds like an application of Parkinson’s second law: Expenditure rises to meet or exceed income.
It is striking that same the people whose first response to Citizens United was to summarize it as “corporations are now people” now point to individual spending claiming it as the consequence.
But often the de facto rules have no resemblance to the written law. If Citizens United did not grant individuals rights, can you point to individuals exercising those rights before the case? (Actually, you must concede that it granted one right to individuals: the ability to obscure their identity behind SuperPACs. Perhaps that had many consequences.)
You’re looking for examples of private individuals engaged in political advertising prior to 2010? I assume Common Sense and The Federalist Papers don’t count? Or, for that matter, 90% of all election-season letters to the editor?
Remember, Citizens United was literally about whether or not a non-profit was allowed to criticize Hillary Clinton.
I can see why she opposes it so strongly, but not why others jumped on that bandwagon.
“Or, to put it more politely, to buy access to a politician, so that your policy arguments are taken seriously, your recommendations of appointees are given a respectful hearing, etc.”
That looks like quite a major loophole in your overall argument…ie, you’re not spending money to put a person i power, you are spending money to put policies in place.
Kestenbaum doesn’t seem to be saying that money doesn’t buy politicians, so to speak, but that the impact of Citizen’s United on the system is perhaps overestimated.
I must not have explained it clearly enough. What I said is that “the independent role of money in electoral politics is enormously overrated.”
(1) In general, you can’t buy an election.
(2) Successful candidates tend to have well-funded campaigns, because the people who donate money are motivated to give to winners, and they usually have a good idea who the winners are likely to be.
(3) If a candidate loses by a significant margin, it was almost certainly not simply because the campaign didn’t spend enough money. Lack of sufficient money in a campaign is generally a symptom of more fundamental problems.
There are other things that can be done with money, and I laid those out explicitly. That does not contradict my point at all.
Somewhat related, for me, to Indians’ view that Hitler wasn’t so bad, is the view I’ve encountered among Chinese and Russians that Mao and Stalin, respectively, weren’t so bad. Basically, if you give people a sense of unity and national pride and strength and stuff like that people are very willing to overlook 50 million deaths or so.
There’s also the fact that, with Mao at least, his face is still on all of the money and the CCP still officially sings his praises. If you’re from the mainland not liking Mao would be like hating George Washington.
If it were common knowledge that George Washington instituted policies that directly led to the death of tens of millions…
So the standard left-wing version of american history then? =p
I’m not sure whether that’s actually common knowledge in the PRC.
As a Sinologist (I think?) you probably know better than I do, but the impression that I got from my Chinese friends is that they don’t know much about their history more than a generation back and don’t care to. My ex only seemed to know about the Tiananmen Square massacre because her dad survived it and ended up on a party blacklist because of it.
My (limited) experience is similar to yours; Chinese people don’t seem to have any clue anything bad happened under Mao or at Tiananmen Square.
Chalid: that’s definitely not the case. They know but are reluctant to talk much about it.
That said, as Dr Dealgood says, there is a steep generational dropping off: older people remember the Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward, for example, but for younger people they are already very vague in the way say, the Korea and Vietnam Wars are for young Americans today.
Of course, the Chinese get a rosier picture of Mao in school than we do, but especially with the internet, information is now freely available. That said, I don’t think most young Chinese have a lot of love or hatred for Mao; rather, he’s just some guy who appears on kitschy old stuff and money who probably did some bad things but also did some good things and who cares, so to speak (the average Chinese is also much more cynical about and disinterested in politics than the average American).
I don’t have nearly as much experience with Russia as with the PRC, but I do remember being even more surprised, during my one visit there, to hear people speak with some respect and fondness about Stalin; Stalin doesn’t even get that “founder halo” Mao gets, which presumably would be reserved for Lenin.
Overall, my impression of both Russia and the PRC (again, much more extensive with PRC) is that having had horrific famine, purges, genocide, war, etc. a few decades ago leaves less of an obvious imprint on cultures and attitudes than one might expect. Of course, the people I talk to are the ones who survived and their descendants…
@ onyomi:
I get the impression that Russians feel about Stalin approximately the way American (conservatives) feel about Columbus:
1: “Rah rah rah! Let’s celebrate Columbus Day and stick it to those liberals who are obsessed with ‘white guilt’.”
2: “But Columbus was evil!”
1: “Without him, our country wouldn’t be here today; why you gotta diss him?”
2: “Are you saying you agree with his enslavement of Native Americans?”
1: “Yeah, he did some bad things, but it was a different time. In fact, you’re making me uncomfortable; let’s talk about something else.”
Just look at this Ayn Rand Institute article on Columbus:
See, they don’t deny any of the bad things that Columbus did. The whole thing just argues that, in a more important sense, he paved the way for and stood for good things.
And that’s just what a lot of Russians think about Stalin: he did a lot of bad things, but he stood for modernization, industrialization, and fighting back against fascism! Why do you have to be so damn negative? I bet you hate Russia.
Columbus is much, much easier for people to diss though, and on the flipside, receives much less actual veneration. In the Russian view of history Stalin is the person who guided the Soviet Union through the Great Patriottic war, which is a much bigger deal in Russia than possibly anywhere else in the world.
Actually, on reflection that might be closer to the mark than it seems at first glance.
Every mainland Chinese person I know has had an urban hukou, and from a municipality-level city at that, or come from Hong Kong. That is, they were from areas which fared relatively well under Mao or were never under him to begin with. Even if their parents or grandparents were born elsewhere they grew up in places that didn’t really have any particular reason not to buy into Mao’s cult of personality.
Has anyone here talked to a genuinely rural Chinese person, or even one from a more minor city? Their political opinions might very be different, if well guarded.
@ Stefan Drinic:
True.
Also, Volgograd keeps wanting to change its name back to Stalingrad for approximately the same reason that so many people keep protesting the removal of Confederate memorials.
@onyomi Makes sense. The people I have talked to are all younger (not old enough to have been aware of events in 1989)
Volgograd’s people want to change their name back? That’s actually really funny; there are many well-known Soviet jokes of people from Leningrad wishing they could live in St Petersburg once more.
@ Stefan Drinic:
I know those jokes.
Funnily enough, St. Petersburg is to this day the capital of the “Leningrad Oblast”. After the fall of the Soviet Union, they had elections in both the city and the oblast (province) to change the name back to St. Petersburg (or Санкт-Петербург, which is actually a Dutch name because Peter the Great was obsessed with The Netherlands in the same way that some people are obsessed with Japan).
The city voted to change the name back, but the oblast did not. So St. Petersburg is the capital of Leningrad.
@ Vox
I wonder how many people still think Columbus was the only person who thought the world was round, and set off to prove it? Yay bold enlightened modern science and the American Way.
In fact, aiui, all educated people knew it was round, and also believed (correctly) that it was too big to sail around because no ship of the time could carry enough supplies.
Columbus was lucky there was a rich continent where he could re-supply to go home. He was unlucky that the Ithmus of Panama kept him from sailing on to the East Indies and coming home saying Nya Nya.
I think we should rename it Queen Isabella Day, or, Fund Crackpot Research Day. (Why did she, anyway?)
I’ve been wondering if Columbus was more the “tech startup” guy of his day. He needed VC money, so he tells them he is going to to get to India which will lead to “explosive, exponential growth!”
But really he just wanted to see what was out there. He figures there has to be a worthwhile market for his “Three Ships Explorer” product if he just goes far enough west.
Once he finds something he has to call it “India” no matter where it is.
Volgograd’s people want to change their name back? That’s actually really funny
St. Petersburg has centuries of history under that name.
Volgograd, is “the city on the Volga”, except that it’s not the only or even the largest such. Whee, there’s a name to inspire civic pride. Or else it’s “The City of the Man of Steel”, against which the Armies of the Forces of Darkness broke and fell. Hell, I kind of want the name changed back, and I live on the far side of the planet and even greater cultural and political divides. Just not in a way that Putin’s crowd can exploit, if that’s possible.
@ John Schilling:
Volgograd was called “Tsaritsyn” for five-hundred years before the name got changed. And that’s obviously unpalatable for other reasons.
Of course, St. Petersburg was also briefly called “Petrograd”, but that was done during WWI under the Russian Empire itself as a way to get rid of the Germanic name and make it Slavic. For the same reason that the British royal family changed their name from “Saxe-Coburg-Gotha” to “Windsor”.
I known quite a few Chinese people (from china , not chinese americans) and they all know about Mao and deaths. Though none of them quite sure exactly how many there were – numbers go from several millions to tens of millions. To be fair I dont know exactly how many died due to Stalin purges . And I am Russian with keen interest in this subject- our stats vary from several millions to low tens of millions
Also Lenin(and Gorbachev) are pretty much universally despised nowdays in Russia because their actions destroyed great country .While Mao gets credit for rebuilding nation. Stalin ironically gets credit for industrialization and winning ww2, even though technically he killed a few orders of magnitude more people than Lenin.
@Max: Gorbachev is despited despite him being one of the biggest contributors to the end of communism in Europe? That’s surprising. He (along with Garry Kasparov) is one of the few contemporary (and widely known) Russians who have a good reputation in the Czech media. I get that many Russians love the grandeur of feeling like an imperial superpower but I thought that most people were still against communism and would rather live in the current non-communist (even if not exactly free) Russia than in the communist Soviet Empire. The country is freaking huge even as it is now 🙂
@Tibor:
I had a Russian roommate (Physics grad student from Russia) in the early nineties. He hated Gorbachev with a passion and, exactly as Max says, it was because he blamed him for destroying the country. We never discussed Lenin, so I don’t know his views on that.
He was a big fan of Yeltsin and if I had to guess, I’d say he’s probably okay with Putin now, though I’m sure he lives in the US somewhere.
The Three Body Problem was a best-seller in China– that’s why it was published in the US. The book has a vividly negative section about the Cultural Revolution. I suppose it’s possible that many Chinese people read it as a fictional dystopia.
I’ve seen a theory that Columbus knew there was something besides open ocean between Europe and Asia because there were Basque fishermen catching cod. I’m not sure whether this is reasonable.
I’ve seen a theory that Columbus knew there was something besides open ocean between Europe and Asia because there were Basque fishermen catching cod.
Or because he had been first mate on a voyage to Iceland, where you could probably still hear stories about the New World and maybe from people who had been there (the Vinland settlements had been abandoned 400+ years before, but Norsemen were making timber-harvesting runs to Nova Scotia for centuries after that and possibly into the early 15th century).
@John
The problem I have with that theory is that Columbus never believed he’d found a new continent. He always maintained he’d found the way to India. If he’d known what he was doing, and used the line about India to con the Spanish into paying for it, then I could believe it. But that’s not what happened.
The fact that they’re both viewed as beating back the Axis powers (undeservedly in Mao’s case, but fairly reasonably in Stalin’s) also goes a long way.
Fairly? You mean nigh-on singlehandedly, right?
The Russian people’s vastly disproportionate contribution isn’t debatable; Stalin’s is.
Yes, there’s a very good argument that Stalin’s purges and other policies left the Red Army woefully unprepared for war—let alone the suggestions that he trusted Hitler way too much.
Oh, that’s much more fair, but then people have a way of not remembering their history in such ways. It was not a reformed and very well-trained army that conquered Persia, Alexander got named a military genius instead; it was not the transition from professional to drafted armies and France being early in such a regard that beat half the other powers of its time, no, Napoleon must have been freakishly good at warfare and that’s all that mattered. Stalin belongs in such a list of people, too.
Nitpick- the purges are overrated? Misrated? From CruelDwarf paradox forum (warning, long)
Reference:
The following number of command personnel of the Red Army was dismissed annually over the past five years (from 1934 to 25 October 1939):
In 1934, 6596 people were dismissed, 5.9% of the regular staffing , of which:
a) for drunkenness and moral degradaton – 1513
b) due to illness, disability, the death and so on. – 4604
c) arrested and convicted – 479
Total – 6596
In 1935, 8560 people were dismissed, 7.2% of the regular staffing, of which:
a) political and moral reasons, the service discrepancy, by own volution, and so forth. – 6719
b) sickness and death – 1492
c) convicted – 349
Total – 8560
n 1936, 4918 people were dismissed, 3.9% of the regular staffing, of which:
a) for drunkenness, political and moral inconsistency – 1942
b) due to illness, disability and death – 1937
c) for political reasons (expulsion from the Party) – 782 [49]
d) as the arrested and convicted – 257
Total – 4918
In 1937 18,658 people were dismissed, 13.6% of the regular staffing, of which:
a) for political reasons (expulsion from the party, the relationship with the enemies of the people) – 11,104
b) arrested – 4474
c) for drunkenness and moral degradation – 1139
d) due to illness, disability, the death – 1941
Total – 18,658
In 1938 16,362 people were dismissed, 11.3% of the regular staffing, of which:
a) for political reasons – are excluded from the CPSU (b) according to the directive of the Central Committee of the CPSU (b) as people subject to dismissal from the Red Army for their relations with the conspirators – 3580
b) foreigners (Latvians – 717 Poles – in 1099, the Germans – 620 Estonians – 312 Koreans, Lithuanians and others), people who were born abroad and associated with it, were dismiised according to the directive of the People’s Commissar for Defense from 06.24.1938 № 200 / N – 4138.
c) arrested – 5032
d) for drunkenness, embezzlement, theft, moral degradation – 2671
e) due to illness, disability or death – 941
Total – 16,362
In 1939 before november, 25 1691 people were dismissed, 0.6% of the regular staffing, of which:
a) for political reasons (expulsion from the party, the relationship with the plotters) – 277
b) arrested – 67
c) for drunkenness and moral degradation – 197
d) due to illness, disability – 725
e) because of death – 425
The total number of the dismissed in 6 years is 56,785. Total number of the dismissed in 1937 and 1938 – 35 020 people. Reasons:
a) the natural reasons (Death or dismissed due to illness, disability, drunkards, and others.) – 6692, or 19.1%; [50]
b) arrested – 9506, or 27.2%;
c) dismissed for political reasons (excluded from the CPSU (b) according to the directive of the Central Committee of the CPSU (b) – 14,684 or 41.9%;
d) foreigners who have been dismissed by the People’s Commissar of Defense Directive – 4138 people or 11.8%.
Thus 7718 people were dismissed by the directive of the Central Committee of the CPSU (b) and the People’s Commissar of Defence Directive in 1938. Or 41% of the total number of the people dismissed in 1938.
Along with cleaning the army of the hostile elements some of the command personnel was dismissed by unjustified reasons. 6650 people returned in the Red Army after the restoration of the party membership and the proof of the unjust dismissal. They are mostly captains, seniour lieutenants, lieutenants and other equal ranks, about 62% of the restored personell.
The dismissed were replaced in their positions by proven reserve cadre of 8154 people. 2572 people with one year training, from the reserve of political personnel – 4,000 people. This covers all positions opened. Dismissal for 1939 comes from mostly natural reasons and from cleaning the army of drunks, as the People’s Commissar of Defense issued an order on December 28, 1938 which requires ruthlessly cast them out from the Red Army.
Thus the army was significantly cleaned during these two years from politically hostile elements, drunks and foreigners who do not inspire confidence about their loyalities. As a result, we have a much more robust political and moral condition. The rise of the discipline, the rapid promotion of the cadre, rise in military ranks, as well as salary increases have raised the interest and the confidence of the command cadre and led to high political enthusiasm in the Red Army, as was shown by the historic victories at Lake Khasan and Khalkhin Gol river. Government has awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union to 96 people and 23,728 people recieved other decorations and medals for their distinguished service in these conflicts.
Chief of the 6th Department Colonel (Shiryaev)
October 20, 1939
Source: Russian State Military Archive (РГВА), fund 37837б, inventory 19, case 87, pages 42-52.
…
…
…
Information on the number of people restored to service is also in archives and is a part of the inquiry about the number of the dismissed command and political cadre in the 1935-1939 period. Which was signed by the head of the Command and Leadership Directorate of the Red Army Shchadenko (Source: RSMA. Fund 37837. Inventory 18. Case 890. Pages 4-7).
4544 people who were dismissed in 1937 were restored to service in 1938-39.
6008 people who were dismissed in 1938 were restored to service in 1939.
152 people who were dismissed in 1939 were restored to service up to Aprill 11 of 1940 (the date of report)
@Stefan:
Put Crassus at the head of Alexander’s army and a possibly even better trained army performs much much worse, possibly gets crushed by the Persians.
Stalin was definitely a smart guy (also a complete sociopath and maybe even a psychopath) and a good politician (as in good at acquiring and using power for his own benefit). He managed to use his political skill quite brilliantly to secure a half of Europe for himself. But if his goal had been above all the liberation of Russia (or even Europe as a whole) from the Nazi occupation at the minimal cost, he would have done a really bad job.
@Samuel: And you think that the official reports would say something like “had to go/be executed because did not like Stalin enough or because Stalin was afraid of his rising popularity”? The official Soviet reports are about as reliable as the “elections” and their “results” were in the communist-bloc.
@ Samuel Skinner
I think it’s staggeringly naïve of you to take those numbers at face value. After all, “suiciding” political dissidents or having them labeled mentally incompetent and committed was pretty much the Bolshevik’s SOP. As Tibor asked above, Did you honestly expect to find “did not like Stalin enough” under the official reasons for discharge?
Even if we do take them at face value, those numbers aren’t exactly comforting. Relieving “only” 11% of your command staff and 2% of your total strength for cause isn’t something you should bragging about. It does not indicate a healthy command climate.
Of course if you really want to do a proper job of debunking the “myth” of Stalin’s purges you need to include the numbers from WWII and immediate post-war period.
@Samuel Skinner:
Stalin’s largest purge happened after the German invasion of 1941, which is well after your data ends counting. I’m not terribly knowledgeable on this subject at all, but I think using 1939 as a cutoff point is disingenuous.
@Tibor:
What point are you trying to make? That sometimes bad tactical choices do matter? Carrhae was a humiliating defeat, but then Crassus wasn’t fighting the Persians(Parthians at that point) on even terms nor in a pitched battle. We’re talking about the person who refused an Armenian offer of aid of more than a ten thousand soldiers, assuming he’d have a breezy campaign, only for him to allow his army to get shot to pieces uselessly whilst on the march. Alexander was no fool, but the tactics used in his campaigns have been almost criminally overrated by Greek writers after his death glorifying his deeds.
Tibor
“And you think that the official reports would say something like “had to go/be executed because did not like Stalin enough or because Stalin was afraid of his rising popularity”? ”
You mean where they torture you until you admit to being a traitor, sign a confession and then the NKVD shoots you? That’s political crimes. This isn’t Nazi Germany where they need to look for dirt to blacken your name- if the NKVD wants you dead, you are an enemy of the people.
“The official Soviet reports are about as reliable as the “elections” and their “results” were in the communist-bloc.”
Exactly why would an internal military document covering staff levels be unreliable? It is from the Soviet archives- who exactly do you think they would be lying to?
Stefan
“Stalin’s largest purge happened after the German invasion of 1941, which is well after your data ends counting. I’m not terribly knowledgeable on this subject at all, but I think using 1939 as a cutoff point is disingenuous.”
You sure about that? The 36-38 purge isn’t called The Great Purge for nothing.
I have no numbers on hand, but I seem to remember correctly at least that 1941 was a bad time to be a Soviet officer in the west:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purge_of_the_Red_Army_in_1941
It may not match up in size to what happened earlier, but ending the data at 1939 seems a little strange regardless.
I hadn’t heard of those until you mentioned it (and I looked it up immediately and saw what you saw; I couldn’t find good sources). The descriptions make it sound like a departure from the usual amount of arrests and executions, but the numbers listed (a couple hundred executed) are pretty small compared to the trend.
The ending date is 1939 because 1936-1938 is The Great Purge which people blame for poor Russian performance. If you are interested in more details here
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/pogrom-of-the-commanders-the-factual-results-of-the-repressions-against-red-army-leadership.872308/
@Stefan: My point is that killing many of your best generals and distributing automatic weapons above all to the military police is pretty much Crassus level stupidity (or would be, if Stalin’s goal had actually been defeating the Nazis at the minimal cost to the Russian/Soviet population and not securing and expanding his own power).
@Samuel: They would be lying to the soldiers who have access to the files and who they would not want to start thinking along the lines of “hmm, that many guys get killed or jailed because Stalin did not like them…what if Stalin decides he does not like me? I better help organize a coup or something before it is too late”. They would perhaps torture you until you pleaded guilty but they would omit the torture in the records. And yes, every insider with half a brain probably knew about it but every citizen in communist countries knew the elections were cooked (and that he’d better make sure he chooses the communist party anyway because he might get in trouble otherwise – for example in Czechoslovakia during communism you could officially vote in a booth so that nobody sees your vote but if you went there they would note you down and keep an eye on you, everyone knew that).
Tibor
” My point is that killing many of your best generals”
The purges were over politics so I’m not seeing why it would select and only kill competent people.
“They would be lying to the soldiers who have access to the files ”
These are from the Soviet achieves. You know, the stuff only the KGB had access to.
“hmm, that many guys get killed or jailed because Stalin did not like them…what if Stalin decides he does not like me? I better help organize a coup or something before it is too late”
They can see that just by looking at the military org tables. This was not a big secret. The total number of military officers arrested/purged during the great purge and the number claimed is nearly the same
(Stalin destroyed the best of the command cadre. He shot, dismissed or exiled about 30,000 officers.
Lev Trotsky, march 13 of 1939.)
“They would perhaps torture you until you pleaded guilty but they would omit the torture in the records.”
Correct. If they wanted guilty people for political crimes, they would find guilty people for political crimes. Unlike the Nazis they didn’t need to charge you with another crime- smearing you with counter-revolutionary treason was how you got rid of people.
The purges were over politics so I’m not seeing why it would select and only kill competent people
Selection bias, a competant officer is more of a “threat” than an incompetant one.
These are from the Soviet achieves. You know, the stuff only the KGB had access to.
And?
He shot, dismissed or exiled about 30,000 officers.
– Lev Trotsky
Well yes, that’s the whole point. Everyone on active duty at the time would have known at least one guy who was eliminated, probably several. I don’t think you appreciate just how damaging that level of turnover can be to things like institutional trust.
Re: Indian perceptions of Hitler, I am currently bingewatching a ton of mythological Hindi TV series on Youtube, and one thing in the dialogue is that there are frequent references to “These Aryan lands”, “our Aryan people”, “Aryan kings” etc., as well as swastikas all over the place.
From a Western viewpoint, this raises uncomfortable associations (I have to keep reminding myself Hitler stole the symbol from the East and turned it to his own purposes). But if all an average Indian knows about Hitler is that he liked Aryans and swastikas, there are completely different associations involved.
Well, it’s funny, “Aryan” does refer to a specific group of ancient people who migrated into Northern India and brought the language that became Sanskrit. So many Indians, especially Northern Indians, would consider themselves “Aryan,” even though we in the US now think it means something like “lily white Nazi.”
I should note that I have also encountered the weird SS thing in Taiwan. I thought it was just like “we here in Taiwan are too far removed from WWII to know or care what this means, but Hugo Boss sure could design a logo.” But I wonder also if it isn’t the proximity to South Asia.
I saw a Chinese guy in Hong Kong (well, specifically on the border with the PRC special administrative zone of Shenzhen at the visa bureau but anyway) with a swastika tattoo on his shin (he was wearing shorts). I don’t know which way it was oriented, probably not the Nazi direction (I never remember which is which), but he could still possibly get into trouble with some less knowledgeable police officers in Europe since (openly visible) Nazi swastika tattoos are illegal in all European countries as far as I know.
I’m almost certain that the “Nazi direction” thing is an urban legend. If you look at South / East Asian or Native American art you can see swastikas facing either direction, because it’s not particularly important to the sun-cross symbolism which way it’s facing. The Nazi’s picked an orientation and stuck with it but they represent twelve years out of millennia of different cultures playing with the design.
Speaking of, there are good odds the guy was using it as a good luck symbol.
It’s definitely a myth. They go either way.
For instance, I went to a Tibetan-style temple in China, and some swastikas were facing the “Nazi direction”, as far as I can recall.
Many years ago my company rented a lodge owned by the Cook County Forest Preserve for a holiday party. It had been built in the nineteen-teens, IIRC, and had a Native American decorative motif. There were swastikas outlined in tiles in the floor and walls of one room. They pointed both directions, again IIRC.
“Nazi swastika tattoos are illegal in all European countries as far as I know.”
Really? Don’t think they are here in the UK, and I’d be surprised if most European countries had legislated. Germany has anti-Nazi speech laws and I imagine it would ban tattoos too. But not aware of any such law here, unless there’s a court precedent of reading some much more general law about ‘causing a public disturbance’ or somesuch to cover offensive tattoos.
Maybe this is me wrongly generalizing from German and Czech laws to the whole EU again…Also, I tried some googling and it was not exactly true. If you have that on you, they won’t put you in jail or anything. But the tattoo saloons are not allowed to tattoo these symbols in the Czech republic. At least if the tattoo website which had an article about it,and where the picture I linked to is from, is correct. The German anti-Nazi symbolics laws are even stricter so that Swastikas get routinely removed from WW2 themed computer games designated for the German market. I’ve always found it stupid, even the tattoos. When the idiots want to permanently label themselves as such, why stop them? It can even be useful 🙂 Also, I don’t even know what the first three symbols mean.
@Tibor,
The first is a sun cross, symbolically means the same as a swastika or sun wheel. The KKK used it for a while over here.
Not sure about the second and third though.Found them, they’re versions of the Odal rune. Means heritage or estate, pronounced “o” or “oe,” used by the Nazis / neonazis and some neopagans.Also surprised to see that the Wolfsangel isn’t on there, I thought they had banned that one too.
On a recent trip to Alaska, I ran across the best airplane name I’ve ever seen, and decided to share it due to Scott’s fondness for puns.
Link.
YES.
Also, can of pringles in the window.
Back in February 2014, Scott wrote, “[Coding boot]camps have helped a bunch of friends of mine, some of whom were having serious life crises related to unemployability, find really good stable high-paying jobs. When I was terrified I was going to miss a medical career, the knowledge that these bootcamps existed and so I would have good options other than drone labor or going back to college for four years was incredibly reassuring. Some of these bootcamps are taking groups not traditionally associated with computer programming and who might not do four year CS degrees – women, for example – and specifically recruiting them to be in the field. The alternative to these bootcamps is four years studying CS in college costing > $100,000 in future debt, with associated bureaucracy issues that many low-functioning people can’t navigate. These bootcamps replaced them with two months of very intense practical training with a near-guaranteed future job at the end of it, and have very much saved some of my friends’ futures. On my more cynical days they are nearly the only form of education in the Western world that I would unreservedly declare are non-horrible.”
Basically, I went the pre-medical school route, and I can’t get in. (My science GPA–3.0–is too low.) I graduated with a degree in philosophy, so I don’t really have any employable skills. I did reasonably well on the MCAT (33), with a Verbal Reasoning score of 12. Thus I have some degree of intelligence, but I am somewhat unconscientious. (I think I’ve figured out a workable solution to this problem via an adderall prescription.) I wonder if coding might be a possible path for me; maybe I could attend one of these coding bootcamps”. Does anyone have any good recommendations for specific coding bootcamps? Is this a reasonable path?
If you have any previous exposure to coding and you found it not awful and maybe even interesting, it is a good path, especially if you have no other qualifications.
One basic issue is that people talk about programming as if it was one field. It isn’t. In the narrowest, strictest sense, it is just formulating instructions to do a thing in a very precise way. Teaching the computer, that idiot genius, to do stuff. Teaching a machine that has a too literal mind, right?
WHAT one formulates is the big deal, because nonprogrammers writing too detailed specifications for programmers is a cost, which is better saved.
Some examples:
– So for example someone writing device drivers should have good knowledge of hardware, even electric engineering
– If you want to program a module to Oracle Financials, be an accountant basically
– Web development and mobile app development, which is certainly a hot sexy field today, relies a lot on knowing standards, like how a HTTP protocol works
If they don’t specify it, I would assume it is the last one. What I would recommend looking into if they teach all the relevant standards.
Programmers should be smart, and lazy enough to dislike doing repetitive work and rather invent clever ways to automate them. Sounds like a fit.
I think a certain visual imagination also helps. Like seeing a variable as a box, you put some data in it, take it out later, and so on. There are multiple programming styles but people usually start with imperative and that is better seen visually, like a loop is like a little industrial machine, processing an array of data that is put into one by one, like an industrial machine would process a bucket of oranges one by one, and throw out rotten ones, which is an if condition, and squeeze the healthy ones into another bucket, which can be seen as some sort of aggregation and so on…
But programming is at the root just precise instruction writing, something like translation work, and automating stuff that way, and the crucial career issue is how much of an expert they are in that stuff they are automating.
I mean, I know a lot of people won’t agree with it, but the most succesful programmers I know DON’T identify as programmers. They identify as, say, the experts of medical diagnosis, so they can write the software for diagnostical machinery. They could win a debate against good doctors on what is the best way to do certain kinds of diagnosis. The Oracle Financials type programmers, the best ones, wrestle with Big Four auditors and tell them yes this algorithm is compliant with the law and so on.
Of course there are many superstars of the Linus Torvalds type identifying as programmers but this is not really that accurate. Linus is an operating system design expert in reality. I mean, his ability of being able to translate that to precise-talk, to code, is not the most important one.
So, learn something else that you can automate! And if the boot camp is any good it teaches some kinds of something else, like web standards. This blogging software here automates the generation of HTML, so whoever wrote it must know not only programmign well, but HTML itself.
But in the longer run, set yourself apart by learning other stuff to automate. Any kid can automate HTML generation these days… so don’t just refer to yourself as a coder.
Is Ted Cruz a natural-born citizen? If not, he is constitutionally ineligible for the Presidency.
Here’s what I thought: The term “natural-born citizen” is not defined in the Constitution. Common legal usage in the 18th century (e.g. Blackstone) is that there are two classes of citizens – the natural-born and the naturalized. In other words, a natural-born citizen is a citizen at birth. Under this standard Cruz clearly qualifies – his mother was a citizen who had lived in the US for more than one year prior to his birth in Canada, so 8 USC 1401 makes him a citizen.
Apparently there’s a Supreme Court decision to the contrary. This is frankly, an absurd result – does the natural born citizen clause incorporate the 14th Amendment, written eight decades later? Or does it depend on the common law definition of citizenship? In that case, John McCain’s eligibility (born in the Canal Zone to a naval officer stationed there) depends on whether the “common law” includes the Statute de natis ultra mare, enacted in 1350, and if not, on what the law was in England before 1350.
This is crying out for a constitutional amendment, but there’s no way 2/3 of Congress and 3/4 of state legislatures go out of their way to help Ted Cruz, so it’ll have to wait until someone likable is affected by this issue.
(And for the record, Obama is eligible under any interpretation of the law. Born in the State of Hawaii = citizen under the 14th Amendment. Duh.)
Rogers v. Bellei does not apply to Ted Cruz.
Bellei was a natural-born citizen, but he was deprived of his citizenship because he didn’t reside in the U.S. for the specified length of time. And this was okay because he was not “born or naturalized in the United States”.
Cruz was a citizen at birth (by dint of Congressional law), so he is a natural-born citizen. And no one is proposing to take away his citizenship.
I don’t see how Rogers v. Bellei could be decisive. In that decision, the Court ruled that Bellei – born in the same circumstances as Cruz – didn’t have a Fourteenth Amendment right to citizenship and therefore could lose it by not living in the United States for a certain length of time (as the law then in force required.) However, they never touched on whether he counted as a “natural-born citizen.” On the contrary, they said he was “presumptively a citizen” while a minor, though never naturalized.
Mightn’t it be reasonable to deem that people who are citizens, but never naturalized, are natural-born citizens? More specifically, couldn’t we so deem people who are citizens due to the circumstances of their birth, thanks to Act of Congress?
I believe, upon a cursory reading, that Mikhail inaccurately reports Rogers v. Bellei.
The dissenting justices in that case describe Bellei as being a “naturalized citizen”, so as to conjure an IMO ridiculously contrived claim that this naturalization occurred in the United States and so place him under the Aegis of the 14th amendment. But another term for “dissenting justices” is “losers”; their words are not law.
I may have missed something, but nowhere do I find the majority (whose words are law) describing Bellei as being “naturalized”. They do refer to other cases in which other plaintiffs were or were not naturalized under various circumstances; I’m not going to track all of them down. W/re Bellei, they concern themselves strictly with the two questions that would guarantee him 14th-amendment life citizenship: Was he born in the United States, and was he naturalized in the United States. They find the answer to these questions both to be “no”, thus the 14th amendment does not apply, thus there is no guarantee that whatever sort of citizenship Bellei had enjoyed cannot be limited by statute.
Logically, if there are only “natural born citizens” and “naturalized citizens”, there are four possible types of citizen:
A – natural born in the USA
B – naturalized in the USA
C – natural born outside the USA
D – naturalized outside the USA
The majority in Rogers v. Bellei ruled only that, first, Bellei isn’t a type A or type B citizen and, second, that non-A/B citizens can be stripped of their citizenship by statute because the 14th amendment language covers only A/B. Nowhere can I find anything in the majority ruling to distinguish between type C and type D citizens.
Bellei does mean that Cruz could theoretically be stripped of his natural-born citizenship by statute, which seems counterintuitive but the law can be that way sometimes. Since Cruz has complied with all of the existing citizenship laws and we’ve got a thing about ex post facto ones, I think he’s pretty safe from that.
Yeah, I think this is the right reading. Bellei was conditionally a citizen by virtue of a statute adopted under the Naturalization Clause (as are Cruz and McCain, unconditionally), which is not the same as being naturalized. The case discusses the law as being part of the “uniform rule of naturalization” but distinct from the naturalization process. Had Bellei satisfied the conditions he would have been a natural-born citizen and thus eligible to the presidency. A bit odd, but not nearly as odd as reading an anachronistic cross-reference or a dependency on 14th-century English law into the Constitution, so I’ll take it.
The fact that is is a Natural Born Citizen is a fairly straightforward matter of common law.
Sadly straightforward matters of common law don’t seem to matter much to either the electorate or to the supreme court when there’s a political question at stake.
I read a whole bunch about this back in the McCain election. The best reading of “natural born citizen” is a citizen, as of right, from the moment of birth. The distinction between jus solis under the constitution and citizenship via statute is an anachronism because the former is only guaranteed by the fourteenth amendment, not the core constitution. Likewise the distinction between defeasible (or conditional) and indefeasible citizenship is irrelevant because at ratification all citizenship was potentially defeasible.
Under this reading Cruz has no problem (nor of course does Obama) but John McCain is in a very dicey situation. Resolving it requires some very tricky retroactive statutory analysis. That said, there’s a better than 50/50 chance it is a non-justiciable “political question”.
I don’t understand why McCain would be in more trouble than Cruz. McCain had citizenship at birth by the same mechanism that Cruz did: each was born to a woman who was a U.S. citizen at the time. McCain had two other routes to citizenship-at-birth: his father was also a U.S. citizen at the time, and he was born on territory that was “under the jurisdiction” of the United States. Cruz cannot claim either of the last two criteria; only the first (born of American woman) is available to him. But since it’s equally available to McCain, it makes no sense to argue that McCain’s eligibility is somehow dicier than Cruz’s.
ETA: I don’t think there’s any retroactivity concern with McCain, either; he’s a lot older than Cruz, but the first statute granting citizenship to children of American women born abroad was enacted in 1790. McCain’s birth was after that date.
The relevant statute governing non-14th amendment citizenship, Revised Statutes § 1993, first passed in 1855 and last modified before McCain’s birth in 1934, said “[a]ny child hereafter born out of the limits and jurisdiction of the United States, whose father or mother or both at the time of the birth of such child is a citizen of the United States.”
The problem is that the Panama Canal Zone was outside the limits of the United States but not outside its jurisdiction. The Fourteenth Amendment on the other hand was unavailing because per the Insular Cases and various treaties and declarations, the PCZ was not “the United States” for 14th amendment purposes. Rather it had the same status as the Philippines prior to 1946. Under this reading, as of when he was born, McCain was not a US Citizen because he fell into a perhaps unintentional hole. In 1937 Congress recognized this problem and passed a statute that granted those born in the PCZ to at least one USC parent citizenship. Thus McCain was certainly a citizen by his first birthday, but that is too late for him to have been a natural born citizen. This argument is fully laid out in this law review article: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1157621
The best counterargument I’ve seen is that “limits and jurisdiction of the United States” is a unitary term of art that refers to the ‘United States proper’ rather than a two prong phrase that can be satisfied in one part but not the other. Therefore there’s no loophole. That argument is fully laid out in this law review article: http://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1085&context=mlr_fi
By the time Cruz was born the law had changed, and in any event Canada is outside the “limits and jurisdiction of the United States” by any reading of that phrase.
It’s also possible that Gonzalez v. Williams, which established the status of people born in the insular territories as non-citizen nationals, didn’t apply to the Canal Zone. The circumstances were too different from the Spanish-American War conquests: the Canal Zone was leased, not conquered, and there was a negligible existing population whose status was to be addressed.
And, of course, it wouldn’t make any sense for someone born in an insular territory to US citizen parents to not be a citizen, when they’d have US citizenship if born in a foreign country.
@brad: Thanks for that explanation. Having read the papers you linked, I think Chin by far comes away with the weaker argument. His paper reads like exactly the sort of statutory analysis that gets judges to laugh and say, “No, but seriously what’s your argument.”
I think the clearest way to understand Chin’s argument is that it is back-to-front: he has to argue that the statute is unambiguously anti-McCain, because if the statute is ambiguous, Congressional intent controls and there’s no reason to think Congress intended that result. But his argument that the statute is unambiguous is not terribly persuasive: the State Department at the time had a different interpretation, and his textual analysis is little more than “if Congress meant ‘or,’ it knows how to use ‘or.'” Which, sure, but statutes are not parsed word-by-word. The 1934 revisions are parsed in light of the existing statutory language and existing caselaw, and there’s no reason (as Professor Sachs argues) to read the 1934 amendment as unambiguously repudiating prior practice. Even a strict textualist like Thomas would agree that a legislative amendment has to be read in light of the pre-existing law. I don’t think Chin really tries to grapple with any except the most naive arguments against his position, to the detriment of his paper. But I routinely turn out to be wrong on the law, so YMMV.
“McCain’s birth was after that date.”
[Citation needed]
I know that it is late in the game, but i will nevertheless make this effort:
http://abcnews.go.com/US/13-year-allegedly-killed-va-tech-students-stabbed/story?id=36665148
I am a 65 y/o retired general surgeon, living in a small southwestern virginia college town. in this town, there has been a lot of tragedy. in my life as a surgeon, i have seen a lot of tragedy.
but i just can’t get my head around this one. i know there is not enough information out there to fully evaluate what happened, but for the past several days, i have been contemplating what might have happened, and i just can’t see any sequence that fits.
it doesn’t compute…
can anyone help me?
Repeat of Leopold and Loeb, trying to demonstrate their superiority by getting away with murder, maybe? The superficial details are pretty similar – Leopold and Loeb were 19 and 18, and their victim was a 14-year-old who’d known Loeb for years.
from the VERY little that is leaking out about this story, it seems that you are pretty much correct.
i guess i still can’t get my head around the concept of how it is that 2 such normal appearing human beings can get this far in life without revealing to others their total lack of a moral compass.
When the story first broke, I had presumed it was a mismatch between her care needs and their ability to provide post-transplant care and they paniced when she died. Now I have no idea.
Someone in the previous thread mentioned this (mis)quote from pjeby: “A nerd is someone who thinks it’s wrong to make a good first impression.”
I’m trying to find the source and I can’t. Does someone else remember the source or the context?
So, about the Iowa caucuses.
The result on the Democratic side wasn’t much of a surprise: the polls predicted Hillary and Bernie in a virtual tie, and that’s what happened. What is shocking is the Republican results. Not the fact that Cruz won; historically, evangelicals have a good ground game and tend to do well in Iowa, and Cruz is the favorite candidate of the Religious Right. Beating Trump 27%-24% wasn’t outside the bounds of probability. But how the hell did Rubio win 23 percent of the vote? None of the polls indicated anything of the sort. Nor is Rubio the kind of candidate who inspires a core of die-hard supporters like, say, Ron Paul in 2012. Could we be looking at fraud in the counting process? This outcome is just too unlikely, and too convenient to the Republican establishment.
Back to the Democratic side, one thing I hear a lot is that even if Sanders wins in New Hampshire, he’ll lose in most other states because Hillary Clinton has strong support from African-Americans and they are a major part of the Democratic Party base. But what doesn’t get discussed is whether they actually vote in primaries. We know that African-Americans tend to have lower turnout in off-year elections, because this is true of all poor and low-information voters and African-Americans tend disproportionately to be poor and low-information. Do African-Americans usually show up in primaries? Or are primaries more likely to be decided by affluent SWPL Democrats?
I think it’s time we stopped treating polls as reliable. They’ve been garbage for several cycles now (not just in the US), and I smell a rat when they say one thing for the whole season and then reverse themselves with a late “surge” once we finally get close to an election where we can check their results.
Apparently the delegate vote between Hillary and Sanders came down to a coin toss six times, and Hillary won all 6. Between that and her luck at cattle futures, I think it’s clear that she’s hacked the RNG of our universe. Also, the fact that a coin toss is used at all lends support to the guys upthread who say our system is bizarre.
Sanders is toast. He had some of his highest favorables in Iowa, and he was only able to pull off a tie. Clinton is popping open the champagne bottle even now.
Sanders never had a shot. Short of Hillary having a heart attack or being indicted she’s going to be the nominee.
The thing I wonder is whether she’ll be a stronger or weaker candidate in the general for having had at least the appearance of having won a non-trivial nomination fight.
I would bet even money that neither of those two things (unless the heart attack were extremely debilitating) would prevent this eventuality.
The first one would probably boost her standing in the polls. “Don’t discriminate against people for medical reasons!”
And if Sanders were nominated, he’d lose the general election in a landslide. Anyone who thinks an atheist, socialist Jew from Brooklyn has a shot at winning Ohio or Pennsylvania has never lived in those states. Hell, has never *visited* those states. Possibly has never seen *pictures* of those states. (Hint: People of Walmart.)
It would be McGovern all over again. Only worse, because McGovern had some “Prairie Populist” cred.
>And if Sanders were nominated, he’d lose the general election in a landslide.
Even against The Donald?
I think that you have a pretty strong case there, but the lure of free stuff and sticking it to rich people is a powerful one indeed. I’d be surprised, but I wouldn’t be shocked, if it overcame such trifling matters as a penchant for socialism (“it’s not like he’s a Commie”) and paradoxical religious attributes.
@WHTA:
I suspect that Trump v. Sanders would provoke a similar reaction from the Universe as a Red Sox v. Cubs World Series: “Okay, that’s it. Everybody out of the pool. We’re aborting this sim and restarting it with more realistic parameters.”
Trump would make mincemeat of Sanders. To continue the analogy, a lot of McGovern primary voters were siphoned off by George Wallace, which seems like the weirdest crossover appeal in history until you realize they were both tapping the same vein of inchoate anti-establishment anger. Trump is way, way better at it, plus he has the advantage of not being an atheist socialist Jew from Brooklyn.
The thing about inchoate anti-establishment anger is that it tends to evaporate when strategic realities become impossible to ignore; this has always been Trump’s (and Sanders’) doomsday clock. I will be extremely surprised if either of them gets their party’s nomination, although a third-party spoiler run isn’t out of the question.
In a Trump vs Sanders final election I think we can look forward to President Bloomberg in January
Held in Escrow, in your scenario (which I’ve seen elsewhere), Bloomberg is pronounced /dʒɑn ændərsən/.
For those of us who like following the horse race, there was always that whisper of doubt in the back of our mind: could Sanders pull it off? Sure, they say Hillary is inevitable, but they said that before Obama beat her, too, and her negatives are legion.
After Iowa, the whisper is gone. The answer is “No.”
I don’t know. For those who follow the horse race, this seems like a loss for Bernie. For those of us who have been paying no attention to the Democratic primary, it feels like a bit of a surprise: Sanders is not supposed to even come close to beating Hillary is the conventional wisdom. And yet here, in the very first primary (admittedly one where he has huge advantages relative to most of the important states), we see him a statistical dead heat with Hillary.
To me, and possibly to the “not following polls but reads the occasional headline” segment which constitutes the majority of the voting public, this makes him feel less like a protest candidate who never had a chance of winning and more like an underdog. Considering he apparently got like 90% of the under-30 vote, this could mean renewed energy for him.
I mean, I still think it’s Hillary’s to lose, but I feel like the horse race-watchers who are spinning this as a big win for Hillary are not adequately taking these optics into account.
That’s a good point.
To me, I think the closeness shows two things: the weakness of Hillary as a candidate, and that she is still not weak enough for Sanders to win.
She is like the Bob Ewell of politics. “Fine, we’ll vote off this nutjob for you, but don’t expect us to take you in with open arms.”
Hillary is a terrible campaigner, as she’s proven time and again. She also has a closet full of skeletons, and is only tepidly supported by most of her own party, while being hated by the other. As long as the Republicans retain their collective sanity and don’t nominate Trump, they will probably win this year. I’d put Cruz at 65-35 and Rubio at 70-30 against her in the general.
I really hope it’s Rubio. The thought of President Cruz… yuck. The guy is just so damn obnoxious, besides being one of the few evangelical candidates ever who seems like he actually believes that crap.
Fair enough. But I never saw any good answer to the black voter firewall. Bernie does terribly among black voters and that’s barely budged.
Interestingly that lack of movement provides some evidence that Scott’s original analysis (roughly: weird fringe movements don’t tend to attack black supporters) was incorrect.
I’m with @onyomi –
I expected Hillary to win by much more. My impression is that much of the electorate thinks that Sanders is a nutty professor that isn’t widely liked/respected. The headlines of tying Hillary in Iowa and beating her soundly in NH are going to change that.
Timed with the right headlines about the careless spread of state secrets and military intelligence, and this could hurt her very badly, as people start seriously discussing their options.
(
DataAnecdote point: two progressive/liberal friends from deep blue backgrounds have committed to Daffy-Duck write-in votes if Clinton is the D candidate (and Trump is not on the ballot) and one is ambivalent about voting for Rubio over Clinton. This is not something I expected to hear this year.)My super-blue friends were kinda the reverse – they were going to vote for Bernie as a protest vote, but now that they think he has a chance of getting the nomination they switched to Hilary, since they think she’s more likely to win the election.
I expected Cruz to win; the caucuses tend to attract the especially interested in politics, because it’s not just about going in and casting a vote, and that’s the exact opposite of Trump’s disaffected base.
I didn’t expect Sanders to do as well as he did, but I think it’s the same process at work; Sanders is popular among those who like politics for its own sake.
“they were going to vote for Bernie as a protest vote, but now that they think he has a chance of getting the nomination they switched to Hilary, since they think she’s more likely to win the election.”
Good point. This is my impression as well, and is one of many reasons Hillary will win the nomination. And, of course, the hardcore will also turn out to vote for the “not-Republican.” But I do question whether Hillary can get people to turn out in a general to vote for Hillary rather than merely against the Republicans. I’m skeptical.
“But I do question whether Hillary can get people to turn out in a general to vote for Hillary rather than merely against the Republicans.”
Perhaps those of us who are old enough to remember peace and prosperity, and assuming we can vote by mail instead of having to ride our wheelchairs to a caucus.
I think we can all agree that there’s a lot to like about a return to the Clinton era: the RFRA, DOMA, DADT, and the occasional incineration of right-wing heretics.
But, as Sanders points out, this was also an era of free trade and NAFTA. Is that really what we want?
@ Jaskologist:
That was the best part! Well, that and welfare reform.
Also, yes the Clinton era was pretty good, but the thing that made conservatives hate Hillary was Hillarycare, which was one of the main things that sparked the Contract with America and the Republican Revolution of 1994. And Bill didn’t exactly roll over easily; there was a long political fight.
Even if the Republicans still control both houses of Congress (and even so, they’re probably not going to have 60 senators, especially if Hillary wins), I’m not sure Hillary will be as amenable.
onyomi – “But I do question whether Hillary can get people to turn out in a general to vote for Hillary rather than merely against the Republicans. I’m skeptical.”
Thing is, it doesn’t matter. As long as Clinton can actually get people to turn out, it doesn’t matter if they’re voting for her, or against Rubio/Cruz/Trumpertantrum. The ballot just says “pick one”, and unless all those anti-Republican voters do something silly like vote for
NaderBloomberg, their votes mean exactly as much as those who vote for Clinton because they really, really like her.It does matter because if Hillary can’t get people to show up to vote for her, then she has to rely on people showing up to vote against the Republican. And this is a major reason why Rubio may be a better strategic choice: Democrats don’t hate him as much as they hate Trump and Cruz, so they won’t show up just to vote against him.
Caucus polling is historically very difficult to get accurate because of how a caucus is conducted
Iowa especially
Primary polling is inaccurate
But general election polling is pretty accurate for what it is.
There are problems with polling. But to throw it out seems dumb. Even if it was just blatant guessing at results what is the harm?
Thinking you know something you don’t is almost never a net positive.
I don’t know–I think it’s most shocking how little of the vote so-called “establishment” candidates managed to garner, even considering that it’s Iowa: if you add up Rubio, Bush, Christie, and Kasich–pretty much all the “establishment” candidates–you get no more than about 30%. That means that 70% of the vote is going to people who, 4 or 8 years ago, would have been considered longshot insurgents.
Recall that when Rubio first came on the scene he was a young, promising, relatively far-right “Tea Party” conservative. He was part of that new generation, but his differentiation from the previous mainstream has been obscured by the rise of the more radical Cruz and wild card Trump. This mean, assuming the nomination will go to Rubio, Cruz, or Trump, that there is almost no chance of the nomination going to anyone who would have been considered acceptable by the party which nominated McCain and Romney. And if, for the sake of simplicity, we assume Rubio, Cruz, and Trump each have a 33% chance, it means a 66% chance of someone winning who is still totally unacceptable to the establishment even now. That’s a pretty big change.
And to the extent that Rubio now represents the mainstream, he, plus all the other mainstream candidates can still barely keep pace with Trump and Cruz, both of whom are WAY outside the old mainstream. This is an interesting election. Thank god. If it had ended up as Jeb v. Hillary I think I would have lost any vestige of patience or interest I had with the US political process.
I’m hoping that Ted Cruz wins the nomination. And that doesn’t seem too unlikely: he’s
favored in the predictions markets by a high margin.(edit: no he’s not; looked at the wrong data).Rand Paul was definitely my favorite candidate, but he’s been effectively out of the race for a long time. Ted Cruz comes second, though. What I dislike about him is his heavy emphasis on pandering to the religious right, though in terms of actual positions (e.g. on abortion), he’s not much worse even than Rand Paul, let alone the other candidates. And, of course, I strongly disagree with him on immigration.
What do I like about him? Well, as Vox.com nicely explains, he appeals to conservative ideologues, over compromising “pragmatists” who are willing to sell out their political principles in the name of “going along to get along”. And I am definitely an ideologue. That’s why the rest of the Republican establishment hates him: when he says he won’t vote to raise the debt limit, he means it, and he’s willing to engage in political brinksmanship over it.
The Republican-aligned business cronies likewise hate him because they know that when he says he supports a free market, he means it (or, well, at least means it much more than most establishment Republicans), and he’s for capitalism even when that means being against “big business”.
In his victory speech for Iowa, he explicitly invokes both the kind of message that Ronald Reagan stood for and brings up the idea of another “Reagan coalition”:
I don’t know if there are actually any “Reagan Democrats” supporting Cruz, but I like his message of being against both the Republican and the Democratic establishment. It’s pretty true to the Tea Party spirit that got him elected in the first place.
On the whole, my best-case scenario for Cruz is that he will be the same kind of mixed case as Reagan: a powerful voice for small-government, free-market principles, but also tying that in strongly with Evangelical Christianity in a way that makes the former more successful in the short term but undermines them in the long run. He’s also, by all appearances, much worse on immigration than Reagan. But at the same time, he’s much better on the War on Drugs (for instance, he’s in favor of removing the federal law on marijuana and leaving it to the states).
Ted Cruz is my second choice after Rand Paul as well, but the predictions I’m looking at have him at only 13% right now, to Rubio’s 54% and Trump’s 26%.
http://predictwise.com/
Yesterday was good for him, no doubt, but it seems he still has a high hill to climb. One hidden strength he may have is that I imagine, if Trump dropped out, far more of his voters would go to Cruz than to Rubio. But Trump seems like he’s in it for the long haul unless he starts racking up a series of embarrassing losses (though considering his whole salespitch is what a winner he is, he may be more vulnerable to that than most).
You’re right, he’s not favored at all.
I either looked at the wrong data or somehow mixed up Cruz’s odds with Rubio’s. It’s Rubio who’s favored highly, at 54% to Trump’s 26% (and Cruz’s 13%).
I didn’t talk about Rubio before. I don’t think he’s that bad. He’s like the Mitt Romney of this election, though: most popular with the establishment, given that they’ve switched to him after the failure of Bush III. However, he is better on immigration (but has backtracked at lot).
Immigration is a major area where establishment business interests come up against conservative ideology. The Tea Party line is to deport all illegal immigrants. But that’s impossible, incredibly inhumane, and also terrible for the economy. Business is not in favor of employer verification of immigration status—rightly so, because it deputizes them as the enforcement wing of the Border Patrol, adding fixed costs and making it impossible to employ illegal immigrants as economic efficiency would dictate. And here, I’m therefore more sympathetic to Rubio, who I think is more likely to “cave in” to practicality.
I don’t think Cruz would really deport them all, either, but he’s more likely to have a harder line.
On the other hand, I don’t think Rubio is quite as much the establishment candidate as someone like Romney. I am prepared to be pleasantly surprised by him, but I’m not expecting that much.
One thing I find annoying about Rubio is that he wants to throw the US relationships with Cuba back where they were before 2015…just because his parents are Cuban emigrants and have a beef with Castro. I mean the regime on Cuba is bad, but so far the restrictions have only lead to worse conditions to the people there thus making them easier to control by the regime (people who are well-off are much harder to control than people who are poor and dependent on the government). Then again, I imagine that since he himself comes from Latin America (well, his parents but anyway), he is unlikely to be overly against Latin American immigration to the US unlike the other two likely Rep. candidates.
At the very least you have to admire the stones of a guy who can go to Iowa, say “I want to cut ethanol subsidies”, and still win.
I was tempted to put up a blog post on that (before he won), with the title “One Cheer for Cruz.”
It’s especially striking given Gore’s admission that part of the reason he supported biofuels, which he now thinks was a mistake, was that he was running for president and concerned about Iowa.
Rubio’s success isn’t surprising. Late polls had him with 17% of the vote, with a ~3% margin of error. A little bit of tactical voting by supporters of other establishment candidates would be more than enough to get him to 23%.
My (metaphorical) money is on him to win the nomination.
This was my reaction too, after an initial shock – did Rubio really “steal” that many votes from Cruz and Trump, or are we just finally seeing all of the supporters of “not Trump or Cruz” line up behind one candidate (which has been overdue for awhile. Seriously Jeb, give it up already).
I had the opposite reaction – the Clinton/Sanders tie was somewhat surprising for the same reason that Trump giving up ground to Rubio wasn’t.
Opinion polls are generally poor indicators of actual voting patterns where “protest” candidates are concerned, because the incentives are different for talking to pollsters and actually voting. People really don’t like to “throw their vote away” by voting for a candidate who “can’t win”. And in the American system, that includes a candidate who maybe can win the primary but not the general election. On the other hand, saying that you are going with the protest, and even half-believing it a week before the election, serves every goal of protesting.
And on the other other hand, where there is a real chance that the protest candidate can win the general election, a lot of their support will come from people who are at least a little embarrassed to admit they are one of those protester types. So the same polls that overpredict the can’t-win protest vote will underpredict the actually-winning protest vote.
In this campaign, Sanders and Trump are the protest candidates that most people understand are not going to actually take up residence in the Oval Office in 2017. Cruz is borderline. Rubio is the GOP candidate most likely to actually win the general election. So people talk Trump, they want to believe in President Trump, and they especially want the GOP to believe that they believe in President Trump so that the GOP will give them an electable Trumpoid next time around, but bottom line they don’t want to cast a de facto vote for Hillary Clinton so they defect to the guy who can win. This is not surprising.
That the various biases canceled to give Sanders almost exactly the support he polled at, in spite of his having no real chance as the campaign progresses, was at least modestly surprising to me.
@John Schilling:
First off it’s Iowa. Iowa isn’t very predictive, historically.
Trump appeals to less active (from a voting perspective) members of the GOP coalition. Cruz is trying to appeal to the most active part of the coalition (social conservative evangelical).
Clinton has set up as a centrist. This is not novel for the Democratic Party so she is not going to get any particular enthusiasm from this position. Sanders has set up to appeal to the most reliable Democratic primary voters (liberal activists, primarily white).
Now I’m not positive in that analysis, but I do not think you can compare Sanders and Trump from a “protest vote” perspective for this reason.
Yes, I think the biggest parallels are between Sanders and Cruz, not between Sanders and Trump. Both of them want to draw their parties back to focus on their guiding ideologies.
Rubio is being positioned as the Clinton alternative: “pragmatic”, etc.
Trump doesn’t have any Democratic parallels in this election, but he does have a great many similarities to Ross Perot, who drew voters from both the Republicans and the Democrats (and won 20% of the vote, don’t forget).
Yeah, Trump and Perot have a yuuugge number of similarities. Perot ran as more of a technocrat, but basically the same message and appeal. If there is a single sound bite to sum up Perot it is “Giant sucking sound”.
Clinton and Jeb!/Rubio/Christie/Romney’s-reanimated-campaign-corpse are the establishment candidates. It’s just that GOP base has not been an establishment friendly base since Reagan completed the transition to the modern GOP coalition. Yeah, the establishment guy usually wins, but the base is less and less satisfied by it.
@ HeelBearCub:
Absolutely.
Again, I have to go back to one of my favorite non-scholarly articles on the political process, Vox.com’s “Why Republicans and Democrats Don’t Understand Each Other”:
That’s it right there: they correctly perceive that their party does not succeed in enacting their professed ideology. They say they’re going to repeal and abolish, but they almost never do.
And this is compounded by a factor that the article also discusses: the median voters is a “conservative” and favors “small government” when you ask him questions about ideology as a broad concept. But on the specific programs, he’s more often with the Democrats and “big government”: he doesn’t want to privatize, let alone abolish Social Security or Medicare, or abolish the EPA or the Department of Education (as Reagan promised), etc.
First off it’s Iowa. Iowa isn’t very predictive, historically.
But we aren’t talking about Iowa being predictive of anything – at least I’m not, and I don’t think the OP was. We’re talking about why polls, specifically polls of Iowa voters, were not predictive of Iowa.
That is a fair point.
I think I was going for “if you are going to stick to your guns in a protest vote, Iowa is the place to do it”. We see weird results from Iowa all the time, this is just the one more.
Also, the nature of the caucus, sort of a non-instant second choice run-off system, means that a)if your candidate is doing poorly you will switch, leading to the win-by-a-lot, lose-by-a-lot dynamic you were expecting. Buuuuuuttttt, if it really is a two way race, that really is super-close, you won’t see it. The Dem primary really is a two-way primary for the first time in quite a while. Even in 2008 I don’t think Edwards had dropped out yet.
Except that the Republicans shifted their caucus rules to “just count the secret ballots like any other election” after the clever way resulted in a Ron Paul sweep in 2012. Still makes a difference that it’s a caucus rather than a primary in that you have to show up, listen to your neighbors speak about their favorite candidate, and either speak in favor of your own or let the opposition campaign unopposed for any swing voters in the room. But there’s no opportunity for tactical voting, for going protest in the first round and then shifting to the safe candidate in the second.
The Democrats still do things that way, and maybe it means Sanders picked up all the O’Malley votes, or maybe Hillary got them. But then, the seven coin-tossers were more important than the O’Malley supporters in the Democratic caucuses.
@John Schilling:
I thought Ron Paul exploited the process for picking delegates (which happened after the actual caucus). So a loss turned into a victory over time. I’m not saying that they didn’t go to secret ballot (I don’t know) but I’m fairly sure Paul lost on election night.
“Trump appeals to less active (from a voting perspective) members of the GOP coalition. Cruz is trying to appeal to the most active part of the coalition (social conservative evangelical).”
Something interesting about this: people were watching the weather on the theory that good weather (and, therefore, presumably, a big turnout) would be good for Trump, since his voters are less “serious,” whereas bad weather and/or low turnout would be good for Cruz.
The turnout was unusually high and Cruz still won. Not exactly sure what this means–might he have done even better had there been a blizzard? I wonder if the biggest beneficiary of the high turnout wasn’t actually Rubio: people who might have stayed home during a blizzard, but if they had to pick, basically wanted “not Trump.”
I suspect it means that, at least in Iowa, there was a significant segment of the electorate for whom neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night would stay them from voting Against Donald Trump.
That, also, is something traditional polls (“who are you going to vote for“) aren’t all that great at measuring. Particularly in a caucus system where you can show up undecided about which not-Trump you are going to vote for and get a feel for where the other not-Trump voters stand.
It will be interesting to see going forward how this works out. Primaries are turnout affairs, which is why conventional wisdom is that you can’t win a full primary contest schedule without a ground game. Trump has no ground game to speak of.
But the Iowa Caucuses are small enough, with weird rules, that ground game is even more important. I’m not sure what the exit polls are showing, but the biggest has to be not just how many people turned out, but who turned out. If first time primary voters did not rise, and “old hands” we’re bigger drivers of the higher turnout, then Trump may have scared people to the polls, rather than inspired them.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say that, if I had to bet money on just one person for next POTUS, it would now be Rubio (followed by Hillary, and Trump and Cruz tied for a distant third). Considering there is a much better chance of the Republican nominee being not-Rubio than the Democratic nominee being not-Hillary, I guess this commits me to a fairly high degree of confidence that Rubio will win a general. Maybe more than is justified, but I just felt a very strong hunch.
Before Monday I’d have bet on Hillary, followed by Trump, because she looked stronger before Bernie basically tied with her, because Trump looked more likely to be her opponent (and I rate him as more likely to lose to her in a general) and stronger when he still had that magical “winner” aura, and because, the more I think about it, the more I think Rubio has a certain charisma factor and smooth public speaking style which Bill Clinton, Obama, and to a lesser extent, Bush Jr had, and which Hillary, Trump, Romney, McCain, Kerry, and Cruz lack (Cruz is a great speaker but a less charismatic, more divisive figure overall; Trump is obviously very charismatic to a certain segment of the electorate, but I don’t think it’s enough to win him a general).
As for why, assuming a Clinton-Rubio election, I give an edge to Rubio (other than my own preference for Rubio, which shouldn’t color my judgment of what will happen, but which probably does): I think Clinton is a weak candidate with some baggage and much less charisma than her husband; Rubio probably wins Florida; Democrats have held the white house for 8 years, etc. etc.
Also, most of my friends and acquaintances are blue tribe and I notice a tremendous lack of enthusiasm for Hillary. They will vote for her, but only because she’s seen as much superior to a Republican and they assume Bernie can’t win. I think blue tribe hates Trump and Cruz enough to turn out just to vote for “not-Trump” or “not-Cruz,” but I think a lot of them probably don’t hate or feel anything about Rubio enough to turn out just for “not-Rubio.” So, if it’s Rubio-Clinton, Clinton is going to need people to turn out to vote for her, rather than against Rubio, and I think she’s too uninteresting a candidate to inspire that.
I’d much prefer Rand Paul or Ted Cruz, but I’d much rather Marco Rubio than Hillary or Trump or Jeb!, so I am okay with this.
Per exit polls, Trump won around 30% of first-time caucus goers, so a big turnout definitely improved his chances above what they would have been. http://www.cbsnews.com/elections/2016/primaries/republican/iowa/exit/
However, there are a lot of Republicans, semi-loyal to the party, educated, who infrequently vote, who really don’t like Trump, and turned out to vote the hell against him (and defend the party).
Trump still might pull off the nomination. He drove a LOT of turnout among some pretty infrequent voters, and that’s no small feat. I am not sure as many states feel as strongly about Not-Trump as Iowa does.
I like Rubio, but I dunno where all this bullishness for his chances comes from. He lost in Iowa, he’s likely to lose in NH, and how does SC not become a Trump-Cruz showdown? It looks to me that the traditional pattern of winning 2 out of IA, NH, and SC puts you on a pretty strong path towards the nomination.
Okay, he can possibly cement his position as last establishment candidate standing and get a mountain of money… but surely the lesson of Jeb, Guiliani, etc, is that the power of cash is limited.
Anything’s possible, but I can’t see him being more likely than the two guys that out polled him in IA and very well might in NH too.
“I like Rubio, but I dunno where all this bullishness for his chances comes from.”
Well, for one thing, the more mainstreamish Republicans and big donors have to realize soon, if they haven’t already, that Rubio is now their only hope for a remotely “respectable” candidate. Trump and Cruz are not only more likely to lose than Rubio, they are more likely to lose ignominiously, spectacularly, ridiculously.
I have a Trump supporter Facebook friend who is convinced that the GOP establishment literally wants to lose to Hillary so they can keep railing against someone without having to actually do anything. I wouldn’t go that far, but I do think they care about the party’s image, and I think they think a Cruz or Trump run (even, arguably, a Trump presidency) would damage their brand. So I think they’d be willing to do a lot to ensure it’s not Cruz or Trump, even if it means lining up behind a guy who wasn’t their original choice.
Of course, the establishment and the higher ups and the donors don’t decide everything, but if you’re already doing as reasonably well as Rubio, I think it can easily put you over the top, especially when the other options have such low favorable ratings among primary voters and especially general election voters. While he may not be everyone’s top choice, most polls show people have a positive-ish impression of Rubio and few people hate him. So people aren’t going to come out to vote against him. The diehards will turn out to vote for Trump and Cruz, but I just doubt either of them will amass enough diehards. Put another way, Rubio may not be everybody’s first choice, but he’s everybody’s second or third choice, and the first choices are too heavily divided.
One scenario which makes plausible to me a Trump or Cruz victory, at least in the nomination race, is if one of them drops out–more likely Trump, I’d imagine, as I just don’t see Cruz dropping out till the bitter end (Trump obviously has a yuuge ego that might prevent him dropping out as well, but if he continues to underperform in a few early states he might lose his momentum and “winner” aura and decide it isn’t worth it to him–unlike Cruz, he probably has more fun things to do).
In such a scenario (Trump underperforms and drops out well before the actual convention), I can imagine a good enough chunk of former Trump and Carson voters going to Cruz that Cruz might win. I’m still skeptical even in such a case though: a lot of Trump voters seem like they might just stay home if Trump isn’t on the ballot. Trump has a weird, unique, different appeal and his support may not be easily transferable. It might work better the other way around, but that requires Cruz dropping out, which I don’t imagine happening, if only due to his personality.
So, in all likelihood, we’re stuck in a three-way race with Cruz and Trump dividing up all the protest, evangelical, and strongly ideological voters and Rubio basically taking everybody else by default. This looks like a good place for Rubio to be in, especially once Jeb!, Kasich, and Christie suspend their campaigns.
Losing SC, NH, and Iowa aren’t relevant, tbh. States later in the process are winner-take-all or winner-take-most…say, California, Illinois, Texas, New York, etc.
Rubio is in a strong position to win a lot of delegates in WTA contests among moderates, especially in bluer states. Yeah, Rubio is “losing” New Hampshire, but when you add up the vote shares of Jeb!, Christie, and Kasich, he’s in the clear lead. He’d also be ahead, slightly, in South Carolina.
If this were a three-man race, Rubio would probably take New Hampshire, and be competitive in South Carolina.
Once March 15th rolls around, the other Establishment candidates will be out, and it will be a three-man race, heading into a lot of blue-r states that are not Trump or Cruz friendly. And they are WTA or WTM, so Rubio is going to grab the lion’s share of delegates.
@Nathan: What do you believe Rubio “lost” in Iowa? Nobody campaigns in Iowa because the twenty-six delegates at stake are worth the bother – particularly when those delegates are proportionately assigned. Cruz “won” by one delegate in essentially a rounding error, Clinton by two on a series of literal coin tosses (well, they always said money decided elections…)
People campaign in Iowa because it offers them the chance to persuade most people in Not Iowa to believe that they will become the nominee – which tends to be a self-fulfilling prophecy in a world where most people dislike “wasting their vote” on a losing candidate and where the media gives free advertising to the “inevitable” winner. And according to e.g. the prediction markets, Marco Rubio did in fact cause most people in Not Iowa to believe that he will be the 2016 Republican nominee. Mission accomplished.
The path by which actual votes and delegates will tend to line up in Rubio’s favor is more or less as oyomi has laid out, but it mostly follows from people believing that he’s the only one who can win and represent their interests. The ~5% Ron Paul vote is going to rapidly divide itself between Rubio and Trump, the ~10% Everybody Else vote is going to go almost entirely Rubio, and at least some of the “I’m with Trump because he’s the inevitable one” is going to defect to Rubio. Cruz will probably get most of the Carson voters, but that still puts Rubio ahead of Cruz everyplace that isn’t strongly evangelical. The party elite, the donors, and the endorsements will start lining up behind Rubio, which gives him the edge in advertising and local organization. Then come the thousands of delegates to be awarded in states that are mostly winner-take-all and not heavily evangelical, and you think Cruz’s one extra delegate from Iowa is going to give him the win?
Rubio is not inevitable; he can still lose if he screws up or his luck fails in a big way. But, for now, the nomination is his to lose.
@ John Schilling:
What makes you say this? They seem equally if not more likely to go for Cruz, i.e. “Mr. Government Shutdown”.
I’m not saying Rubio can’t or won’t win the nomination, but I think as onyomi said that Cruz picks up the “strongly ideological” group, including the people who would have been for Rand Paul if he had a chance.
“His to lose” makes it sound like Rubio has a high chance of getting the nomination. But according to the prediction markets, it’s a coin flip between Rubio and non-Rubio.
There is no “strongly ideological” group to line up behind one candidate, because strong ideology is inherently polarizing. Cruz is the evangelical ideologue, Paul is as close as the Republican party is going to get to a rationalist ideologue and noticeably “soft” on issues like abortion, immigration, drugs, and LGBT rights. I doubt there is much crossover in their support within the party.
Edit: Polling indicates that only 8% of Rand Paul voters prefer Cruz as their second choice, compared to 12% for Trump and 11% for Rubio. Of the others, 16% favor lesser evangelical candidates, 30% other mainstream republicans.
And any Republican who is going to cynically, tactically vote for the candidate most likely to result in a government shutdown is going to cross over and support Bernie Sanders, on the grounds that Bernie + Republican House = No Budget.
@ John Schilling:
Paul is not really “soft” on abortion. He’s pro-life and favors banning abortion at the federal level with a constitutional amendment. (Not that this is a realistic possibility.)
On immigration, he’s stuck to the standard line about “secure the border first” and has opposed “amnesty” and a “path to citizenship”.
On drugs, yes, he’s come out against the War on Drugs and said it should be a state-level issue. But then Cruz has also said marijuana should be left to the states. And Paul hasn’t been dumb enough to come out and say cocaine or heroin should be left to the states, nor would he be likely to support such a thing if he magically became president.
On LGBT rights, eh, sort of. He’s said it should be left to the states, and/or that the government should “get out of the marriage business” altogether.
As for “crossover support”, I mean, I don’t like Cruz, but anecdotally both onyomi and I have said that he’s our second choice after Paul. I’m not sure that is so uncommon.
The Republican party is a coalition between evangelicals supporting social conservatism, proponents of economic freedom and small government, and pragmatic establishment types. Cruz supports both social conservatism and small government, with a hostility toward the establishment.
It’s similar to how Reagan combined the Moral Majority with a focus on economic freedom, and a hostility toward Nixonian-Kissingerian establishment pragmatism.
When Cruz stands up and says we’ve got to do everything possible to fight Obamacare even if it means shutting down the government, he’s trying to capture the spirit of Reagan saying that peaceful coexistence with the Soviet Union is impossible, and we’ve got to have victory. We can’t be “pragmatic” and accept them; we’ve got to recognize that they are an “Evil Empire” and make sure they’re eliminated. (Of course, Cruz is far less charismatic and likeable than Reagan.)
There were people like Ayn Rand who hated Reagan because he linked capitalism with evangelical religious values. Ed Clark and David Koch ran against Reagan for similar reasons. But there were also a lot of people—probably more people—who didn’t sign on to the religious message but liked the small government, moralistic message.
There are a lot of people out there who are maybe religious but not super religious and find the antics of crazy evangelicals silly, but who are willing to put up with it to fight Obamacare and high taxes. That was the whole original Tea Party movement: to unite the small government people and the evangelicals in their common cause, which is an antipathy toward Obama and the whole establishment.
I’m a pretty establishment guy, so it would seem Rubio would be my natural candidate, but it seems like discussion of the Republican natural bases (evangelicals, libertarian-ish, and establishment) misses one of the key appeals of Cruz.
Cruz (and Bernie) have the non-negligible advantage that they are the two guys in the room that appear to actually believe what they say they believe. Bernie might be a crotchety old man, and left of mainstream-left, but he comes across refreshingly straightforward. So too with Cruz: he might be arrogant, or difficult, or a jerk, but he effectively conveys the courage of his convictions. Next up would be Trump, and who the hell knows what he believes in other than himself, but he gets voters by appearing to “tell it like it is” in a vague outragey way.
As has been mentioned in many other contexts, I’ll believe you mean what you say when you act like you believe what you say.
Contrast this with Rubio, who appears to me like a young, handsome muppet (but also your typical politician), and Clinton, who is still tarred by the same charge that stuck to Bill; viz, we’ll find out what she believes the next time a poll tells her what to believe.
Cruz is also interesting re: the likability issue. By all accounts I’ve seen (in truth, probably those most actively promoted by the media), he’s a pretty abrasive, difficult guy. But I’m not sure I care. Likability is hugely important for getting elected, but less so for actually governing. Rubio is likable enough (or, appears to have been packaged that way). Bernie has a quirky charm that seems to be working far better than expected. A certain subset of people seem to find Trump’s brashness appealing. And Clinton, well, to steal from Deiseach, her likability falls somewhere between wet-cardboard guy and watching-paint-dry guy. I’m just not sure I care a whit about likability after, say, noon on January 20th.
The president is a strange mix of very powerful and not very powerful at all. One of the reasons for the latter is that while cabinet secretaries and people further down the chain work for him and can often technically be fired, in actual practice there’s a lot of convincing, cajoling, and inspiring that goes into getting the departments to actual enact his agenda. Also there’s Congressional relations, state relations, and foreign relations. Now granted success in leadership, diplomacy and the like aren’t exactly the same as likability, but they are surely related.
@ The Anonymouse:
I agree that this is a big advantage, but is it actually true of Cruz?
First of all, there is the general suspicion that Cruz is too smart to actually believe some of the things he says he believes.
But more than that, he has a pronounced tendency toward “posturing” on every little “culture war” outrage-of-the-day. I mean, so do most other politicians, but that’s why people don’t trust them and find them insincere. In other words, he is definitely a student of the “tell me what I want to hear” approach over the “tell it like it is” approach, and this can come off as very phoney.
I suppose it’s not so much that he doesn’t believe his own ideology, but he acts much more outraged about each little issue that any real person possibly could be. Like, he probably doesn’t really believe that “creeping sharia law” is an “enormous problem” in the U.S., even though I’m sure he’s against sharia law.
@Vox Imperatoris
I can kind of see that, but it still strikes me as a bit strange. That is, if the working hypothesis is that he’s too smart to believe all the things he says he believes–which could make sense; for all his personality faults, you don’t get to clerk for Rehnquist by being a dummy–it seems odd that he would choose these particular issues to posture about.
And by that I mean, the demographic he supposedly postures so as to appeal to just isn’t that big. A politician seeking maximum aggrandizement via posturing would seemingly choose centrist, broadly-agreeable positions so as to maximize the votes gained by posturing. (Clinton springs to mind.) But no one has ever called Cruz either centrist or broadly-agreeable.
My heuristic is that if you’re a very very smart person in politics, and you nonetheless take an out-of-mainstream position on something, the simplest explanation is that you genuinely believe in that position. Everyone pushes toward the fringes in the primaries and collapses toward the center in the general, sure. But I can’t think of anyone in recent memory who started as far left or right as Cruz has, and actually become a centrist after the primaries.
tl;dr: Cruz is probably too smart and too far to the right not to believe in the things he says he believes, for better or worse.
@The Anonymouse:
Cruz has run as someone who is uncompromising. That appears to be one of his strongest appeals. Uncompromising and principled are not the same things, even though they may seem to be.
William Saletan is only one writer, and maybe he has some bias that is coloring his conclusions, but he has assembled a fair amount of evidence that mostly Ted Cruz wants to win legislative battles, or claim he won them, calling him “[maybe] the most spectacular liar ever to run for president.”
@ The Anonymouse:
But if he took centrist, broadly-agreeble positions, he would be like Jeb Bush and wouldn’t be popular or inspire any enthusiasm.
Reagan was very far-right, especially at his time, and he campaigned as even more far-right than he governed. People were legitimately terrified that he would launch nuclear war on the Soviet Union—including the Soviet leadership!
Cruz is hoping that by taking a relatively extreme position, he will motivate people and find that silent majority waiting to “take back America”. That real Americans are tired of Washington bureaucrats overtaxing and overspending, and they’re ready to send someone to restore the Constitution and the Judeo-Christian values it was allegedly founded upon.
So I think he believes sincerely in that basic strategy.
However, I also think that he’s not averse to helping public opinion along the way by carefully cultivating xenophobia, vilification of his opponents, and bombastic religious language in a ways that he is smart enough to recognize are less than one-hundred percent accurate. I think he sincerely believes that this tactic will work. But I don’t know that he sincerely believes everything that he says.
He’s also very careful (because he’s smart) to phrase things in a way that are not wrong but are misleading and irrelevant but useful to him. For instance, in the aftermath of the Planned Parenthood shooting, he said:
Now that is almost certainly true, even though Politifact disgracefully rated it as “mostly false”.
But of course it’s completely irrelevant to the point. “The media” paints Republicans as potential users of terrorism to advance their political ends. But the majority of criminals, despite being Democrats, don’t commit crimes to advance the goals of the Democratic Party—unless you really believe that the Democratic Party is a secret conspiracy to reduce us all to barbarism and lawlessness, and Cruz is smart enough to know that’s not the case.
In other words, he’s a demagogue, like most politicians. And I think voters can see that. You can see when you’re being played even when you agree with the player and his goals. Maybe not every voter sees it on any given issue, but if someone does it on every issue, you don’t have to be too smart to pick up on it.
As for the others:
– Rubio: phoney; he’s the man in the suit to represent the party
– Clinton: completely phoney; all her positions are a matter of political convenience
– Trump: undoubtedly a flip-flopper but sincere in his lack of principles
– Sanders: sincere in his basic message but engages in similar demagoguery to Cruz—”open borders is a Koch brothers idea”—but I think he believes his own rhetoric more.
So when I say that I don’t think Cruz comes off as completely sincere, I don’t think that places him far behind everyone else, except possibly Sanders, but I honestly haven’t followed Sanders’ rhetoric that closely. (Nor Cruz’s, except for a few articles I’ve read.) And I guess Trump, in his own way, since he’s a demagogue but doesn’t try to hide it.
@ HeelBearCub:
Well, I think he is “principled” in the sense that he really does believe in his broad ideology. I don’t think he’s just in it for “unlimited powah”. But he is also sleazy and self-aggrandizing, willing to do “whatever is necessary” to get into a position where he can put his ideology into practice.
When you’re carefully phrasing your answers to every question in such a way that you can always show that you were on the side of the victors, it doesn’t come off as honest, candid, or sincere. You just want to shake him and tell him to put down the facade to tell you what he really thinks.
In contrast, that’s why Reagan was so enduringly popular. He really did come off as sincere, even to his opponents. They thought he was a lunatic or an ignoramus, but not a liar.
Take the relatively famous incident where Reagan was paraphrased as saying, “If you’ve seen one redwood tree, you’ve seen them all.” Now, his campaign did play the politician game of objecting that he had been misquoted. But his actual words were almost exactly the same: “I think, too, that we’ve got to recognize that where the preservation of a natural resource like the redwoods is concerned, that there is a common sense limit. I mean, if you’ve looked at a hundred thousand acres or so of trees — you know, a tree is a tree, how many more do you need to look at?”
Nevertheless, he largely came off as sincere:
@Vox:
Is Cruz fully committed to preventing legalization of immigrants? Or was he for legalization before he was against it? Which is the position that he is broadly committed to?
Does Ted Cruz think that it would be good thing if the debt-ceiling was not raised? Is he ideologically committed to it?
I’m not saying he is not an ideologically minded candidate. But there are plenty of ideologically minded candidates who aren’t loathed by their Congressional colleagues. I have a sense that, hyperbolically, there has never been a deal that Cruz didn’t immediately look for ways to defect from for personal gain (as he defines it).
Maybe that amounts to the same thing. But I wouldn’t call it principled.
@ HeelBearCub:
I think he is against letting illegal immigrants become citizens, and in his ideal fantasy world he’d deport them all, but he is willing to grant them permanent residency as part of an immigration reform / “border security” package.
That seems to be consistent with his stated positions. At the same time, he is perfectly willing to spin anyone who supports similar measures as in favor of “amnesty” if they don’t phrase things exactly the way he likes.
Again, in his ideal world, I think he would not raise it and cut all spending immediately to be in line with it.
But I think he is willing to use it as a bargaining chip to get dramatic spending cuts, as he says in one of the news articles quoted on his website:
I think you’ve got to separate the individual policies from his larger goals.
I guess I think of him as something like Trotsky. Trotsky was definitely “principled” in that he was a die-hard proponent of communism and was not prepared to settle for anything less than complete victory. But he was also an avid proponent of using every dirty trick in the book to win. He had a real cause he fought for, but he was not “honorable”.
Or, to use a fictional example, I think Cruz is more Stannis Baratheon than Ned Stark. Stannis believes that his cause is just and that he really is the best king for Westeros, or at least the right king. But he’s also willing to use very underhanded means to become king. In a sense, Stannis is “principled”, but not if that is taken to mean that he is honorable and candid in everything he does.
By the way, do you think that Latin Americans would more likely vote for Clinton (because they are more likely to vote Democrats) or Rubio (because his parents are from Latin America)? He seems to be hostile towards Cuba(n government) but the Cubans who matter in the elections are those who emigrated and they seem to share his hard-line attitude towards their former country.
Cubans in the US have a different voting pattern than almost all other Hispanics. In part, because they are people who were fleeing Castro and so were very strong cold warriors and in part because they have special, much easier immigration rules (basically if your foot touches US soil and you are Cuban you can stay). So unlike every other Hispanic group, Cubans tend to vote Republican. This is changing a little bit with the latter generations, younger Cubans, both more recent immigrants and the descendants of the older immigrants are trending towards the democrats. They are also more likely to support better relations with Cuba.
Anyway, none of that really answers whether or not non-Cuban Hispanic voters would be more likely to vote for Rubio than generic Republican (say Bush) out of ethnic solidarity. Frankly I don’t know. My sense is that even if there is some shift it won’t be enough to change the overall direction — Hillary would still get the majority. But in a close election even a small shift could be important.
“Likability is hugely important for getting elected, but less so for actually governing.”
This, imo, is one of Cruz’s best qualities, and an area in which he may even be superior to Rand: his seeming total lack of regard for the regard in which his fellow politicians hold him. Lots of politicians claim they want to fight the DC establishment on behalf of their constituents, but when push comes to shove, how many of them will actually let the government shut down sooner than vote for something their constituents don’t want? The very reason why Cruz is so hated is why I like him: because I don’t like most politicians and I don’t like the political status quo, so anyone who acts very intransigent in the face of those things is okay in my book.
Of course, the mainstream wisdom is that you have to have friends and allies and be willing to compromise to “get things done,” but the problem is that the current window of what can be done in Washington without making enemies is way too narrow. A president has the power to reset the terms of such debates and set the tone in a way a senator does not.
That said, I think Rubio has a better chance of beating Hillary than Cruz, so as to who is the better nominee, strategically speaking, I’m not so sure. I lean toward Rubio, though I’d much rather see Cruz as president. Unfortunately, the gossip is that they hate each other, so I guess I can’t have a Cruz-Rubio ticket. If Rubio doesn’t win the nomination, however, he seems the obvious choice of running mate for almost anyone (who doesn’t hate him).
Tibor –
By the way, do you think that Latin Americans would more likely vote for Clinton (because they are more likely to vote Democrats) or Rubio (because his parents are from Latin America)?
Rubio (or Cruz) will not draw any significantly greater number of Hispanic voters than would any non-Hispanic Republican candidate not named Donald Trump. Latin Americans don’t like each other that way. Cubans might be more likely to vote for the Republican candidate if it’s Cruz or Rubio, but most of them were already voting for the Republican candidate, and those who have more thoroughly assimilated will vote for whichever party they see serving them best, whether that means Clinton, Sanders, Cruz, Rubio, Trump, etc.
Trump is something of a wild card, because many Mexican (and working-class white) voters will vote for the most masculine-seeming candidate. For example, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. So if Trump becomes the nominee and doesn’t melt down on TV, he will get more Hispanic votes than any other Republican candidate might, even Cruz and Rubio.
@ onyomi:
Exactly. This is also the main thing I like about him.
It’s “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”. I hate the Washington establishment. They hate Ted Cruz. I therefore am okay with Ted Cruz. (They hate Trump, too, but Trump’s even worse than they are.)
Ted Cruz is completely against a certain spirit of cooperation that has a long history in Washington, where politicians give vicious speeches against one another, but behind the scenes they’re friends. But when Cruz has political enemies, they’re his enemies in real life, too.
Now the left loves “bipartisanship” and this attitude of “go along to get along” because it ultimately results in their getting what they want. When everyone gets along, they decide to “do something”. And that something is almost always to expand the power of government and erode the Constitution. It’s exactly like that Vox.com article I quoted: “policymaking has a liberal bias”.
(Under Bill Clinton, you might be tempted to say it was different, but spending was only cut after a Republican resurgence, vicious fights, and a government shutdown.)
Also, you’re definitely right about Rand Paul. He’s very buddy-buddy with the establishment Republicans, despite their disagreements on policy. And his tendency to compromise with the right in an anti-libertarian way have, in my opinion, undermined his attempts to reach out to Democrats on issues like the Drug War.
@Anthony:
“So if Trump becomes the nominee and doesn’t melt down on TV, he will get more Hispanic votes than any other Republican candidate might, even Cruz and Rubio.”
I think this is wildly off. Hispanics, broadly, are apoplectic at Trump specifically (and the GOP in general.) Hard to see how he washes off his earlier statements about Mexicans, etc.
@Vox:
“I think he is against letting illegal immigrants become citizens, and in his ideal fantasy world he’d deport them all, but he is willing to grant them permanent residency as part of an immigration reform / “border security” package.”
But that is not what he is claiming now. Now he is claiming he only ever said that so he could kill the immigration bill. So, I’m not sure it is consistent with his current stated position.
In any case, he seems nakedly Machiavellian to me. I honestly don’t know what he really believes, but I think if he is a true believer of anything it’s the evangelical positions. Maybe. And that is only because his Dad is super hard core on that front. Not that it necessarily indicates anything about true belief.
@ HeelBearCub:
I think he didn’t exactly like everything with the immigration bill, but he was basically okay with either killing it, or—if he couldn’t kill it—passing it with his amendment.
But I’m hardly disputing that he has been duplicitous and Machiavellian on this issue and others.
Nevertheless, I think he’s doing it for what he believes to be the greater good, to advance the principles that he holds. (That doesn’t mean I think he actually is serving the greater good by doing this.)
Are there any Ned Starks in politics today? What has Ted Cruz done, more than the average congressman or senator to be compared to “number one dad”? Not that I don’t think he’s calculating in what he says and does–but so are nearly all successful politicians.
@ onyomi:
It’s a matter of degree. Cruz does this more (or at least is more competent about it) than many other politicians.
For instance, see Rand Paul’s comments in the debate on how Cruz pisses off all the other Republican candidates by saying that they’re for “amnesty” when they all support broadly similar policies:
All politicians definitely do this, though. That’s why people don’t like them.
And when I say Cruz is like Stannis, I mean that as a semi-compliment. After all, many politicians are more like Petyr Baelish.
@ Jaskologist
http://www.cnn.com/2016/02/02/politics/hillary-clinton-coin-flip-iowa-bernie-sanders/
No, Hillary Clinton did not win Iowa because of a coin flip
[….]
So in the seven coin flips that the Iowa Democratic Party has a record of, Sanders won six of them.
These seven recorded coin flips accounted for more than half of the 1,681 precincts.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/29/us/drug-shortages-forcing-hard-decisions-on-rationing-treatments.html?smid=nytcore-ipad-share&smprod=nytcore-ipad
A description of serious shortages of a lot of prescription meds, and the difficulties doctors have with deciding who gets what.
Are things really that bad? If so, do people have explanations of what’s going on? I prefer explanations based on specific knowledge, but I’ll settle for theory and hypothesis.
https://www.facebook.com/nancy.lebovitz/posts/10205795789916415
@ Nancy Lebovitz –
Contrary to what you indicated in your fb post, when I read the article, the reason was explained.
Many drugs are made by only one manufacturer, so production or safety problems at a single plant can have big effects. For another company to begin making the products and getting them approved by regulators requires the right combination of manufacturing capabilities and economic incentives.
What we are seeing is the systemic cost of centralized control of manufacturing & production priorities. We have built a system based on high regulatory requirements for safety and quality, with negligible room for prioritizing cost and innovation. As a result, we have large companies who can produce large quantities (due to scale) of products at a narrow band of high quality, and we lack a secondary (and tertiary) layer of lesser quality produced faster and/or cheaper. Additionally, because we’ve had third party payments for so long, clinicians are trained to only provide one level of medicine, regardless of the cost, instead of learning to present a series of options cost/likely outcome to the patient, and have that person decide what they want.
While one might protest that telling a patient that the quality of their care depends on how much they can afford to pay, not doing so perpetuates the myth that one can have anything, regardless of cost. Everything has upsides and downsides.
This is the downside we chose when we “picked” the health care system we have. I’m not sure which is worse – that we never actually chose this (because it grew on its own, instead of being formally created), or that the people who did the choosing along the way were never formally appointed to make those decisions for everyone.
Thank you for checking.
@ Nancy –
Check out this article on the 2007-2010 rabies vaccine shortage. At the same time that this was going on, India and China had “plenty” of vaccine – but this was produced by domestic nationalized plants under a cheaper process that had a high(er) level of severe side effects. (And India loses a tremendous number of people annually to rabies, so calling their supply “plenty” is a kinda ‘depends on your point of view’ thing.)
I strongly suspect that the shortages in US hospitals are rarely, if ever, at the “omg we have two patients and only enough medicine for one, the other will DIE” point. Instead, physicians are facing scrutiny when they attempt to treat with medications that used to be plentiful, and strongly encouraged to use more plentiful alternatives. I’d welcome input from someone currently working in those situations.
Ice cream and class: to my Euro mind this is about *age* not class!
At 9, “yes please”, because you don’t want an earful from mom.
At 16, “yeah”, because fuck you, parents.
At 22, “yeah”, because you are just used to it now.
At 30, “yes please”, because now you are showing an example to your kids or trying to get a promotion.
In other words, you adopt classier habits in the periods of your life when you care about your or your kids social mobility, and adopt edgier lower class habits when you don’t or want to signal not-giving-a-damn.
Still class (I know it would belong to that thread, but more chance of getting it read here):
Try expanding the models geographically. It is obvious that rural Alabama is far more Labor class than SF, but it is more interesting if you expand it internationally.
The reason Western Europe is to the left of the US and US liberals tend to like it is that Labor class almost disappeared from the picture. There is hardly an equivalent of wrestling, destruction derbies and other redneck hobbies. It disappeared especially obviously in Scandinavia and that is why the are the most Progressive, in France even the occasionally visible rural conservatives (La France Profonde) come accross as educated and classy. Strangely, Holland preserved a small element of it: gabber / hardcore techno culture, where the dress code is tracksuits. Soccer is all that is left of a Labor culture of Western Europe, but that got a class elevation makeover in the later decades.
While Eastern Europe is very strongly Labor class, which tops out at Putin signalling Labor class values even stronger than Trump.
Now Southern Europe is a place I don’t understand. I am entirely unable to put Italians into class categories and I spent plenty of time there. Everybody seems classy in a certain old sense, pretty clothes and accessories, yet not in this Prog sense. I go to a smaller town’s discotheque, music club, the place looks like a palace covered with marble and other richy stuff, women wear elegant clothes, and then they just sit around and don’t dance and the music doesn’t have a dancy, pumpy beat anyway just some Ramazotti type vocals. I just don’t understand the culture, like, at all.
IMHO most of Labor culture can be reduced to testosterone and basically the old-time ideas of masculinity, while higher classes look increasingly unisex and gender-neutral. See this: http://www.thoseshirts.com/ as examples of Labor being fed up with elites. This is one part of the story. (Labor class female culture is about being pretty and / or motherhood but overally it is far less visible, it is a feature of Labor culture that gender cultural visibility is inequal.) Upper class neutering partially ideology driven but the point is, if boys and girls grew up spending their time learning and studying instead of wrestling each other in the mud / putting up make-up before a mirror and dream of becoming divas they will more or less automatically end up more neutered, more unisex. Civilization is neutering, suggesting that if it culminates in a transhuman singularity, it will disappear. I am not looking forward to that.
It is a very interesting theory that many of the cultural/political differences between the US and Western Europe, as well as Coastal America’s love of Europe and Middle America’s disdain for Europe see to be explicable by appeal to the disappearance of Western Europe’s labor class. Question is, where did they go?
I don’t think the labor class (in the sense of rednecks) has disappeared in the UK, rather it never existed, because there isn’t enough space for any significant amount of people to be far away from a major city. Other possible factors are that the upper labor class often aspire to middle class (to slip between terminology), and a bigger welfare system fuses the lower labor class with the underclass.
If you drop the requirement for religiosity and rurality, then the equivalent of the redneck is White Van Man — working-class, conservative, clannish, fiercely patritotic , from an honor culture.
And that is one phrase never used by UK politicians. They talk about Essex Man, Mondeo Man, Worcester Woman – this is more of a middle-class-ish centrist constituency, politically undecided, and voting for personal interests, typically, once owning their house or having a small business, switching from Labour to Tory. Generally they are seen to be not having any particular characteristics beyond self-interest.
My point is how irrelevant or unimportant the White Van Man Vote appears to be. And how his culture is invisible except when mentioned negatively.
I think that’s just about the peculiarities of the UK electoral system. White van man probably isn’t a large enough part of the population in the seats which actually decide elections: he probably lives in a suburban Tory stronghold (in the South) or in dyed-in-the-wool Labour territory (in the North).
Not the labor class disappeared, there is still a lot of German industrial capacity – it is labor class culture and the visibility of labor class culture. Like, entertainment. It’s just football and beer and some gambling, nothing more these days.
I don’t know where they are now, but something like 1/3 of the population of Norway left the country from around 1840-1930. They mostly ended up in the midwestern United States.
I imagine those migrations had significant impact on the population today.
I’m officially stupid. Damn! I should have thought of that the very fact of the US having a redneck culture and Europe not so much is precisely because the redneck types were disproportionately likely to move from Europe to the US (or AU etc.), because owning your farm is better than working for some landlord or in a factory.
Shit, this is a glaring omission. Not just by me, Europeans overally don’t study and don’t discuss how emigration changed us. There are probably totally important stuff there. Like, class culture. This needs to be looked into ASAP.
This is similar to what Clark noted about the effects of Jizya taxation in the Middle East. There, non-Muslims steadily became more elite, wealthy and high-IQ, because everyone who couldn’t pay up had the choice of emigration, conversion or death. The Muslims basically got the worst quality people due to this policy.
To expand on that a little …
The tax on non-Muslim peoples of the book is a head tax–a fixed amount per year. The religious tax that Muslims are required to pay to support various worthy causes—not exactly a tax in our sense, since they can choose to spend money on those causes themselves rather than giving it to some authority to spend for them—is more like an income tax, depending in a somewhat complicated way on earnings of various sorts.
So if your income is high, it’s better to be a non-Muslim, if your income is low it’s better to be a Muslim.
I believe that is a correct account of the traditional religious rules–perhaps someone who knows more of the relevant details can correct it.
@David Friedman
To that, I’d add that apostasy from Islam is punished by death, which creates a certain incentive structure here.
Per Clark’s book, IIRC, Jizya is traditionally set into three tiers – amount X for the poor, amount 2X for the middle, and amount 4X for the rich. The middle and the rich, with a much larger discretionary income, are in an easier position to pay than the poor, even if they have to pay more.
According to official Norwegian language textbooks, a lot of them came back after they saw what American culture was doing to their kids.
LOOOL. Which aspect of American culture?
The teacher filled in some of this (particularly about the coming back, which their wiki indicates to be 1/4th of those who went after 1880), but just from the text:
– Loosening of morals, especially felt by those who are religious.
– Dishonorable (loose?) women.
– Rampant dishonesty (fraud?).
– Kids allowed to dance together at gatherings.
They also hated being ridiculed for not knowing English, and many never learned, but that’s a general problem with immigrants.
Are you Norwegian or have you just heard about it? I don’t have big illusions about Norway (there seems to be a very strong force in the society there to be conformist and support the government whatever it says) but this seems like Russian-style propaganda and I have doubts the text books would be that specific anyway (unless they indeed wanted to hammer the idea of “backwards and regressive USA” into the students’ heads).
Does it matter who I am?
The quote is from the intermediate textbook for adults. Page 112.
I agree that it is propaganda, but it’s a propaganda saying that Norway was a backward, religiously conservative land, and they did the same things upon immigrating to USA as immigrants to Norway do now to Norway, so shut up you hypocrite and welcome those migrants.
Interesting. Norwegian’s Americans were very geographically isolated from other member’s of society. We generally lived on Homesteads in the Dakotas.
Isolation generally created it’s own problems, notably Alcoholism. But for the most part, we were more interested in leaving the Dakotas than ever going back to Norway. I’ll leave you with a Gene Amdahl quote.
AMDAHL: I didn’t really have that as an ideal in mind, but I did know I wanted to be in California.
NORBERG: How did you come to that?
AMDAHL: Well, anyone who is born and raised in South Dakota gets to the point where they recognize sooner or
later that getting to California is having one foot in heaven. [laugh]
@Anonymous: It does not matter. What I meant by “are you Norwegian” was more or less “do you have a credible source of information on that or did you read it online somewhere” 🙂 Sorry if it rubbed you the wrong way.
Thanks, interesting! Also interesting how quickly Norway changed. If for example one uses gays as a canary in the coalmine of social liberalism, it was forbidden until 1972, legalized in that year and already in 1981 discrimination and hate speech against gays banned, first country in the world, so in a mere 9 years the law took completely the other side. So it suggests the 1970’s were a period of really rapid change.
But it still does not explain what changed it.
I found this: https://www.quora.com/How-was-it-like-to-live-in-Norway-during-the-1970s
The author mentions moralism, which was probably religious, and yet the strong influence of Marxism-Leninism.
I have a more general model that suggests that religious sentiment, no matter how conservative, can very quickly move over into far-left or very liberal sentiment, because the same kind of virtue-signalling. So you can signal Christian virtue by hating gays, or you can quickly move to signalling liberal virtue by hating those who hate gays. But it is very similar. Stable, enduring conservatisms are not based on too much religion, rather economic interest or patriotism or something similar, a down-to-earth pragmatic approach, like in Ancient Rome. So this could be one explanation.
“On the more cultural side, extreme interpretation of Marxism dominated. Marxist-Leninism or Maoism. It was actually more akin to the various religious sects which existed everywhere; pietist and moralist. ”
Aha. Not far from my model.
The ‘returnees’ from my lot were much smaller than that, and most of the people who attempted to come over and were refused, were turned back due to tb or other infectious disease.
Not saying that some people didn’t take one look at the flat wastelands of the shortgrass prairie and run as fast back to the mountains and fjords as they could, but that most were leaving really bad economic conditions, which pretty much persisted until the US found oil in the North Sea.
A pattern I’m pretty sure I’ve seen asserted for some immigrant groups, perhaps Italians in particular, was that someone would come over, make what was, by home standards, quite a lot of money, then go back to the home country to retire. A quarter of immigrants eventually going back doesn’t sound inconsistent with my memory of what I’ve read.
@Tibor
No offense taken. I just have my reasons to post anonymously.
If we(or France, or Scandinavia..) don’t have a labor class, who votes for all the right wingers? The votes such parties get in most any country moves well up into the double digits in most places.
Southern Europe I agree on though, I’ll have to do some thinking about that. It is a place where on the one hand a labor-signaling person like Berlusconi can cheerfully rule with much approval for a long time whilst also having movements like Podemos getting popular elsewhere. It appears very strange, yes.
I don’t think that right-wingers in Europe get votes mostly from the working class voters. It is the various social democratic parties that have traditionally been working class parties. Who votes Tories in the UK, Republicans in France or CDU/CSU in Germany? Middle-class. Now, all of these parties (maybe except for the Tories) have recently shifted much more to the left while the social democratic parties have abandoned their working class roots and made their programmes more Green Party like (sort of upper class leftist). Those two things opened a lot of political space for parties like Le Pen’s FN in France or AfD in Germany (who, I believe, actually used to be a right-liberal party with Bernd Lucke, but have shifted quite a lot to the very conservative side after Frauke Petry took over). They get votes from both the working class and parts of the righ-wing middle class (they are also no “right-wingers” in any meaningful sense – FN’s economic policies are very socialist and protectionist for example). I don’t know much about Nordic countries but I expect that there will be a similar story with the Folkeparti in Denmark and the Swedish Democrats in I forgot which country. At least in Germany (and Austria) this is also fostered by long years of either official “great coalitions” (that is a coalition rule of the CDU/CSU and the Social Democrats) or generally converging politics of the two main parties.
Meanwhile, Spain has a huge unemployment rate, especially among young people, which is caused above all by the insane socialist labour laws (huge benefits for employees, if you want to fire someone you have to pay him several months of wages and so on) which make employers very hesitant to hire anyone. But apparently, the leftists like Podemos can attract the attention of the many unemployed* young Spaniards whom they promise jobs and punishment of the greedy bankers who, of course, are those really to blame (basically Podemos are something like Bernie Sanders). By the way “podemos” means “we can” in Spanish. I don’t know much about Italy, I’ve never understood how Berlusconi can get elected despite his countless scandals either. But it seems like Italians like a macho guy.
* I was told by some Spaniards that the unemployment rate is not as bad as it looks on paper – there are many people who work illegally in Spain nowadays, because that is the only way the employers are willing to risk employing someone they might have to sack after a few months and paying for it as well as avoiding paying the myriad of other benefits and fees they have to with legal employees.
The post-communist countries are also special. Actually, I only know the country I am myself from, i.e. the Czech republic, well enough to say something about it. The specific thing (and I imagine that this is the case of other post-communist EU countries as well) is that at least until recently, to vote for the left-wing was considered something working class, any “decent member of the middle classes” would vote the right-wing or at least not admit in public that he votes the social democrats (almost nobody at all would admit voting the communists…also mostly people over 60 vote for them and their voting base keeps getting older), so you have your “labour class vote” but it does not go to a right-wing party but to a left-wing one. As I mentioned before, this has been generally the case in Europe for the most part – the welfare state is mostly supported by the working class and the state employees. There has been some shifts lately though and this includes the Czech politics as well, although with some delay, caused by the communist past and a period after that in which everything left-wing was not considered “worthy of an educated society”. This also lead to the left-wing becoming more conservative in social issues than the right-wing (I mean maistream right-wing). Today the Social democrats have partly moved to a more “middle class euro-left” party (although not as much as the German SPD for example, not yet anyway) and the mainstream right-wing is also trying to look progressive and cool to attract the young voters. At least that is my take on things, I am not entirely sure how accurate my understanding of the current political shifts is.
To summarize (and oversimplify a bit)- there is a labour class or working class in Europe, but it votes for social welfare, “taxing the rich” AND social conservativeness. The middle class is a mix of what would be middle class Democrat leftists in the US and “centre-right” Republicans. This seems to be true of pretty much all countries in the EU. I will not find a large group of of people who’d actually like to seriously cut taxes and the scope of the state anywhere in the EU (or Europe in general with the notable exception of Switzerland). Of course, most establishment Republicans don’t want that in the US either but I guess that a sizable minority of their voters do.
You can tell me the PVV or Front National or the True Finns aren’t ‘real’ right wingers because they’re not actually into rightist economic policy all you want, but that’s hardly the point I was making. TheDividualist’s post implied Europe somehow lacked a labor class of its own, and I simply wanted to point out that the mere voting statistics argue against that strongly: everywhere Pegida or UKIP rears its head, you can evidently see there very much is a labor class.
Whether or not they’re rightist like so or not isn’t something I’m terribly interested in.
But it is an important distinction from the US point of view and the original question. The reason the US right-wingers might look at Europe with disdain is because Europe is not capitalist enough, the left-wingers like it for the same reasons (although both also imagine Europe to be much less capitalist than it is, or rather they imagine all countries in Europe to be like France). The original question was whether that might have something to do with the presence or absence of the labour class. You correctly pointed out that the labour class is present but I wanted to clarify that the difference is probably due to the different voting patterns of the labour class – they used to vote (still partly do) the social democratic parties and now they partly vote the so called right-wing populist parties (who are often socially conservative social democrats, UKIP is a notable exception, they seem quite capitalist, but the UK also seems closer in this to the US than the continent is)
About class: I’d rather put this into this newer thread:
Class is IMHO BOTH adaptation-execution and fitness maximization: you do it because it used to be useful for mating, but also because it still is. (Thanks to Eric Raymond for the idea that interesting human behaviors are generally **overdetermined**, so don’t stop at the first suitable explanation!) Men do it to be able to mate at all, and with a pretty one, women do it in order to make high-status man marry them, not just an affair.
Now my Evil Plan to uproot the Prog Culture of Goodness and introduce a terrible era of far-rightery (or, well, at least to turn back the clock a bit) is based on the idea that these two got out of synch. At least for men. You can signal Davos type goodness-and-caring class, but it is still the selfish muscular guy on the motorbike getting the girl. And as for women, signalling Prog feminism usually works against a man offering a ring, a pretty feminist can be a good short term girlfriend if you put with her stuff for her looks but too dangerous for a wife. Doesn’t mean men want stupid wives, but usually smart-but-not-feminist is a winning strategy. But I think this change will come from men.
So basically you can play the Prog class game as a man, it gets you status but this status is rather useless for mating. Or you can say fuck it, be a well paid smart blue collar (stuff like dangerous work in oil refineries) or the kind of white-collar job where you don’t need to watch your tongue much, work out, ride a motorbike, box, live a manly and fun life, be full of un-PC opinions and still score far better with women.
In short, I am betting on that sex is so powerful, it could break anything. I am betting on a revolt of men who are doing everything right, and even gaining status nicely, but are still undersexed and badly sexed.
The weak spot of my plan is economics. Ultimately, Prog elites could arrange things so that some college educated equal opportunity officer is paid much more than now and the smart welder licenced to work in dangerous flammable environments, or the generic office software dev is paid much less than now. And this would work badly, if you gotta take the bus to work and someone else rides a Ferrari to work, THIS kind of status would not work that well sexually, not even necessarily because women care that much, but because men care much, it is difficult for a man to be confident and not feel embarrassed and small in a situation like this, so he would lose his Game, his confident edge. But if this comes to happen, you essentially have a Soviet type nomenclature. And you know how that ends.
Re. the sexual disadvantages of embracing progressive ideology, I’m not sure I see it, at least not in the gentry circles where it would be a problem: in my experience the pot-smoking, long-haired male members of the Campus Democrats got a lot more action than the Alex P Keaton types who populated the Young Republicans, though partially just because there were a lot fewer women in the latter. But that counts! Women are attracted to men who seem like compassionate, giving caretakers. What better way to signal this without actually doing anything than to embrace progressive and/or Marxist economics?
The Alex P Keaton type is highly conformist,which is probably something common in the moderate-right. Here in Europe the moderate-right tend to be the most boring guys ever, and I think it is the same. The sheer boredom of most Republican candidates who aren’t Trump is probably worse, sexually, than Sanders, who is a gamma but his ideas may at least look like something bold. This comes across as petty and fearful i.e. not very masculine, while the pot-smoking hippie is able to signal some amount of courage, boldness, bravely bucking social standards and so on. This is fake: they actually are of the highest status and their standards are the real ones, but fake signals can work, too. This was the idea behind the 1968 type rebelliousness: to impress girls by boldly challenging their fathers values, so showing that they don’t have a lower status than their dad. The young buck locking horns with the old buck is the most basic sexual competition strategy and it works, too. However please factor in that most adult, post-college liberals are highly conformist office drones and not that different from the moderate-right boringness, they aren’t bold radicals in Che tees, they are simply conformist to Prog norms and parrot what everybody else is saying. Look at Davos.
My point is, forget moderate-right Keaton type boring Republicans, they aren’t going to upset the Prog establishment, they are part of it. Thing about more radical right guys who are not afraid of being called racist, sexist or homophobic. Bad guys on motorbikes. Roosh. PUAs. Captain Capitalism and his “Asshole Consulting”. Vox Day.
I mean, if you want to signal boldness and courage, and that certainly tends to work with women, go far-left or far-right, it cannot be done close to the middle. The far-left kind work better previously as they were in reality far less suppressed than the far-right by the establishment, the problem is you cannot be a Che type anymore. Che was homophobic, racist etc. because he was a masculine man with strong opinions. These days on the far-left you gotta roll with the Tumblr trans fats and be very sure you don’t give offense by misgendering anyone and basically I think that is emasculating and is not going to work with girls, because it isn’t really bold. You see, the far-left radical looks bold as long as he looks like putting a lot of energy in fighting the establishment or any random enemy, right? But today they cannot exert that energy purely outward, they gotta put a lot of energy inward, i.e. basically watching their tongues, braking themselves if they would do anything inappropriate, they cannot call someone a retard because that is ableist and so on, so these days they are tying up themselves, braking themselves, and that does not look that bold.
Male attractiveness seems (empirically) to be distributed about evenly among all social classes. While it’s true that some women go for the “downtown guy” as Billy Joel put it, that’s essentially a fetish. Super-progressive guys in the Gentry class get laid just fine, as long as they are attractive in the universal ways (facially symmetric, high-status, dependable, charming, funny, etc.). Note also that women from the Gentry class rarely marry downward, even if they might mess around a little.
Weird example: I’m a big fan of the TV show Gilmore Girls. (Major spoilers follow!) Through the series, Rory, the younger of the titular Girls and the daughter of a Gentry escapee from the Elite, has three main love interests who correspond very closely to the three classes Scott mentioned. Of the three, the one who’s most obviously positioned as her OTP is Jess, who — while a bit of a “bad boy” as a teenager in the early seasons — eventually becomes a recognizable avatar of the Gentry class, an urban, politically liberal, published author and founding member of an artists’ commune. Dean, her first boyfriend, is tall and hunky but Labor to the bone (he starts out as a bag boy and ends up as a construction worker); Rory eventually realizes the two of them have little in common, after cheating on him with Jess! Logan, the Elite bachelor, represents a potential return to her mother’s forsaken life of privilege, but Rory (in the series finale) spurns him too, in favor of striking out on her own, as her mother did. The Jess romance is the only one left unresolved, and the creator has strongly hinted he will be Rory’s “final” boyfriend in the upcoming Netflix revival.
It’s just one show, but it’s interesting because: a) it’s very explicitly concerned with social class throughout; and b) it’s written from women’s POV. Suffice to say that male attractiveness is a whole lot more complicated than you’re making it out.
I am familiar with the series, as my wife watches it. It’s romantic fantasy for women. Has about as much to do with reality as fantasy for men e.g. Bruce Lee kicking down everybody. Seriously, we all know not to take male fantasy too seriously, life isn’t blasting guns and roundhouse kicks, why take romantic fem fantasy seriously then? Because it looks more down to earth, real life than all that unrealistic action in male fantasy? Fem fantasy is more realistic about events, stuff done, but highly unrealistic about emotions. Men want fantasy-action, women fantasy-emotions. At least GG has a highly ironic tone, in order to suggest not taking it seriously.
The way I remember the series, her Labor class boyfriend is something sort of a nice-guy while her rich-guy boyfriend, the one who makes them jump down from some structure, is strong masculine, something sort of an athlete, and has bad-boy Game a bit, although fem fantasy never shows too much of that, it is something usually hidden because it is supposed to stay subconscious.
In reality, Labor class is rarely such a nice guy. They have a tough life. They become tough. An upper-class bad-boy is fairly rare, because of a sheltered life, although athletics, sports can change that. But can you imagine that athlete boy watching his tongue not to misgender a trans fat from Tumblr? These guys necessarily pushed out to the Trumpish non-PC right, even if they like to signal holiness through supporting environentalism or something I think their essentially masculinity cannot stand SJWery. And it is mutual, no matter how hard they try, being a manly man is automatically a shut-up-your-opinion-is-invalid for them.
Jess in the beginning is just a bad dude. He’s a high school dropout who works at Walmart. He’s manipulative, aggressive, and has no regard for others people’s feelings.
I understand that he mellows out quite a bit. He’s handles Logan much better than he ever did Dean. Now, I agree with you that I think Rory will end up with Jess. But if she’s sees Dean shirtless in a 1967 Chevrolet Impala, sorry there’s no chance for Jess.
Would you eat your hat if it turned out that Red Pill types are not what women prefer after all?
You people always take that as some sort of axiom of human sexuality, but it doesn’t square at all with my anecdata. What I’ve seen again and again have been stereotypical alpha men who lost, and lost hard, to beta nerds who looked like Legolas and liked to recite poetry. Those were the ones causing catfights — and, I mean, under a certain perspective this makes sense biologically.
Honestly, it seems to me that this is just an excuse to go on to do whatever you felt like doing in the first place, selfish things like pursuing power and pleasure, and then rationalize it by saying that that’s what gets you women. Because, according to some pants-on-head retarded theory, they would be masochistic enough to actively prefer what’s worst for them in a relationship.
But you know what, go on living the Red Pill alpha bad boy fantasy. That’s one less credible competitor for the rest of us to worry about.
See, I think some women are attracted to the Red Pill stuff.
The question is: do you want to be in a relationship with those women?
Like, the whole “pickup artist” thing is all about cruising around in bars and clubs to pick up sluts, so that you can have one-night stands with them. And they act like every man really would like to do this but is bad at it. However, I don’t think that’s true at all. I think there are some men who want to do it but are bad at it, but there are a lot of others who just don’t want to do it.
*Some* red pill stuff is generic good advice for men, like giving appearance of confidence, persistence in keeping up attempts, etc., but you’re right that the PUA-specific stuff is not suited for the desires of most men. Most, I think, would be perfectly happy to have an arranged marriage with a woman they can at least tolerate long-term.
Look up “married game”, Athol Kay, MMSL. Totally different life.
About he cruising stuff, that for example Roosh and Captain Capitalism recommends: it is based on the idea that Western women and the rules are so horribly feminist that you don’t want a long-term with them.
I honestly don’t know. European women here don’t seem too bad to me but I am almost 40, I haven no idea how the 20 year olds are. I have heard the Erasmus is a fuck-fest, guaranteed cheating, but it is a rumor. But do pick up some signals that female entitlement in the US could be indeed rather big. For example divorce laws in the US are far more man-hostile than ours. Imputed income instead of real? Paying not only for the kids, but also to the ex-wife? Here in many countries it is just 20% of real actual income per kid, that’s it, or something similar, nobody gives you shit for the crime of being unemployed like in the US if you have to pay child support, and nothing to the ex-wife except splitting commonly acquired property, and parental gifts are even exempt, if your dad buys you two a house it stays yours after divorce. With US type laws I’d be far more scared of marriage.
But do pick up some signals that female entitlement in the US could be indeed rather big. For example divorce laws in the US are far more man-hostile than ours.
I’m not sure that U.S. divorce laws tell you anything about U.S. women (who didn’t make the laws after all, and often don’t agree with them (yes, even feminists)).
I think “look like Legolas” is a confounding factor. Those of us who look more like Gimli are at a distinct disadvantage.
IME, having an bad-boy “edge” is definitely attractive to many women. It can be offputting even to the same women, but both attractive and repulsive beats “beneath notice” any day of the week. In the beast’s terminology, an edge can move you from Omega to Sigma.
I am extremely grateful to my ancestors for being tall. I see even very obese women on Tinder saying they would not date a short man. It must be really hard on them. Such an unfair disadvantage.
And yes, it is because being taller than the other is a dominant vibe. This is evidence right there.
The current research is inconclusive about this, but it seems boys should not do weight lifting before they finished growing as it may retard the growth. I don’t understand it: it generates human growth hormone. May be some other factor. Anyway, parents, remember this.
I think this is largely true. I have colleague who’s something like 160cm, I would not want to be in his shoes. I think women are usually ok with men who are taller than them or at least as tall, at least in the case of tall women, my ex-girlfriend was 180cm, same as me, and this is also exactly the average Czech male height. But I could tell she would have been happier if I were taller.
Then again, while they may not be entirely against dating women taller than them, are also not entirely comfortable with the idea. I know that I felt weird when my ex wore high heels (she almost never did though) and was suddenly 5-10 cm taller than me. Then again, even if she were naturally 10 cm taller than me it would not have been a reason for me not to date her (it would have possibly been a reason for her not to date me) So really tall women have it more difficult as well, although it is probably worse for men to be short than for women to be tall.
Of course you don’t want to be in his shoes. They’re probably way too small!
*ba dum tish*
Seriously… yes, being tall is, you should pardon the expression, a huge part of being attractive for men. I am only indifferently handsome at best but I am reasonably tall (6’1″ in my sock feet) and once I got past the idea that women were actively repulsed by me I found that it seemed to be a pretty big (again, please pardon the expression) plus.
You often meet men who like petite women,* as in they find it attractive as a general property, but it seems like you very rarely meet women who like short men ditto.
*Spare me the immaturity theories, please.
@Marc: I think it is spelled “bada bum tish” 🙂
Anyway, I don’t know any men who would be particularly turned off by short women, or tall women and there are men who prefer one or the other (although the general rule is that they don’t want the woman to be much taller than them…but those women are not likely to be interested in them anyway unless they are 2 metres tall or more and there are almost no men around who are taller than them).
This is so true and important, I almost mentioned it, but eventually decided against going off on that tangent (discussion of the different types of male physical beauty is probably worth its own separate post). The reason I chose to say “elfin” rather than just “handsome” is that there is a certain view of male attractiveness (one that favours bulging muscles and other very pronounced secondary sex characteristics) that would disagree that Legolas lookalikes even are handsome, or that this facet of attractiveness (“pretty” faces, nice hair etc.) matters to women at all.
Yes, I would eat my hat. You see, I appreciate that certain folks on my side my be generating bullshit. The human capability for self-delusion and rationalization is huge and we are not exempt. But you see, I think people are less likely to do this about important stuff in their personal lives that can have big rewards and big failures. And being actually good at picking up hot women is such a huge reward that I’d expect people to try hard to get it right. Little room for delusion: it works or doesn’t.
I mean, for example, people get fat when they don’t care, but when people care and put a lot of effort into figuring out nutrition, and is a whole subculture debating whether peanuts are okay, then you would expect them to be in actually good shape, to succeed at it, and not be fat?
So I would expect any subculture putting a lot of effort into womanizing or manizing to get it right: if there are any alternative, how to put it, poetry geek PUA subcultures who similarly put a lot of effort into it I’d like to know about because they too are probably getting a few things right. Because at the end of the day it works or doesn’t, not that much room for delusion.
It’s important to not oversimplify “alpha stuff”. For example, In the A-team series Mr. T (even the name suggests) have always been a symbol of masculinity and yet I thought he is probably not too attractive to women. He is more like what a little boy thinks admirable men are like, right? However in Titanic DiCaprio is a good example of my idea of “alpha” – bold and confident, behaves as if he owned the ship.
So it is not about being some threatening bully – although even that is preferable to a whipped dog. It is above all signalling courage, boldness – and yes, in some particular circumstances specific ways of being a nerdy poet can be a good way to do that. I assume this is some very high IQ circles. Not the hairdresser girls at the bar.
If you look at swashbuckler movies, Depp and Bloom as pirates, they come accross as kind of feminine, metro, wearing eyeliner – but they do it in a way that signals boldness, and that is why I think they are a very good example of being “alpha” and most women I know love those movies.
One difficulty in debating human behavior with folks from this Rationalist subculture is that basically everybody you know guys, everybody in your circles has sky high IQ and that tends to suppress natural instincts. If you want to study human instincts, study the stupid! Study soldiers, not officers. I mean, for example, Rationalists are well known to be sexually rather “weird”, all kinds of stuff, poly, asexuality, trans. Why? Because you run on IQ not instincts, because your basic simple mating, reproduction instincts are suppressed by IQ. So your anecdata is not that useful. (And that is why I am even trying to hack my brain into simulating stupid, so that I am more in harmony with my own natural instincts.)
For example, I’d bet your beta poetry nerds are not too bad at dancing. That is excellent at signalling boldness, most men can’t dance largely because they don’t dare to dance, they are self-conscious about it. And there are studies that women estimate men’s T levels by their dancing. So for example ballroom dancing is mega-“alpha”.
>Honestly, it seems to me that this is just an excuse to go on to do whatever you felt like doing in the first place, selfish things like pursuing power and pleasure,
This is horribly wrong. Most of the Red Pill culture is ex-nice-guys who are angry because doing favors to girls bought them nothing. OK this is not as genuinely nice as doing favors without expecting anything in return, it is calculating, but still a niceish strategy. Putting it differently, ex-cowards. Selfishness takes courage! And there is a lot of talk about how to develop inner game, courage, not giving a fuck, so that you get the courage to be selfish. Because they used to be the guys who are pathethically afraid of others having bad opinions of them, like not nice enough, who always pandered to others. So no, they absolutely DON’T like to be selfish and Machiavellian, their ideal world would be that of the life of Indian programmer who gets arranged-married to a girl whose mother pushes it because the programmer earns good money and he does not need to be attractive to the girl, the girl is rather submissive and doesn’t divorce, and therefore the programmer can be as beta and cowardly and pandering as he wants to, he can afford to be coward, he can afford to cry, show weakness, and still he can bang his wife, they want that kind of life. (Maybe it is not how Indian programmers live: then just consider it a fantasy! Irrelevant now whether it is actually possible somewhere. The relevant is that this is what they would like.) But instead most of them found themselves in the hyper-competitive sexual marketplace of US / first-world college campuses (campi?) where the jocks have harems.
And that really blows.
It’s true; women do like men who can dance
🙂
He’s good but would you also like him if he looked like the lad who plays cajón in the back? :))
Well, don’t ask me What Women Want, because I haven’t a clue, but I do suspect that the kind of men who want to ” cruis(e) around in bars and clubs to pick up sluts, so that (they) can have one-night stands with them” are attractive to some women, who just want to find a guy for a one-night stand and don’t want anything long-term.
The impression I’m getting from some of this advice is that it’s all about “tricking” women into having sex with you, as though there is some huge level of difficulty to be overcome and maybe there is, but I do think that women who go to pick-up joints go there for the exact same reason that men do: to find a hot partner for a night’s fun. They’re not looking for love and romance and long-term relationship, they just want the shift (and a bit more if both click).
So I really don’t understand that there’s any reason to have a note of triumph about being the “alpha male bad-boy with the harem”, because you’re on the same level as the “sluts” and they think about you as you think about them: pretty to bang but nothing else.
>this advice is that it’s all about “tricking” women into having sex with you, as though there is some huge level of difficulty to be overcome and maybe there is
Red pill in the PUA flavor is about,
a) presenting a facade of greater attractiveness than you naturally possess,
b) overcoming the western male monogamous adaptation (from “relationship -> sex”, to “sex -> maybe relationship”), ie. becoming an unashamed cad.
Per Roosh’s book, you not so much convince an unwilling woman to have sex, but convince her to have sex with you for a cheaper investment from yourself.
Exactly what I think. A friend of mine is friends with his gym trainer and he kind of admires him for his supposed ability with women. I had the misfortune of traveling with this guy (I wanted to go with that friend and he asked me if this guy could join us as well) around Asia for three weeks 2 years ago. He was not exactly a pick-up artist in the sense of doing all the “theory” but he was otherwise exactly what they envision as “alpha-male”. I remember that we met a pair of French girls on one occasion in the Philippines and when this guy (and my friend as well) left those girls asked me where I knew him form…because according to them us two were entirely different (which was true) and they wondered how I could have been friends with someone like that. It was quite obvious that they were not impressed by him at all. They were both pretty but neither seemed like exactly the kind of women that are after these types. At the same time, the kind of women who do like these guys are not exactly those I (and my friend probably neither) would be interested in either. Needless to say, I wished him to forgot his papers somewhere and get locked up in jail somewhere for a week or something so I could get rid of him. This actually almost happened in Singapore where they have pretty strict border control and where this idiot put “Singapore” on the line “place of stay in Singapore” in the form we had to fill in to be allowed to the country. The officer sent him back to fill it properly and he had to call us (we were already on the other side) to tell him the address of our hotel because he did not remember it. The form also said “Death to drug traffickers” so one could tell they take it seriously :).
Davos quotes:
There is something I would like everybody to the left of me (so, mostly everybody) to think a bit about. In the 20th century politics was highly ideological, people joined parties, read manifestos and whatnot. Now it seems much of politics is largely reduced to “being a good person”. Like, if people march for gay rights or anti-rape sometimes they do have some bits of ideological motive left, like the principle of equality, equal respect or consideration (read this PDF, really do: http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1261&context=fss_papers ), but the general mood is more like “let’s not be an asshole to people of group X”. So ideology got largely replaced by “generic goodness”. And similarly, violating a feminist-inspired code of conduct at a Silicon Valley company is no longer put as an ideological disagreement but is frames as being an ass, so again, ideologically generated taboos are no longer framed so, but more like generic bad behavior. Now, my explanation for this process is that Progressive principles amongst educated people had such a total victory that now ideological debates are almost over. (With the only possible exception is purely economic conservatism/libertarianism, which is the only socially acceptable form of dissent, basically a loyal opposition. You cannot say you don’t want your taxes to support your own ethny or race only, you can only say you just don’t want to pay much high-ish taxes in general.) And if any worldview wins, of course everything it approves of becomes Lawful Good and what it opposes becomes Chaotic Evil. My first question: any other possible explanations? For example, the Post-Modern turn against rational, objective truth, which boosted the importance of feelings?
The second thing I would like to consider is that while status-signalling, holiness-signalling has ALWAYS been part of human psychology, this Culture of Generic Goodness is an especially fertile ground for this? That it easily becomes an arms race now?
The third thing is: if these Davos folks rule the world, and that is not too inaccurate to say, they are certainly highly powerful and influential, it seems basically this sort of thing runs the world right now, right?
The fourth thing is, the problems with this are rather obvious? Consider the “there is no feminism after Cologne”. We had Prog elites, feminists organizing Slut Walks and telling men it is not womens fault if they get raped. Suddenly when it is non-Westerners do it, we get Prog elites all over Europe telling women to be more cautious because those guys are not used to seeing women in miniskirts. This an incredible about-face, and has neither a rational nor even an ideological explanation because you cannot derive this from a principle of equality or Rawls or even from Judith Butler. I think it derives from this Culture of Generic Goodness which underlines the whole victimhood olympics. The only reason victimhood olympics works is because this Goodness Culture, because it puts such a huge premium on signalling compassion with anyone, even utter strangers, that anyone who can at least slightly plausibly made looking like a victim is basically untouchable because it would make you look mean and nasty and that is a status loss in this culture.
And now the big question is, even if you don’t want to run out as far towards the right as I do, how would you hack / fix these obvious faults? I mean, I get it that to many of you, consequentualists, knowing the basic human habit to fall into arms races, when it is about signalling goodness it is one of the best possible outcomes. But it has the obvious glaring problem of being too defenseless, too trusting, suicidial, not pointing out problems when they are connected with people who are untouchable because they look like victims and so on. To put it succintly, you are raising & letting in Utility Monsters, and violent ones at that.
The “generic niceness” was always the real thing. It is the truck that actually pushes against the ground, entombed invisibly deep within the ideological parade float. It being more naked than usual now hasn’t changed the nature of the forces at work much.
Any democratic country contains a series of social groups variously cooperating, competing, and politely ignoring each other as they try to carry on existing.
Those groups can be categorized as either haves or have-nots. A have group has access to power, wealth, social respect, etc. They’re full blown members of the nation and have a lot of influence on the direction it’s going to go. Have-nots are the opposite. People don’t socially value or respect them, they don’t hold political offices, they don’t have a lot of money. Have-nor groups still have influence over the nation as a whole, but it’s much smaller and only really relevant when aligned with friendly have groups.
The Haves can then be subdivided into Left and Right. If a group’s political consensus favors more have-nots in, that’s the Left. If they don’t want to let anyone in, or even want to kick someone out, that’s the Right.
There are lots of different things to have opinions about and a group’s consensus can absolutely be Right on one topic but Left on another, for example racial minorities opposing gay marriage. A group may even be atomized enough that it doesn’t have a consensus, its members scattering to Right and Left randomly on nearly every topic.
What matters is what every does have a consensus about. It is an inerrant fact that *everyone* wants their own group to be a Have group.
Consider what that means for the fight between the Left and Right. In the absence of that self interest, you might expect them to be roughly evenly matched. Why shouldn’t they be? Everyone’s opinion of everyone else is determined by their own past, and there are plenty of different pasts to go around. There ought to be a swingy little tug of war moving the country Left and Right a couple of degrees to either side of some equilibrium or other.
The invincible triumphant march of the Left that we actually see is due to the self interest.
When the Left and Right fight about letting more have-nots in, the Left has reinforcements in the form of the proposed new haves and the Right stands alone. Every incremental step of the havification process strengthens the Left because the scraps of mobey/political power/social respect their allied have-nots are fighting for are also the weapons this fight is fought with. Conversly, preventing an incrimental step in the havification process doesn’t do anything for the Right. They gain no new allies or resources. All they get is a little time before fighting that fight again and again and again until they lose and retreat to the next one.
The Right trying to kick a have group out is even more fruitless. They will lose any members of the targeted group they had and that group will use all the have privileges which are already in their hands in a bitter fight to the death to stay haves. This in addition to the regular Left which was already roughly on even ground with the Right before the Right expelled a bunchanged of its own people. Going up against a force which is now larger than yours plus a bloc of utter fanatics, many of whom know all your tricks, is not a winning strategy.
This force bears many names, usually Cthulhu and Elua around here, but that’s all it is. Being nice to some have-nots and helping them become haves, thereby conscripting them.
>The “generic niceness” was always the real thing.
Nah, remember when every French intellectual and many Americans were Soviet lovers. That was something else, the Soviet stuff was openly aggressive and non-nice in a kill-the-kulaks way.
Less democratic states express this less clearly, but even so, the soviets were promising, and to an extent delivering, have-status to a great many more people. That’s the key thing, bringing effectivly limitless reinforcements to every fight from outside the tent.
Examining people’s beliefs is adding noise to the system. May as well ask a single electron it’s views on the amperage.
This process changed around 1968. The New Left shedded its working-class cred, started caring about upper-class stuff like sexual liberation, and began forming a culture that from an education perspective, was becoming more and more elite, to the extent that now a plumber doesn’t understand half the vocab of a feminist. Any group of people where a word like intersectionalism can be a slogan is educationally elite.
This began slowly alienating the working class, especially whites and males. This is a highly international process, I remember UK workers complaining about Blair being too posh etc.
Of course, there is the issue that sex i.e. feminism could potentially mobilize more voters than class, at least 50% of them, and with changing fertility and immigration race is a bigger and bigger voter finder tool.
So right now the big question is whether working class women and working class men of color get alienated by the too-posh educational style of the New Left, and vote for right-wing populists, Trump types, who seem to speak the language of the common folk, or vote with their (perceived) racial or gender interests.
Beyond the educational elitism, I think generic niceness does not sit that well with the working class either. Those who have few privileges tend to guard them so that something differentiates them from others. Having a little have and that is all that differentiates one from the have-nots, it is crucially important that the have-nots should not get a little have either or else the little haves will lose their status advantage and basically become the new underclass because nobody is under them anymore.
This gradual alienation of the working class from the left is more or less a fact, here in Europe the white working class districts tend to vote for the Le Pen types, and I think in the US Trump is their guy, the big question is that in the big picture this matters or not. Gender, race, and welfare could easily outweigh a white working class that is shrinking anyway by outsourcing and automatization.
“Every incremental step of the havification process strengthens the Left because”.
Unless there’s churn at the other end.. .established former-minority communities discovering their inner conservative.
Strictly anecdotal I know, but I do get the sense that this is happening.
I know a fair number of socially conservative blacks who grew up in the south and then either joined the Army, or got a scholarship to a mid tier college. They end up with a decidedly “red tribe” social circle because that is where their battle-buddies, school-mates, co-workers, and fellow churchgoers come from.
Their red tribe neighbors welcome them as natural allies. While the blue tribe vocally condemns them as dupes, “uncle toms”, and “race traitors”. When the time comes to pick a side they naturally go “red”.
This is where folks like Tim Scott, Mia Love, and Ben Carson come from.
Yeah, the race-based attacks on people like Clarence Thomas or Thomas Sowell are extremely nasty. I’m not trying to say “this proves the left are the real secret racists!”, but it’s something that has to be kept in mind.
@Vox I don’t get what about the left’s racism would strike anyone as secret.
Don’t all worldviews tend to present their version of good as “generic good”? This is hardly a feature of those you call “progs”. The term “progressive” gets confusing because in current use it is both a replacement term for “liberal” (which became a bit of an insult in US political discourse, and and 10 or so years ago, as I remember, mainstream Democrats started calling themselves “progressives”) and a descriptive (self-identifying?) term for left-wingers who tend to be kind of hostile to those they call “liberals”. The difference seems to be, in large part, that “progs” attack the idea of equality of opportunity, valuing equality of outcome instead: it is not rare to see the idea of equality of opportunity attacked as deceptive, etc.
I would say that the defining feature of their version of goodness is that it’s relative – whether something is good or bad, and how good or bad, is dependent on who does it and who they do it to. There’s a complicated system of (contradictory, vague, from different sources) rules to figure this out, to figure out who is punching in what direction in a given situation. While this could be seen as standard tribalism – when the ref calls a foul on the other team, yay, when the ref calls foul on our team, boo – it cuts across tribal lines: there’s a lot of overlap between German women and the “feminist tribe”, probably a lot less between “feminist tribe” and the guys who committed the robberies and sexual assaults in Cologne, and yet…
1. Possible other explanation, or related: these ideas come out of universities, and universities are cushioned places populated disproportionately by cushioned people. The level of social dysfunction that can happen at a university is much less than the level that can happen in society in general, so they pay less attention to how their ideology might cause or enable social dysfunction. This seems to occur across the political spectrum.
2. I don’t know if it’s the specific culture – I think it has as much to do with media as anything else. Virtue-signalling to a large audience is easier, and assessing the degree to which people approve or disapprove is easier.
3. I think the reason the Davos set are on board with this is that it is ultimately not radical. Today’s left-wing activists are, while they will call themselves radicals, and have disdain for “reformism” and so on, making ultimately reformist demands, for the most part. Less impunity for police officers is not disbanding the police, more black professors is not demolishing the educational hierarchy, more female CEOs is not dismantling capitalism, getting rid of luxury taxes on tampons isn’t disputing the ability of the government to levy taxes, etc.
4. People are really good at dealing with cognitive dissonance, I guess. As a left-winger, I find myself dismayed to see other left-wingers (from pundits to friends on Facebook) tolerating or condemning behaviour based on who does it – eg, had NYE in Cologne seen drunken PEGIDA hooligans robbing and groping women from the Middle East and North Africa, my Facebook feed would have probably been about nothing else for days; in reality, the only condemnation I saw was from one of the few right-wingers I know, and he got attacked for it; I saw another left-winger post an article about how bad it is to scapegoat for the attacks that read like an NRA press release the day after a spree shooting.
I think one big factor here is a weird form of cultural supremacism with a side of typical mind fallacy popular among left-wing, middle class, educated, acceptable-in-polite-company “enlightened moderns” – that is, they imagine that everyone already is, or wants to be, like them; they don’t understand how someone from a different culture or subculture might have radically different values – they promote multiculturalism but don’t see cultures as much beyond window dressing. It’s sort of an End of History scenario: deep down, everyone wants to, and inevitably will, become cosmopolitan and so on. Ironically, it belittles other cultures far more than xenophobes on the right do: “they will come around to our way of doing things, which is infinitely superior” is more insulting to whoever “they” are than “they are different from us and will remain different”.
5. I suppose that a way to deal with this would be to try to counter that “everyone wants to be like us” notion, and the very notion that “good [ie, our side] always wins”.
Addendum: while the discussion here has been mostly about groups, this all functions on an individual level. It is not hard to consider the example of an abusive person who is adept at setting it up so whatever they do to other people looks like “punching up”, and who gets away with it because other people assume everyone must be nice like they are.
While liberalism and leftism are different ideologies, my point is that ideologies are no longer important, at least all I hear today is getting ever hysterical about racism/sexism/and so on. This signalling arms race is basically louder than those voices on the left or liberals who still care about ideology. This is what I call progressive or Prog.
Look at this thread: http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2016/01/31/i-cant-take-no-more/
Can you tell what kind of ideology they have, left or liberal? No, but who cares? They aren’t even feminists in the deepest sense, just people who think non-feminism is low status and embarrassing, and thus loudly signalling that they are distancing themselves from it, besides, it surely feels good to be “better” than Dawkins.
It is behavior and personality, not ideology.
Whether it is true of other ideologies, well, it depends on what ideology dominates the elites. What gets the most status. Yes, sometimes it is something right-wing. The dominant ideology of 1914 Europe was nationalism, so this kind of signalling: http://www.hschamberlain.net/kriegsaufsaetze/hassgesang.html and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gott_strafe_England
Or in the US perhaps not so long ago if some small town was totally dominated by religious conservatives and isolated from generic liberal culture, I suppose they had similar arms races about who loves Jesus the most.
Also signalling arms races are not always that crazy, usually, what helps in keeping things in control is having multiple status ladders. An old-time gentleman signalled wealth, education, virtue, and masculinity. Now it all reduces to virtue of this type i.e. never say anything offensive and tear everybody apart who does etc. I mean, Mel Gibson, once he made his remarks none of his other talents and achievements saved him.
But isn’t it normal for any ideology to turn itself into a code of morals or rules for proper behaviour or whatever?
I also think you’re overestimating the prevalence of a certain sort of left-wing thought/behaviour. It’s definitely strong on university campuses, parts of the internet, etc. But it’s hardly true that signalling “prog virtue” is the only form of status, or anybody who doesn’t gets destroyed. The sort of university activist-Tumblr-clickbait feminist website thing you are describing only has power in and around its own domain.
I think you are seeing from the right something that seen from the left looks very different: the classic “left wing circular firing squad”. Campus activists can hound a university administrator who puts one foot out of place into resignation – but they have far less ability to harm people actually on the right.
I think what is exceptional here is that the signalling is just especially self-undermining, because of internal contradictions.
We had Prog elites, feminists organizing Slut Walks and telling men it is not womens fault if they get raped. Suddenly when it is non-Westerners do it, we get Prog elites all over Europe telling women to be more cautious because those guys are not used to seeing women in miniskirts.
Can you provide a link? Because I haven’t seen anything like this (though I have not been following the Cologne story closely).
Alternatively: Could this be outgroup homogeneity bias at work?
>Can you provide a link? Because I haven’t seen anything like this
I’ve definitely seen it, cannot provide links right now, but I’ll try to get some later
>Alternatively: Could this be outgroup homogeneity bias at work?
To me, it most certainly is. I’ve never seen anyone non-(american feminist) say the “teach men not to rape” thing seriously (though I might be subject to the same problem you are with Cologne), Merkel and pals (the ones that have been advocating caution), though somewhat proggy (of course, this is always a relative measure) and probably eliteish, probably don’t fall into the “american feminists” group.
OK, that is the small-town mayor’s response. And the issue was children harassing children. I’m not sure what point you think the video is making.
“Children harassing children”? What do you think they’re complaining about, refugee kids shooting spitballs?
The grandfather talking at the start of the linked video specifically says he’s concerned about what will happen in the summer, when the girls wear less clothing, and towards the end of the video someone calls the refugees “perverts” and the subtitles include a note specifying that sexual harassment is what’s being referred to. People tend to get outraged when their young daughters get sexually harassed and possibly assaulted, regardless of whether the perpetrators are over or under 18.
You’ve got stuff like the mayor of Cologne and the “arm’s length” comment. I think, however, that TheDividualist is blurring the lines between “prog elites” (surely Cologne’s mayor, being a left-winger and in a position of authority, counts) and “feminists”.
Feminist sites and authors immediately attacked her for saying that. I haven’t seen any victim-blaming from them. However, their criticism of the mayor was rather more dramatic than their condemnation of the Cologne assaults in the first place.
It’s more a case of ignoring it/minimizing it ,when it is the kind of story they would ordinarily be all over (I mean, here we have a bunch of men acting in pretty much the manner those wicked fratboys are supposed to, getting drunk and deciding they are entitled to do whatever to women) because condemning the Cologne sex attack would be inconvenient in various ways – I don’t think somebody writing for Jezebel wants to be on the same side as someone writing for Breitbart, let alone TakiMag.
Good point, I may have outgroup uniformity bias or whatever it is called. However – which way the world is going is coming from a mixture of opinions, of different people. So a generic Prog direction, as a mixture, is a mixture of the opinion of feminists and e.g. the opinion of the mayor of Cologne.
All “prog* elites” are feminists, and a lot of feminists are “progs”, but most feminists aren’t elites, of whatever variety – most people period aren’t elites.
The SlutWalks, as I remember, were actually grassroots, at least to begin.
I think most “on the ground” feminists – from random people on Twitter to columnists, “recreational” or “professional” feminists as opposed to tycoons or politicians who are or say they are feminists – are dissatisfied with the way that, for instance, the mayor of Cologne has dealt with this. But they are caught in a bind, because seriously condemning the stuff in Cologne beyond the most generic way puts them in the same corner as people with Tumblr accounts that have “EVROPA” in them.
Additionally, I think they are hamstrung to some extent by the fact that a lot of campaigns against things like domestic abuse, sexual assault, child abuse, street harassment, etc treat these things as equal-opportunity offences – when in reality neither perpetrators nor victims are evenly distributed throughout the population.
*I’m putting it in scare quotes because I’m not of the political persuasion where “prog” is an insult, and it’s also kind of confusing because Neil Peart is nowhere to be seen, but I can’t think of a way to describe the “progressives-who-aren’t-liberals-by-another-name” that isn’t monstrously clunky.
As someone who is well to your left, I’m insulted that you would assume I must be even more naive than you appear to be. I am under no illusion that my political allies of convenience are anything else. I don’t put much stock in the professed beliefs of European political leaders, nor do I see them as “on my side” except in a very relative sense. I’m on the left not because I see their fanatics and political opportunists as especially virtuous, but because I find the right so abhorrent that I have no practical alternative.
I have an economics question.
Since the depression, the stock market has grown 2-3 times as rapidly as our GDP. Can this continue indefinitely, if so, would we eventually see a stock market 1000 times as large as our GDP?
I suspect I’m making some sort of mistake, because this isn’t making sense to me at the moment…
I got really nerd-sniped by this exact issue a long while ago…
I think the key is to distinguish between the growth of the total market capitalization of the stock market and the growth rate of a hypothetical dollar invested in the stock market.
The first quantity obviously can’t exceed GDP growth forever; stock values come from corporate earnings which are a component of GDP, so it’s unreasonable to think of total stock market capitalization reaching 1000x GDP (as you realize). Indeed, historically, market cap/GDP bounces up and down over time.
But when you hear things like “the stock market has grown 2-3 times as rapidly as our GDP” this is generally referring to the growth rate of a hypothetical dollar invested in the stock market. The key point is that this is not the same as market cap growth, due to dividend payments. A company that issues a dividend reduces its market cap but does not reduce your investments’ growth rate.
So I think the relationship that must hold in the very long term, assuming corporations are a constant fraction of the economy, looks something like:
stock market growth rate = real GDP growth rate + inflation rate + dividends/GDP
And quantitatively dividends/GDP has historically been a few percent, which fits nicely.
Good point about how a portion of earnings each year is consumed rather than reinvested.
Another point is that the stockmarket only reflects the value of “publicly traded” companies. Private companies, including most small businesses, aren’t included.
I think that the US has a higher proportion of publicly-traded companies than, say, Germany, and the proportion probably increased during the 20th century.
Ultimately, the stock market is a component of “accumulated wealth” (along with land, buildings, art works, all the other stuff we think of as wealth.)
GDP is more of an income statement measure. As a country becomes richer over time, we should expect an increase in the ratio of wealth to income.
Ultimately, the stock market is a component of “accumulated wealth” (along with land, buildings, art works, all the other stuff we think of as wealth.)
GDP is more of an income statement measure. As a country becomes richer over time, we should expect an increase in the ratio of wealth to income.
I don’t think this is right, or at least it’s not applicable to the stock market. The value of stocks is tied closely to the income the companies involved are expected to produce, so stock market “wealth” and corporate incomes can’t diverge too much.
Sure, but the ability to generate income is based on invested capital, which is the wealth.
You can look at a company’s “book value” (value of original capital investment plus retained historical earnings) as an “historical cost” or “accounting” value of a company that doesn’t consider income-producing ability at all, or the “market value” which basically adjusts for the market’s view of the ability of the invested capital to produce a stream of future income, but either way companies are quite properly thought of as organized accumulations of wealth.
But that’s no reason that the ratio of company wealth to company income should keep rising over time. And no such trend exists for that ratio historically.
What you say is true for an individual company. We’re talking about an economy here.
Imagine a poor country, with almost no accumulated wealth. They still have GDP. Maybe the ratio of wealth/GDP is close to zero.
Now imagine an advanced economy, like the US. Wealth is many multiples of GDP.
There’s a lot of room for wealth to grow at a faster clip than GDP between A and B.
Not indefinitely sustainable, but, as you note some income is consumed rather than reinvested as well, and as I noted, over time an increasing proportion of the wealth of an economy may reside inside publicy-traded companies, so… Bob’s your uncle.
OK. So I think we agree that if we’re talking about the stock market of the US or other advanced economies, you should not necessarily expect the ratio of stock market value to GDP to rise going forward.
I’m not sure I agree with everything you’re saying about the poor to rich transition – even the poorest countries have plenty of wealth in land and natural resources and housing and “human capital” and the like, though it may not be properly valued or easily traded.
But I’d agree with you that certainly the total wealth *held by corporations* is going to increase much faster than GDP during the transition from an undeveloped to an advanced economy.
I am assuming you are referring to the GDP of the US only. With that in mind there are a couple things that come to mind:
1) GDP =/= Stock market at all, they are not directly related. Most people are not employed by public companies for example and when a company’s stock goes up it may have nothing to do with actual money being earned.
2) There are foreign companies listed on US exchanges and US companies do business outside of the US. So your measure of GDP may not be inclusive enough.
3) The stock market is taking into account expected (predicted/guessed at) growth rates of company earnings in the future. People are making bets of what they think will happen in the future to that company. And that future could be in a billion years: common financial models usually use perpetuity function to calculate terminal value of companies (the rationality of that is for another time). And in theory this could be taking into account the potential GDP of other planets, if you believe that people like elon musk want to colonize mars or something.
What if the French miracle of not getting fat is amongst others based on undercooked, chewy meat, as taking longer to chew makes people feel full quicker and it also takes longer to digest it? The comparison of the rubbery ducks served in French restaurants compared to the huge fried schnitzels hammered butter-soft in Mitteleuropa is especially glaring. Similarly, the American Diet seems to be based on not really using your teeth. Burgers are almost literally pre-chewed for you.
(And it is not the “Mediterrean Diet”, Normandy is far less Mediterrean than Spain, yet Spain has high obesity stats. Similarly, this is one of Portugal’s national dishes, notice the large serving size and that everything on the plate is calorie-dense: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Feijoada_%C3%A0_transmontada.jpg IMHO just because Sicilians or Greeks eat fairly healthy, don’t over-hype the whole of Southern Europe in this.)
There was an Atlantic article – itself quite bad, as a lot of writing about nutrition tends to be; the article is scattered and swings from “calories aren’t the deal” to “here are ways people might be getting more or fewer calories than they think” – but it includes the tidbit that cooking food – including meat – means more calories can be gotten from it.
Food that is easier to eat is definitely easier to overeat, as well.
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/01/what-does-a-calorie-measure/427089/
This didn’t quite seem to take when I posted it OT on the predictions thread, so I’ll try it here. Hopefully, this will prove to be the right home for it.
I’ve read S.A.’s article Scientific Freud (https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/09/19/scientific-freud/). The thing that I never understand about studies that compare different styles of psychotherapy is … do these treatments all cost roughly the same amount of money on average? Certainly, it’s impossible to imagine that anything called psychoanalysis could fail to break the bank (unless your analyst is a student, who is presumably studying so they can someday charge somebody else full price). But, if we are limiting the dicsussion to the relatively stripped-down psychodynamic therapy vs. CBT … and let’s assume that practitioners are charging the same fee per session … is the course of the average psychodynamic treatment going to require roughly the same number of sessions as CBT treatment?
If not, then any study which finds that the therapeutic results of two styles of treatment are about the same is actually showing that whichever one is quicker is in fact providing the same service for much less money, no?
Here’s the background of my question: for years, I have considered making a career change to become a psychotherapist. I am deeply attracted to the psychodynamic approach. Freud is the coolest. I have little interest in being a CBT practitioner. However, I remain deeply uncertain that psychodynamic therapists actually reliably provide a service to their clients at a reasonable price. I’m ambivalent about whether my own therapy has been very productive (I’ve certainly enjoyed it), even though I am (as evinced by the fact that I’ve considered a career in mental health) more psychologically-minded than average. Even if I’m convinced that most clients are deriving substantial benefit, if I’m charging them twice what they could be paying, that’s not a job I really want to do. It might end up being unsustainable to attract clients and, moreover, it’s just plain unethical if I’m aware that’s what I’m doing.
These concerns are a drag for me because they mean that I will probably not undertake the considerable challenge of changing careers to become a therapist, and therefore will most likely continue with my boring office job indefinitely.
P.S. to any of my office coworkers who somehow end up reading this: I love you guys; you’re the best. But surely you are also aware that our job is boring and contributes nothing to society.
Regarding “research parasitism” the latest climateaudit post illustrates the reverse problem: if there’s no requirement to archive, it’s easy to bias data in a way that can’t be verified in a timely manner by anybody outside the tribe.
For instance, researchers who collect things like tree cores and ice cores can tell any story they want with it by after-the-fact selectively choosing to use some of their collected data to form, say, a nice publishable hockey-stick-shaped chart. Then wait to publish the unused data until literally on their deathbed so nobody else can get a look at it.
By my reckoning, at least about 25-30% of the Davos 36 are overweight or obese. Of those, about half look like they have serious weight problems, i.e. they look like their extra fat poses a serious risk to their health.
Probably this is roughly consistent with the overall rates of obesity in the developed world.
Perhaps they should pay more attention to the elephant in the room, so to speak.
Do you even lift, plutocrat?
++
Interesting. I was thinking these people looked thinner than average. But then, I live in middle America.
Yet it reminds me of the “bikeshed” or “triviality” problem Fullmeta mentions here:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/01/31/ot41-having-your-mind-thread/#comment-318440
I feel like all the biggest health problems in the developed world could be solved with exercise and diet (another example of “biology is easy, society is hard”–if you could get the benefits of exercise and diet from a pill, everyone would be taking it and heart disease would be pretty much gone).
I feel like the biggest social problems in the developed world could be eliminated if we just started having intact families (again, easier said than done, and, unlike diet and exercise, no longer pc). On the level of individual psychology, it reminds me of when you do the dishes in order to avoid the big, important project that is due tomorrow.
But we never really talk much about these things because they’re hard to deal with, not sexy, not pc. It’s like the guy looking for the key he dropped in the darkness under the light because he can see better in the light. Or better, the aforementioned bikeshed. And this is another reason I hate things like Davos–it’s all about grandstanding to score points and saying “women should stop having babies with irresponsible men!” is not good grandstanding.
Of course, third world problems are different, especially in the health arena, but if we were worried about addressing that we’d see some quotes about mosquito nets, etc. instead of “an internet of women” and a “minister of the future.”
I feel your pain mate.
OK, I’m sorta new here and I’ve been wanting to ask this for a while: what is the gray tribe?
I’m guessing libertarians? Liberals who are not also SJWs?
Thanks.
Nerd-culture natives. From here.
None of Scott’s tribes have a perfect correlation with politics, but especially not that one; Scott cites “libertarian politics” as a trait of the tribe but I don’t think that’s any more universal among them than, say, calling the Superbowl “sportsball”. They’re probably more likely to lean libertarian than their peers, though, and also more likely to embrace technical solutions to social issues.
(It should go without saying, but apparently doesn’t, that the portraits Scott gives of all three tribes are as ridiculously stereotypical as it’s possible to be outside of an editorial cartoon. Libertarian-Dawkins-paleo-Soylent-Uber-filk guy isn’t the typical Gray, he’s the ur-Gray, the Grayest of the Grays.)
The gray tribe is people who are in/affiliated with/align with tech/nerd culture (in a broad sense) and their political and cultural makeup follows from that.
> But are either of them into computers? Do they like scifi? Call football sportsball? Are they Dawkins style atheists? Do they drink soylent? Do they like to throw around the word othoganal in ordinary conversation?
According to this post from the other thread, libertarians that are also kind of dicks.
It was part of an attempt to show the Koch brothers weren’t libertarians.
My personal definition? Look to the 19th century.
If you identify with the single ladies up in New England writing petitions to end slavery
Blue Tribe
If you identify with the pioneer settlers
Red Tribe
If you identify with Jules Verne
Grey Tribe
An attempt to show that they weren’t grey tribe. Don’t want to read to much into a typo but this is sort of perfect for the point I was trying to make.
Subthread in question: https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/01/30/staying-classy/#comment-316549
This seems an odd way of looking at American political culture in the 19th Century. You’ve included abolitionists but left off slaveholders and their supporters, and oddly characterized the Gray Tribe by a rather superficial cultural marker.
I’d classify 19th-century America as follows:
Blue Tribe: Most of the elites and gentry of New England. The 19th-century Blue Tribe is characterized by a belief in the moral perfectability of mankind, and a corresponding belief that national political action can do away with evils such as slavery, excessive drinking, and the oppression of women.
Red Tribe: Most white Southerners, at least outside Appalachia. The 19th-century Red Tribe believes in order, hierarchy, and tradition. Slavery is seen as a positive good, part of the natural order of things.
Grey Tribe: Those who believe in Progress with a capital P. The 19th-century Grey Tribe is much larger and more powerful than its 21st-century counterpart, as the world has not yet known the horrors of the Great War. The Gray Tribe includes industrialists, settlers, and freethinkers. Robert G. Ingersoll, though not the most famous 19th-century Gray Triber, is perhaps the most representative.
@ JDG1980
I think you are missing the point of self-identification vs that of correlations made by other people.
@ brad
Gah. I don’t know why I wrote that. Apologies.
@JD
Because the only other examples for Grey tribe I can think of off the top of my head is King Camp Gillette and ‘lets build a utopian city powered by SCIENCE’. Maybe positivists is better?
Also I don’t identify red tribe with slavery because it isn’t; I can imagine people who were against slavery because it would edge out the small farmer being totally red tribe. Associating the red tribe purely with reaction is wrong. Same with the blue tribe being purely elite; the ladies church group that sent petition to the US Senate (and triggered the one of the largest political crisis’s in American history over free speech as the government tried to shut down talk of abolition) were totally blue tribe and in no way, shape or form elite.
You think settlers and the “off to California in the morning” during the gold rush types were Grey Tribe rather than Red Tribe? I’d say that, given their backgrounds, a lot of them were Red Tribe. Many of them just wanted their own farm or ranch from the vast untapped new wilderness and weren’t too concerned with founding Utopia with ever-greater STEAM POWER amongst the prairies.
Map is not territory seems to apply here.
Grey/blue/red tribe is a crude map drawn on a napkin of the sociological here and now. Trying to make it work for 1840s America is going to end just kind of humorous.
For one thing, grey/blue/red is incomplete, as it doesn’t include a large chunk of the urban poor. But if blue/red captured anything essential it’s urbane/rural. Grey? Might not have existed before the Internet, as it seems like Scott has identified a certain disaffected diaspora that is mostly non-geographic.
But I’m not sure what grey tribe really actually is anyway.
“But I’m not sure what grey tribe really actually is anyway.”
It’s a small subsegment of the blue tribe with some dissident politics.
Which is incoherent if you think of these groups as being organized by ideology, but I think that’s a mistake. They’re cultural groups (personally I’d go so far as to call them nations) with cultural affinities and values that strongly encourage particular ideologies, but those tendencies can be overridden by class (like Samuel Skinner’s small farmers) or by personal experience and intellectualization (greys).
@ Deiseach
As for “STEAM POWER amongst the prairies”, Kipling and Twain were sure enthusiastic about something.
For the geographical, here’s fictional evidence:
East is east and west is west
And the wrong one I have chose
Let’s go where I’ll keep on wearin’
Those frills and flowers and buttons and bows
Rings and things and buttons and bows
Don’t bury me in this prairie
Take me where the cement grows
Let’s move down to some big town
Where they love a gal by the cut of her clothes
And I’ll stand out in buttons and bows
I’ll love you in buckskin
Or skirts that I’ve homespun
But I’ll love you longer, stronger where
Your friends don’t tote a gun
houseboatonstyx, that lyric is not necessarily about progress with a capital P enthusiasm, it’s about the subset of people who have always wanted to leave the farm for the bright lights of the big city. “How you gonna keep ’em down on the farm, after they’ve seen Paree?”
The singer wants the Good Life of fancy clothes and jewellery and leisure, not to live somewhere she has to spin her own cloth and her man carries a gun. It’s just as likely (even more likely) that moving to the city means she’ll end up working as a shop girl or a seamstress in a garment factory rather than some endeavour all to do with proto-Gray Tribe values of enlightenment through technology 🙂
I like Dawkins , but I am not atheist…
Also I do wonder how many people like to work out here. So far the infoproc blog is only one of this intellectual sphere which talks about UFC/Combat sports
Do we have any readers from Iowa? If so, are you planning to be at the caucuses tonight?
This is sort of the wrong thread for this, probably should go in the last one, but I would like to propose that we stop using Church’s extremely confusing class names.
Moldbug’s classifications were already a bit confusing, although at least I could be reasonably sure that when a [forbidden acronym] uses the terms he’s probably not referring to actual Indian castes. Blue tribe and Red tribe were clever imo, although they immediately fell apart because of the party color affiliations confusing other people. But the labor / gentry / elite thing is 100% high-grade nonsense to me: I literally cannot parse it on the first run, because gentry does not sound like petite bourgeoisie as much as English country gentlemen. All jargon is confusing at first but this seems unnecessarily so.
Blue collar worker and white collar worker convey >90% of the meaning of Church’s labor and gentry, with the added benefit of being actual terms people use and cutting things a lot more cleanly. Technically small business owners aren’t workers as such but you can’t honestly say that an independent plumber and a private practice doctor aren’t respectively blue and white collar in terms of culture. If you want to lop off Church’s elites into their own group separate from white collar workers you could extend the clothing metaphor into Suits, another existing term which conveys the same meaning in a less confusing manner, or just call them the 1%.
It all seems to be reductive nonsense to me. Even blue collar / white collar doesn’t seem to apply that much any more, because so much of the blue collar population is being shifted into the white collar workforce.
Is it so hard to accept that people are complex amalgamations of overlapping identities and allegiances?
Yes, evidently.
To be fair, the distinction between hourly wage manual laborers (skilled or unskilled) and college educated salaried professionals is a real one that is reflected in the culture. Music, food, non-work clothing, politics, even their religions to an extent are different. Of course blue collar workers are generally getting starved out and replaced but that isn’t really making them less relevant nationally, as Trump and Sanders are demonstrating.
I don’t know about over there, but in London you can walk into an awful lot of call centers, bars, shops and so on and find a great many people with undergraduate degrees who are culturally white collar working for very low hourly wages alongside people with no degrees and often very different culture. In manual jobs it’s rarer, but still far from unheard-of.
Service-industry work doesn’t seem to have evolved clear class markers yet. If someone tells you they’re a barista, that doesn’t tell you whether they come from a working-class or middle-class or upper-middle-class background; all it reliably tells you is that they’re young and probably don’t have a technical degree.
If someone says they’re a factory worker, on the other hand, you can make a very strong guess about their class background — even though the factory worker is probably making more money.
Tom Richards – but I’ll bet the reasons people dislike their jobs are different by class origin. In the Bay Area, we have that, too, though there are more people from culturally white-collar backgrounds, and many of those low-paying jobs are filled by people who dropped out of college, often because of the expense of college.
>Blue collar worker and white collar worker convey >90% of the meaning of Church’s labor and gentry
Used to, in 1950, when the blue collar was much bigger than the white. But you see since far more people go to college, and get generally lower quality education, and many of them from blue collar families, and on the other hand college grads are not guaranteed a knowledge job anyway, often just slaving away in cubicle type jobs, customer phone support from scripts, which are white collar theoretically, but this lower while collar is in many ways the new blue. I am often surprised by the more and more “common” habits of guys wearing ties, like getting blind drunk, playing console games and going to football matches.
On the other hand, it was the dumbest blue collar jobs that got automated or outsourced, more and more blues are rather intelligent and well paid fellas doing sensitive stuff like repairs in an environment where a spark could lead to explosion, or operating expensive equipment, or even programming CNC machines, and they acquired more middle class habits.
Well, I’ve just seen this and had to come here. Let’s hope the OT didn’t accumulate so many posts that this one goes unnoticed!
Guess The Correlation: The Game
This is a game about, well, guessing the correlation coefficient (Pearson’s r) from a scatter plot. (Scatter graph?)
I’ve had one go, with mean error 0.08. Will see how a second run goes.
Edit: Second run had me doing really poorly with mean error 0.19 and losing all 3 lives in 5 attempts 🙁
2nd Edit: My first run was my best run so far… I’m somewhat saddened. Guess I’ll try again tomorrow.
I’m pleased to announce that I have decided to abandon all education concerning statistics in order to play this game for an indefinite amount of time, and would recommend everybody to do the same.
Great find, thanks.
I seem to be good at this, mean error of 0.03. Also this is more addicting than it has any right to be.
This is very educational, thank you. Since I do not have much experiences looking at scatter plots it helped me calibrate myself a bit.
Question for election nerds: Why does the US seem to be bad at literally counting ballots compared to other places?
I look at something like this article from 538 and read the phrase “so final results can be verified in a matter of days, rather than weeks.”
Iowa has a tiny population, and isn’t that large, smaller than the UK at any rate. A caucus has far lower turnout than a full election which makes the task easier, and there is only one election on caucus day. Why then can the UK have a full general election and have the official final result declared the following day after all recounts are finished?
Is this just a policy preference that the US chooses to spend less than the UK on election infrastructure? Or is the lower population density more of a problem (even in a place like Iowa which is hardly Alaska) than I expect? Anyone got any thoughts?
@Adam Casey:
There are a number of factors that go into the question, but I am going to start out by answering for the Iowa Caucuses (and not the broad electoral question).
Caucuses aren’t elections, per se (and in Iowa, they don’t even actually determine the conventional delegates). The people who show up tonight will debate the relative merits of the candidates in relatively small local gatherings, and at the end of the night people actually “vote with their feet” (IIRC) by moving to their candidates chosen corner. There aren’t any paper ballots, it isn’t secret, and it is not intended to be. Then someone counts up the votes and phones them in (at a guess, could be electronic these days). That will become an unofficial total. Then certified paper results will be physically brought to the state organization and reconciled with the electronically submitted results.
Sure, the caucus process is strange. But I was thinking more in terms of how long that final step takes. Once all votes are cast and all the voters have gone home, what is it that takes the time from that moment to the official result?
Literally couriering a bit of paper from one end of the state to another does not take several days. So what’s the extra work?
There are 1700+ plus individual precincts.
If it works anything like the elections I was involved with (I worked for 5 years at a State Board of Election), each one of those precincts will need to send in the paper, and all of the results on it will need to be verified. Frequently there are other matters at hand, and not just the one statewide contest. It looks like in Iowa there are delegate elections as well as, perhaps, other party business.
Each of those needs to be properly signed by the local officials, and probably notarized. If there exist discrepancies with the informal results on election night they will need to be documented and verified. That is likely to go through individual county boards and then up to the state. Not until every single precinct in every single county has dotted every “i” and crossed every “t” will the election be officially certified by the State Board who will convene, vote, and sign the official results in the presence of a notary.
Some of this just the hyper-local, heterogeneous nature of US Government. But some of it is that you may not even be aware of the result becoming official in the UK or what that process is. It only really ever comes in to play in elections that are very, very close.
>Some of this just the hyper-local, heterogeneous nature of US Government.
Yeah, I think that’s something I keep struggling to get my head around. The UK is fantastically centralised by international standards.
Thanks. I hadn’t realised just how extreme that was.
> you may not even be aware of the result becoming official in the UK or what that process is.
Oh no we’re very aware of the result becoming official in the UK. Each district has a returning officer who announces the final result publicly (the exciting ones are televised). That announcement is final unless a court voids the election in that district entirely and orders a by-election (but that is exceptionally rare).
@Adam Casey:
Do you guys even have primaries in the UK? I was under the impression that people go to vote for their party appointed rep and that was it. You vote party, not person.
Whereas a typical ballot in the US, if the State and National contests are aligned will contain something like 10 to 20 different contests to vote for.
@HBC:
Not to mention local or state referenda, judge retention ballots (which aren’t technically contests,) and all the other manifold weirdness that can be on a US ballot form. 🙂
@Marc Whipple:
Yeah, I think this is the big driver. With him saying everything is hand-counted below, I have to think there are few questions on the ballot, perhaps merely just one.
@HBD
Yes indeed, in a UK general election there is typically a single election happening. Sometimes county and parish council elections happen at the same time. But 4 contests at once would be very unusual.
That’s another factor I always forget, the US elects *vastly* more public officials. Thanks for reminding me. =)
@HeelBearCub
No, we don’t have primaries. You don’t have control over who is the candidate for a particular party for your area – that is chosen by the party. Most people vote for a specific party, but the individual MP also comes into it: independent candidates can win through charisma. For me, the story of Dan Jarvis finding “his Nottingham origins put off some Barnsley voters who remembered the fact that Nottinghamshire miners did not join the 1984–85 miners’ strike, although he had been 12 at the time” is quintessential British politics. (For reference, Barnsley and Nottingham are 60 miles apart).
I just heard today that the Republican caucus does proceed by secret ballot.
Don’t know if it’s true, but I suspect the “open declaration” approach may introduce an interesting element of group coercion into the process.
The party has overhauled the caucus rules since 2012, when Santorum won the caucus-night vote by the slimmest possible margin over Romney, but after being filtered through the county and state conventions Ron Paul ended up with most of the delegates. Now the delegations will be allocated based directly on the caucus votes.
Caucuses are run by amateurs, tend to have weird methods of voting and vote counting (Iowa’s Democratic caucus involves people registering support by physically walking to different sides of the room IIRC), and have strong cultural traditions that resist updating.
It’s a strange and cumbersome way to pick a party’s nominee for the most powerful office in the land, but the party leadership can’t intervene or they risk alienating the caucus goers — who, remember, are only a small fraction of registered voters. They’re selected for being fiddly, self-important political junkies.
I’m not sure that “resisting updating” is the problem. Doing things the way they’ve been done for years seems like a very good feature from a security pov. But if it’s the way it’s been done in that town, and the next town over is totally different … well that’s terrible.
First is that the United States doesn’t run elections. States do. Even the presidential election is technically a vote for our state’s electors.
Sure, so that means that we should see high variance, some states should be much *more* efficient than the UK. But unless I’m just not noticing something that doesn’t seem to happen.
There are differences in how fast and low-drama states report their findings, but that’s obscured by the differences in sizes and political party control. An efficient and smooth working state that has multiple tightly contested is not going to be much different in time than an inefficient state with few contested elections.
HBC has the specific answer. The more generic reasons are: extreme decentralization, volunteerism, and lots of redundancy to try to prevent shenanigans.
Each tiny little area has its own ad hoc group of volunteers (disproportionately octogenarians) that run things in idiosyncratic ways which vary a lot from place to place and every step has to be either repeated by or at least done in the presence of a representative of each party.
hmm, that seems like a good explanation of a failure mode. If steps have to be repeated and lots of errors and inconsistencies rectified because counting isn’t run centrally that would add a lot of time.
I suppose this is an advantage to the UK system I hadn’t noticed. Each constituency (electoral district) has a single counting room when all ballot boxes are collected together so they can be processed in a single uniform way.
Thanks, that explains a lot. =)
So, if I want to rig a UK election I just have to figure out one clever ballot-box-stuffing scheme and implement it in one central location? Preferably by getting myself appointed Official Head Ballot-Counting Guy for the district?
You mean you “just” need to place officially stamped ballots into boxes that are being watched constantly by both the media and dozens of representatives from all candidates? Yeah, good luck with that.
Much much easier to just install dodgy code into an electronic counting machine.
@Adam Casey:
How are the ballots counted in the UK? I presume electronically?
If so, the issue is that a manual recount can catch the fraud, if it ordered. The only issue with electronic counting of ballots is when their is no ability to manually recount ballots. I was never in favor of the “electronic touch screen” voting systems for the simple reason that they erode confidence in the electoral process for just this reason.
@John Schilling:
Ballot security is always an issue, but so long as voter rolls are tracked and tallied separately, it’s fairly easily detectable.
The Iowa Caucuses don’t use electronic voting machines. If they did, we could give you the official results at the end of the night like you are asking. So now I’m not clear on what it is that you are asking, and why you think that electronic voting machines are at all relevant.
>How are the ballots counted in the UK? I presume electronically?
Nope, 100% hand counted paper ballots.
>So now I’m not clear on what it is that you are asking, and why you think that electronic voting machines are at all relevant.
Sorry, that was an irrelevant and slightly argumentative comment on wider US electoral security rather than the matter at hand. Apologies, seems I was in a more defensive mode than I thought.
No, seemingly you arrange a heist to get your hands on blank ballots.
Or orchestrate a wave of postal voting.
Here in Ireland, we had the electronic voting machine débâcle when a former government wished to change to this method instead of the hand-counted paper ballot. Concerns about the ease of fraud and lack of traceability were raised*, and all the reassurances that American elections ran perfectly fine on these machines did not work. So they were stuck with having bought e-voting machines that could not be used (due to the very real threat of someone going to court on a Constitutional challenge to their legality and under other points) and had to be kept in storage over a period of years that cost a very great deal in total money spent, until eventually they were sold off for peanuts to another buyer.
*Irish elections are Proportional Representation on the Single Transferable Vote model, and often candidates will fight to the bitter end demanding recount after recount to get those last few votes to drag them over the line. So any system where a vote ‘vanishes’ as soon as it’s been tallied and there is no corresponding physical record was not at all palatable to the politicians worried they’d lose a seat or not get one and to be fair, there was public concern as well about possible fraud and vote-rigging, not to mention if the machines could be hacked by third parties.
I think the Official Head Ballot-Counting Guy plan is unlikely to succeed. However, given the very small number of voters in a very small number of marginal seats who typically decide UK general elections, schemes along the lines of “post in lots of postal votes from dead people, non-English speakers etc.” or “pay people to turn up at ballot stations posing as voters who you think unlikely to vote” (because no ID of any kind is required) could succeed quite easily, and probably have. Certainly one recent and probably many past mayoral elections for Tower Hamlets (a poor district in east central London with a large Bangladeshi community) were massively corrupt.
@Deiseach: I find it weirdly schadenfreundlich heartwarming that this level of idiocy happens in other countries as well. I think it was some 2 or 3 years ago that the Czech military bought a huge amount of detonating cord because there was a discount for really large orders. Only trouble was (and nobody responsible realized this) that that material expires after 3 years or so (after which it is as good as rubbish) and the amount they bought would be enough for something like 15 years of regular use.
Tibor – that sounds like an opportunity for a lot of high-velocity
funtraining. (See this t-shirt.) I’ve hand-shot fireworks shows – it’s *fun*.Okay, weird kind of medical question I was wondering if anyone else had experienced.
So for the past 2 years I’d been on a 6 hour work week sleep cycle with more sleeping in during the weekends. I’d often notice myself have extreme drowsy spells during my commute home around either noon or between 5 and 6:30, to the point where I feared I would pass out. These left after maybe 30-45 minutes, but if they happened while I was at home I’d sleep for about 2 hours and wake up completely refreshed; otherwise I would just spend most of the day tired. I almost had to pull over my car about 2 months back in the middle of the afternoon because I was having to hit myself to remain conscious despite getting around 7 hours the previous night. I recently was injured and have been telecommuting, allowing for me to get a standard 7-8 hour cycle every day.
Now, this has lead me to figure out that I need to keep this sleep cycle and just go to bed earlier, but a friend of mine wondered if it may perhaps been a slight narcoleptic issue. Anyone have any experience with narcolepsy to comment? I plan on asking my doctor about it during my next check in, but that’s not for a few months and I’m not particularly mobile right now.
Getting very, very sleeping after moderate sleep deprivation doesn’t sound like narcolepsy as I’m familiar with it. And if your baseline for feeling well is set to 7-8 hours of sleep, it’s almost certainly not. The (few) folks I know with narcolepsy required (before treatment) a lot more than 8 hours, and one pretty much could not make it through more than 10 minutes of a car ride or passive entertainment (like a movie) without falling asleep, no matter how much she had slept the night before.
How well rested do you feel after 7-8 hours of sleep? Are you constantly tired? Do you feel fine until a few hours before bed time? If it’s the former, you have a decent chance of narcolepsy or another disorder than messes with your sleep quality (apnea, restless leg, etc). If it’s the latter, then you’re likely normal. It’s totally not abnormal to come close to falling asleep at the wheel after 2 hours daily, accumulated over a week, of lost sleep.
A note on naps – you say you feel fine if you nap. This is generally not the case for narcoleptics, as narcolepsy seems to exert its action through disruption of slow wave (or “deep”) sleep. If you’re simply frustrated that you can’t force yourself onto a 6 hour sleep schedule, you can still take the medication narcoleptics take – stimulants – and they will keep you awake. Sleep, though, is not something you should deprive yourself of long-term. It’s better to just go to bed earlier if you can.
Thanks, that takes a load off my mind. I’m just worried about the sudden onsets of drowsiness honestly. It comes out of nowhere and hits for the better part of an hour. I may need to look into stimulants if after I end up commuting again this keeps happening, as I spend most of my days laying down due to my injury.
Shameless plug/advice:
I wrote a password generator that I use to “manage” my passwords. It doesn’t actually manage passwords, it generates a password based on a numeric input (and optional adjective) and the numeric input is easier to remember than the actual password. So all I have to do is remember something like “9000 fluffy kittens” and it will generate a complicated password for me.
I’m wondering if I should attempt to make this a mobile app and actually try to share this with the world instead of keeping it for myself. Or if I did, if anyone would even bother to use it and/or if it defeats the purpose of having those more complicated passwords in the first place if my password algorithms are more widespread.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/6jv2mm63fcznb5p/PasswordGenerator-0.1.2.jar
Short answer: you can write a secure password obfuscator, but, as with anything involving crypto, there are a lot of gotchas you need to be aware of.
The big one in a situation like this is the possibility of a dictionary attack. Imagine someone taking your binary and running each combination of number + common adjective up to, say, 10000 and the thousand most common adjectives, then storing the resulting mapping in a database or even just a flat file (of 10,000,000 entries, a very manageable number). This reduces the apparent complexity of the outputs back to the actual simplicity of the inputs, and makes brute-force attacks practical in many situations. Depending on the threat model it can be even worse.
This can be defeated with salting or similar techniques and made more difficult with a number of other options, but they’d better be good if you’re making your code public. Haven’t read your code, so I can’t say whether you’re doing the right thing.
A standard security analysis would treat the algorithm as public knowledge. The security versus offline brute force would be against the input space not the output space, with a factor for the computational difficulty of the transformation. So if you are using scrpyt or bcrypt or something like that to do the transformation than you are potentially increasingly the effective difficulty of brute forcing the password, but if you are doing something like MD5 or other cheap transformation than you aren’t adding much, at least with respect to offline brute force attacks.
If the user simply picks the input words the entropy would tend to be very low. A better method of picking relatively memorable phrases is the diceware system which selects words randomly from a dictionary of common words. A four figure number plus two randomly chosen words from a list of 7776 is around 39 bits of entropy. For comparison a random password of 7 characters chosen from a-zA-Z0-9 is around 42, excluding upper case it’s 36.
There are already programs such as SuperGenPass that can be used similarly, and whose security has been better-tested. SuperGenPass generates a per-site (or per-program) password based on a memorable master password and the name of the site.
There are two mechanisms by which program-generated passwords can be more secure. One is security through obscurity – the fact that hackers trying to guess your Gmail password don’t know that your password was generated with your special program. However, as brad said, standard security analysis always ignores this factor, because it is unreliable. Since it is possible to make systems that are secure even when their workings are known, we should just use them, so we don’t have to expend effort keeping their workings secret. So when considering security, analyze as if everyone already knows the code of your program.
Thus, your can add value only by the other way that generated passwords can be better than normal passwords: by making it slower to try a guess of a password. If it takes an artificially long amount of time to generate a password, this extra delay will slow down any hackers who try to use your program to iterate over all possible passwords. While the normal user might see a tolerable half-second delay in generation, the hackers could get a multiple-year delay in generating the 10 million they want to guess that would cause them to give up their plans.
SuperGenPass accomplishes this delay by running its hashing algorithm multiple times. By default, it runs the MD5 algorithm for 10 rounds. Such a design is not as elegant as using the bcrypt algorithm, which is specifically made for slowing down hashing, but it can still work. If SuperGenPass’s defaults aren’t secure enough for you, you can increase the number of rounds it uses, at the expense of slightly increasing the delay when a legitimate user hashes their password.
The point of this is to make it hard to guess the master password. But your system has another weakness there. As Nornagest said, your password structure of a number and an adjective reduces the space of possible passwords. This decreases the time it would take for hackers to try all likely passwords. SuperGenPass avoids this problem by allowing master passwords to be any string. You could still use a number and adjective with SuperGenPass if you wanted, as long as potential hackers didn’t know that in advance.
I wouldn’t recommend trying to publish and popularize your program unless its design makes it more secure than similar open-source programs like SuperGenPass or One Shall Pass. I think it is better if there are fewer equivalent programs in the password-generation space, so that each program can get a higher proportion of developers’ eyes looking for security problems. Having fewer password-generation methods also means people can write ports of the generator to other systems, so people can use their password system conveniently from any device.
This is pretty much what I figured. A hacker can guess the algorithm I use just by generating a couple of passwords and seeing what the pattern is.
So I’ll keep this to myself!
I’ve noticed something recently, during a conversation in another forum. I have a fairly significant distaste for current online feminism, but intellectually I’m aware that for every blogger complaining about the patriarchy there are probably five people on the ground that I’ve never heard of, doing much more concrete things — e.g. abortion clinic staff, or Planned Parenthood providing birth control, or safehouses for battered women, or whatever. This distinction exists even if you don’t think any of those are Good Things. I do, but I expect even people who don’t would recognize it, at least around here.
I’m not aware of similar activities by the social justice movement outside the shared context of feminism — I only come in contact with them, or become aware of them at all, when they’re writing check-your-privilege thinkpieces or organizing social media lynch mobs. This bugs me — any movement is going to be mostly composed of stupid people, and I feel like I may be throwing some unknown baby out with the movement’s rhetorical bathwater.
I gather about half of Scott’s readership leans left, so probably there are some people here who can answer this: What is the social-justice equivalent of the safehouse or abortion clinic? What do the rank-and-file members of the movement do that doesn’t fall under “consciousness raising” or similar?
The distinction I’m after here isn’t so much “good things to do” vs “bad things to do” as it is between “doing things” and “talking about what everybody else should do.”
>I’m not aware of similar activities by the social justice movement outside the shared context of feminism
What’s left? Anti-racists? Trans-rights people?
>I gather about half of Scott’s readership leans left
Left of whom?
Rank-and-file SJW often do things like raise funds for underrepresented groups to attend conventions or to aid women in need due to some perceived social injustice. They do do some good.
The awardees for the convention scholarships have included a non-representative number of high-class/high income members of select racial groups. The women-in-need fund raisers have run the gamut from “get my buddy a new computer” to causes more thoroughly vetted.
Not denying that, and not approving of it either. But as Glenn observed on Superstore, helping members of your own group is a tiny bit less bad than harming members of another group, because it’s still helping. 🙂
It also leads to a large number of people picking fights in the hopes that they can be recipients of charity (and that charity is often in the form of enough money not to work at an actual job). In the least possibly controversial version of this, Banned Books often means something like libraries are not buying my book.
Yeah, sometimes I do feel like the latest Banned Books outrage is more along the lines of “I need some cheap and easy publicity for my book” or “We want to actually get more teenagers using their local library so if we can convince them there are all these filthy depraved books considered too corrupting for their innocent eyes, that might do it!”
It’s much the same reaction that I have to people banging on about “They suppressed Galileo, they suppressed Darwin, and now they’re suppressing me!” Mate, you’re no Galileo 🙂
Mate, you’re no Galileo
Wasn’t Galileo suppressed for basically being an arrogant, socially inept jerk?
Nah, it was a moral panic due to the Reformation.
That’s the Catholic-apologist, victim-blaming explanation…
They did admit they were wrong and he was right, though—under John Paul II.
Relevant: http://tofspot.blogspot.no/2013/10/the-great-ptolemaic-smackdown-table-of.html
TL;DR: John is right.
I briefly looked over that link.
See, I don’t think people like this get it: it doesn’t fucking matter whether Galileo’s beliefs were adequately proven at the time, or if the geocentrists were “right”. Even if they were (and the case that they were is hardly airtight; for all the reasons that point to the stationary Earth, there are other reasons that suggest this is wrong), the point is that giving the Church the power to burn people at the stake for disagreeing with them (or put them under house arrest at the very least) holds back the progress of science and philosophy. It’s not about the freedom to be correct. It’s about the freedom to think, even if you’re not correct.
For every Galileo who was an “asshole” and “abrasive”, there were ten other people who decided to shut up and not say anything that might get them into trouble. Those people aren’t in the historical record.
Relevant here is Hallquist’s recent post “The Enlightenment was Not an Age of Freedom” (i.e. it was an age when people strived for freedom, not an age when they had it):
@ Vox –
Read the whole thing. Then you can say whether you think what the Church did was right or wrong, rather than getting worked up over what you’ve been told they did.
@ keranih:
I looked over it again.
What am I supposed to be missing?
The Inquisition tried him for heresy, found him guilty, forced him to recant, and he spent the rest of his life under house arrest. This was evil. It was evil regardless of whether he exaggerated the evidence for heliocentrism.
Yes, lots of proponents of heliocentrism were going off a “gut feeling” that “shit ain’t right”. But look at this and tell me that there wasn’t something to that. I mean, the second picture isn’t actually “disproven”; it’s just a far more complicated and less elegant model of things.
And I don’t think much of this kind of revisionism:
Yes, it’s true that popular mythology tends to exaggerate the role of individual “great men”. If it hadn’t been Galileo we remember, it would have been someone else. But that doesn’t mean Galileo is not actually a historically important individual, and that we shouldn’t honor him.
People do this with every historical personage. It’s like a game. “Screw Edison! He wasn’t that great. If it hadn’t been him, it would have been someone else.” People just enjoy feeling that they’re so clever, they know the true story of things. And it flatters them, too: none of these great men is better than me; they all have feet of clay.
And if you don’t think that the kind of environment in which a Galileo could be tried for heresy didn’t have “chilling effects” on science and free thought, I don’t know what to tell you.
I don’t know how people can object (validly) to the “tyranny of political correctness” in academia today and then try to excuse and apologize for the much more severe tyranny of political correctness in the past.
es, it’s true that popular mythology tends to exaggerate the role of individual “great men”. If it hadn’t been Galileo we remember, it would have been someone else. But that doesn’t mean Galileo is not actually a historically important individual, and that we shouldn’t honor him.
People do this with every historical personage. It’s like a game. “Screw Edison! He wasn’t that great. If it hadn’t been him, it would have been someone else.” People just enjoy feeling that they’re so clever, they know the true story of things. And it flatters them, too: none of these great men is better than me; they all have feet of clay.
The text you quoted wasn’t saying “Without Galileo, someone else would have discovered the same things eventually”. It was saying that other people actually did discover the same things, and at more or less the same time. Surely you can see the difference?
@ The original Mr. X:
And Galileo was just as important a part of the conversation as they were. This is trying to set up everyone else as a collective vs. Galileo as an individual.
And Galileo’s story was not exactly dredged up from obscurity by atheists in the 21st century. He was a major historical driver of the acceptance of heliocentrism in the sphere of ideas. Yes, if Galileo hadn’t existed, then one of those other guys would have made it into the history books. But they didn’t; it was Galileo, in no small part because he had the courage to stand up against intellectual tyranny—which is at least as important a part of his legacy as heliocentrism and mechanics.
People always want to play this game of “who said it first?” And for any proposition, you can always find some guy who said it before the guy we remember. But maybe the guy we remember said it better or said it in a way that was going to be more impactful.
And this is all beside the main point that this whole “controversy” is bullshit revisionist attempt at justifying tyranny. But people should do a lot less apologizing for criminals and tyrants and a lot more condemning. Conservatives are always (rightly) attacking progressives for defending savagery when it’s practiced by people in other places. But when it’s people in other times, it’s always time for cultural relativism again.
“Relevant: http://tofspot.blogspot.no/2013/10/the-great-ptolemaic-smackdown-table-of.html
TL;DR: John is right.”
You are going to have to point out a specific part because the list is long (and a bit annoying; apparently there were no good arguments for heliocentric at all and they were entirely motived by petty reasons) and Galileo was hauled before the inquisition on his second attempt when he had additional proof for heliocentric AND had gotten his book approved by the censor.
Galileo was hauled before the inquisition on his second attempt when he had additional proof for heliocentric AND had gotten his book approved by the censor
Galileo being factually correct and recognized as factually correct is no defense against the charge of Galileo being an asshole. And, as a general rule, when someone who is factually correct but an asshole is censured, censored, prosecuted, or persecuted, it’s a good bet that being an asshole has a lot to do with why.
And everything I’ve read on the Galileo affair seems to confirm that this was indeed the case.
“Galileo being factually correct and recognized as factually correct is no defense against the charge of Galileo being an asshole.”
If he wasn’t persecuted the previous time and he was approved by the censor the second time is however a defense against ‘being an asshole’.
“And, as a general rule, when someone who is factually correct but an asshole is censured, censored, prosecuted, or persecuted, it’s a good bet that being an asshole has a lot to do with why.
And everything I’ve read on the Galileo affair seems to confirm that this was indeed the case.”
That doesn’t follow. For starters the Church obviously didn’t think he was correct. Being correct in parts is also not a defense- Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake and there isn’t evidence that he was an asshole (he did tread the line towards heresy and mysticism of course). If Galileo was persecuted because he was an asshole, the fact that he was put under house arrest, but allowed to continue his research doesn’t follow, but does match ‘shutting him up’.
@Samuel Skinner
I found the whole write-up interesting, but I guess I can give you the high points.
>(and a bit annoying; apparently there were no good arguments for heliocentric at all and they were entirely motived by petty reasons)
There were good arguments, or at least arguments that weren’t worse than the accepted theory, but at that point there was no evidence of the heliocentrists being right, and the early models (there were plenty of them, all different) were not substantially better (remember – astronomy was then not a physical science, but used primarily for horoscopes and shit) than the geocentric ones, due to corrupted data and false assumptions (bodies move in perfect circles).
>and Galileo was hauled before the inquisition on his second attempt when he had additional proof for heliocentric
He did not, AFAIK, have sufficient proof, because the means to obtain sufficient proof were not invented yet. The experimental evidence for heliocentrism is available only when measurement can be made that is sufficiently precise to distinguish it from error, or see it at all.
>AND had gotten his book approved by the censor.
There were really strange circumstances and communications failures involved in that approval, what with the damn plague and no instant communication.
>For starters the Church obviously didn’t think he was correct.
The Pope at the time thought he was (and they were both wrong). But again, due to a particular set of circumstances, Galileo being an asshole, and the scientific establishment hating him, he was brought to trial and sentenced. He probably didn’t intend to call his friend, the Pope, a simpleton, in a work commissioned by him, which had the general tone of “my enemies are morons, only I am right” (quite a far cry from what the Pope requested – a review of arguments for and against the various models of the time), but that’s what happened.
“There were good arguments, or at least arguments that weren’t worse than the accepted theory”
I dropped out when he declared that the best argument was based on elemental fire; it is odd mocking people for using Aristotelian physics when the geocentric were also using Aristotelian physics. What good arguments does he attribute to them?
“but at that point there was no evidence of the heliocentrists being right, and the early models (there were plenty of them, all different) were not substantially better (remember – astronomy was then not a physical science, but used primarily for horoscopes and shit)”
The first part and the last part don’t really mesh; if the two models were about equal how exactly is there difference in evidence between them?
“He did not, AFAIK, have sufficient proof, because the means to obtain sufficient proof were not invented yet.”
I’m not aware of an agreed upon scientific standard for sufficient proof. ‘Seasons exist’ could be counted as sufficient proof under some metrics after all.
“There were really strange circumstances and communications failures involved in that approval, what with the damn plague and no instant communication.”
And? I’m not saying the censor would detect heresy, I’m saying the censor would detect ‘is an asshole’. Old regime censors were keen on avoiding pissing off powerful people. The church would force you to recant; a pissed off noble could kill or otherwise ruin you.
“He probably didn’t intend to call his friend, the Pope, a simpleton, in a work commissioned by him,”
? That doesn’t march the wiki page (calling the pope and idiot, the pope commissioning the book).
” a review of arguments for and against the various models of the time”
That really doesn’t match the book. Not the ‘review’ part, but ‘various models’; as far as I’m aware he only covers two.
He did not, AFAIK, have sufficient proof, because the means to obtain sufficient proof were not invented yet.
Tycho Brahe’s observations and Johannes Kepler’s analysis of same were sufficient to prove heliocentrism, or at least to demonstrate substantially greater predictive accuracy from a much simpler model, and were available by the time Galileo published his Dialogue. Unfortunately, part of Galileo’s assholery was his unwillingness to acknowledge that other people had better evidence of his preferred theories than he did himself, and so offered a decidedly sub-par and Galileo-centric defense of heliocentrism – in a book commissioned by the Pope with the specific intent of comparing the best arguments for and against both systems.
Between Copernicus and Galileo, the Catholic position was pretty clearly one of “This looks like it might be the real deal; we need to have our best people trying to pin that down and figure out the implications”. Copernicus himself was only censored because he died before he could rewrite the conclusions section of his masterwork to remove the claims that went beyond what he had proven – modern peer review would have demanded no less. Galileo was one of the “best people” tasked with pinning it down; oops. Between Galileo and Newton, I believe Catholic astronomers favored the Tychonic cosmology, which was basically heliocentrism with a coordinate transform to a non-inertial reference frame where the Earth’s coordinates were defined as (0,0,0). I’m fairly certain that reflects a true understanding of the relative motion of various celestial bodies combined with an unwillingness to be associated with Galileo.
If at all possible, avoid having your controversial truths championed by an asshole.
Your timeline is ridiculous. Copernicus delayed publishing until after his death in 1543, almost certainly because he knew he would be persecuted. But he didn’t live in Italy, so there was nothing that Rome could do to him or his book. The Index wasn’t even created until 1559, probably because of the spread of Protestantism (as Samuel said).
And it was only with Galileo in 1616 (or maybe Bruno in 1600) that there was any censorship of science. That was when Copernicus was banned. It is true that the Censors only demanded a lightly redacted edition of Copernicus’s book, which was approved, but never published because there is no demand for censored science. But at the same time Kepler’s books were completely banned. You can’t simultaneously claim that people should have turned to Kepler and that the censors did the scientifically correct thing.
TOF says that Galileo held back the recognition of Kepler by the Church. Maybe that counterfactual is true, but ultimately that is the fault of the Church.
I think you mean Italian astronomers or Church astronomers. The Roman Index had no sway in other Catholic regions. It destroyed science in Italy, but great work was done in France by Descartes and Cassini. And by Protestants like Huygens. (Kepler, too, was a Protestant working in a Catholic court.)
Your timeline is ridiculous. Copernicus delayed publishing until after his death in 1543, almost certainly because he knew he would be persecuted. But he didn’t live in Italy, so there was nothing that Rome could do to him or his book….And it was only with Galileo in 1616 (or maybe Bruno in 1600) that there was any censorship of science.
So, Copernicus lived more than half a century before the Catholic church censored science, in a country where the Catholics had little influence, yet he refrained from publishing his life’s work during his life because he “knew he would be persecuted”, and I’m the one who is being ridiculous?
I’m pretty sure Copernicus waited until he was on his deathbed to publish because he tended to be a perfectionist and Copernican Geocentrism was grotesquely imperfect. As long as there was any possibility that he might come up with a version that matched observational data without more epicycles than even the Ptolemaic version, he held off on publishing. When it was clear that he wasn’t going to accomplish that before dying, he published what he had. Some time later, the Catholic church insisted that the book be removed from circulation until the concluding paragraph or so was rewritten to clarify that this was an unproven hypothesis. Which never happened, Copernicus being dead and all.
And on the subject of ridiculous – citing Giordano Bruno as a martyr to the cause of Science! Giordano Bruno was a champion of geocentric cosmology in roughly the same way that Deepak Chopra is a champion of quantum mechanics. He is mentioned as anything but an idiot mystic only because in certain circles “everybody knows” that the Church tortured people for teaching True Science!, and when that turns out not to be the case for Galileo (or Copernicus or any other scientist), well, there’s got to be someone that the Church martyred in the name of Science.
“Some time later, the Catholic church insisted that the book be removed from circulation until the concluding paragraph or so was rewritten to clarify that this was an unproven hypothesis. Which never happened, Copernicus being dead and all.”
And if he was alive, do you imagine his books would have been treated any differently than Kepler’s?
“And on the subject of ridiculous – citing Giordano Bruno as a martyr to the cause of Science!”
And Newton practiced alchemy. You don’t have to be correct in everything to be a martyr of Science. Given that the methodology of science wasn’t established in those days, I’m not seeing why we are excluding Bruno. Is there something specific about his methodology which is more ridiculous than relying upon Aristotle?
“He is mentioned as anything but an idiot mystic only because in certain circles “everybody knows” that the Church tortured people for teaching True Science!, ”
‘True Science’ is a massive straw man. Galileo was wrong about the causes of the tides. If the church suppressed his theory of the tides, that would still count as censorship of science. Science does not require that every thing a scientist proposes be correct- it requires that they can propose them and test them against other theories.
The one guy I knew who was really into this stuff also volunteered as a tutor for kids at a poor, predominantly black school. No idea how typical that is.
I’m not particularly left-leaning nor a big fan of SJ, but for complicated reasons I’ve ended up hanging out with a number of people who are.
Of about twenty people I know in person who I’d call SJWs, about half do nothing to speak of besides complaining online. Another half-dozen or so are involved on the ground in Occupy-descended protest groups, but don’t do any non-protest social justice work that I know of. Three or four do women’s self-defense teaching (note that I know many of these people through martial arts). One does environmental work, and a couple do animal rescue work. One considers herself a hacktivist and has done some research into robust rapid-deployment mesh networking.
Just how big a group of people do you think this describes, and it what sense are they a coherent movement?
If I knew that, I wouldn’t need to ask.
I’m not talking about non-feminist social-justice people; I doubt those exist in any significant numbers. I was more noting that modern feminist concerns can be seen as a subset of social justice concerns and I was looking for examples outside that subset — because I already *know* of examples within that subset.
To state it plainly, I don’t think the group of people you are asking about is small, mostly quite young, and only very loosely affiliated with each other — not much of a “movement” at all. The exceptions are specific groups that have other names, like Black Lives Matter or Occupy, though too we are talking about relatively small groups of mostly young people.
There’s a much larger group of people that have generalized political or ideological views that can in part be seen as part of the social justice umbrella, but now you’ve gone from loosely affiliated to not affiliated at all.
The twin impulse to having wild ideas about the size and importance of your own subculture is having wild ideas about the size and importance of your perceived enemies.
@Error:
My sister started out in restaurants. She has worked as hostess, wait staff, chef, and manager and fairly upscale restaurants. Eventually this led to a an abiding interest in food justice, which is roughly the broad concerns for decent treatment and outcomes for everyone in the broad food-chain (including but not limited to farm workers, kitchen workers, farm communities and under-served poor communities). She did a great deal of volunteer work on the issues, got a PhD in planning and now works in a “Farm To Table” program working directly with farmers to improve the outcomes of everyone along the chain, including the farmers themselves.
I’m fairly sure she has never posted about the issue on facebook, tumblr, twitter or anywhere else, with the possible exception of organization efforts for turnout at events.
@Error A church I attended in grad school (which had a lot of people who would identify as caring about social justice especially around race/diversity) ran an after school tutoring program for the kids in their neighborhood (which was poor and majority black or hispanic). The pastor or church leaders would sometimes go with parents (especially those for which English was not their native language) to attend meetings at the school and generally help those parents make sense of how to work with the schools. They also ran and ESL classes. would host community meetings to help communication between the local police and the community.
Other social justice people I know do things like send books to prisoners, volunteer at food banks or open community gardens for their neighborhoods.
About a decade back, I was going to university in a uni town, in a largely Protestant area of the American South. In that town was a Catholic Worker House, which was staffed by the most…sjw/communist/occupy sorts of people I have ever met outside of some sectors of online SFF fandom. They weren’t just pro-progressive, they were obnoxiously and echo-chamberly anti-socially conservatively. (Leaving aside the abortion thing, which was almost never addressed – the emphasis was on other “women’s health concerns” and “support of the poor”.)
The activists there walked the walk as well as did the talking – maintained housing for destitute people, weekly sit down nice meals for anyone (mostly homeless), supported medical and legal appointments for the homeless and for immigrants of dubious legality, and did eod meal & sundries run to the hobo camp. And they were, in person, and when not preaching, really good at respecting people. The newsletters and the preaching (“Jesus and the money changers at the temple was an example of non-violent protest!” and “None of the women in the bible were against Jesus, only men” (which devolved into an argument about Salome and her mother, because I’m good like that)) was a different matter.
It’s frustrating, because I forget that dicotomy, and judge SJW types by what they do online/in print. I also remember the whole thing about not bragging about what you do for charity’s sake, so it’s not right to demand people “prove” they are doing charity. (Just like the infuriating line about how “prolife people don’t really care about women or their kids once they’re born” and ignoring the support systems that Catholic charities support.)
I don’t know if church/religious involvement makes a difference – I know that I would prefer to think so, but I am very badly biased here.
Does animal rights work come under Social Justice (War)*? I have a militantly vegan/animal rights brother who has just returned from the weekend picket of a coursing meeting. He drives me up the wall with his zealotry and parroting the party line at times, but he does go on protests, is involved in groups, etc. (You could possibly throw in gay rights there too, as he was part of his teachers’ union participation in some LGBT parade – I think it was the Pride parade in the capital city or something, I can’t remember off the top of my head).
So if that does count as social-justice, yeah I know someone who’s active on the ground (Blessed Lord, do I know someone).
*I want to make a distinction here between the way “social justice” and “SJW” are used currently, and the social justice as I learned the term back in the days of the dinosaurs 🙂
Heh. I guess I qualify as an animal rights on the ground activist, every time I tend the compost heap. (Or, puns aside, put time and money into my acre of rainforest instead of into flaming on social media.)
Actually there’s a term for people who spend their time volunteering in a clinic or soup kitchen or whatever: Social Justice Worker. But I don’t think that term can survive: no distinctive acronym.
I don’t think this really matters much, because the West is a guilt culture, not a shame culture. So the external social dynamic of gaining/losing face through morality and politics gets internalized as conscience or guilt. The most obvious evidence for this that doing something against your principles results in feeling ashamed, and shame is exactly the same thing as losing social status. Your mind is making you feel like you lose status in a virtual society even when nobody knows it. And the opposite, the warm glow of having done a good deed, is a virtual, internalized, face gain.
The end result is that human minds in a guilt society can hardly tell the difference between actually gaining or losing social status, or just feeling an internal bad-conscience shame vs. warm glow of self-esteem.
What do we assume is the ratio of blogs complaining about patriarchy to blogs complaining about feminism?
How much does branding influence social movements?
I’m interested in that question when it comes to Black Lives Matters and now things like, The Tampon Tax. These concepts seem relatively narrowly focused. Black Lives Matters is concerned about police brutality and reform, but comes across as if the police only treat Black people in such a manner, ignoring the many non-Black people who suffer. Similarly, people against the “Tampon Tax” are focused on making feminine hygiene products tax-free, while ignoring that many personal hygiene products (a large portion of them necessities) are subject to sales tax.
Does such narrow focusing help or hurt these causes? Do people see BLM as only being concerned with Black people and thus they are less likely to back them, even if said people are concerned about police brutality and the criminal justice system?
Does excessively focusing on menstruating women (a tax exemption that would only say them ~$10/yr) push more people away from the idea or draw more people to it?
I don’t think that the two are particularly comparable. For whatever reason, BLM explicitly focuses on police brutality towards black Americans. This is a conscious decision on their part. On the other hand, the campaigners against the tampon tax are generally unaware that many other essential items are also taxed (and in the case of the UK, it is impossible for the level of VAT on tampons to be changed without exiting the EU). This is a flaw that renders their argument stupid.
Now I’ve got the amusing picture of the feminist movement joining with nationalists in the Anti-EU campaign…
I think in general it makes them less credible and less sympathetic. I’ve personally been mistreated by police, so when I hear BLM talking about police brutality as if it’s all about racism, I hear “Your problems don’t matter, white man”, and I’m disinclined to support them, even if I know they’re often right.
The tampon tax thing is just ridiculous; making it out like it’s some sort of sexism rather than just a vagary of a largely arbitrary system is silly; you’d have to show a pattern to do that, not just one item. For instance, in New York State, shampoo is taxed but dandruff-control shampoo is not, tampons and toilet paper are. Across the river in NJ, all shampoo is taxed, but tampons and toilet paper are not. Both use the same basic rule, which is that drugs or items to treat a medical condition are tax-exempt but grooming and hygiene products are not. In NJ, the second overrides the first and in NY the first overrides the second. And NJ has a separate exception for disposable household paper products, which apparently covers tampons as well as TP. The whole system is crazy sauce.
The amount of sales tax on tampons/pads isn’t very much. Texas has fairly high sales taxes, and the only common exemptions are medicine and grocery food. Even here, taking the highest city’s sales tax and a high estimate of a $5.00 box of tampons every month, means you pay $4.95 a year in sales tax. This is very low on the list of financial issues to worry about.
A more sensible thing to push for would be for menstruating people who are low-income and get other benefits as a result of their low income to get a small additional allowance for hygiene supplies, just a few dollars a month to cover generics. If they can’t afford the sales tax, they can’t afford the tampons either. That’s a bigger problem than people who have no problem spending $30-$60 a year complaining about $2.50-$5.00 in sales taxes on that purchase.
Not that this is the most pressing issue either IMO but it makes a lot more sense than making menstrual hygiene supplies tax-free for everyone. The poorest still can’t afford them and the wealthier probably won’t even notice the savings since the savings are so small.
In previous threads, I’ve expressed interest the in various effects of religiousity, mostly focused on the benefits. So let’s look at it from the other side.
Anybody hear of Religious Trauma Syndrome? Is it a real thing, at least inasmuch as there’s been any peer-reviewed work on it? Her book is over 20 years old, so there should be something by now.
Full disclosure: my interest in this subject is not entirely academic. There is somebody close to me who is genuinely mentally ill, and I suspect Winell is milking her for money, which she doesn’t have much of to begin with. All the less so since she’s been burning bridges with all her existing support structures for the past year.
Yeah. People can suffer greatly from religion. That being said, looking at that website at first I thought it was pretty much some kind of typical therapeutic-cum-‘spiritual but not religious’ effort (is it bad that when I saw Dr Marlene and her outfit was based in the Bay Area I went “Oh, of course”?)
But looking at their page of fees for programmes is setting the alarm bells ringing. It sounds exactly like the type of cultishness Scientology, for one, is accused of: sets of programmes, sliding scale of fees, and if you can’t afford those we’ll take work in barter (e.g. you can work for peanuts as a ‘volunteer’ cook, cleaner, etc. at one of our retreats to pay for attending a programme). Even using the word “retreat” is a bit dubious, given that that is a religious term and this is all about leaving oppressive fundamentalist religion behind.
So yes, I’d be mildly concerned about someone getting entangled with these, as turning patients(?), clients(?) into unpaid labour in exchange for counselling is dodgy, to say the least.
I’m not a psychologist or anything similar, but am fairly sure that this is not a separate disorder as much as just how generalized anxiety / etc. manifests in particular people.
I grew up an atheist, raised by agnostics, with no original sin or hell or anything like that. But for a long time I had a very strong anxiety about dying and ceasing to exist*, to the point of developing overblown Yudkowskian ambitions of conquering death through Science! and other grandiose fantasies along those lines. So was that a case of Anti-religious Trauma Syndrome, with the certain knowledge of my own mortality playing the part of damnation, or just my nascent anxiety disorder seizing on the closest source of doom at hand?
And sorry to hear about your friend / family member.
*Especially since, as it’s not possible to imagine nonexistence, my mental image reverted to being immobile in a dark room
I keep hearing this from atheists, but I have to know what denomination this is referring to. All the ones I’m familiar with have a pretty straightforward answer to what you can “do…about it”–accept Jesus and repent. I think Catholicism requires a confession to an ordained minister, but that’s not exactly hard if you’re really sorry for what you did.
You have to accept Jesus sincerely, actually believing in him; just mouthing the words won’t do. Many people, particularly rationalists, can’t choose their beliefs and can’t force themselves to believe in Jesus sincerely. The penalty for this: eternal torment, and no way to avoid it.
Even for Christians, it can be a bind, because of how original sin works. According to it, everyone deserves Hell. God chooses to save you at his whim; nobody gets saved because they did anything to deserve it. If God’s whim doesn’t happen to include you, you’re screwed.
For what you did? With original sin, you don’t need to do anything in order to be considered a sinner and deserving of Hell.
Many people, particularly rationalists, can’t choose their beliefs and can’t force themselves to believe in Jesus sincerely.
Have they sat down and thought about the problem for five minutes by the clock?
I have but I’m unwilling to engage in brain surgery or mind-altering chemicals.
“If your hand or foot causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to enter into life maimed or crippled than with two hands or two feet to be thrown into eternal fire. And if your eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. It is better for you to enter into life with one eye than with two eyes to be thrown into fiery Gehenna.”
Matthew 18:8-9
Is this the sort of thing the medical profession exists to prevent you from attempting?
I’m not sure this is really the case, at least under Catholic and Orthodox sacramental theologies, which are much more concerned with ritual correctness than utmost sincerity in your heart of hearts. If you’re willing to verbally confess the Creed and aren’t doing so with deliberate deceit (as opposed to mere doubt), then you’re saved as long as you’ve been baptized in the name of the Holy Trinity.
Assuming there are limits to how much doubt is acceptable, most rationalists would still be disqualified. My assessment of the probability that Jesus exists as a divine being is about the same as a Christian’s assessment of the probability of Zeus existing. I don’t think that would qualify as being just “mere doubt” unless “mere” means “a nearly unlimited amount of”.
It’s pretty difficult for me to conceptualize someone that believes in Christianity enough to be legitimately scarred over worry about eternal damnation but not enough to accept Jesus as their savior.
Not saying it doesn’t exist, or is somehow invalid, but tough to wrap my mind around.
@brad:
And contrary-wise I find this concept very easy to understand. You can believe in Christianity and still reject the idea that God should be allowed to get away with the fathomless misery He’s inflicted on the human race because it’s His bat and His ball. (Jubal Harshaw has a fine speech in SIASL to this effect, IIRC.)
If the Adversary is real, He would be pretty much the best possible example of this, although obviously His motives are in dispute in such a case. Or the little comment from Dogma:
Scene: Bartleby and Loki are angels in human form, who are hanging around in the Milwaukee airport, where they have been banished for all eternity. Loki has just convinced a nun that there is no God.
Bartleby: You know, here’s what I don’t get about you. You know for a fact that there is a God. You’ve been in His presence. He’s spoken to you personally. Yet I just heard you claim to be an atheist.
Loki: I just like to f*** with the clergy, man. I just love it, I love to keep those guys on their toes.
Spoiler for the film: We find out early in the movie that the reason Bartleby and Loki were cast out of Heaven is that they told God off for being a homicidal maniac. Bartleby’s entire motive for everything he does throughout the story is finding a way to punish God for being unfair to both angels and humans. Loki, at that point, says he sounds just like the Adversary.
One of my favorite movies. And perhaps the most contrarian of my favorite movies — I think the general rap is fun but not great. I’m not otherwise much of a Kevin Smith fan.
The way I phrased my post, it is a perfect response. But that said, I’m not sure it really applies to the “problem” at hand. It seems to be a lack of faith, not perfect faith in the divinity of Jesus but an additional belief that he’s an asshole.
@brad: I think we are much alike regarding Kevin Smith and his oeuvre. 🙂
And fair enough, I see that question too. But (perhaps due to my upbringing and personal beliefs) I’m still easily able to imagine someone who has significant concern that Christianity is true, and that not accepting Christ as your Savior will damn you for all time, who also just finds the whole thing just a little too unlikely and would feel ridiculous going and asking to be “Bap-tized!” as Clarence Day might say.
Perhaps a crude analogy would be a lottery ticket and Pascal’s Wager. A rational person could understand, rationally, that buying a lottery ticket is a fool’s game, yet experience considerable peer pressure/FOMO/etc which would make it difficult for them to resist, you know, just one or two. In my crude analogy, a person could believe that there is no rational, empirical proof for the existence of God (quiet in the back, this is a hypothetical and not an invitation to debate) yet still have, for many different reason, that little voice in the back of their head saying, “If you’re wrong… if you’re wrong… IT’S THE LAKE OF FIRE FOR YOU!”
I can see where that would be very stressful indeed.
Even faithful sincere religious people sometimes worry too much about their friends and family.
I think two separate things are involved here.
The problem with feeling guilty over being damned is mostly for believers. You are guilty because of original sin regardless of whether you have done anything.
Nonbelievers probably won’t suffer psychological stress from it so that part doesn’t apply to them. But to nonbelievers, this is still a criticism of Christianity; Christianity claims to condemn to Hell nonbelievers who by non-Christian standards don’t deserve it and can do nothing to avoid it. You don’t need to believe that Hell actually exists to be able to say “if Christianity is right about Hell, that is horrible”.
I think what happens to unbelievers after death is one of the things different versions of Christianity disagree about. In Dante, you have the harrowing of Hell, in which a small number of virtuous pagans are rescued by Christ. That specific example wouldn’t apply to those of us born after Christianity existed, still less to those who were exposed to it and rejected it, but it suggests other possibilities.
It was the view of a Jesuit colleague of mine that virtuous pagans could get into Heaven. I don’t know how widely that view was or is shared.
@David Friedman:
I guarantee you there are no significant number of Fundamentalist/Evangelical Christians who believe that: in fact, most of them would consider it heresy. This is more nuanced than it seems, though: some Fundamentalist Christians don’t believe that Heaven or Hell exists (right now) at all. So nobody goes there. But when God raises up the dead and judges them, pagans, virtuous or not, are kinda boned even under this theory according to all the Fundamentalist dogma I am aware of. My own grandmother, a kind, loving woman who took care of sick people in public health wards before the development of modern vaccines and antibiotics, once told me in so many words that she was sad because a man she knew was such a good man but was not Saved and so was bound for Hell. And do not, I repeat do not, even get me started on the man who spoke at my father’s funeral.
For some reason my memory is trying to tell me that this is, strictly speaking, also a heresy in the Catholic faith, although my memory is iffy and also seems to be in conflict with the casual pronouncements of the current Pope Francis as well as those of your Jesuit colleague. So I am putting that down as “I’m probably wrong.” But I don’t have any idea what the “right” answer is, either. And I don’t even have anything iffy on file for the Orthodox faith.
There are probably a lot of middle-of-the-road Christians who would, if pressed, say that they don’t think a loving God would send good people to Hell for a procedural error. While I appreciate charity, I find this rather irritating. But then I am a nasty man.
Worries aren’t necessarily about beliefs. When I was a kid, my house was next to the woods. Whenever I’d hear hunters shooting outside, I’d stay away from windows, even though I knew rationally that the odds of my being struck by a stray bullet were infinitesimal (especially since our house was on a hill).
My feelings about life after death are very much the same: I don’t necessarily worry about a specifically Christian hell (I’ve encountered much worse possibilities in fiction over the years), and I believe quite strongly that my existence will just end when my brain dies, but I have that same, gut-level, “stay away from the windows” feeling. Of course there are no windows, no actions I can take to avert hypothetical bad outcomes, but the feeling is still there.
If religion helps some folks live with that, I can sympathize, even if I find their particular beliefs ludicrous.
@ Marc Whipple:
The Catholic dogma is still “no salvation outside the Church (extra Ecclesiam nulla salus)”, and this is shared with the Eastern Orthodox Churches.
However, this is interpreted in a manner completely different from how it sounds. No one is saved outside the Church, but not everyone who’s part of the “visible Church”—i.e. actual practicing Christians of the correct denomination—will be saved. And some people who are not actual practicing Christians of the correct denomination are nevertheless “invisibly” part of the Church.
As one Greek Orthodox bishop explains, “no salvation outside the Church” is a complete tautology:
As an interpretation of the Bible, this is at least dubious. And it certainly doesn’t fit with the historical record of the Catholic Church and the way it believed in the necessity of converting people by force, if necessary. (Aquinas, for instance, says that it’s wrong to take babies away from Jews to raise them as Christians, but for pagans it’s okay.)
But it’s a fascinating example of how you can keep the same “doctrine” but totally change the meaning of it.
It reminds me of Scott’s “Parable on Obsolete Ideologies”:
@Vox:
Thank you, that is the dogma I was thinking of. So I wasn’t wrong 🙂 but my understanding was imperfect 🙁 .
To be honest, that sounds suspiciously like the Argument To God Wouldn’t Do That No Matter What He Literally Said About It.* While I am all for this approach in practice, as I said in theory it irritates me. But that’s on me and not on you. Thank you, that was interesting.
*”There is an old, old story about a theologian who was asked to reconcile the Doctrine of Divine Mercy with the doctrine of infant damnation. ‘The Almighty,’ he explained, ‘finds it necessary to do things in His official and public capacity which in His private and personal capacity He deplores.”
Universalism is very much a minority position, but not a heterodox position, which is an important distinction.
Letting in some of the virtuous pagans has a long pedigree, as the Church Fathers were generally fond of Plato, Aristotle, and the like.
As Vox mentioned, Catholicism and others additionally have a concept of people being saved even when they don’t consider themselves Catholics (this is most often extended to Eastern Orthodox and Protestants, but can go further).
The view that you are SOL if you have not explicitly accepted Christ is probably the dominant one in American Evangelicalism. Some would accept that there are probably allowances made for those who never had a chance to accept Christ, but speculating too much on the specifics there is discouraged for lack of data.
All would agree that your odds are much better if you have heard and accepted the Word, so better keep up that missionary work.
@ Marc Whipple:
It’s interesting to compare that to some passages by Pius IX, writing in the 1860s:
@ Jaskologist:
See, this position always seemed bizarre to me.
I can understand having the “hardcore” view that God just plain won’t save anyone who doesn’t believe in him.
But how can someone say, “No, that would be unfair and unworthy of God, to damn a virtuous pagan just because he hadn’t heard the Gospel, through no fault of his own,” and then turn around and say, “Yeah, okay, but he damns most of them, who otherwise would have been saved if they’d just been lucky enough to run into a missionary.”
If the first isn’t fair, the second isn’t any more fair.
@Vox:
That may be heinous, but it is at least consistent. I approve.
It does remind me of the joke somebody told around here the other day about the missionary who told the Inuit that if he didn’t believe in God, he would go to Hell. IIRC it went like this:
Missionary: “I have Good News for you: accept Christ, give up your pagan ways, and you will be saved from Hell.”
Inuit: “If you come along to tell me this, would I have still gone to Hell?”
Missionary: “If nobody had ever told you the Good News, and you had lived a virtuous life, you would have been safe. God does not punish the ignorant.”
Inuit: “So why did you tell me?”
(I should add that while I find this joke quite funny, I realize that it has pretty big logical flaw that prevents it from being an effective argument against evangelizing.)
I recently skimmed a document that the Catholic Church had put out specifically with respect to Jews (http://www.news.va/en/news/vatican-issues-new-document-on-christian-jewish-di) that touched somewhat on this subject. The key sentences, at least to my reading, were:
@brad:
You may know that many primitive Christians have a somewhat comparable view on Jews.
Some of them have a very conflicted view on the matter. The Jews, they reason, are the Chosen People and protected by the Covenant. They can’t go to Hell, for any reason. But they killed Christ, so they are not to be trusted. It often seems that the latter is more important than the former as far as how they view Jews in the physical here-and-now.
@Vox,
There are people who, absent having fallen in with a bad crowd, would not have committed a crime and been sent to jail. We still jail them.
If salvation is granted based on a person’s choice, and a person’s choices can be influenced by those around them (and I think it obvious that they are), then I don’t see a way for what you object to to be any other way.
(If salvation is instead gifted by God regardless of the actions or merit of the individual, well, that raises a whole different set of issues. Pick your poison.)
@ Marc Whipple:
Unless someone else also did, I believe it was I myself who posted that joke (in the context of a larger discussion).
What is the flaw? Someone pointed out (and I agreed) that the “troll answer” is that telling the Eskimo about God makes him less likely to be saved (than he would be if invincibly ignorant), but you still have to do it anyway.
I searched for a while but can’t find again a pretty nice article I read a while back, titled something like “The Paradox of Evangelism” or “The Problem of Evangelism”, which nicely set up the issue into a trilemma. Either:
a) People who do not hear the Gospel are less likely to get into heaven (the normal interpretation). In this view, God can rightly be attacked as damning people for factors totally outside their own choice.
b) People who do not hear the Gospel are more likely to get into heaven. This view has absolutely no Biblical support, but it follows from the combination of two semi-plausible views: that a virtuous life is not possible without accepting Christ into your life, and that God does not punish people for things outside their control. The result would be that all pagans are unvirtuous yet all go to heaven because God can’t damn them for their sins. But this would make evangelism downright harmful. (I don’t think many people actually believe this one, but it’s the basis for the Eskimo joke.)
c) People who do not hear the Gospel are just as likely to get into heaven. This view has little Biblical support, but it can be justified by arguing that God knows whether you would have accepted Christ if you had heard about him and judges you accordingly. But this view implies that evangelism is useless, or at least it has only worldly benefits, such as bringing more earthly happiness to people’s lives.
Now, as far as actually sticking to the Bible, it pretty clearly suggests that option a) is the case. And the standard line among the early Christians was: yeah, it’s unfair, but, as you put it, it’s “his bat and his ball”. Or he’s the potter; you’re the clay.
Also, I just thought I would post what happens when you read that verse into Siri:
Path not the potter power over the Clay to make us one vessel unto water and another on to diss honor.
“and you had lived a virtuous life.”
A possible flaw in the joke is that being a virtuous pagan is possible but difficult. So if the Eskimo does not have Christianity preached to him, he has a 10% chance of living a virtuous life (obeying God’s law engraved in his heart, as per something someone recently quoted), a 90% chance of yielding to the temptation to sin. If he has Christianity preached to him, his odds are much better.
The problem with both those responses is that God choose a specific time and place for revelation; this screws over people who weren’t accessible through no fault of their own and they either
– get treated differently to make the results fair
– get treated the same and the results aren’t fair
Fair? Who said anything about fair?
Augustine, Luther, Calvin, etc did not claim that God was fair, they claimed that He as just. The root idea is that everybody deserves damnation. Good is being extra-nice by saving anybody at all.
You can say that isn’t fair, and they’d agree, but it’s beside the point. We’re rather unique in elevating fairness above all other values.
@ Jaskologist:
There are a lot of things in this world that aren’t fair. And there’s only so much we can do about it because we’re limited human beings.
If two people work just as hard, it’s not really “fair” that one ought to get paid more than the other because of luck and factors outside his control. But given that we aren’t omnipotent and omniscient, the unfair system works a lot better for producing a high material standard of living for everyone than trying to make it fair.
For instance, it would be best if everyone had the best parenting possible. And yet it’s better to let some people have good parents and some have bad parents (within limits) than to put everyone in a state orphanage.
Moreover, to your specific example, we have the concept of “extenuating circumstances”. If someone had a bad upbringing, he is or ought to be treated more leniently because the temptation for him to commit crime was greater. On the other hand, since the world is unfair, it’s often easier to argue extenuating circumstances if you have “affluenza” than if you’re actually poor.
However, none of these limitations apply to God, who ought to judge people in a spirit of perfect fairness and not be moved by contingent circumstances.
Well, yeah: the whole thing is insane! You take limited, finite human beings and ask them to be responsible for choosing their infinite destiny. It’s crazy; they couldn’t be ready for it.
Moreover, if there were ever a case for paternalistic intervention, this is it. It’s one thing to let a five-year-old grab dad’s gun and shoot himself: he only cuts off a finite number of years from his lifespan. But to reject God (if Christianity is indeed true) is infinitely unwise and results in an infinite loss. And this is true even if there is no hell; one is still giving up an infinite benefit. If it’s right for limited, finite adults not to let children have the “responsibility” of gun ownership, it ought to be right for God—a perfect being—not to let adults have responsibility over their eternal fates.
As I argued extensively in the previous Open Thread, you have this problem either way. Christianity is just not compatible with free will, if “free will” is understood to exclude determinism.
Let’s limit this just to the question of Adam, getting rid of all the complications of Original Sin. If God has a Plan, if he knows what will happen in the future, then he knew that Adam would disobey him even before he created Adam. God created Adam knowing that he would sin. But if God can know that Adam will sin before he created him, then at the time Adam was going to eat the fruit, he could not have done otherwise, or else God would have been proven wrong.
It is immaterial whether Adam sinned “of his own volition” or whether God directly made him. Adam sinned through his will, but as it turned out, there was only one way his will could turn: the way it actually did turn. It could not have turned the other way, or God would have been wrong. So Adam had a will, but it wasn’t a free will. Even if Adam’s will wasn’t influenced by any external material factors and operated purely under the influence of its own nature, God created Adam and Adam’s will, so God is therefore responsible for Adam’s sin. Adam never had any actual free agency; his willing was just a complex Rube Goldberg machine for God to make a creation to sin against himself. God was the only one with any fundamental, active agency (which is also a Christian dogma: that God is the cause of all things).
The Augustinian / C.S. Lewis solution that God exists outside of time does not solve this problem at all. This view implies the position known as “eternalism” or “four-dimensionalism”: that the past, present, and future are all fully real. Time is a dimension along which “moments” are arranged, just as length is a dimension along which points are arranged. “Adam” actually exists in four dimensions, spread out over time as well as space. And therefore, when he was created, his being cast out of the Garden of Eden was just as real as his first moment of existence. It was/is/will be true that, at that moment, he was cast out of Eden. Thus, he could not possibly do anything but that which would eventually cause him to be cast out; to do so would contradict a true fact. (The more consistent time travel movies and stories, like Heinlein’s “—All You Zombies—”, are really useful for understanding this.)
A simpler way to put it is like this: if there is a fact of the matter for God to know about whether Adam will sin, then Adam does not have free will. Aristotle understood this and used the example of a sea battle. It seems either true or false that there will be a sea battle tomorrow. But if it is true now, it was true yesterday, and the day before, and so on back to infinity. Therefore, no one ever had any choice about whether we will have this sea battle; it was inexorably determined. But that conclusion is wrong, Aristotle thought, so he said that it is neither true nor false that there will be a sea battle tomorrow; there is no fact of the matter about future contingents, and they are unknowable. Yet if that is the case, then not even a being who knows everything there is to know can know whether there will be a sea battle tomorrow.
Or, to use the example at hand, God could not know whether Adam will sin because there was no fact of the matter to know.
I guess you can say “free will is a mystery”, but you can get out of any hole that way. It’s also not the escape used by people like Augustine and Aquinas, who explicitly came out in favor of determinism. They are what are now called “compatibilists”, who differ only verbally from others like Luther and Calvin who were “hard determinists”. The only difference between those two schools is the definition of free will: the compatibilists define it so as to be compatible with determinism, so they say we have it. The hard determinists define it so as to be incompatible with determinism, so they say we don’t have it.
@ David Friedman
A possible flaw in the joke is that being a virtuous pagan is possible but difficult. So if the Eskimo does not have Christianity preached to him, he has a 10% chance of living a virtuous life (obeying God’s law engraved in his heart, as per something someone recently quoted), a 90% chance of yielding to the temptation to sin.
Which of course needs the assumption that whatever pro-virtue influence the pagan’s existing religion has, better to disrupt it by evangelism.
@ David Friedman:
This doesn’t solve the essential problem.
Say it’s impossible to live a virtuous life without Christianity. Then the chance of damnation is 100%.
Say it’s possible, but it’s very, very difficult, like beating Dark Souls on the first try without dying once. Then the chance of damnation is (say) 99.99%. As Scott said in one of his FAQs, the 0.001% difference is not “all the difference in the world”. It’s a 0.001% difference. It’s still impossible for the vast majority of people to be virtuous without Christianity.
If having access to Christianity improves your odds to 50%, that seems really unfair if access is distributed more or less arbitrarily.
@ Jaskologist:
Okay, yeah, people don’t really buy the idea that everyone deserves to suffer eternally in hell for doing things that a) are not really infinitely bad and b) that they could not have avoided doing.
If you do accept that, then you don’t have the problem of God’s being “unfair” in deciding whom to save. But now you have the problem of how God can possibly be both just and merciful at the same time. These are contradictory qualities!
Justice means treating people as they deserve, and in this context punishing them as they deserve. Mercy (if it doesn’t simply mean “being nice”) means treating people better than they deserve, or punishing them less than they deserve. For instance, the U.S. had mercy on Hirohito after WWII: they didn’t punish him. But that meant that justice was not done! He deserved to be punished, but he wasn’t.
If you truly believe that you deserve to suffer in hell for eternity, then it would be wrong—unjust—to accept his mercy. It’s like scamming the welfare system to get a benefit you don’t deserve.
If one actually does believe that everyone deserves to go to hell, then it is both unfair and unjust for God to save some people and damn others. He ought to damn all of them.
***
Really, though, the whole Christian concept of God’s having human virtues like justice and mercy is silly. Aristotle knew better than that: for him, every kind of being had its own type of virtue, which was the correct kind of living for the kind of thing it was.
Now God is a perfect being; he doesn’t need anything. Therefore, as Aristotle argued quite plausibly, nothing is a virtue to him except contemplation, which is the only action available to him: static contemplation of himself.
The concept of God’s being “omnibenevolent” is just incoherent. What does it mean for God to be good, in the human sense? If he’s good in the human sense, he’s bad in the godly sense, in the same way that a good dog is a bad flower. And even if this had a meaning, why would you expect God to have human virtues; it doesn’t make sense. God has no more need for justice than he has for oncology or plumbing.
@Vox
The point of the joke was that the Eskimo would be better off if not converted. My response solves that problem.
The problem you are bothered by is the problem of moral luck, which is still a problem outside of questions of religion.
Someone does horrible things–murders people for the fun of it, tortures small children, … . You can always imagine an alternative history in which he didn’t do those things for reasons he was not responsible for–he could have been born somewhere where no opportunity to do them existed, he could have been brought up differently, he could have died young … . Do you conclude that, since he didn’t deserve to become the sort of person who committed the murders, he doesn’t deserve punishment?
There is some sense in which all your characteristics are undeserved. You didn’t deserve to have the genes you have, the upbringing you had, the environment you had. Push the argument far enough and you didn’t deserve to be born as a human rather than a mosquito. Does it follow that mosquitoes should have the same rights as humans? That nobody should ever be punished for anything?
My solution to the problem is that “deserves to be punished” isn’t predicated of the potential human who became the murderer, it’s predicated of the actual human who, for whatever reasons, was a person who committed those murders. Under other circumstances the potential person would have become a different actual person who wouldn’t have committed murders and wouldn’t deserve punishment.
For a longer discussion of the issue, see:
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Payne/Payne.html
@ Vox
None of that really sounds like a counter argument.
The issue of God’s Omni-benevolence being in tension with the existence of suffering has already been addressed in the Book of Job, in Scott’s own parody of the same, and by numerous theologians way smarter and more knowledgeable than either of us.
I also suspect based on your answers that you may be operating on a different definition of “justice” than your typical believer.
Besides, mercy is Christ’s thing not God’s.
@ hlynkacg:
I’m not sure how you mean. I have argued that a) free will is incompatible with Christianity, b) God cannot be both infinitely just and infinitely merciful at the same time, and c) the unequal spread of the Gospel is unfair and unjust whether or not everyone does in fact deserve to go to hell.
That last one relates most to the conversation at hand.
I don’t think I brought up the problem of evil in this thread…
Also, sure it is discussed in Job—in a very unsatisfactory manner.
Probably so, but I’ve tried to specify a fairly neutral meaning of the concept: treating people as they deserve. This is actually part of the problem, because it’s completely unclear what religious people mean when they say that God is good.
Christ is God.
@ David Friedman:
Yes, exactly.
The thing he deserves to be punished for is the actual crime. And the degree to which he is responsible and therefore deserves to be punished is the degree to which the crime was the result of his free choice and not outside circumstances.
If he were in some circumstance where he would have liked to commit the crime but didn’t have the means, then there is nothing to punish. That might be a matter of “luck” in some sense, but I don’t see it as a problem.
This is exactly the argument for why determinism invalidates moral responsibility!
Determinism assumes that all human agency is passive agency. An individual act is like a domino in a chain of dominos: the domino acts to push the domino in front of it down, but if you look back, the domino was itself pushed by a domino behind it. None of the dominos have any active power of their own; they are just passive conduits for the first impulse that was imparted to the first domino.
If some being with active power caused the first domino to fall, then it is responsible for the whole chain. If the chain of dominos goes back to infinity, or if the first domino fell by chance, then no one is responsible.
If all the causes of a murderer’s action are traceable back to a time before he was born, then he is not at all responsible for the murder. It would therefore not be appropriate to punish him, if that means to pay him back what he deserves. He doesn’t deserve anything for it. The only thing that might be appropriate is the application of “negative reinforcement”, so as to cause him not to repeat the action in the future. This is exactly how one “punishes” a dog: it’s not meant to show moral disapproval or to imply that the dog should have acted differently.
And if this “negative reinforcement” is to be applied by other deterministic machines, then it’s also senseless to talk about whether it’s “appropriate” or “due”. The judge, jury, and executioner are merely acting in the way they have to act, and they don’t deserve either credit or blame.
On the other hand, I say that people’s actions are caused in part by circumstances and in part by their free will. To the extent that they are caused by circumstances outside the person’s control, the person is not responsible.
If someone commits a murder in the middle of a psychotic break, he is not responsible at all. It was completely outside the control of his free will. (Unless he neglected to take necessary medicines, in which case he is responsible indirectly.)
If someone commits a premeditated and deliberate murder, knowing full well that it is wrong, he is about as responsible as one can be. I suppose he is not “fully responsible”, since he’s not God and didn’t create the universe and every factor that influenced him, but on the scale of potential degrees of responsibility among humans, he’s near the top.
If someone commits a murder under the influence of, say, a primitive culture that says “honor killings” are necessary, then he is excused to a degree depending on how honest was his choice to stick to his culture. If he had never been exposed to alternatives, this might be completely honest. If he had been exposed, it might not be.
If someone from a primitive culture like this is trying to kill you, you might have to kill him in self-defense. That doesn’t mean he deserves to die. It would be better if you could stop him without killing him. On the other hand, if he deserved to die, then it would be better to kill him than not kill him.
In a sense, this is true, as I said in my first paragraph. One punishes the actual person for the actual crime, not what he might have been and done.
But the question is whether he’s responsible for being the kind of person he is.
If he were, say, a robot, and his brain was designed by his human creator to be the brain of a murderer—or even if it weren’t designed to do anything in particular but just operated in a deterministic way—then that robot wouldn’t be responsible for the murders. The robot would be the proximate cause of the murders, sure, but not an ultimate cause.
I mean, look at the saying “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.” Sure, guns are the proximate causes of many murders, and the murders couldn’t have happened without the guns. But the guns are just passive conduits for human intentions. They don’t have any free choice.
And obviously if people operate in a deterministic way and God is their creator, then people are only proximate causes of murder. God is the sole ultimate cause. Unless God operates deterministically, which is the Muslim view, or at least the view of Averroes.
@Vox
In regards to A, number of believers would agree with you, which is why the word “Schism” appears in the dictionary. B is nonsense because god him/itself is infinite and a fraction of infinity is still infinite. Any contradiction between mercy and justice can be rolled into the question of omni-benevolence noted above. and I don’t think that you’ve really made a case for C.
You might not like Job’s answer but it is an answer. After all, infinity is fucking weird.
No, Christ is an aspect of god.
Something can be true of a part that is not necessarily true of the whole.
@hlynkacg:
Job is Old Testament. The Jews of that time weren’t attempting to claim that God was triple omni. God isn’t portrayed as particularly benevolent, and indeed he mostly kicks Job in the teeth for daring to question him. Basically he tell Job that Job’s life is God’s to do with as he sees fit, so shut it. There is another wrapper story around it, but the central message is not of a benevolent God.
So, Job really doesn’t attempt to deal with the problem of a loving God who would condemn the vast majority of his creation to eternal suffering. It’s not an answer.
@ HBC,
Granted, but the story does give an answer of sort’s. Namely that the human frame of reference is woefully limited.
In other words,
“THERE IS NO OBJECTIVE COSMIC UNEMPLOYMENT RATE.”
@hlynkacg:
That really just boils down to God being inscrutable. Fair and just don’t even really apply because we have no sense of what that even means or whether it applies to God. He is beyond our ken.
But if you accept that framing, then words like good, kind, caring, or loving don’t apply either. And while we are at it, the words like obey and rules.
A simpler way to put it is like this: if there is a fact of the matter for God to know about whether Adam will sin, then Adam does not have free will
I don’t see how that follows, any more than there being a fact of the matter about what I’m doing now and have done in the past means that my present and past actions are determined.
@Vox Imperatoris:
What is the flaw?
Basically it’s part (a) of the trilemma you set forth. More specifically, the Bible teaches virtue known to be pleasing to God, whereas despite what is “engraved in all our hearts,” the odds of being virtuous in a manner pleasing to God are worse if you don’t know about it. So the argument to Leave Them Alone And They’ll Come Home is not a solid one.
@ The original Mr. X:
Your past actions are “determined”. You can’t change them, can you? You have absolutely no freedom right now about what you did in the past.
You had freedom in regard to those actions only when they were in the future, at which point there was not a fact of the matter about what the result would be.
In other words, the past is fixed. There is a fact of the matter about what it is, and no one can change it. (As some scholastic theologians argued, not even God can change the past.) If the future is the symmetrical with the past, if it is fixed in the same way (and this is what eternalism says), then no one can change the future, either. It only seems like they can because they don’t know what the future holds.
***
To be clear, determinism has to be differentiated from “fate”.
The idea of “fate” is something like the story of Oedipus, where there is some outcome that is set in stone, and even though the rest of your actions are free, the outcome will happen no matter what you do. I’m not saying that eternalism implies that.
Determinism doesn’t say that, for instance, Adam will be cast out of the Garden of Eden no matter what he does. No, if he didn’t sin, he wouldn’t be cast out. Rather, it says that, as a matter of fact, he will choose to sin and therefore be cast out, that this was true from eternity, and that he could not in fact have chosen anything else. To do so would be a contradiction: it was true from before Adam was created that he would sin at a certain time, and yet he chooses not to sin at that time. That’s just as impossible as his being both five and seven feet tall at the same time.
@ Marc Whipple:
That just goes back to the initial point that, if you’re going to say that, you might as well bite the bullet and say that all pagans go to hell no matter what. It’s unfair (and unjust) in exactly the same way.
@ hlynkacg:
a) Okay, granted.
b) This is not so. Just because God is infinite, doesn’t mean he can have the maximum amount of contradictory qualities. If God is infinitely good, he can’t be infinitely evil, too. Some sects (“negative”, or “apophatic”, theology) hold that you can’t say anything about God, including that he’s good, precisely because he has all contradictory qualities including being evil—but this is not a universal view and is opposed by the kind of theologians who say that some aspects of God can be understood rationally. Or, for that matter, by anyone who says “God is good” or “God is love”.
The point is, to the extent that God is merciful, he is not just. The same action can’t be the maximum of both.
And if you want to say that God is the law, so he is just by definition, fine, but then you can’t say that it would be “just” for the people he saves to go to hell, since ipso facto he saved them and his will is justice. So they are being treated as they deserve, not given mercy.
c) I don’t know how I can respond to this. I made a case; if you think it’s bad, I can try to clarify. If you think I just didn’t make it, there’s nothing I can say.
Let me put it this way: suppose everyone deserves to go to hell. Then God is unjust in spreading the Gospel unequally among mankind, since he is giving some people the punishment due to them but unjustly saving others. This would be unjust in the same way it would be unjust if the president decided to randomly pardon East Coast murderers but allowed West Coast murderers to be sent to the gas chamber.
On the other hand, suppose that virtuous people who follow the Bible and believe in God do not deserve to go to hell (this may be heretical, but a large number of people believe it). Then God is being unjust to the Eskimos or whoever else who does not hear the Gospel, since if only they had heard it, a significant additional number of them would have been virtuous and/or would have believed in God. They are being punished for external circumstances that not only aren’t their fault; they’re God’s fault since he created the world and spread the Gospel in the way that he did.
Your past actions are “determined”. You can’t change them, can you? You have absolutely no freedom right now about what you did in the past.
Were determined, then. The point is that there is a fact of the matter about what I have done/am doing, but this fact is caused by my actions, not vice versa. Ditto for facts about the future.
Also, bear in mind that time isn’t objective and absolute, but varies depending on which perspective we’re taking. Think of the scientific thought experiments about how a person travelling at close to light speed will experience time as passing much more slowly than someone travelling very slowly. Neither of these perspectives is more true than the other, and neither one, properly understood, contradicts the other. Similarly, I see no difficulty in saying that, from God’s perspective, all of time is happening all at once, whereas from the perspective of something in the universe the future doesn’t exist yet.
@ The original Mr. X:
Of course what you do is (proximately) caused by your will. It’s not as if you’re walking around freely but then “fate” causes you to stab somebody against your will. No, if you stab somebody, it’s because you wanted to. It’s just that what you will was inevitably one thing from eternity, viz. what you actually do will.
Augustine is correct enough on this:
Yet despite the fact that sinning is voluntary (i.e. it occurs by an action of the will), it is not free because in the moment of sinning, the will can only turn in the way that it actually does turn.
Imagine a case where you are about to pull the trigger and commit a murder. The libertarians say that, in that moment, it is possible for you either to pull the trigger or to refrain. There is no fact of the matter about what you will do. Your willing is an ultimate, active cause of the murder which cannot be explained as a passive result of a previous cause.
On the contrary, eternalism says that, in that moment, it is only possible for you to do what it is and was true that you do at that moment. You cannot do otherwise. And moreover, not only can you not do otherwise at that moment, you could not have done otherwise at any previous moment of your life. There was an inexorable chain of causation from the first moment of your life to the moment when you pull the trigger. This is implied by saying that the future is fixed like the past, that time is a subjective feature of perception, and that God is outside it.
And therefore (Augustine doesn’t say but I say) you are not responsible for pulling the trigger. God, since he created you, is responsible.
Whether time is objective and absolute is the very point in question.
The view I hold—presentism—says that only the present is real. The past and future are not real; time is not a “dimension” that one can travel upon; you can’t visit or observe the future; nothing can exist “outside of time”. (This view was held by some scholastic theologians, and possibly others, and they were clear that it means God does not know future contingents. He only knows all possible future contingent facts, but not which ones will actually occur.)
This is not contradicted by physical observations. The theory of relativity is indeed formulated in an explicitly eternalistic, four-dimensionalist way because Einstein was a committed determinist and eternalist and phrased his theory accordingly.
Presentism says (following Aristotle’s usage) that what we call “time” is the human way of measuring change by comparing the rate of one change against another. For instance, we compare our motions to the motion of the Earth around the Sun. Change is an objective, absolute process. When a vase breaks into shards, the vase does not in some sense “exist in the past”. It doesn’t exist; the shards exist.
The presentist interpretation (or one interpretation; others are possible) of the slowdown in the perception of time as one approaches the speed of light is that objects near the speed of light in fact do change more slowly. That’s why if you put a clock in orbit, it ticks more slowly than a clock on Earth. The conclusion is not that time is subjective, but rather that time (or really change) is objective but your means of measurement is being affected by its movement at high speeds.
Vox Imp –
If having access to Christianity improves your odds to 50%, that seems really unfair if access is distributed more or less arbitrarily.
This is why missionary evangelism is a moral imperative.
Even if the odds of salvation as a virtuous-but-ignorant pagan are 20%, the improvement is such that people who would have a reasonable chance of bringing Christian salvation to those who have not heard the Good News should try as hard as they can to do so.
@ Anthony:
Well, obviously.
It’s not the evangelists who are in the moral wrong, here. It’s God who’s the asshole. If he wanted to, he could have sent Jesus down fifty or a hundred times, enough to convince all the skeptics and the Buddhists and the Muslims and the Jews that he is the Son of God.
The joke with the Eskimo and the priest (it’s just a joke) only comes in when people soften the message of “you are basically doomed without the Gospel” to say that it’s okay not to believe in God so long as you haven’t heard about him, and that most pagans probably don’t go to hell because God loves all his children. (They do this to make the religion sound more appealing, because the traditional version sounds downright disgusting.) Then you’ve screwed the Eskimos because once you’ve told them, they have no excuse and are surely going to hell unless they convert.
It’s like the reaction to Roko’s Basilisk: “if this argument is correct, screw you for telling me about it! I was probably okay until you told me.”
***
Let’s look at the joke again:
Now, clearly, traditional Christianity does not endorse the proposition that you will not go to hell if you did not know about God and sin. Rather, it says that you will almost certainly go to hell, even if you did not know.
But most moderate, normal religious people don’t want to endorse that explicitly because it’s horrible and obviously shows that God is cruel and evil. So they say things like that Indians were “noble savages” who weren’t all or almost all doomed to hell. (And this concept was invented by the Spanish almost immediately after the discovery of the New World, in order to explain how it was possibly just of God not to give them the Gospel. Being innocent and childlike, they were mostly okay without it until they got corrupted by Europeans.)
The joke then turns this common belief around by saying that granted most or all pagans don’t go to hell, evangelism actually hurts them.
On the contrary, eternalism says that, in that moment, it is only possible for you to do what it is and was true that you do at that moment. You cannot do otherwise. And moreover, not only can you not do otherwise at that moment, you could not have done otherwise at any previous moment of your life. There was an inexorable chain of causation from the first moment of your life to the moment when you pull the trigger. This is implied by saying that the future is fixed like the past, that time is a subjective feature of perception, and that God is outside it.
None of that follows from eternalism. If the future is really present, then my having free will in the future is no more problematic than my having free will in the present — i.e., not at all.
@ The original Mr. X:
It’s problematic from the view that someone can know what you are going to do as you are doing it (as God would have to know). You can only say what the choice was when it is no longer present; i.e. when it is in the past, fixed, and determinate. While the choice is present, it is indeterminate. (This is obvious because if choice is determinate in the present moment, then it was also determinate in the previous moment and every moment before that, and you have complete determinism.)
Look at it this way: suppose that there is a particular, real, existing future moment when you will sin. But you want to say that there is more than one possible future, that your choices aren’t determined—and nevertheless that the future is just as real as the present. If that’s the case, then you have to be capable of doing more than one thing in the present moment. Suppose you choose to become more virtuous; thus, that future moment where you sin would have to go from “real” to “not real”.
But for what is to become what is not, is a process of change. And change inherently exists in time. If the “timeline” can change, that means the timeline itself exists in “meta-time”. In other words, to say that change is real inherently means that time is real. In the four-dimensional, eternalist view, change is not real. “Space-time” is a static “block” that is extended in four dimensions. It only seems like change is real because our subjective experience is somehow riding along one of the dimensions (how this is possible is never explained).
So you have a dilemma: if the “timeline” can change, then it exists in time, and God cannot exist “outside” it. Nor can he know what the timeline will actually be until the moment comes around. On the other hand, if you say that the “timeline” cannot change, then there is only one possible future, and you don’t have free will. You are not capable of acting in the present to make the future any different from what it was eternally fated to be.
I realize that this is somewhat abstruse, but I’ve tried to make it as clear as possible.
I’m Great Coursin’ my way through Martin Luther and this was definitely something he struggled with (John Bunyun, too). It pops up a lot less if you’re not into predestination, but Arminians came later. American evangelicals tend towards Arminianism, where we are given a choice.
That said, I tend to think that worriers are going to worry regardless of their religious background. As Dr. Dealgood pointed out, even full-on materialists can always worry about their inevitable demise.
In the Southern Baptist tradition I spent most of my childhood in, we were taught that we have to accept Jesus and sincerely repent, with honest intention never to do those things again (but accepting that failure is a possibility), AND doing this as “fire insurance” against going to Hell made it not count. So, if you were just afraid of going to Hell and that’s why you obeyed, then you’d be damned to Hell anyway because you were acting out of self-interest and not pure gratitude and love, and you deserved Hell for cheating and trying to “trick” God into letting you into Heaven.
I don’t know if that’s a common view in that denomination or if that was just the circles my family ran in. In any case, I hated it because I realized I was screwed either way; I couldn’t force myself to be the person I supposedly had to be not to be punished for eternity. Believing, maybe (obviously if I didn’t at least sort-of believe I wouldn’t be scared, right?); obedience, I could manage that; but pure and selfless motives, no.
I deal with this now by telling myself it’s probably BS anyway, the specifics of religions don’t fit my worldview despite them FEELING possible. And then distracting my brain with other thoughts. Still bothers me from time to time.
Does anyone go to Southern Baptist heaven?
Nope. It’s like Heaven in Only Begotten Daughter, which you can only get to if nobody else thinks you should go to Hell.
Spoiler: There are two people in Heaven, and one of them defects.
That is a very common view in Fundamentalist/Evangelical/primitive Christianity. It wasn’t just them.
Just from the name and the Papyrus in the header, I’d give about 9:1 odds that it’s bullshit.
But that’s not going to be helpful if your friend’s already hooked, of course. From actually reading some of it, I get the impression that the author’s leaning on the Barnum effect: vague symptoms, a long list of similar conditions, etc. all seem designed to be inclusive rather than exclusive. Not a good sign.
I searched Google Scholar for “Religious Trauma Syndrome”, and the only references to it that I found were either from journeyfree.org or clearly pointing to it. No academic papers, and I’m seeing a lot of phrases like “popular press”, which suggests strongly that she hasn’t done any rigorous work on the subject, PhD notwithstanding.
Thanks. It put me in mind of the Barnum Effect as well, but I know I’m biased here.
I’d still appreciate it if somebody here has the ability to check proper psych publications for signs of peer review; I’m way out of my zone of expertise here.
*** Striving for perfect rationality is actually a very bad idea ***
(Well, maybe unless you are Eliezer Yudkowsky)
Thoughts while reading the book The Corruption of Reality by John Schumaker: http://www.amazon.com/The-Corruption-Reality-John-Schumaker/dp/0879759356
Or, to quote another source, *You can’t handle the truth!* The stark reality is dreary, depressing and overwhelming. At the base level “You” are just a transitory collection of quantum fields in a vast uncaring universe. To function in the society we construct a distorted version of reality, a “normally abnormal” representation of it, with cultural memes, imperatives, lies and myths. But the amount of self-deception has to be just right, too much of it, and you get psychotic, psychopathic, depressed or suicidal.
Another quote within a quote: “Effective functioning in everyday life appears to depend upon interrelated positive illusions… that make things appear better than they are.”
And another quote within a quote within a quote : Yeat’s Eugene O’Neill, a man who was “in hell looking out at the world” was “the result of a man who had stripped away every illusion from his mind, only to find there was nothing in the end.”
TL;DR: Don’t overdecompartmentalize, it’s dangerous to your wellbeing.
>But the amount of self-deception has to be just right, too much of it, and [bad stuff]
Isn’t this just a circular argument? The stuff is only bad because it’s considered bad within the self-delusional meme framework of the culture. If you actually manage to shed it, you will also shed its idea of what constitutes “bad stuff”. The eagle is doing “bad stuff” from the perspective of the rabbits it preys on, but the eagle sets its own values.
“To Trin Tragula’s horror, the shock [of having her true proportion to the universe demonstrated] completely annihilated her brain; but to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.”
This may be related to the false(?) belief that you are the same as the rational man sitting in the control room of your brain. There are many programs running in there independently and you certainly don’t know them all. Why can you decide to go on a diet and then need to eat? There’s another program in there that’s stronger than your conscious mind although it doesn’t appear to you that way. Or how you can be talking to your wife and not be able to stop your eyes following that much younger woman walking past you. Trying to pretend that these other programs, which are ancient and deeply irrational, aren’t there or that you can control them is probably a recipe for psychological disaster unless for you’re a very special person. Which Eliezer might be, but you probably aren’t. I know I’m not. I think the most dangerous one for grey tribe types is to try to ignore the dominance hierarchy program and pretend you’re not constantly trying to measure your place in the hierarchy. You can try to redirect that program and how it’s judging your place in the hierarchy, but it is _not_ going away.
“At the base level “You” are just a transitory collection of quantum fields in a vast uncaring universe.”
Uh, quantum fields?
Also other people care, so I don’t see why the universe’s opinion is so important.
From Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality:
Or in Terry Pratchett’s formulation
Amen.
I’m not following. You can’t find redness either by that method.
@Samuel Skinner.
Yes you can.
“Red” is a specific wavelength of em radiation that can be isolated and measured (caught in the sieve). Items that emit or reflect this sort of radiation (but not others) are said to have the property of “redness”.
@ HlynkaCG:
No, this is a conflation of two different things.
If your neurons were switched around so that you had the experience normally associated with high wavelength light as a result of being hit low-wavelength lightwaves, you would see blue, not red.
This is just like the “If a tree falls in the forest with no one around to hear it, does it make a sound?” debate. Yes, it vibrates the air. But if “sound” is the experience encountered by air waves impressing themselves on the eardrum, then no, it does not make a sound.
You can, of course, choose to define sound as the vibration itself and color as the wavelength of light itself. But that’s not really the common use.
Edit: moved this reply to its proper location, after he moved his original comment.
If this was true, CMYK coloring would not work, and the color-rendering characteristics of LED lighting would be much worse.
There is a relationship between wavelength and perceived color, but it’s a lot more complicated than one-to-one.
@Vox,
Only if you go the post modernist route and argue that all truth is subjective.
@Nornagest,
How does CMYK printing disprove this?
CMYK — or any color model, really, I just chose CMYK because it doesn’t include a red — works because a combination of intense colors gets interpolated in our perceptual color space to some point in between. This works even if the actual emission spectrum is very spiky: our eyes are happy to interpret a combination of cyan and yellow as green whether or not anything near “pure” green is being emitted by the media.
@ hylnkacg:
Nonsense. You are laboring under a serious misunderstanding here.
I am not arguing that “all truth is subjective”. No truth is subjective. “Subjective truth” is a meaningless term.
But experience is an ontologically subjective phenomenon. That is, it is had by separate individuals in different ways. This is an objective fact about experience.
When a normal-sighted man and a color-blind man both look at the same object, and one says that it appears red to him, and the other says that it appears grey to him, they are not (properly) disagreeing on the truth about the color of the object. That would be stupid. The color of the object is the product of two things: a) the intrinsic properties of the object (the wavelengths of light it reflects) and b) the properties of their mode of perception.
The two men are not disagreeing on what wavelengths of light it reflects. They are indicating that their experiences are different, which is true because their modes of perception are different. As an objective fact, independent of what anyone thinks or wants, the same object appears red for one and grey for the other.
One of the two is not “right” and the other “wrong”. They are both right: the object really objectively does appear red to one and really objectively does appear grey to the other.
The only way that the two could be in disagreement about the truth is if they accept the premise that color is a product solely of the intrinsic properties of the object. But it obviously is not.
Now you can talk about the intrinsic properties of the object: that is what you’re doing when you talk about wavelengths. But when you talk about color, you’re talking about how it is experienced. And that differs for different people. That doesn’t mean the truth about color differs among people.
There is one objective truth about color, true “for” everyone: that the experience of color differs among people.
The view you are defending is called “naive realism”. It has a certain appeal because it seems like the alternative is between that and subjectivism. But this is not the case, though it is a very common misunderstanding.
Nornagest‘s point about CMYX is that—using only certain objective wavelengths in combination at very small scale—it is possible to produce the experience of a wide gamut of colors. This process of printing exploits certain contingent facts about human biology. To an alien that perceived color differently, it wouldn’t work.
@Nornagest
I don’t follow.
Saying that a combination of wavelengths generates a spike in the wavelength typically perceived as “red” would appear to support my assertion not refute it.
@ hlynkacg:
The combination does not generate a “spike” in the wavelength typically perceived as red. That’s not how it works. The combination of other wavelengths produces the same experience as that produced by the single wavelength commonly associated with red.
To make the point simpler, consider the color purple (which is not the same as violet). It is a combination of red and blue. But the wavelength between (those associated with) red and blue is (the one associated with) green. “Purple” is what we experience when our red cones and blue cones are stimulated at the same time; it does not correspond to any particular wavelength of light.
See this video, which has been commonly shared under the title “purple is not a real color”, proving my point that people think the only alternative to naive realism is subjectivism.
Some animals (such as birds) have four types of cones, and they see many more “non-spectral” colors like purple. Such colors are produced when cones that are not “adjacent” on the rainbow are stimulated together. Suppose you had a red cone, a green cone, a blue cone—and a yellow cone. Then there would be a color produced when the blue and yellow were both simulated but not the green cone, or when the green and red cone were stimulated but not the yellow, and so on.
What Vox said.
@ Vox,
You say I am being naïve, but I am not the one who appears to be conflating the map with the territory here.
You say experience is subjective, and animals with different visual organs are going to experience vision differently.
My unfiltered response to this is “Well no shit Sherlock”.
Experience being subjective does not change the fact that the thing we experience as colors are spikes in the EM spectrum just as sounds are vibrations in the air. Purple may not be a “real color”, but if you look at a wall that has been painted red through an optical spectrometer you will see a red “spike”.
From my position it looks like you’re trying to have your cake and eat it too. You want to maintain the belief that you are a creature of science and reason without having to accept the logical implications there of.
@ hlynkacg:
I am not trying to gratuitously insult you. That is a philosophical “term of art”, the technical name for the position. It’s what you can find it under if you want to read about it.
Okay, good. We are in agreement here.
Purple is sure as hell a real color—are you telling me my purple tie is not really purple?—but it’s not a spike in the EM spectrum. So color must be something else.
Color is a form of experience, which is caused by light waves stimulating the retina and producing certain impulses in the brain. Color is not “spikes in the EM spectrum”.
Yes, color is an experience of reality. But the form of the experience in your mind is not the same as the intrinsic form of the object in the external world. The view that these two are the same is “naive realism”. And this is a view that has been defended by respectable thinkers, including Aristotle.
He looked at things like the fact that, when you see a red object, the redness can be seen reflected in your eyes. So he supposed that the way perception works is that the intrinsic “redness” in things turns your eyes red—and therefore the redness in your eye has the same form as the redness in the object. This is not so, but it’s not crazy.
In fact, it is just impossible and senseless to talk about what an object “looks like” independently of some specific means of perceiving it. That doesn’t mean that, when we look at things, we’re not really looking at the object but only at a subjective illusion. (However, the idea that it does is the basis of Immanuel Kant’s whole philosophy.)
You’re going to have to explain this one. I don’t see it.
In general, I think people—including many defenders of reason and science—have a tendency to lapse into naive realism. They think that we perceive the intrinsic form of things, rather than the objective form which is a product both of the intrinsic form and our means of perception.
But I consistently reject this. For instance, even with something like extension, there is no certain indication that this is an intrinsic property of things “in themselves”. Quite possibly, extension is merely the way the intrinsic properties of things are perceived by the human type of mind, and that aliens might be out there who have no more notion of “length” or “width” than blind men have of “blue”.
That doesn’t mean length and width are “not real”.
Let’s all go read the SEP entry on color (if you’re not familiar with the philosophical landscape of the issue) and then continue the discussion.
It occurs to me that when people see colors in dreams, it’s not a matter of an *external* EM pulse.
I think it’s instructive to think about things from the perspective of a rock. It doesn’t really make sense to talk about time, if you are a rock. It doesn’t make sense to talk about anything. From the perspective of humans we might be whizzing around, doing things, but from my perspective there is nothing – there is no time, nothing ever started, and if it had, it would have already finished.
And, if you think its silly to think about being a rock – well, its also silly to not notice that the universe is contained within our minds.
(That’s not to say that there isn’t an underlying structure to reality (objective facts) – it’s just to say that these have *no meaning* unless combined with perception and they are not themselves perception.
[Or perhaps I should say that we derive meaning by linking together bits of perception, so it doesn’t make sense to talk about meaning without perception]
Edit:
Actually, doesn’t this cause quite a big problem? If the universe would have instantly ended without someone to perceive it – if time only exists with consciousness – how did we manage to emerge from unconscious material? It just shouldn’t have existed.
@Mark:
That is a very “dualist” point of view, that somehow our perception of the universe is divorced form the universe. I don’t subscribe to it, for pretty much the reason you bring up in your edit.
The more we learn, the more and more clear it becomes that our perception of the universe arises from the universe. The idea that each of us have some ideal, indvisible mind, divorced from the universe just isn’t born out by what we learn about how people and minds actually work.
This is why I think Vox is “all wet” in this argument. He is arguing that since we can’t know for sure what the experience of red feels like in someone else, that it very well may be different from person to person, so it’s not in any sense universal. More charitable though, color perception arises from facts about the universe, including how our brains are put together.
Hmmmm… I think some form of dualism is necessary unless you believe that either (1) relations without content have meaning or (2) the specific details of reality are an inevitable consequence of the structure of minds.
I think that if you downplay the importance of perception, you are really saying something like (1).
I would say that the basic structure of reality, the relations that can exist (for us), are determined by the kind of perceptions we can have. I would also say that the specific details of those relations are imposed upon us by some external reality.
So, there are two types of things, our perceptions, which provide the content to the relations that make up reality, and the whatever-it-is that determines which specific relations we perceive.
@Mark:
Let me ask a clarifying question.
Are you rejecting materialism?
@HeelBearClub
I think I reject it, though, to be honest, the position makes so little sense to me, I may just be misunderstanding it.
Firstly, if we are saying that a physical dog *is* the thing that I have in my mind when I see a dog, that a dog = my mental image of a dog, to me, this is not materialism, but idealism.
Secondly, if we are saying that the representation of a dog in my mind must be entirely determined by external reality – that the sensory organs, mental machinery, play no part in creating the representation, then I just think that it is clearly wrong.
Thirdly, if we are saying that we can talk sensibly about things that have no basis in perception – we can just *forget* the perceiver and take a rock’s eye view of the world – then I feel that this is probably wrong.
On the other hand, if we are taking about basic, common sense materialism, as in – there is an external world with physical objects, then I accept it (though I feel that this is more of a religious position than anything else).
(Basically, Kant was the furthest I got with philosophy, and I haven’t yet been able to understand the criticisms of his metaphysics. Seems to me people took against him because he claimed that the world would have to be structured along the lines of Euclidean geometry, since he believed this was the only form of space comprehensible to the mind, and then the discovery of non-Euclidean geometry made that seem a bit silly. I don’t think that really undermines his more general points, though.)
@ HeelBearCub:
I agree with everything you said in that paragraph (except maybe the mind being divisible; it depends on what sense you mean). I don’t know why you think I don’t. I think the mind is a natural part of the universe, and that our perception of the universe is caused by the universe.
The reason you experience “red” the way you do involves the fact that your eyes are built a certain way, and that your neurons are arranged a certain way. If they’re arranged one way, they cause one mental state; another way, they cause another mental state.
Switching the hookups of the red cones and blue cones is not a mental change; it’s a physical change. So even a materialist should be on board with that possibility. Now, where I of course disagree with the materialists is in the supposition that an experience of redness is a material object or can be “reduced to”.
“Caused by” is not the same as “reduced to”. “Caused by” means: these are two different sorts of things, (lightwaves, cones, and neurons vs. redness) one of which causes the other. “Reduced to” means: redness is actually the same sort of thing as lightwaves, cones, and neurons. The second one I do not find at all plausible.
I am not saying that the experience of redness could differ from person to person for no reason. If it differs, it’s because of some cause. And the examples I gave were of physical causes.
I suspect that you are imagining that I have some kind of naive dualist position where the mind is some thing all off on its own and uninfluenced by the universe, yet which somehow is aware of the universe. Well, I don’t think that. The mind is aware of the external material universe because the universe causally impinges on the mind. And our external actions (such as the motion of my fingers to type words on a keyboard) reflect mental content because the mind also causally impinges on the external material world.
But the error of someone like Descartes is to set up mind and body as absolutely separate substances which could never possibly interact—and then trying to explain how they interact. But I think they do interact and that there’s no religious mystery to it, though I do not claim to be aware of the mechanism.
@ Mark:
Here’s the basic problem with Kant: to say that we perceive the universe only in the way that we happen to perceive it, does not mean that we don’t perceive it “as it really is”. Our specific mode of perception is our means of perceiving it as it really is, and it is just as valid as every other means of perception.
To imagine how the universe would appear to a rock doesn’t make sense because a rock is not conscious, does not perceive the universe, and so the universe does not appear to it.
So to argue that time is a subjective aspect of perception because rocks don’t experience it is fallacious. They don’t experience it, but it affects them all the same.
Now the grain of truth that Kantianisn is trying to get at is that, for example, it appears to us that rocks are solid, immobile things. But it turns out that the atoms that make up rocks are a jittering mass. That doesn’t mean rocks aren’t “real”; it means they are reducible to something more basic, which causes us to perceive it these things as a rocks.
If there were a species with a consciousness capable of direct perception of atoms, atoms would seem as obvious to them as rocks are to us, but it would take a genius of theoretical physics among them to conclude that all these atoms form unimaginably massive composite objects like rocks.
@Vox:
No, I don’t think that you are being naive. I think you are being some part uncharitable, some part cantankerous.
In other words, the experience of red by the mind starts with the some facts about a physical wavelength range. Occam suggests that we should then accept that people experience this red in the same way. Yes there are red/green color blind people, and color perception can be monkeyed with by optical illusions, etc. But this is different than saying “There is no fundamental red at all.” Red arises from a fundamental fact of the universe, which is that the light has wavelike properties.
You clearly have a great deal of philosophical education. I’m not sure if you were a philosophy major or not. In any case, I sometimes wonder whether experts in fields can win arguments on technicalities in ways that obscure rather than illuminate.
@Mark:
If you don’t know whether you think “mind” is some separate thing that does not arise from “brain”, you might gain some insights by thinking about it or doing some of your own research. For me, the fact that various different brain injuries have fairly predictable affects on the mind seem like very strong evidence that mind and brain are not separate.
I don’t think ancient/older philosophy, writ large, is actually terribly helpful in this regard, but I know I am not familiar with all the arguments. There is a two or three thousand year old thumb on the scale in philosophy that just can’t conceive of a mind that arises from the body, rather than controlling it. But the major advances in science that illuminate how brain gives rise to mind are only very recent.
“Red arises from a fundamental fact of the universe, which is that the light has wavelike properties.”
That’s the first approximation, but as I think Vox has been arguing, it’s only that. The subjective experience of seeing red can result from light of a frequency within a particular range falling on the retina. But it can also result from a mixture of frequencies none of which are in that range falling on the retina, due to complicated image processing by the brain of the data coming from the retina. Since both of those are the experience we call red, the wave nature of light isn’t a sufficient explanation of what that means.
@David Friedman:
No, the light mixing that leads to a perception of red is further evidence for the fundamentally physically bound characteristics of red.
Now, there are other species that don’t perceive red, or don’t perceive it in the same way. An alien that lands on the planet may not perceive colors at all, or the way they perceive colors may be very different, involving completely different breaks in the spectrum and might perceive a broader, narrower, or different range of frequencies.
But that is a really different ways of arguing against the idea of “fundamental red” than the way Vox has, which is emphasizing the mere fact that “I” perceive it which may be different than the way “you” perceive it. He seems to be treating the mind more as black box.
If one says that we can’t know which exact humans share our fundamental perception of redness, I would probably agree with it. Or, if one were to argue that because red is essentially an arbitrary discrete model of what is an actual continuous spectrum, this would also seem a better argument to me.
@HeelBearCub:
I am fairly sure that if I get a mirror, cut a hole in the side of my head, and stick some wires in my brain it is going to have some effect on my perceptions.
I think if I were a substance dualist, I would say that the mind is made up of a fundamentally different thing to the brain. What I would actually say is that when I see the relationship between jabbing my brain and my perceptions, the two things involved in that relationship are both my perceptions (I perceive myself jabbing my brain, then I perceive myself dying). The content of thought/our reality is perception, and the question of what something might be fundamentally made of *outside* of our reality is really quite meaningless (or at least meaningless as a scientific question – if it gives us pleasure to say that we are living in God’s dreams, that’s an entirely different matter.)
(It is fairly clear to me that there is some kind of outside reality imposing perceptions upon me, so in that sense I think there might be a kind of dualism – there is something that determines the perceptions I have, and then there are the perceptions, but I don’t think that the thing causing the perceptions is actually something that can be inquired into, at least not with the scientific method.)
@Vox
“Here’s the basic problem with Kant: to say that we perceive the universe only in the way that we happen to perceive it, does not mean that we don’t perceive it “as it really is”. Our specific mode of perception is our means of perceiving it as it really is, and it is just as valid as every other means of perception.”
I don’t really understand this. On what basis are we determining what something really is?
@Mark:
I’m not sure whether what I am saying is helpful or not to you, but I will soldier on. Messing with the brain doesn’t merely change your perceptions, as near as we can tell it changes who “you” are. This feels like it is substantially different than what you were driving at.
What you think is good and evil, what you like and dislike, what you do and don’t do, what you love and hate , all is determined by your brain and can be altered by altering your brain. There is no “you” that isn’t your brain.
This doesn’t mean that “you” don’t exist, but the you that exists isn’t really all that much different from the rock, in the grand scheme of things. You are a collection of matter with certain properties.
@ HeelBearCub:
Honestly, I am confused as to exactly what you are trying to argue. So I’m sorry if I’m misinterpreting you, but I don’t understand you completely.
Yes, I think the experience of redness is caused by lightwaves bombarding the retina. And yes, Occam’s Razor suggests that if there is no reason to think otherwise, other people perceive red in the same way as I do. I don’t know why you think I don’t think that…
I surely agree that redness is a real phenomenon. But when you try to argue that there is “fundamental red”, I don’t understand you. Because you just said it “arises from” something else (a point on which I agree). Therefore, it is not fundamental. Whatever is fundamental, is the basic layer that can’t be traced back any further.
Yes, I was a philosophy major. And I completely agree that far too much of philosophy gets focused on meaningless verbal arguments. I am not trying to “win on a technicality” here.
Do you think I don’t believe that the experience of redness is caused by a physical process?
If it’s even possible that one person could perceive an object as red and other perceive it as grey or blue, then that proves redness is not an intrinsic or fundamental property of things. Maybe I am misinterpreting you, but I feel like you think I’m saying, “Ah, but how do we know we all don’t perceive colors differently?” No, it doesn’t matter if no one were colorblind and everyone perceived colors identically. If it’s even possible that it could be otherwise, then that is enough to show color is not intrinsic.
And again, as I said in my very first post on this topic, there are two very different things that we could be talking about when we’re talking about “red”. One is the “dispositional properties” of the object: i.e. a “red” object has certain properties such that, combined with my sensory apparatus, it will produce the sensation of “redness” in me. The other is the actual experience itself: “redness” is not a physical thing; it is a mental state that is caused by the lightwaves interacting with my sensory apparatus.
The virtually unreadable SEP article on color Urstoff linked is devoted to nitpicking several different positions on the question of whether objects properly “have” colors. It is a great example of a senseless verbal debate. But the view I hold is what it terms “color dispositionalism”, the view held by almost all the early modern philosophers like Descartes and Locke. (Honestly, I am not very familiar with the myriad of other views. In my opinion, they are not really substantially different on the facts; they just want to use terminology in a different way.)
To quote the article:
As Descartes explains his view:
@ Mark:
On the basis of its being the object of perception. The Kantian perspective is that the mind does not perceive reality; it creates reality. That’s why there is a “phenomenal world” you create and a “noumenal world” that is “reality as it really is”.
Or, as an example of something that is not real, take The Lord of the Rings. It’s real in some sense; it’s a real example of a fictional story. But it does not purport to describe reality; rather, it is a subjective creation of Tolkien.
@Vox:
It’s your appeal back to various philosophers who had no conception of how the brain actually works, (and how it is similar to other mammals, and that those mammals were inheriting traits from pre-mammalian dinsosaurs, etc.) that feels like it is confusing things. You seem to be appealing to dualist philosophers in your argument. For example, you end your response to me by quoting Descartes who argues for a mind vs. body distinction.
Conversely, if you aren’t arguing for dualism, I think could take your arguments to mean that there isn’t even such a fundamental thing as “matter”. There is only the zero-point field and we are all just an uncertain quantum fluctuation. (My tongue is in my cheek here, I hope you realize.)
The fact that you can influence the mind by influencing the brain does not prove materialism. This sort of influence is exactly what we should expect on the theory that the mind interacts with the brain.
Imagine an astronaut in a spaceship. If we break the oxygen recycling system or open the airlock, that’s going to affect the astronaut. And the same goes if we wipe the databanks or put drugs in the water. But that doesn’t mean the astronaut and the spaceship are the same thing. This is just an analogy, of course; there are differences between the astronaut-spaceship relation and the mind-body relation.
If the mind and the brain are mutually dependent on one another, then we ought to expect that if you damage the brain, you can damage the mind. Now this might discredit (or at least cause serious problems for) such views as the immortal soul or the idea that e.g. autistic people have a normal person “locked inside”. But those aren’t my views.
I think dualism is true despite its association with religion, which has tried to link it with some silly and implausible views. The best take on this I’ve seen is Bryan Caplan’s essay, which I’ve linked before but really recommend.
The obvious difference between you and the rock is that you are conscious and the rock isn’t. The rock has only physical properties; you also have mental properties.
I don’t think materialism is a sensible and potentially plausible theory but which I reject on some kind of doctrinal grounds. I think it doesn’t make any damn sense at all! That’s why I find the materialism debate rather frustrating; it’s like arguing with someone who believes in square circles.
If you want to endorse epiphenomenalism—that only matter, not mind, is causally efficacious—that’s completely implausible to me, but at least I can make sense of it. The epiphenomenalist says: “love is just the result of glands squirting in the brain; there’s nothing deeper to it.” But the reductive or eliminative materialist says “love just is the squirting of glands in the brain.” And I say: okay, maybe I have to debate you on the evidence for the first one, but the second is just ridiculous!
Obviously, love is not an external, physical phenomenon like the squirting of juices in the brain. It is an internal experience. And the properties of the two couldn’t be more different: the glands are visible, have a certain weight, are located in space, don’t exist “for” anyone in particular. While the experience of love is not something you can see (you can see external physical correlates of love like flushed cheeks, but that’s not, of course, the same thing), it doesn’t have a weight, it’s not spatially located, and only I can have my own experience. If it doesn’t look like a duck, swim like a duck, or quack like a duck, then it’s probably not a duck.
Now, the eliminativist is refuted on those grounds, but the reductionist says “Oh, of course they’re not the same. The glands are one ‘level’ of analysis and the experience is another ‘level’, but they’re both the same material thing.” And I say: what the hell are “levels”, if not something that exists in the mind? Which are in fact a means the mind uses of understanding the physical world? So if the experience of love is a “level”, then ipso facto it’s a mental thing.
And obviously the mind itself cannot be a “level of analysis”. Analysis by whom of what? If minds were “levels”, there would be no really existing minds for any of the “levels” to exist in. In other words, reductivism cannot explain mental phenomena at all; it just sneaks them in by various means while denying that it is doing it. This is what Ayn Rand called the “fallacy of the stolen concept”: accepting some derivative concept while denying the fundamental concept upon which it rests.
Another way to put it is like this: just how is this “reduction” supposed to work? If you start only with premises about physical facts and physical laws, you will only get physical conclusions. You’re not going to get any mental conclusions (even on the level of “the mind exists”) unless you snuck a mental premise in there somewhere.
I feel like the whole motivation behind materialism is the following “argument”:
“In barbarous times, people attributed mentality to all sorts of natural phenomena. For instance, they thought lightning came down at the will of angry gods, or that the forces responsible for the harvest could be appeased by sacrifice. They thought everything happened for some conscious purpose, such as the stars revolving in order to be more like the Prime Mover. But science always advanced when brave men showed that mentality was not present in these things; humanity had been anthropomorphizing the universe. Now, the Final Frontier will come when humanity stops anthropomorphizing itself and accepts that people don’t have minds, either.
@ HeelBearCub:
The dispositional theory of color is by no means reliant upon dualism. In fact, as the article points out, the theory was propounded precisely by those who tended to be more “scientific”, including materialists like Hobbes.
If you think that experiences of color are mental, but that the mental reduces to the physical, there is no problem for you in embracing a dispositional theory of color. That is, that to say an object is “red” is to say it has properties which are disposed to induce a certain kind of experience in a certain kind of person. Now, I don’t know what the hell a “physical experience” would be, but that’s the materialists’ problem.
On the other hand, if you think that experiences of color don’t exist; that they are a myth or something, that there is no such thing as the experience of redness, I don’t know what to tell you. That would be very silly.
@Vox:
“I think it doesn’t make any damn sense at all!”
I think that is where we part ways. I honestly am not sure why you were confused by my objections, as I accurately diagnosed that you were subscribing to dualism and making explicitly dualistic arguments. Frankly, that the idea that there must be some extra-material consciousness that floats out there somehow, somehow tethered to the body, completely and utterly unperceivable, is the only one that makes any sense to you seems odd to me.
I understand the appeal of dualism, but I don’t find it to be supported. That you can’t conceive of materialism being correct seems to me to ignore the last 100 years or so of scientific and medical progress.
“The dispositional theory of color is by no means reliant upon dualism.”
As I said, I found your arguments to be sort-of uncharitable and sort-of cantankerous. In other words, you were arguing from a dualistic perspective, when the proper counter argument was for what you are here referring to as “dispositional color theory”. You weren’t really engaging with the other side.
@ HeelBearCub:
I think the uncharitablility here is on you. Nothing I said about color in any way relies upon dualism. I wasn’t even thinking about it until you brought it up. If you think the mind is a material thing and that the experience of redness is a material thing, then you are free to accept the dispositional color theory.
That was my confusion earlier: I was confused about why you even brought up the issue of dualism.
I don’t think it is “utterly unperceivable”. You perceive it in every waking (and dreaming) moment. The fact that consciousness, which we all perceive, is inexplicable on a materialist framework is the argument for dualism.
None of the scientific and medical progress in any way refutes dualism. That would be impossible, since science and medicine are bodies of theory and observations, which are done by minds.
The arrow of causation is not “scientific facts imply materialism” -> “scientists are materialists”. It is “scientists are materialists” -> “they interpret facts in a materialistic way”.
Anyway, I can’t argue against a simple dismissal, which is what you are providing.
@Vox:
Are not arguing that consciousness isn’t real. I’m arguing that arises from material facts and is not separate from them. I honestly can’t tell if you are disagreeing with that.
In your second post in this sub-thread, you said:
“But experience is an ontologically subjective phenomenon. That is, it is had by separate individuals in different ways. This is an objective fact about experience.”
I, perhaps, took this to mean something stronger/different than you meant by it, but that is how I thought you were bringing dualism in. Again, this might go to to the fact that you were a philosophy major, and that I was not. Not sure.
Say we have a computer optical sensor and we program it to respond in a certain way for the light wavelengths between 620–750 nm. Then we manufacture billions of these sensors. Yeah, there will be some slop around the edges of the measured wavelengths, and different uses of those optical sensors will result in different actions when the sensor registers, and many things will lack that particular sensor, but there is no magic that happens when there is a “consciousness” that perceives the the output of that sensor. It’s just the output of the sensor.
@ HeelBearCub:
“Arises from” is vague. It can mean “caused by” or it can mean “is the same thing as”. I think the manner in which consciousness “arises from” material facts, under materialism, is considerably more “mysterious” than the picture under dualism.
Suppose I rewired your brain so that the hookups of the red cones and blue cones were reversed. That is, the lightwaves that stimulate the red cones go down the pathways that used to be connected to the blue cones.
Do you think your experience of color would be the same or different?
You would still be as good at discriminating hues of light on the spectrum. It’s just that your experience of red and blue would be inverted. Or at least, I don’t see why it wouldn’t be.
Now, a material experience of redness or blueness doesn’t make sense to me. But as long as you don’t think the experience of redness or blueness implies dualism in itself, this experiment shouldn’t bother you.
Moreover, the “magic” (of course that’s your disparaging term, not mine) when a consciousness is hooked up to the sensor is that someone is aware of the sensor, its output has a meaning, and it imparts knowledge. When it’s just a sensor it’s a hunk of metal that beeps; it doesn’t experience color. Unless you think spectrometers have minds.
@Vox:
I think you may be “hearing” a tone in my posts that I am not intending to put there. The word magic wasn’t meant to be disparaging, or be read as exasperated or insulting. It seems like that’s how it came across, which was not my intent.
Clearly we are creatures that are conscious. I just think that the consciousness is emergent. Frogs are (probably) conscious, but less than dogs, who are less conscious than chimps who are less conscious than we are. We, as a species, have spent a great deal of time being wrong about a great many things because we thought we were special, different, and completely unlike all of the various beasts.
So, the experiment you speak of, wherein we manage to cross wire the cones that detect various colors does not bother me, and clearly that would screw with what we perceive. Put us in a red room and we would perceive it as blue. Put another way, this is simply proof that perception and reality are not the same thing.
But this is different than saying that the perception of red is normally some unique thing, different from individual to individual. And again, I have no issue with saying that there isn’t any true universal “red” in the sense that our perception of red is really just a fairly arbitrary selection of a range of wavelengths. But for those of who do perceive those wavelengths as red, there is a true commonality to the perception.
All of these individuals are getting the same inputs fed into them in the same way and they are all processed in the same way. And sure, at some point you can say every individual is unique, but I don’t think was really what was being gotten at.
@ HBC and Vox,
You seem to be talking past each other. If I may paraphrase:
— Dualists think that minds are objects made of something-like-matter-but-different, some sort of ‘mind-stuff’ — but that’s silly!
— Materialists think that minds don’t exist — but that’s silly!
(I blame metaphysics.)
How about this?
1. Minds and experiences do exist, in a certain sense, but they are not made of soulonium.
2. The word “red” usually refers to the way certain objects look to a typical, non-color-blind person. It can be a wall painted red, but also e.g., a poster covered in magenta and yellow dots, viewed from a distance.
3. The experience of redness cannot be captured by physical instruments, but the corresponding physical phenomenon — patterns of neural activity — can be (at least in principle, even if no one’s built a brain-scanning qualia-meter yet).
@Nita:
I know I am not understanding something about his position, that’s why I have been trying to get him to clarify why he went with what seemed liked dualist arguments to me.
It’s not clear to me whether he thinks consciousness emerges from the physical, or exists alongside it.
The statement “The experience of redness cannot be captured by physical instruments” is perhaps both obfuscating and revealing.
Assuming a few things (the brain state of experiencing redness is physical and can be measured, we can find the corresponding neurons in another brain and excite them, or build a simulation so detailed that it re-experiences the sensation) then saying that “the experience of recess cannot be captured” seems like question begging.
But, from a Goedelian perspective, we can’t know how any one else truly experiences anything merely because we are self-describing systems. We can’t truly know the experience of another, because to do so we would have to be them (and therefore not ourself). This makes logical sense, I just think it ignores our shared evolutionary heritage and Occam.
@HeelBearCub
With respect to the current discussion I won’t disagree that every aspect of me is determined by my brain (though I would take issue with your view that a person is not significantly different to a rock; you either have a very high opinion of rocks, or a rather low opinion of humans.)
All I really wish to say is that it is better to explicitly state that we always engage with reality from a human perspective – that it doesn’t make sense to talk of a reality beyond this perspective, any more than it makes sense to think about time from the perspective of a rock.
I feel like materialists might actually have a tendency to anthropomorphise the universe, by claiming that our perspectives might exist in some way beyond us, which is quite an embarrassing mistake when you claim not to believe in God.
@Mark:
I don’t disagree with any of that. My comment about the rock was only in regards to non-materialistic dualism. But I agree that it’s wrong to anthropomorphize the universe.
@ HeelBearCub:
“Emergent” is a buzzword.
Take a composite object like a rock. I agree that it is “emergent”. But what does that mean? It means that intrinsically, apart from its being perceived by some mind, there is no “rockness” to it. It is just a pile of atoms. The “layer” of analysis in which we see it as a rock exists in the mind.
Now, if the mind is “emergent” in the same way, that means the mind does not exist apart from the mind. But that implies it doesn’t exist at all! To say that rocks, as such, exist in the mind, relies on the fact that the mind is real thing in which they exist. But I don’t know how to interpret the statement that minds themselves exist only in the mind.
Well, yes. Rather, it proves that color is not an intrinsic property of objects; it depends on the nature of our sensory apparatus.
And note that if this experiment were done to you from birth, you would call blue “red”, since “red” is ultimately defined by pointing to examples of red objects. And neither you nor anyone else would ever figure this out by external observation.
Sure! I absolutely agree that those of us who perceive these wavelengths as red have something in common. What in the world makes you think I disagree? You keep arguing this, but I agree with you! I am just curious as to what makes you interpret me this way.
I am not arguing that the experience of redness that I have is not similar or perhaps even exactly the same as the experience as the experience of red you have. Unless I had a reason to think otherwise, I’d say they are the same. Occam’s Razor.
It wasn’t what I was getting at…
@ Nita:
I do think that souls are “made of soulonium”. That is exactly what I mean by being a dualist. I don’t see how experiences in my mind could be made of atoms. Caused by, sure. Made of, no. They are just entirely different kinds of things.
Also, on the question of whether materialists deny the mind. Eliminative materialists do. Reductive materialists do not. But my argument is that their metaphysical principles imply the non-existence of the mind, and their explanations of “emergence” are nonsensical.
@ HeelBearCub:
I think it exists alongside it, but that it might very well be produced by the physical, in an analogous way to how a generator produces an electric current.
Birds have four cones and perceive colors in a way fundamentally different from us. If you built a perfect simulation of a bird, would you be able to experience those colors? I think not.
Part of the problem is the (quesiton-begging) assumption that the brain is a closed physical system. If it is, then it is possible to simulate it using only physical matter. If it is not, then any simulation would either be an imperfect approximation or would itself have an immaterial mind with which it interacts.
I mean, do you grant the difference between an actual conscious bird and a machine that looks very much like a bird and can react to color stimuli the same way? I am not arguing a “p-zombie bird” in the technical sense, since—if interactionist dualism is true—a true “p-zombie” is metaphysically impossible. I am arguing that there are two kinds of facts: the facts about the bird responds to external stimuli, and the facts about the real mental experiences of the bird. If you don’t deny the existence of mental experiences, you have to grant the latter. But I don’t see how they can be physical.
This is irrelevant / just weird.
For a counter-example: do you think telepathy is metaphysically impossible in principle? I don’t think it actually exists, but it makes perfect sense to me to imagine “reading someone’s mind” and experiencing his experiences.
Yes, in a nitpicking sense, they would be your experiences, but they would be exactly like his experiences. So I can imagine knowing what it is like to be, say, Adolf Hitler, perfectly well. It’s just that there is no material machine I can build to give me this knowledge. Even if I pick apart his brain and find out exactly what makes him tick, I still won’t know.
@Vox:
This is not helpful.
I think in another context you would say this is nonsense. There is a reality about how the matter is arranged that leads to a conscious mind being willing to lump similar things together under the heading “rock”. Yes, there is a certain amount of arbitrariness to it and some of what is happening is specific to a place and time in the universe, but it’s just not the case that “rock” is some subjective figment. To say that there is no “rockness” is the kind of sort-of uncharitable, sort-of cantankerous style I was pointing out before.
But only a mad scientist or trickster god would do this (or even could do this). The evolution of our minds that led to us perceiving red precludes this from occurring. Only in the case where perceiving the color red stopped being advantageous could the offshoot of humanity that lived under these conditions re-purpose our “red perception” as something else.
I actually don’t think this is likely to be true. Much as with re-green color blindness, blue-red perception switch would likely be detectable. Certainly if it occurred as more than a bizarre one-off.
Because you point at things like “And neither you nor anyone else would ever figure this out by external observation.”? It seems like you are arguing for assigning a low probability to the idea that peoples perceptions are as our own.
@ HeelBearCub:
Yes, there are intrinsic facts that dispose us, as beings with the kind of minds we have, to view these things as rocks. And this is not epistemically subjective: if you choose to believe that a rock is a ball of cotton candy, it will still break your window.
For that matter, “rockness” is really the same as color. That was one of my points: that even the phenomenon of extension itself may not be a necessary feature of all experience. Or maybe it is, but at this point in our physical knowledge we don’t know.
In either case, if you choose to believe red is blue, it’s still red. The experience exists in the mind, but this is an objective fact.
How would it be detectable? I mean, if you went and cut up the eyes to see they were wired up differently, yes. (Not that we have a complete understanding of the visual system.) But that’s not what I meant by “external observation”; sorry if that was confusing.
Red-green color blindness is detectable because the colorblind people cannot distinguish between certain colors that others can distinguish. But red-blue inversion would not be detectable in such a way. They would pass every test.
Oh my God, aaaahhhhh! Why do you keep saying this?!
I don’t believe that anyone has red-blue inversion on the basis of Occam Razor: I have no reason to think they do.
It’s the same reason I don’t think that God planted fossils and aged them in order to make it appear the world is not 6000 years old. This would be indistinguishable from the present, except that it adds a lot of complication and I have no reason to accept it.
@Vox (continued):
If I built the “machine” out of biological parts (muscles, neurons, etc., etc., etc.) then no, I don’t grant the difference. But as you said, perhaps this is question begging. I grant that “things which are conscious” and “things which are not conscious” are different that we “things which are not conscious” an be said not to have any experience of the world.
But as we move from amoeba to human, through all the intervening complexity, I don’t think there is any bright line that separates “conscious” from “not”.
In order to really, truly experience exactly what it would be like to “be John Malkovitch” you wouldn’t be able to experience what it is like to “be John Cusack being John Mlakovitch” because John Malkovitch doesn’t experience being “John Cusack”.
It’s a logical circularity that isn’t particularly useful to this discussion.
@Vox:
“How would it be detectable?”
Well, as an example, I think it’s possible some color TV sets wouldn’t work, would look really weird to these people. Or if not that specific thing, other things like it. Our brains are wired up so that when we see red, it actually really is reacting to red.
“Oh my God, aaaahhhhh! Why do you keep saying this?!”
Because we are failing to communicate? I have already admitted that color is a subjective experience, so I’m not sure why you keep bringing up one-off examples?
I think we are discussing dualism at this point, rather than whether color is subjective or not.
@ HeelBearCub:
Maybe I wasn’t clear. The point with the bird and the superficially similar robot replica is not that one is biological and the other mechanical. The point is that one actually experiences colors, while the other simply reacts to stimuli as if it did.
This discussion is frustrating because I am trying to name something that is incredibly obvious—one of the two most obvious things, along with the material world—but you are not accepting it. And you keep wanting to talk about something else which is not that thing.
Think of it this way: how do you know what “material world” refers to? Ultimately, it’s by ostensive definition: you point to it. “External world”, “material world”, “physical world” and so on are all synonyms. Definitions don’t go back in an infinite regress; they have to start somewhere. You just have to wave your hand around at the world around you and see if the other person “gets it”.
What I am trying to do is “point” to the mind and see if you “get” what I am talking about. If you do “get it”, then I don’t see how you could say such a thing as “I don’t see any bright dividing line between a conscious and an unconscious being.”
Now, if I wanted to play Bishop Berkeley with you, I could simply say: “Material world? What the hell are you talking about? You mean there’s some ‘matter’ that exists when I’m not perceiving it, off in some unobservable plane and entirely disconnected from the mind? No, what you are calling ‘matter’ merely reduces to a set of experiences in my mind. That’s obvious.”
And that’s what you’re doing with me, except in reverse. The fact is that we perceive two kinds of things: external material reality and internal mental reality. You cannot try to derive one from the other. As Descartes’s failed project showed, it is not possible to prove the existence of matter from the existence of the mind (the “prior certainty of consciousness”). And neither is it possible to do it the other way around.
Anyway, I’m not clear whether you’re denying internal mental experience, or saying that it’s really a material thing or “reducible” to such. The latter I find implausible, the former just crazy. You keep saying you believe the mind is reducible, but the statements you are making sound like you just don’t believe in it at all.
Do you believe that it would be metaphysically impossible to build a robot (on the level Data in Star Trek) which is not actually conscious but simply puts on a really good imitation? I don’t. “Punches you in the face when you insult his mother” is completely orthogonal to “feels the emotion of anger”. It is very obvious to me that you could build a machine that simply behaves as if it looks and feels but which has no internal mental experience.
(I want to be clear that I’m not saying “p-zombie” here. That is a very misleading discussion put forward by proponents of property dualism, which is a weird type of epiphenomenalism. It’s not my position.)
Yes, it isn’t useful. Fine, I can’t experience what it is like to really be John Malkovitch, in the petty nitpicking sense. (And I’m granting this, but I’m not sure it’s even true. Couldn’t you wipe my memory and make me think I am John Malkovitch? Then I would know what it is think you are John Malkovitch. Not what it is to think this and actually be right, but I’m not sure there’s a difference in how it feels.)
But that’s not the kind of knowledge I am talking about. There is nothing logically impossible about my reading his mind and feeling the same emotions that he feels. Say he likes black coffee, while I hate it. I don’t know what it is like to enjoy black coffee. However, if I could read his mind, then I would know what it is like to enjoy black coffee.
And this is different from knowing abstractly that some people enjoy black coffee.
@ HeelBearCub:
It would look backwards to them compared to us, but it would be the way they’ve always seen things. They wouldn’t know the difference. Maybe they would have different favorite colors.
They would look at the aliens in a science fiction movie having “blue blood” and think this is very strange, while seeing the color we would describe as crimson.
I mean, we live in a world where people often don’t even know they’re colorblind until they look at one of those tests. If you can come up with a test for this, I would be interested in hearing it. But I can’t think of one.
The point is once you admit color is something different from wavelengths of light, you have the problem of “reducing” it to the material things that make it up. Which is impossible.
I hate to be “uncharitable and cantankerous”, but I’m not sure what you mean when you say “Our brains are wired up so that when we see red, it actually really is reacting to red.” It sounds to me like you’re saying redness is not a subjective experience. If redness is subjective, there is no “actually real” way to perceive it. The red-blue inversion is just as valid a means of perceiving reality.
We’re certainly failing to communicate, that’s for sure.
Clearly, that is where the discussion has moved.
@Vox:
This will be short, but I will come back later.
I fully admit that Descartes solidly established “I think therefore I am”. I admit I could just be a “brain in a box” or a simulation inside a bigger simulation, etc. I admit that my mind is the only thing I can be sure exists.
Where we start to diverge is in what happens tonthese arguments once I start trusting that my sensory data is tied to a material world that actually exists.
@HeelBearCub & Vox Imperatoris
What do you mean by material?
“my sensory data is tied to a material world that actually exists”
If the material world isn’t sense data, isn’t that dualism?
@ HeelBearCub:
But I don’t think that!
I think the existence of the mind is no more evident than the existence of the material world. Descartes’s argument is that, maybe an evil demon can trick you into thinking 2 + 2 = 5, but not even a demon can trick into thinking you’re thinking. But why not? It is just as impossible that 2 + 2 = 5 as “you think you’re thinking, but you’re not actually thinking”.
As I see it, the possibility of knowledge presumes that there is no evil demon (or that you’re not insane, etc.). You can’t prove the non-existence of an evil demon, or that you’re not crazy. It’s just the starting assumption or axiom.
@ Mark:
The material and mental are, in my view, defined ostensively against one another.
@Vox:
Good lord, it’s like wrestling a box of eels.
First you said the existence of the mind was the most self-evident thing ever. Now it could be just a figment created by an evil demon and it isn’t self-evident?
I must be missing something about your argument and/or what it is your are objecting to in mine.
“The material and mental are, in my view, defined ostensively against one another.”
Could you give me an example?
I can understand saying “the mental is the stuff going on in my head” and people either have experience, or they don’t – but if my experience of the external world is a (large) subset of my total experience (the mental) – I’m not sure that there are any examples of the non-mental, except to say something that does not exist for me… or perhaps relations themselves are the “material” while the objects involved in a relation are the “mental”?
@ Vox Imperatoris
I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone claim that experiences are made of atoms. Brains are made of atoms. Minds are a different type of thing, not really “made of” any sort of stuff the way physical objects are.
Do you also have corresponding special substances for various non-mental, non-palpable things? E.g., are complex numbers made of mathium, U.S. Constitutional law of lexene, and phototropism of troponium?
The only special thing about minds is that we are them — no wonder they feel different from everything else! But that’s a fact about us, not about the fundamental ontology of the universe.
@ HeelBearCub:
It is the most self-evident thing ever. That’s why I mean by saying it’s an axiom.
That doesn’t mean you absolutely can’t deny it. That’s just not true of anything. Descartes argues that you can still establish the existence of the mind, even if you deny the efficacy of reason (for which the evil demon is a metaphor). But he was wrong because, if you’re going to throw out reason and hold that maybe 2 + 2 =5, then you could be wrong about actually having a mind, too.
No, what I mean by saying it’s an axiom is that it’s implied by every other item of knowledge and cannot coherently be denied. If someone denies it, you can show him how this denial refutes itself (this is what Aristotle called “reaffirmation through denial”). But if someone just wants to be incoherent and crazy, there’s not much you can say to him.
@ Mark:
See, you’re doing the Bishop Berkeley thing: advocating idealism, or the denial of the material world. How do I know that there is a material world, if all I perceive is experiences in my mind?
This was a development from people like Descartes and Locke, who believed in the “representational theory of perception”, which says that we perceive experiences in our own minds, but that they “represent” or “are similar to” reality. Berkeley just pointed out: how would you know what reality is like to compare them against it?
I think this whole theory is an error. I believe in the theory of “direct realism”, which says that we perceive the external world directly, not experiences in our own mind which “represent” reality. In other words, we perceive objects, and this act is called perception; we don’t perceive perceptions. But we also have the faculty of introspection, to perceive our own mental contents, and there we can also consider our past acts of perception as mental objects.
My theory is essentially the one advocated by David Kelley in The Evidence of the Senses.
@ Nita:
Then if materialism is true, either minds do not exist, or they somehow “reduce” to physical objects. But just how this reduction is possible is the problem: if you have only non-mental facts and non-mental laws on a “fundamental” level, you can’t get a mental conclusion.
I think abstract concepts are mental things “made of” mental substance. I don’t have an opinion on whether they are best thought of as objects “in” the mind or qualities of the mind.
No, I think the special thing about minds is that they have a subjective quality: there is something that is it like to be a mind. The Solar System is a complex, intricate system, but there is nothing that it is like to “be” the Solar System: it just exists without anyone inherently being aware of it. A spectrometer can beep when it detects light of a certain wavelength, but it doesn’t perceive light; it’s not consciously aware of light.
I am not you, but I think there is a difference between you and a robot that pulls off a convincing imitation without having any quality of subjective experience.
To me, that sounds like a fundamental difference.
@Vox:
I think you have already stipulated that you think senses can be co-opted. Your specific example was “switching” the cones which detect red and those which detect blue. Given that you think that some medical intervention could do this, I think you should be willing to admit in principle that the sensory input for red cones could be co-opted and attached to some artificially created sensor. Given that you accept this, you should be willing to accept that the information sent from the sensor could be false. From there, you should be willing to accept that all of your sensory inputs could be co-opted in such a manner.
Given that you accept all of those things, I’m not sure why you are unwilling to accept Descartes brain-in-a-box as a possibility. Or perhaps you are willing to accept, but that you still find the existence of physical matter to also be axiomatic for some reason.
Perhaps, restating Descartes, we could say “I think, therefore something exists” and it would be a more acceptable formulation to you?
@ HeelBearCub:
No, the information sent from the sensor cannot be “false”. All the evidence of the senses is axiomatically veridical.
The only thing you can be mistaken about is your interpretation of the sensory evidence, on the conceptual level. For example, when you put a stick in the water and it looks bent, this is not because your eyes are “fooling” you. Your eyes are reporting perfectly accurate information about reality: namely, the refractive index of water. It’s only the naive interpretation that’s wrong.
David Chalmers has a good articled called “The Matrix as Metaphysics”, where he argues that even if we were actually tapped in the Matrix, it wouldn’t mean that our senses were lying to us or that all or even most of our knowledge was wrong. The only thing we would be wrong about is our interpretation that we live in the “base-level” reality, when we would actually live “one level down” in the Matrix.
Seeing as the Matrix is essentially the same thing as the brain-in-the-vat thought experiment, that’s my view on it as well.
And none of that means the existence of the external world is not axiomatic. The Matrix is still an external world.
My problem with Descartes is not his specific formulation but his method. He tried to doubt everything that can possibly be doubted on any conceivable grounds, and then work from what was left. The problem is that there is nothing left if you do that. He was inconsistent in thinking that there was, and his deductive arguments from those few things to the rest of knowledge are bad.
My approach to axioms is more like: what has to be true in order for knowledge to be possible? But there’s no non-question-begging absolute guarantee that it is possible. You can refute rational arguments for skepticism by showing that they contradict themselves. But you can’t refute the outright rejection of reason as such. All you can do is say: this is the only means of knowledge and survival we’ve got; you can either accept it or not, but there’s no alternative.
Yeah, that inspirational quote doesn’t work for me. Sure, there is no fairness in the material universe. Yes, it is up to humans to care and make the rules. So? B does not follow from A, unless you are making a criticism of the idea of objective universal morality and that is philosophy, not science, dear boy.
As an ego-boost to people who like to think “I love SCIENCE!”, throwing in a bit about the equations of motion probably makes them fist-pump. Yay us! We know the real rules of the universe! We don’t depend on silly religious fairy tales or useless philosophical waffling, we have measurable hard facts! We are the light, we are stardust, we are gooooolden…
Why should I care? What does caring mean? Who makes the rules? What is the best outcome? All that has to be decided, and knowing that the earth goes around the sun rather than the other way round does not get you any further forward on “what is the end of mankind, is it happiness or duty or compassion or tending one’s own garden?”
The quote strikes me the same way as those “You are stardust” posters. Technically correct, but not much damn use to me (I know the iron in my blood comes from the core of an exploded star, thanks) when I’m trying to juggle getting to dental appointments, house work, other work, bills coming due, and do I really want to make a charitable donation this week because frankly I don’t particularly feel like a caring sunbeam in the world, Harry, I’d rather buy too much chocolate with the money and sit at home and sulk while consuming it?
Just for once, Deiseach, can you read a comment about the laws of nature and not assume that they’re saying “Yay science, boo religion”?
You’re pretty much spot-on that this is a question of philosophy, not science, but the author of this quote seems well aware of that fact. The quote flat-out says that science is not going to give you any answers about morality.
But if you’re wondering about the meaning of life, and you don’t have a religion to give you answers, and you’re staring at the laws of physics and wondering why they don’t seem to say anything about fairness or justice or the meaning of life, it can be pretty reassuring to have someone say “Nonetheless, meaning still exists, you just have to create it yourself.”
It’s not a “science, fuck yeah” quote, but it’s a very nice way of summing up existentialist philosophy.
Aegeus, when I get a comment that is about that and that alone, then I will. Unfortunately, the types of people who like to slap up inspirational quotes about “we are the meaning in a meaningless universe” involving technobabble about laws of physics generally do so in a “Fuck yeah I love science” spirit (which would be tolerable on its own) and also with a heaping helping of “Take that, dumb religion!” liberally sprinkled over it.
No, this is a conflation of two different things.
If your neurons were switched around so that you had the experience normally associated with high wavelength light as a result of being hit low-wavelength lightwaves, you would see blue, not red.
This is just like the “If a tree falls in the forest with no one around to hear it, does it make a sound?” debate. Yes, it vibrates the air. But if “sound” is the experience encountered by air waves impressing themselves on the eardrum, then no, it does not make a sound.
You can, of course, choose to define sound as the vibration itself and color as the wavelength of light itself. But that’s not really the common use.
“I think the manner in which consciousness “arises from” material facts, under materialism, is considerably more “mysterious” than the picture under dualism.”
Just like the mechanism in which the planets moved under heliocentrism (gravity) is more mysterious than how they moved under geocentrism (clockwork). Heck, action at a distance? That smacks of the occult. Yet we accept it and not geocentrism today.
“Moreover, the “magic” (of course that’s your disparaging term, not mine) when a consciousness is hooked up to the sensor is that someone is aware of the sensor, its output has a meaning, and it imparts knowledge.When it’s just a sensor it’s a hunk of metal that beeps; it doesn’t experience color. Unless you think spectrometers have minds.”
Self reflection is a property of consciousness. This shouldn’t be a surprise since that is how consciousness is defined. However ‘output has meaning’ and ‘imparts knowledge’ do not require consciousness and the sensor can do them fine.
See, I don’t agree with this at all!
I think this point of view is extremely destructive. On the object level, I don’t think the materialist/reductionist/nihilist premises of it have any basis in fact. But on the meta-level, the advocacy of such views positively discourages people from embracing reason and science—and rightly so!
If the alleged conclusions of reason and science are that “you” are a figment of your own imagination, that the universe is some kind of dead machine, and that all of your “choices” are ultimately the result of unconscious physical and biological factors—then the proper response would be: to hell with reason and science! Obviously, they’re useless; they’re propounding absurdities that no one can live by.
The result is that you push people away into weird mysticism of all kinds. Sometimes, people manage to convince themselves of a relatively “clean” mystical-religious viewpoint, in which they believe that their dogmas are actually supported by reason. But other times, you get a reversion to the most disgustingly cynical “blood-and-soil” traditionalism, where tradition is accepted—not on the basis of naivety or rational arguments for it—but simply on the basis that, since everyone is an irrational tribal animal, you might as well accept your local form of irrationalism. After all, everything is relative, and it’s not worse than any other.
The naive traditionalist says: “My local customs are universally correct; this is obvious because every good person I know practices them.” The cynical “postrationalist” says: “My local customs are mine, and ‘correctness’ is a bourgeois construct.” The latter is far less innocent. I despise it.
I don’t think we ought to live any “level” of illusion and self-deception. Because I am not afraid that, by investigating the facts in detail, we might invalidate that which is more certainly known: the reality of the conscious self, the efficacy of the mind, and the freedom and objectivity of reason.
I’m constantly suprised how much I hear that rationality is bad on rationalist forums (and closely connected ones). Irrationality may feel better in the short-term, but it reduces your ability to fight against the real evils of the world, which will also cause subjective suffering for you and others btw, so its a false light at best. Good requires both rationality and morality to exist, remove one or the other and you have problems.
Perfect epistemic rationality or perfect instrumental rationality?
I don’t see how you can be instrumentally rational without being epistemically rational. (I guess you can do it the other way around, but if you’re not going by instrumental rationality, ipso facto you have no reason to be epistemically rational in that case.)
I understand “instrumental rationality” to mean “using reason to get what you want” and epistemic rationality” to mean “using reason to believe what is true”.
Suppose your instrumental goal is to achieve the maximum amount of happiness possible. And suppose the only way to do this is to believe in God. But, it turns out, God does not exist. So it seems like—instrumentally—you rationally want to believe in God, but—epistemically—you rationally don’t.
But in order to be instrumentally rational—in order to actually find out what will promote your ultimate goals—you have to look at the facts. If you don’t look at the facts and if you sit around in ignorance, you could be missing out on huge ways to promote your happiness. You can’t know the facts until you look. Yet the same process of looking that tells you that you have to believe in God in order to maximize your happiness also tells you that God does not exist. You can’t know in advance to look at one fact and ignore the other unless you started off with a preconceived notion about what will promote your ultimate goals. And that’s not any form of “rationality”.
In the proposed example, it is simply impossible to be instrumentally rational. The means—reason—is incompatible with the goal—happiness. If you have blind faith instead of reason or in opposition to reason, perhaps you will achieve your goal, but you aren’t pursuing it in an “instrumentally rational” way. You are pursuing it in way that is non-rational and unprovable by reason—but nevertheless a way that (for the sake of argument) works.
And suppose the only way to do this is to believe in God. But, it turns out, God does not exist
I think you miss the point with what God is if we talk about epistemic part and its relevance to happiness (or to purpose of life and so on). “God” is simply a better story. It meta level structure of cognition , and it does not need to be verifiable or falsifiable. Nor it requires you to tie your instrumental rationality to it
” It meta level structure of cognition , and it does not need to be verifiable or falsifiable.”
God’s properties, goals and plans however quickly run into that issue.
God’s properties goals and plans are beyond mere mortals understanding. Whatever is in holy books/scriptures is mortal human words of dubious origin.
For God to be a meta level structure, it actually needs to have… well, structure. Not have any traits at all sort of makes that impossible.
Re the Davos links, as of the current administration, Sweden does in fact have a Minister of the Future. I keep thinking someone must have lost a bet.
(The incumbent minister, Kristina Persson, also made the news when she revealed that she has used “deep meditation” to explore her past lives. In the 1800s she was a crofter’s wife living in Finland, in the 1300s she was murdered at the age of 19, and sometime in the 1900s she was a man.)
Sorry, but I have a nearly irresistible temptation, whenever this topic comes up, to quote Elliot Kay’s Natural Consequences, which has what I believe to be the only statistically realistic discussion of reincarnation I’ve ever seen in a popular work:
Interviewer: “[Asks what interviewee, who has recently been magically caused to remember most of his past lives, remembers about history.]”
Interviewee: “I’m pretty sure I did a lot of farming.”
(Note: This is despite the fact that the character remembering was being supernaturally influenced to choose incarnations which had a higher than average chance of armed conflict.)
On a less fictional note, past-life regression is a pretty controversial topic in mental health therapy, especially hypnotherapy. Some people believe in it utterly, some people see it as a useful metaphor, and some people see it as categorically wrong. While if somebody tells me they’ve had a successful past-life regression I will not dispute it with them, I am a member of the second group. I will do them if asked, and I will keep an open mind while using them therapeutically. I won’t just assume that the person is an airhead. (What I won’t do is age regressions. That’s just asking for trouble.)
I referred to this in a comment on previous post: Why Do So Many Ex-Cons End Up Back in Prison? – Maybe they don’t—a provocative new study says recidivism rates are drastically lower than we think.
If this study is correct, there’s an interesting conclusion to draw: Prison works.
Seems like more evidence would be needed to conclude that prison itself caused a person to not commit (get caught, really) another crime.
You’d need a control group to conclude that.
If you simply observe that 2 out of 3 people who serve time in prison never come back then you can’t really conclude much. Perhaps if you did nothing 2/3 would never commit another serious crime. Perhaps doing nothing would have a 3/4 success rate and prison makes things worse.
Perhaps they have almost zero effect and the only change in behavior is to make people more paranoid such that they avoid getting caught apart from the 11% with the worst planning skills.
Age curbs criminality? Not quite and nor does illness 🙂
Statistically, most criminals are young men. And while being a career criminal is not good for long-term health or well-being, this doesn’t seem to be entirely because they get shot, stabbed, or locked up before they get old.
In a world of seven billion people — or even just a nation of a few million — you’re going to be able to find an exception to just about anything. Doesn’t mean that it’s good policy to treat the exceptions as normal.
The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill, nor crime the province of the young, but that’s the way to bet.
The likelier conclusion is: older people commit less crimes. Prison is just a waiting game.
nope – that still translates to “prison works”, even if the mechanism is different. If what’s really happening is that most people, by the time they’re released from prison, are old/mature enough to restrain their impulses enough to not get sent to prison again, that means that prison is keeping (most of) the most violently impulsive people out of society until age has calmed them enough to be reasonably safe. That counts as “works” in my book.
I’m not always joking when I say we should just preemptively lock up all males aged 16-24.
Alternative solution: Marry them off.
If it worked for hardcore terrorists like the Black Septembrists, why wouldn’t it work for regular people?
Explain to me how “marry them off” solves the terrorist problem again?
@John Schilling: See Gwern Branwen’s “Terrorism is not about Terror”.
Given that I have a hard time telling the difference between high schools and minimum-security prisons from the outside, I think you might not be alone.
And I don’t think you’re even from Hawai’i.
(Seriously. Drive by a Hawai’ian school. In the middle of paradise are these ugly, boxy POW-barracks looking things surrounded by bare dirt and scraggly trees. It’s bizarre.)
How representative are the Oscars?
Here is an analysis of the racial and ethnic composition of Academy Award nominees in the acting and directing categories since the 2001 ceremony.
A first thing to note: the main categories at the Oscars are not awards for American films, they are awards for anglophone films, principally those produced in the US, UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. For instance, 2016 Best Picture nominees Brooklyn and Room were Irish-English-Canadian and Irish-Canadian productions, respectively. With rare exceptions– Letters from Iwo Jima and Amour, notably– nearly all nominations in these categories are given to English-language films. This means that some minorities will be underrepresented relative to their proportion of the US population simply because nominations go to movies made in other English-speaking countries which have different racial and ethnic compositions than the US.
Blacks
Blacks comprise around 13% of the US population, so, adjusting for the other anglophone nations where there are fewer blacks, approximately 10% of Oscar nominations should go to blacks. This means that, of the 160 male and 160 female acting nominations since 2001, we should expect to see 16 black men and 16 black women nominated for Oscars, while of the 80 directing nominations we should expect to see 8 blacks. What do we find?
Best Actor/Best Supporting Actor– 16 nominations (16 expected)
Best Actress/Best Supporting Actress– 13 nominations (16 expected)
Best Director– 2 nominations (8 expected)
Overall: 31 actual/40 expected
Conclusion: Blacks have been more or less proportionally represented in the acting categories since 2001. They have been underrepresented among directing nominations.
Hispanics
Hispanics comprised around 15% of the US population on average between 2001-2016, so, adjusting for the other anglophone nations where there are almost no Hispanics, approximately 10% of Oscar nominations should go to Hispanics. This means that, of the 160 male and 160 female acting nominations since 2001, we should expect to see 16 Hispanic men and 16 Hispanic women nominated for Oscars, while of the 80 directing nominations we should expect to see 8 Hispanics. What do we find?
Best Actor/Best Supporting Actor– 6 nominations* (16 expected)
Best Actress/Best Supporting Actress– 7 nominations** (16 expected)
Best Director– 6 nominations (8 expected)
Overall: 19 actual/40 expected
Conclusion: Hispanics have been underrepresented in the acting categories since 2001. They have been close to proportionally represented in the directing category.
Asians
Asians comprised around 5% of the US population on average between 2001-2016, so, given that figures in other anglophone nations are comparable, approximately 5% of Oscar nominations should go to Asians. This means that, of the 160 male and 160 female acting nominations since 2001, we should expect to see 8 Asian men and 8 Asian women nominated for Oscars, while of the 80 directing nominations we should expect to see 4 Asians. What do we find?
Best Actor/Best Supporting Actor– 3 nominations (8 expected)
Best Actress/Best Supporting Actress– 3 nominations*** (8 expected)
Best Director– 2 nominations (4 expected)
Overall: 8 actual/20 expected
Conclusion: Asians have been underrepresented in the acting categories since 2001. The expected and actual numbers in the directing category are too small to tell if the difference means anything.
Summary: Asians and Hispanics are dramatically underrepresented in the acting categories, and perhaps slightly underrepresented as directors, while blacks are underrepresented as directors but not as actors. Also note that precisely zero of the minorities nominated for best director have been women. This has nothing to do with intersectionality, only four women have ever been nominated for the award.
*Excluding James Franco’s one nomination. Franco is a fraction Portuguese.
**Excluding Lupita Nyong’o’s one nomination. Nyong’o is of Kenyan descent but was born in Mexico.
***Including Shohreh Aghdashloo’s one nomination. Aghdashloo is Iranian.
Can someone explain why White, Hispanic, Black, Asian is the standard “carving of the pie”? First of all it mixes “racial” groupings with “ethnic” groupings: (most) Hispanics are white, especially in Hollywood. Do you see a lot of Native American blood in this guy? And if you’re going to extract Hispanics, why not other sub-groups? Surely Jews are a more distinct cluster than Hispanics, and they seem like a particularly relevant group when it comes to film (what do the white representation stats look like if we take out Jews?). There are also more distinct ethnic clusters within “Asian” than Hispanic is in White: how are Japanese and Indians close enough to be a single group when a White dude born in Mexico gets his own? I suppose there aren’t that many Asians so that’s why they’re all put together in one pile. And what of people from the Middle-east or Central Asia? Many of them look white (especially those from around the Mediterranean, and Persians) but clearly belong in a different ethnic cluster. Which slice do we stick Omar Sharif in? What about Kiarostami or Ana Lily Amirpour?
Can someone explain why White, Hispanic, Black, Asian is the standard “carving of the pie”?
Because that’s how the US government collects the data. So that’s what we have to compare things to. Also – be aware of shallow reference pools. While there can be local large populations of Asians from specific origins, as well as Muslims and Jews, on a national level, these are pretty much rounding errors.
The current population of the USA reflects our history, not the present state of the world, nor its future.
Yeah, more or less that’s how the government collects the data: certainly, that’s why Hispanic is the only ethnicity. However, the Census race variable actually distinguishes between Chinese, Japanese, and “Other Asian or Pacific Islander” and has been doing so since the 1910 Census (https://usa.ipums.org/usa-action/variables/RACE#codes_section). And in some years, it actually gets a lot more detailed. Since 2000, you can break out Asian Indian, Pakistani, and others from East Asian subgroups. (Last link, if you select “detailed codes”)
Additionally, racial and ethnic subgroups need to be aggregated so we can be confident that underrepresentation isn’t just due to sampling error.
The Census also distinguishes between Germans, French, English, Polish, Italian etc – the 2000 version of that data is presented on the WP page I linked. (Census link: https://usa.ipums.org/usa-action/variables/ANCESTR1#codes_section)
The problem is that, for instance, Poles alone were 3.2% of the US population in 2000. All Asians lumped together were 4.7%. All Muslims (an imperfect match for ME/Cent Asia) were 0.6%. Jews were 1.7%.
These are not large groups. Representation in a group of (say) 16 actors/actress is going to be very variable, just because of the numbers.
There are lots of “not reported” for that one. More than the total number of black people + Asian people using the race variable. That’s the big issue with that variable: people just aren’t disclosing. But that’s not the case for the detailed race variable.
I think you might be misunderstanding my point – go back and look at the ancestry link I gave. Don’t worry about absolute numbers – for crying out loud there are 500 people every year who gave their ancestry as “Texan”. Look at the relative sizes of the groups.
Asians, American Indians, Mid-easternerns, etc – these are small, *small* minorities in the USA. It is not at all practical to expect relative representation from a group of 16 people.
When I did this on my own I wasn’t sure whether to include Chiwetel Ejiofor (nominated Best Actor, 12 Years a Slave). He is a British child of 1st generation Nigerian immigrants. While that clearly isn’t white, it also isn’t clearly African American. As I recall there were one or two others like this. Lupita Nyong’o was a clear one.
I guess it depends on what question you’re asking, and what counts as “Black”.
I also had a technical question for someone better than me at statistics: how do you go about putting confidence levels on the under/well-represented decision. We’re necessarily dealing with a small number of small sample sizes, so fluctuations could be significant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binomial_distribution
If you really want to get a confidence level you can calculate the probabilities as in the given example, and add them up between the expected value and the observed value, and see whether they’ve crossed half of 95% for a 2-tailed test. Though such concepts are a bit better for continuous distributions rather than discrete ones like this.
Huge numbers of British actors and actresses are nominated for Oscars, e.g. recent winners Eddie Redmayne, Kate Winslet, and Colin Firth. It would make no sense to include white brits in the demoninator but not black brits in the numerator. This is why I noted at the start that the Oscars are primarily awards for anglophone movies– expecting 13% of nominations to go to African-Americans is nuts.
(And even anglophone is still stretching it– french movies like The Artist, Amour, La Vie en Rose, etc. also frequently earn nominations)
Good point. I was dissecting “Black” from “Black American” but leaving “White” and “White American” lumped together. Any dissection has to be more involved.
This is pretty far out of my wheelhouse, but I ran separate chi-square goodness of fit tests for the combined acting categories and the directing category. For the combined acting categories, we can reject the null hypothesis (that the nominations were drawn at random from the population) at p=0.0022, while we come up just short of significance on the directing category at p=0.0533.
I’m not sure this is the right test to run, though, others would know better.
High probability guess without looking at the numbers, verging on certainty: Jews are INSANELY overrepresented. Not necessarily bad, but not really part of the discussion for most people.
That’d be my guess as well. And what makes this factor relevant is that if you separated out the Jews as their own category you’d likely discover that non-Jewish “white” actors are, just like every other racial group considered upthread, underrepresented relative to population.
It looks to me like non-Jewish whites will be proportionally represented as actors, underrepresented as directors, and overrepresented as actresses. This is just an estimate, I have to go by hand through people’s wikipedia pages to find out if they have jewish ancestry.
Why waste time looking them up on Wikipaedia when you can look them up on Jew Or Not Jew?
That’s true. In fact, Daniel Day-Lewis, David O. Russell, Steven Spielberg, the Coen Brothers, Alan Arkin and Joaquin Phoenix have 14 nominations between them since 2001.
Erratum: the number of Asian best director nominees should be 3, not 2 (all to Ang Lee).
On a semi-related note, I remember watching the Oscars one night and being struck by how every art/technical award winner seemed to have an Asian wife.
Not suggesting that it’s remotely practical, but I would be fascinated to see a class-adjusted breakdown of these numbers. Acting and directing are careers that are, for the great majority of those pursuing them, incredibly poorly remunerated, insecure and unreliable in prospect, not to mention massively oversubscribed and frequently involving years of expensive residential training which provides few if any transferable skills or qualifications relevant to any other field, followed by a life largely restricted to a few expensive cities, but which are disproportionately high status among parts of what in another recent thread here is referred to as the gentry. The barriers to pursuing them are very high for anyone who cannot command considerable material support from their parents. In fact, they’re pretty high for those who can. I’m betting that would account for some (though very possibly not all) of the apparently race/ethnicity-driven results.
As for the women directors thing… yeah, I’m not often mistaken for any flavour of collectivist, but Hollywood should really probably institute some sort of approximate gender Rooney Rule for directors, producers and studio execs.
Conclusions:
1. Media coverage of this has been typically abysmal. Somehow, the point that the Oscars are an international award ceremony and that other anglophone countries don’t have the same racial breakdown as the US has eluded every major media outlet. Even this otherwise sensible Economist article screwed the pooch on this one. The Economist is based in London! How many blacks and hispanics do they see on the tube each morning?
2. Worse, the real diversity issues at the Oscars– virtually no black or female directing nominees, hispanics and asians being shorted in the acting categories– have been largely ignored in favor of the simple-minded demand for greater inclusion of black actors, the one place where the Academy’s selections have been above reproach. It is true that no black actors have earned nominations in the past two years. It is also true that black actors were overrepresented in 2011, 2009, and 2006, where they received 3, 3, and 5 nominations, respectively. The failure to look at and understand the data is all the more egregious when it distracts from actual problems.
3. I strongly suspect that the genuine cases of underrepresentation noted above have little to do with the Academy itself, and a lot to do with the pipeline leading up to top directing and acting gigs. The graph in the Economist article is convincing evidence in this regard– the races of acting nominees are a mirror image of the races of actors taking top roles in major films. The Academy, against all odds, has been almost perfectly meritocratic when it comes to race. Hollywood more broadly has not been.
NPR (National Public Radio– my local station gets a little government money and some grants, but is also crowd-funded) has been pretty reliably mentioning that the Oscars aren’t just low on actors of color, but there’s also a shortage among the directors. I can’t remember whether there’s been much mention of the awards which are for neither actors nor directors.
I’m pretty sure that it’s nearly every NPR station that is partly tax-funded and largely listener-supported.
Mine’s been talking about actors and directors, but not other awards. (They’re also giving play to the idea that the Academy is “international”…which…nah. Not really. Not in any form where one could actually expect it to have truely global representation.)
OTOH, they did have someone from the staff of The Revenant talking about “omg we actually got a movie that uses real live First Nations/Native Americans/Indians, which has a real shot at winning the Oscar, AND NOW YOU WANT TO BOYCOTT???” Which I thought was a good & useful addition to the conversation, as well as a good point about statistical frequency.
(I am deeply curious as to how Chris Rock is going to run with this. I suspect him of being capable of mocking Pinkett-Smith for getting worked up over her husband not getting nominated (conflict of interest much?) at the same time as working the #OscarsSoWhite angle, and I might watch just to see if he rises to the occasion.)
Like every bad DM in history, I have decided to try my hand at building my own roleplaying game. Since we’ve got a fair number of tabletop gamers here I’m hoping to get input on my idea for a core mechanic.
I based the system roughly on Elo, actually the formula I use for win expectancy is directly stolen from Mark Glickman’s approximation of the US Chess Federation formula, but I tried to make it as comprehensible as possible. That said it might be too convoluted and ugly to serve as a core game mechanic.
Again, I welcome any criticism constructive or not.
I think the advancement mechanic is very promising, because of the focus on “creative solutions” to problems. I would like to see the math as it comes together, because my only fear is that tracking/figuring it out becomes too burdensome and interferes with the flow of the game.
Would it apply to every action? Would the tested stat be the one rewarded or is it more of a general EXP approach?
Well the basic math is the same as with regular Elo:
Score_after = Score_before + K(Wins – Expected_wins)
The main issues I’m having are setting an appropriate K value, so that you get gradual change without tracking decimals in the ten thousandths place, and simplifying the math so that it doesn’t cause people’s eyes to roll into the backs of their heads. Most gamers can’t even add up an attack bonus properly so I want to minimize the amount of multiplication involved.
As for per-action or per-encounter, I’m a bit divided. Per action is cleaner and generates a more useful win/loss percentage but also means more fiddly numbers to track. That’s one of the things I want feedback on.
And it would definitely have to be by skill tested: I don’t think it could work otherwise, it would be like a chess player’s credit rating going up every time he won a match.
Even before you work out your K function, how do you define “Expected wins” in a way that promotes creative gameplay?
In your first description, you suggested that players should try coming up with solutions that don’t require rolls, or that stack the odds in their favor. But if you’re not making a roll, then how do you gain XP? Likewise, if you’ve stacked up every advantage in your favor before you make the roll, doesn’t that mean that your “expected wins” will be very high and reduce the reward?
I’m guessing that, like with chess ratings, “expected wins” is based only on your current skill rating. I.e., if you have skill 50 and a +50 circumstance bonus, you calculate XP as if you’re just a skill 50, not a skill 100.
But that’s basically just a very complicated version of CR. In D&D, if you’re low-level and you fight high CR monsters, you get more XP and level up faster. If you fight monsters too weak for your level, you level up slower. What makes this system different, besides more complicated math?
You guessed correctly, that’s exactly what I was thinking for it.
The main difference would be that it’s a gradual increase (or decrease) in the skills based on how often you use them, rather than having all of your skills increasing a set amount at regular intervals.
Not that that’s necessarily a feature worth doing extra math for. I think that it’s worth reworking / scrapping that idea since it seems like a sticking point for people.
While I am all for encouraging players to think for third way solutions, I fear that you are putting an awful amount of effort into a system that is encouraging your players to not use it. Might be simpler just to hack out an exponential exp required curve for their next skill up and be done with it? It approximates to about the same thing if you reward third way solutions just the same as successful rolls but don’t reward unsuccessful rolls (as third ways are more likely to succeed).
Wait — so, if you fail a lot at a given skill, does your skill level go *up* or does it go *down*?
What if someone makes a whole bunch of frivolous skill rolls to try to level their skill? Can they say: “every time we pass a doorway, I try to tear it off its hinges using just one finger, because failing at a strength check improves my strength”? Can they say: “every time we pass a doorway I do a pushup, because succeeding at a strength check improves my strength”?
One example of an existing game system that does this is Dungeon World. Dungeon World gives you an experience point every time you fail at something. But it also says the DM must narrate a bad consequence every time you fail at something. If there is no obvious bad consequence from your action, the DM is free to narrate a coincidence, like you get attacked by wandering monsters.
Another example is Mouse Guard. In that system, you need a certain number of failures *and* successes to level your skill. But ability to make skill checks is tightly limited — basically during every session there’s one part following the GM’s plot where your actions are pretty limited, and then another part where you’re on your own time but you only get one action.
If it’s based on ELO, I assume you lose “experience” when you fail.
Correct. Although I did purposefully put in floors to prevent that from turning into a death spiral: you can’t lose enough to knock you down a “letter grade” as it were.
My main defense against trivial rolls is “don’t roll for anything unless there is a significant chance of success and failure, and that success and failure both mean something.” You can’t really hardcode that into the math of a game but you can tell people and hope they listen.
As for exp, WHA had it right. Elo adjusts scores up or down as needed to match performance.
In general, good RPG design means that players are rewarded for doing the thing that you want them to want to do. For example, early versions of D&D were about collecting gold pieces, so characters received experience based on how many gold pieces they collected. Later versions were about fighting monsters, so characters receive experience based on how many monsters they killed. Newer, “indie-r” RPGS have fancier ways of awarding experience — for example, websearch turns up this forum post which seems to be heading in an interesting direction.
Think about what you want your players to want to do in this system: roleplaying? Succeeding at mission objectives? Finding creative solutions to problems? Set up your rewards so that they actually want to do that thing.
Reading your original post again, it sounds like currently your players are rewarded for escaping the ELO system by asking the DM to let them make checks against ad-hoc targets. This seems like a weird thing to base your experience point system around.
Very true, and I think that might be the biggest conceptual flaw that has been pointed out yet.
I started as a 3.PF player / DM so part of what I’m trying to do is avoid the “there’s a listed DC for everything” syndrome where the rules prevent you from trying to solve problems as if you were actually in the game world. But that seems like as much of a culture as a rules issue, so addressing it in the character advancement system is probably inappropriate.
As long as I’m sticking with a pseudo-elo system (which might not be a good move in itself…) though, there has to be an element of player skill in there somehow. Otherwise the nature of the system will anchor scores more or less where the character started, since expected and actual successes on straight skill rolls will be nearly identical in the long term.
Is there an aesthetic you’re going for there with the d100, perhaps to differentiate yourself from other tabletop systems?
Because your core mechanic (outside the special cases you mentioned) doesn’t actually sound any different from a “standard” d20 skill system, except requiring a little more math and an additional die roll for each calculation. Divide everything by 5, and you get a skill level of 13 versus a skill level of 11 with a d20 roll; add the difference to get 12 which you must roll beneath, or add the skills to the roll and the DC to get a d20 + 13 with a DC of 21, for a chance of failure in either case of 40%, same as before.
Your system is also isomorphic with rolling a 1d100 + your skill, to exceed 50 + their skill, if I’m not making a basic arithmetic error somewhere; that description of the same process might be more intuitive to some players.
I like d100 because it makes the probabilities clearer and because since you’re using d10s you can play with it if you want to change the size / precision of results. Plus to me d20 is always going to mean D&D, I know other systems use it as well but it just seems like reinventing the wheel to me.
I feel a bit stupid for not noticing that. People generally like roll over more than roll under, so that would probably be less obnoxious.
If you’re looking to maintain the percentile aesthetic, you can subtract their target’s skill from the player’s skill, and then add that to the 50 prior to giving them the odds.
Are you working in a sci-fi setting? Percentiles seem more… appropriate to that context, somehow.
Thanks for the additional advice, I think that and your earlier suggestion both sound like good ways to handle it.
Sort of, more of a “hard fantasy” sort of thing. No magic in the sense of explicitly supernatural stuff, although anachronistic Lost Technology / giant critters fill a lot of that role.
The basic premise is Early Modern Swabian League x Migration Period Germans transplanted to the Last Glacial Maximum. If it was a professional RPG the cover would probably have Landsknecht pike and shot formations squaring off against berserkers on the mammoth steppe.
I recommend the gaming den. You can absorb good game design standards just by osmosis; I’d recommend doing that rather than posting because a lot of the traditional mistakes people make have been ripped apart. Repeatedly (for some reason people keep making really bad RPGs).
Link: The Gaming Den forums
Thanks, I’m checking the site out now.
You are welcome. They have a collection of reviews and analysis here
http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=53716
Lots of drunken reviews and genuinely bad rpgs ripped apart
and most famously and importantly an attempt to make a better 3rd edition D&D here
http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=48453
The latter is how I learnt about the gaming den; it is probably something most people here would appreciate for its indepth look at the consequences of rules and how things flow from that.
Honestly, reading the threads (never been a member) there are interesting not just for design or people talking about magical sociology, but also seeing how the RPG hobby evolved over the last 20 years. Reading the Earthdawn analysis was fascinating because of that.
“Good game design standards” like what? Their ways of judging gaming products and general approach to the hobby always strike me as something a group of anthropologists from Mars might come up with; almost everything they say is completely orthogonal to my experience of actual RPG play. That they all seem to talk like they have the One And Only Divinely Ordained Way Of RPGing All Deviations From Which Are Badwrongfun For Reasons We’ll Imply Are Obvious But Never Actually Fucking Explain is also an extreme turnoff.
Are there any updates you’d care to add on The Biodeterminist’s Guide to Parenting?
Without having checked these very thoroughly, some stuff I’ve seen the past few years:
– Father’s diet before conception
– Mother’s diet at time of conception
– Choline levels during pregnancy
– Very very tenuous but possibly don’t be too quick to treat morning sickness as people who have it tend to have babies with higher IQ, maybe because it’s correctly forcing mothers to reject things that are bad for the kid
– Avoid phthalates
In reading a recent Room for Debate (especially Orin Kerr’s opinion), I was reminded of your statement that when people seem to have irrational moral beliefs, they just might not be consequentialists. I imagine this type of thinking shows up more often when people are close to a topic and have an emotional response involved.
I’m glad we (as a society) have mostly settled on the term “Social Justice Warrior” or “SJW” for a member of
the outgroupthat small slice of the outgroup, even if it is a little unwieldy. I felt calling them “feminists” or “feminists (but the bad ones, not the good ones)” was unkind to feminists. However, people refer to the thing SJWs do as “Social Justice”, which I feel is unkind to Social Justice. In devising a better term, I have tentatively worked backwards to the phrase, “Social Justice War”, which I would hazard to guess is such a strange combination of words that probably no one has actually used it before and it’s roughly connotationally neutral. Please update the glossaries of your zines or whatever accordingly, and, in the future, use the term “Social Justice War” to refer to whatever it is that SJWs do that makes them SJWs.I’ve always enjoyed the term “militant authoritarian progressive”. I really hate the inclusion of ‘social justice’ in the term, because, as you said, there’s really nothing wrong with caring about social justice, or even being militant about it.
Which social justice?
The kind where my side wins, and crushes our enemies under the wheels of our chariots, of course!
Assuming a definition of authoritarian which includes SJWs (something like “willing to inflict legal, nonviolent negative consequences upon people whose ideology you consider harmful to advance your political vision,” if we’re thinking of the same people), how can you be a militant supporter of social justice (or anything, really) and not authoritarian?
This is how the consequences of that logic are usually portrayed in libertarian circles.
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/564x/0a/a7/e9/0aa7e95bb2f500c3dbeee0e6b7c8c2b9.jpg
The image is evidence that libertarian circles smother their ability to think about power by conceptualizing government, or ruling in general, as something you can buy by the kilogram (i.e. have “more” or “less” of), rather than as a complicated system with many moving parts, that is subject to internal conflictual dynamics and so on. What’s going on in there has exactly zilch to do with “more” government, and very much to do with a faction trying, not yet/very successfully, to appropriate the mechanisms of an institution (the state) for their own purposes. The fact that their culture is fundamentally incompatible with the enforcement branch of that institution, and that they’re currently on the receiving end of “enforcement”, isn’t very relevant here — except to note, in the context of the broader discussion, that in the long run SJW is an ideology that saps its, er, hosts of the capacity for “hard power” and therein likes their likely downfall.
Tl;dr it’s complicated. Beware outgroup homogeneity bias.
@Dahlen: You have a good point.
However, I’m not sure it’s dispositive. Because I think that if the history of the twentieth century teaches us anything, it’s that you can’t try to “restrain” government by selective means. If you let it grow, it will, and it will grow in every direction, not just the direction you think it would be nice to have “more” government in.
In which case while it’s absolutely true that government is a complicated system with many moving parts and complex dynamics, it’s totally irrelevant, because every single one of those moving parts is moving in the direction of “more.” Its complexity may hinder its absolute rate of movement, but it also makes it impossible to steer or stop. So net, it actually makes things worse. You can fight them when they try to break glass in the night, if you have the courage. But no mere mortal can resist Paragraph 37.1(a) of the Implementing Regulations of the Victim Protection Act which had as its purpose protecting children from Internet predators but coincidentally gives the police the power to seize every computer that’s ever been within five hundred feet of a child, or a place where a child has been, or a place where a child might go at some point in the future.
I can’t say I don’t understand what you’re saying, I do; I’m just saying it’s a very lossy simplification that makes one stupider. You can’t have “more” or “less” of a necessary institution, you need other ways of looking at it such as its bargaining power relative to agents opposing it, or intensity of activity pertaining to it, resources it eats up for its maintenance, its permitted reach in other spheres of life, etc. Quick, answer the question: does modern life have “big kinship”, or “small kinship”? You can’t, you can answer the less horridly dumbed-down question of whether family ties are more or less essential to survival and social integration now than previously, or similar other guesses as to what the asker meant.
In the context of ruling specifically: if you want to say that modern states don’t protect business interests enough, or that they make legislation that affects spheres of life previously left untouched, or that they incur vastly more administration costs and burden the population with paperwork, or that they’re authoritarian and eager to exercise power for the sake of it, or that it’s much more difficult to get them off your back than it used to be in, say, the 19th century, then say so. Say any of these things. They’re certainly much less grating on the ears of any social thinker than a purely quantitative description of an amorphous, homogeneous lump of “government”. What libertarians call “growth” of the government is one of three things: consolidation (including here bureaucratization and activities intended to better secure sovereignty), intervention in new spheres of activity, or Stalining up (the use of sovereign power for the exertion of more naked domination than before). These three things can be rolled back at different rates, and very likely not beyond a certain point.
To understand the situation better, and to contrast it with the alternative which libertarians want to bring about, please reflect on the concept of “power vacuum”. It is why power can change hands, can get distributed from few to many actors or the other way round, can metamorphose from a daily reality of brutal domination to a gentle social landscape of contracts between equals, but it cannot get destroyed entirely without any compensatory force arising.
I loathe it. It’s so smug and smarmy. Is there any other political group in America that gets referred to with an exonym that only makes sense when said with an eyeroll? The only comparison I can think of is the Bundy folks being called y’allqaeda or yihaidists (which I also dislike, although more because it’s misleading–they’re not southerners–and mildly/ironically islamophobic).
Of course, in one sense, you can’t blame anyone from using an insulting exonym since the people in question haven’t really offered an endonym to use in the alternative… but that, too, should trouble folks. People who spend a lot of time talking about the evils of a nebulous group that no one actually claims to be a member of have an uneven track record.
edit: My preferred alternative is “illiberal leftist”
An acquaintance recently suggested “Neo-Puritan,” as a way to identify the offending group in a way that’s unlikely to get misapplied to people who don’t deserve the negative affect.
I don’t think that’s an accurate term; basically everyone who gets called an SJW is a sex-positive feminist. “Don’t shame people who have lots of sex” is a big part of their platform.
“Sex-positive” is a big word. Most people are sex-positive… so long as it’s sex they approve of.
@Marc Whipple:
There is real meaning there, though. It’s not bullshit signalling terminology.
How do you square that view with their extreme aversion to any display of sexuality in TV/film/games? Or the transformation of harmless, normal sex-related activities into “sexual violence” (e.g. elevatorgate)?
They are Puritanical about new and different things.
@HBC: I agree that there is signal there. But there’s a lot of noise. Anon points out two of the more obvious discrepancies. (Though I think that “any display” is a little too far.) There are many others.
@March Whipple/@Anon.:
“How do you square that view with their extreme aversion to any display of sexuality in TV/film/games?”
Feminists, whether sex positive or not, are always sensitive to objectification. Sex-positive feminist does not mean pro-objectification.
“Or the transformation of harmless, normal sex-related activities into “sexual violence” (e.g. elevatorgate)?”
This was about both objectification and consent. She literally just finished saying “Please, I don’t want every interaction to consist of an approach” and was then approached. This isn’t “sex negative” at all.
@HBC: And who gets to define when something is objectifying?
Uh-huh. That’s what I thought.
Elevatorgate was a bad example – that guy was a serious tool, and once he became aware that his actions were undesired he should have disengaged, even if he thought she was being oversensitive. (Calling it “sexual assault” somewhat weakens the term, in my opinion, but my opinion is neither asked nor desired.)
However, the whole constant-positive-consent movement, which seems to be gaining ground, is arguably a reframing of the idea that pretty much anything men do is to be assumed sexually violent unless proven otherwise. It’s almost Dworkinesque. In the sense of denying agency, I think it objectifies women far more than pixellated breasts in a video game, but my opinion on the topic is neither asked nor wanted.
Similarly, your alleged sex-positivism doesn’t impress me when in one breath you decry “slut shaming” women who get drunk and make bad decisions, and then scream for the heads of men who do exactly the same thing – often in the same transaction. It may be something-positive to say, “Girl power! Get drunk and get laid, sister, we got your back” and the very next minute say, “Having sex with drunk women is RAPE BY DEFINITION,” but it is not sex-positive.
I don’t think anyone says “Girl power! Get drunk and get laid, sister, we got your back”, but the discouragement of such behavior is only voiced in non-public spaces as anything else could be construed (by someone, somewhere) as either victim blaming or (conversely) encouragement for males to take advantage of such women.
@Marc Whipple:
There is a large undercurrent of tension within feminism between sex-positive feminists and those who are not sex-positive. Given that feminism is about as coherent a movement as libertarianism, if not less so, it’s no surprise that it can be hard to tell them apart when the yelling starts. Hell, there are some radical feminists (very few, very fringe) who contend that any male-female sex while the patriarchy exists is rape, because consent cannot be meaningfully given while under the effects of patriarchy.
I’m not sure if you actually care what the difference is or not. Or already know and are just trying to make a point. I’ve stated before that the conversation around drunkenness and consent is severely flawed, so I will not argue that point. I do think that a large part of the problem is that the US as a whole has pathologically anti-sex views, and that this is one of the main drivers of poor thinking around the sex-alcohol issue.
Sex-positive and affirmative-consent, while both engaging with sex, are not the same thing. It’s possible to be sex-negative and pro-affirmative consent, the rough formulation being “only women of loose morals say yes”.
@HBC:
Well said, and I have little disagreement.
However, my original post was in response to merzbot’s allegation that “virtually everyone who gets called an SJW is a sex-positive feminist.” I was making the point that that requires a pretty darn broad definition of sex-positive. I’ve seen lots of people who stand up for constant-affirmative-consent called SJW, and I wouldn’t call them sex-positive.
It sounds like you might even agree with me that far. 🙂
@Marc Whipple:
I wasn’t actually disagreeing with you insofar as merzbot is concerned. That was what was intended to be conveyed by the “though” in “There is real meaning there, though”
I agree that it is most certainly not the case that all people who might be labeled “SJW” are sex positive. Actually, from a bayesian perspective I might put it as more likely to be a non-sex-positive feminist. Not actually sure, about that.
This does not look much sex-positive to those who don’t buy into the concept of objectification as used by feminists. Same thing with the affirmative consent push.
I suppose you could compare some Christian saying “I’m not sex-negative at all, I think once they’re married people can totally do whatever they want in the bedroom”, which makes sense given their premises but is missing the point of those who are calling them puritans.
@ Cauê:
There is a long tradition in Christianity (and Greek neo-Platonism, and other mystical traditions) of being fundamentally opposed to the physical body as such, and being against sex because it is “physical”.
For instance, a few quotes I ran across just the other day:
Actually, I think Stephen Hicks’s (my source for those quotes) chart of three ideals on love and sex is a very good typology. He calls the three main views: “Platonic Love”, “Romantic Love”, and “Promiscuity”.
“Sex-positive” is an ambiguous term because it can refer either to “Romantic Love” (“sex is good and love is good“), or to “Promiscuity” (“sex is good and love is an illusion“).
Both of these are opposed to the “sex-negative” view of “Platonic Love” (“sex is bad and love is good“).
Both the “Romantic” and the “Platonic” ideals have sources and defenders in the Christian tradition. Opponents of Christianity tend to caricature it entirely as “Platonist” and thoroughly opposed to sex. And modern defenders of Christianity tend to downplay the elements of “Platonism” (now seen as unreasonable) in favor of the “Romanticism” which is there. They also tend to cast the issue as Christian “Romanticism” versus atheistic “Promiscuity”.
The “Platonic” view was not at all strange in the world of Greek philosophy. Epicurus, the famous hedonist, is supposed to have said “sexual intercourse has never done a man good, and he is lucky if it has not harmed him.”
I don’t think anyone says “Girl power! Get drunk and get laid, sister, we got your back”,
I have however seen people saying that advising women of the danger of drunkenness is horrible.
Nobody ever says, “Girl power! Get drunk and get laid, sister, we got your back”, but if it is anathema to say anything else, the message still gets delivered.
The sex-positivist and anti-objectificatist natures of SJWs/neoPuritians/feminists whatever hinges a great deal on what sex we’re talking about, and who is being objectified.
It is not typical for female-gaze objectifying to be decried, and sex-as-a-means-of-obtaining-more-humans is definitely not promoted.
Blackout is a book by a woman who got into heavy drinking and thoughtless sex at least in part because of low-quality feminism (or if you prefer, because of the influence of toxic masculinity)– she thought she could prove her strength by living like a certain sort of man.
A detail which might be of interest here– when she realized that drinking made her weaker rather than stronger, her craving for alcohol went away.
****
I’m surprised no one has pointed out that Manichaeinism (the belief that the material world is evil) is a heresy. It *is* a heresy (do Protestants have heresies?), but I believe it’s an ongoing temptation for Christians.
^ this is good. endorsed. I have on occasion called certain people Calvinists while yelling at them.
Tea Party adherents are frequently called “Tea Baggers”, which seems worse than “SJWs”. Before there were SJWs there were “FemiNazis”.
But it kind of has to be a bit smarmy, because much of the criticism is the assertion that SJWs take things way too seriously / way too far, and the best way to poke an overserious person is with the equivalent of an eyeroll. (“Smug” is a quality of the sort of person who is likely to be labeled as an SJW as well).
I object to your last couple paragraphs too – illiberal leftist seems equally bad (or at least equally argumentative). And there are plenty of people who loudly claim to be aggressive proponents of social justice. Heck, there’s a pro-affirmative action group that literally calls themselves “By Any Means Necessary”. You pretty much HAVE to call that “Social Justice Warring”, don’t you?
“Tea Party adherents are frequently called “Tea Baggers”, which seems worse than “SJWs”. Before there were SJWs there were “FemiNazis.””
I don’t disagree with these comparisons. That’s kind of what I’m saying: that SJW deserves to be listed alongside “insulting terms for political opponents” like Teabagger and FemiNazi. I’m not trying to police speech here, call them whatever you want–but let’s recognize that it’s not remotely neutral.
(It’s interesting to me that both times I’ve suggested it here I’ve had people say “illiberal sounds at least as insulting.” Possible that I have a weird sample, also possible that there’s no such thing as a not weird sample in this context, but most of the people who I know who are supportive of the controversial aspects of modern left social/cultural politics would be more insulted to be called a liberal than illiberal.)
I really like Illiberal Left, because it’s super catchy, but it kinda’ doesn’t work in the sense that something as broad as “Illiberal Left” also describes:
Stalinists, Maoists, a whole bunch of other commie branches that aren’t as relevant to anyone to the right of Hugo Chavez, Catholics and, depending on who you ask, our good old friends, the National Socialists.
@ Zippy
As a real (ie 1970s) feminist I agree with you about unfairness to feminists, and as a Lewis fan I agree with you about unfairness to Social Justice. 😉
>Please update the glossaries of your zines or whatever accordingly, and, in the future, use the term “Social Justice War” to refer to whatever it is that SJWs do that makes them SJWs.”<
"War" seems confusingly strong. I've been saying "SJW-style". Perhaps "SJW tactics" would work … no, that's too small.
I like the phrase “regressive left”. It highlights the fact that blacklisting, due process infringement, etc. aren’t new ideas at all, they’re just being adopted by the worst elements of the other side this time.
@ roystgnr
“I like the phrase “regressive left”. It highlights the fact that blacklisting, due process infringement, etc. aren’t new ideas at all, they’re just being adopted by the worst elements of the other side this time.”
That might be kind of getting warm: to define and label the strategies and/or style of thinking, independently of who is doing it this time. Use of Bulverism is a factor, and we see that from the Right quite a lot.
I like that as well.
How about “Feudalist Left”?
The problem with that is that “feud” and “feudal” are unrelated in both meaning and etymology. You are presumably thinking of the former, but your term suggests the latter.
Thanks, I couldn’t see what they were getting at.
FWIW I was 100% thinking of the latter.
I prefer “SJ supporter who is an asshole about it” or “radical SJ activist” or something like that. SJW is so poorly defined that you can’t really tell who is being described by the term unless you know the political views of the speaker already. Someone just people use it to describe the militant radicals, but there are loads of people who consider anyone pro-transgender to be an SJW. And if you go further right you get people who think anyone who isn’t an honest-to-god racist is an SJW. (Proof: browse /pol/ for five minutes.)
Yeah, a lot of people on the left also by now read “social justice warrior” as an insult aimed at *anyone* left-of-centre. As a rule of thumb, it’s a bad idea to describe ideologies with terms used almost exclusively by their opponents because it usually causes the people you’re debating to write you off as mindkilled.
As Scott Alexander once wrote in a post on “bravery debates”: Can you remember a single debate that stayed productive after someone accused their opponent of “political correctness”?
My own suggested term is “illiberal, equivocating guilt-mongers”, which can be shortened to IEGMs.
…yeah, it’s not exactly the catchiest, but it sums up briefly what it is they actually do wrong. (It is not, of course, intended as a definition; actually satisfying all three parts is neither necessary nor sufficient. (For instance, I’m not trying to point out any conservatives who may happen to equivocate, guilt-monger, or be illiberal.))
http://brainchip.thecomicseries.com/comics/first/
Transdimensional Brainchip, a newly finished comic by Øyvind Thorsby, this guy’s stuff is right down the lesswrong crowd’s alley, I’m surprised he’s not better known.
http://prestersfiresidechats.blogspot.com/ – A schizophrenic former conspiracy theorist/fundie gives her perspective on authoritarian personality types “from the inside”. The thread on Something Awful is more complete but SA forums tend to go members only semi randomly
On that second link, the explanation of how gay marriage can be seen to be the ultimate sin is fascinating. It also made me think of God’s post-flood covenant with Noah/humanity in a new light: rather than a “I promise not to flood the world again” contract, it’s a way of saying “that was your one shot, next time I’m simply ending it all.”
“For reasons that I will do my best to explain and elaborate on, I have concluded that between now and the 2016 elections we will see bigots drop their mask and start getting real.”
Pretty good prediction coming from ~11 months ago.
Read the entire story in the first link.
It’s somehow completely unhinged, and exactly what I’d expect in a rationalist work. I have absolutely no idea how that’s possible.
Read the rest of his comics as well, Thorsby is a mad genius. The Accidental Space Spy is pretty great.
Do you want to hear about the alien species who actually have emotional feelings that multiply (so 10x the suffering leads to 10x the emotional pain?) If they actually understand the scope of the real world their poor little minds break. They live in walled off communities that never go past a certain size, carefully avoiding any understanding of the outside world.
Or the Castration Planet, where children attempt to castrate their parents so resources are spent on them instead of younger children? Everyone is also a perfect game theorist who always understands exactly which of their relatives have the most shared genetic material and instantly updates on any known changes in fertility.
Read that one too, I’m starting to get the feeling this author is the master of anticlimactic endings. I kind of like it.
I’ve tried to share some of the past ones like Accidental Space Spy because I agree, they’re great fics for nerds, but I get no uptake. My theory is that the art is so offputting that people don’t give them enough time to let the plot and worldbuilding unfold. (I am pretty sure it is not that people have violent objections to comedies-of-manners because Thorsby tends to give into that temptation relatively late into his comics.)
Thanks; I’ve been achieving binging.
I remember Transdimensional Brainchip. I almost didn’t read it because the art was so awful and the beginning was so slow, but once I got into it, it was really good. With its delightful exploration of ideas like anthropics and memetics, it truly is a must-read for any rationalist.
The part where Ulf realizes the earth hasn’t blown up due to the anthropic principle, that there is no one destroying worlds it’s just far more common for worlds to destroy themselves gave me an uncomfortable feeling when I think of the numerous close calls we had with nuclear war irl.
Ooh, I read Transdimensional Brainchip (or at least some of it, I don’t remember how far I went), it was pretty neat! I didn’t find the art very off-putting (it’s on par with xkcd and homestuck, though admittedly a bit uglier)
One of the most interesting facts about the human body is that brain size a) varies wildly between individuals, and b) explains very little variation in intelligence. There have been people with tiny brains in the far far far right tail of the distribution. That said, there seems to be a threshold effect below which you get really bad results. The point is: it’s all about the algorithms(/organization), not the neuron count. But why? Is it that once a NN reaches a certain number of neurons the marginal value of an additional neuron drops significantly? And what does this tell us about strong AI? Increasing computational power is easy, but improving algorithms/structure seems like something that would have hard limits.
Perhaps certain structures _do_ have the ability to scale well with computational power, but they’re not present in the human brain?
>One of the most interesting facts about the human body is that brain size a) varies wildly between individuals, and b) explains very little variation in intelligence.
Meaning there’s a positive correlation but a huge variance?
The problem with “people with tiny brains in the far far far right tail of the distribution” is that you generally can’t weigh the brains of living people and we’re understandably unwilling to kill geniuses in their prime for that purpose. Geniuses like Einstein whose brains have been measured were typically octogenarians or older, and we know that you lose a huge amount of brain matter as you age: it’s not at all clear how large Einstein’s brain was in 1905.
Unless geniuses lose more brain matter than non-geniuses it seems like a straight-forward thing to model.
Thing is: we don’t know that. For all we know geniuses could have more optimized pathways with fewer remaining living cells but might require larger brains initially.
I guess I’d casually kind-of assumed that you can infer brain size based on the dimensions of the skull. But apparently not.
Couldn’t you tell with an MRI or something?
It seems obvious to me that a certain neuron count “n” is necessary but not sufficient for intelligence. Surely, understand that a fork bomb can cripple even a supercomputer.
Tangent: afaik the brain is most highly optimized for energy efficiency. I think the reason nature hasn’t made our brains any larger isn’t because “adding neurons no longer makes us smarter”, but because “the brain already consumes 20% of the body’s oxygen; adding even more neurons will cripple muscles, etc.”. (That, and because the head has to fit through a birth canal.)
This is what Computer Science is for: finding the {algorithms, data-structures} with the fastest {hard, average} limits (regardless of hardware). Everything revolves around Big O Notation. The goal is usually O(n^2) or lower, because anything higher than O(n^2) is unfeasible.
For example. If you were to ask someone to sort a grocery list alphabetically, most people would use Bubblesort. On average, this is O(n^2). But a faster algorithm is Quicksort. On average, this method is O(n log n).
Thank you very much (Scott and Sniffoy both) for the mention! I laughed a lot.
I wrote more specifically about class at https://meaningness.wordpress.com/2015/10/05/buddhist-ethics-is-advertising/#class and at https://meaningness.wordpress.com/2015/10/09/buddhist-ethics-a-tantric-critique/#class . The latter valorizes both the working class and the aristocracy against the middle class, which some might find contrarian. It also advocates basic guaranteed income and dancing naked around bonfires.
https://twitter.com/strana_mechty/status/694071880605683712
Heh.
My current pet theory is that it is not so much an alien superstructure as the ruins of one.
http://www.unz.com/akarlin/kic-8462852/
Has anyone been to Davos/know someone who’s gone? How sinister is it? On one hand you see pictures of Bill Gates talking to a Rothschild and the Premier of China, on the other you have a bunch of people listening to John Green talk about tumblr.
Which one of those examples was supposed to be the sinister one?
I guess a better way to phrase it is how influential is it? Is there lots of policy planned and created? If Davos/Bilderberg didn’t happen how different would the regulatory/legal atmosphere be?
Bilderberg
Seeing as I have no idea about who the hell John Green is, I think the second one. I know Gates etc. and why they might be asked to that kind of get-together, but why ask (apparently this is what he is) an author of YA fiction? Either it’s in a spirit of “dance, monkey boy!” professional jester for the elite, or it’s in the spirit of “how do we tap into popular culture from a young and impressionable age to form the minds of our future
drones and minionshope of change and progress in the world young people?”That’s much more sinister than “I have a large personal fortune” “Why, what a coincidence, so do I!” hobnobbing.
He along with his brother is a cultist.
http://nerdfighteria.wpengine.com/
Considering how many of us here are LessWrongers, throwing out “cult” at weird-looking internet communities seems a bit “people in glass houses”.
I’ve a bunch of questions I’ve been meaning to ask the readership here for a while, but I seem to get amnesia every time a new OT shows up, so they’ll end up being asked all over the place. Anyhow..
.. How long do the people here think it’ll take for the baby boomers’ cultural influence being so strong to wane? I’ll define such a point as one where people stop calling the godfather the best movie ever, or when you don’t have people voting Queen into the top bands of all time for their radio stations just because.
My vote is for when people quit waxing nostalgic for the ’60s, or quit comparing every geopolitical shitfight to Vietnam.
Or, when the Boomers start dying off faster than they can loot the Treasury, whichever. 🙂
You’re not wrong, but the answer here kind of is the same as the question is.
2060.
That’s a really specific answer. How come?
Because I expect there will be fewer than 100k Boomers left alive by then, and of those, most will be incapacitated physically or mentally.
Your expecting that there won’t be significant improvements in health extension in the next 20 years or so?
Yes. Especially not for those already old.
My parents are early boomers (’50 & ’51). They like bands like The Beatles and The Beach Boys. When I was growing up they used to listen to this oldies radio station in the car. Every year the station would have a top 500 songs countdown and every year “In the Still of the Night” would win and every year my parents would get annoyed. (That song came out in 1956 and is a silent generation hit rather than a boomer one.)
This doesn’t answer your question, or even address it really, but your comment made me think of it.
Wait that song was once mega-popular????
To my 1970s born ears, it sound about as gloriously unremarkable as a song can possibly be. It always gave me the vibe of being the type of material that would’ve been pure radio filler from the get go. The same niche as the third best song on a Taylor Swift album these days.
My estimation of how pleasant it would’ve been to be alive in 1956 has just gone way down.
2025. Boomer influence is already beginning to wane.
It’ll be gradual. I doubt there will be a watershed event like the “rural purge” that ended the dominance of prewar culture.
But certainly some Boomer culture will survive – for instance, Queen really was one of the greatest bands of all time. Come at me bro. 😛
I read this as “Bosmer culture” and was confused
Oh, this is me being curious more than me being actually annoyed/offended by such things, in the pop culture sense at least. I am convinced that twenty years from now people are still going to name Ocarina of Time the best gaem evar too, and kids then are going to be very annoyed at their parents insisting they are having fun the wrong way as well.
Madness! The best game of all time is clearly Fallout 2, and always will be…
Best computer game, that is. Best game tout court is Magic.
Planescape: Torment or gtfo.
Seeing what I spoke of in action here amuses me endlessly
After picking it up again in a recent sale along with some other goodies, I’ve been sinking some time into Civilization 4 (Beyond the Sword), particularly a mod that is new to me, Fall from Heaven II. I’m a huge fan of the mechanics so far, the two civilizations I’ve tried (Grigori and Luchuirp) both played very differently, my experience with the mod is comparing very favorably against the better 4X games I’ve played (Alpha Centauri is my current favorite). I vaguely remember Scott and some other people enthusing about this mod in the past, any suggestions on fun match-ups between civs or unorthodox strategies to try?
I liked to run the orcs with a very light military and focus my production elsewhere, since the warrens allowed for extremely quick mobilization in the event of war.
A few fun strategies remembered from my years playing the game:
Magic orcs under Sheelba. With the right civics and Command Posts you can train adepts instantly ready to upgrade to mages. Fire and Body mana are both excellent.
Hannah’s Super-City: With a bit of luck with positioning, you can make a truly ridiculous coastal city by building the City of a Thousand Slums and the tower that removes unhappiness (can’t remember the name, it’s an Overlords wonder)
Cassiel’s surprise ascension: Set a city to maximize Great Prophets before casting your world spell in the lategame. You may be able to immediately begin building the final Altar of the Luonnotar.
I also recommend you play at least one game as the Infernal, as they can be great fun. The aforementioned Hannah’s Super-City can be a good way to get them into the game as quickly as possible.
Very happy to hear that.
I’ve always had a lot of fun with mimics while playing as the Balseraphs. I like randomness in games, though.
One fun thing is to play Hippus and put all your promotions into flanking. You can get ridiculously high retreat chance (IIRC you can even hit 95% by promoting fully upgraded horsemen to horse archers); you can take on tough opponents by first weakening them with your high retreat chance horses (which gain XP by retreating), followed by farming the now-weakened enemy with your fresh horsemen (which you then promote with more retreat odds…)
Welcome to the best strategy game of all time 🙂 Not only do all the civs play differently, but so does each civ/religion combination.
I mostly played on randomly generated maps, but I got my first win on deity by sending Loki to harass nearby opponents by blocking tiles and stealing workers early in the game.
Does anyone else find it highly reassuring that most people don’t think about morality in a consequentialist framework?
Yes.
I’m more reassured that most people don’t think about morality in a universalist framework.
Is that not mostly the same thing?
Not at all. Universalism is perfectly compatible with deontology. For example the idea of natural rights is typically used in a universalist way. One can also be a consequentialist without subscribing to universalism.
I don’t think it’s possible for humanity to survive for a long time if that were to happen.
I agree. The distance between “that which produces the best results is right” and “I know what will produce the best results” is too short.
I’m either really relieved or really disturbed by most people not bothering to think much about morality at all, and I’m not sure which would be worse of me.
Not really, no. It’d be like finding it reassuring that most people don’t measure distances in an SI framework, and like finding it reassuring that most people don’t appreciate art in a post-structuralist framework. Not identical to either of those things, but with elements of both.
If people did think about morality, they’d mostly just decide to carry on with what they were doing anyway, so I don’t see any reason to expect any particularly bad outcome from people thinking about morality in a consequentialist framework. Having a well-thought-through philosophy of morality is (presumably) supererogatory, though maybe you could argue it’s a duty. And it seems virtuous to think about things deeply. So overall, I’m not really sure what there’d be to be worried about. Economic collapse due to everyone thinking too hard and doing too little? Seems unlikely.
Yes and no. Yes, as consequentialism is usually paired with the standard human overconfidence that they know how to effect certain outcomes. No, because it means people typically using just a really ugly hodgepodge of moral intuitions, prejudices, and emotional reactions to make moral judgments.
What’s this comment supposed to mean?
Are you saying you’re glad that people with different values than you aren’t maximizing them? Or perhaps that most (all?) people are too stupid/irrational to get better results out of consequentialism than other moral theories/naive morality. Both?
No, I find it to be a constant background source of frustration. It both makes interacting with people more difficult and makes the world a worse place.
Yup
I find it unsettling both that most people don’t think about morality in a consequentialist framework, and that they tend to be realists about it. However, the manner of its unsettlingness is very similar to the unsettlingness of I find in the non-rational roots of many beliefs and behaviours, and in all these categories of case I am aware that 1. I am frequently guilty of it myself and 2. Given how basically rubbish at thinking, inescapable lacking in data and prone to overconfidence people are, it’s not at all clear to me that a world that was not like this would in fact be preferable.
Scott, how about tabooing accusations of posts being not true/kind/necessary? It seems to generate a substantial amount of largely contentless internal drama, and a (partly automated) procedure for notifying you about breaches of the policy already exists.
FWIW, disagree.
People should be able to publically address non-productive comments – and the community should be able to push back on that assessment, if other individuals disagree. Learning to deal with this strikes me as a valuable skill.
Why not do away with the policy altogether? Both the true and the necessary categories are pretty much irrelevant by now, and “kind” is sort of the same as being “don’t be too much a dick”, which is pretty standard as far as comment policies go.
I mean, we already have the Reign of Terror in place, so it’s not like adhering to the letter of the law will keep you safe anyway.
I have a comment on the interpretation of the policy:
I think the “kindness” part should be understood as referring primarily to kindness and charitability towards the other commenters more than some abstract sense of “kindness.” Presumably if I said something mean about Hitler, for example, no one would object (except maybe in South Asia, apparently).
What generally derails and ruins comment threads is not someone saying something mean about some public figure or historical thinker or whatever. It’s probably better to be nice and charitable to them as a general rule, but I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect that if, for example, I think Marx is responsible for billions of deaths, that I should nonetheless be kind when talking about Marx.
HBC above accused me of being unkind to Emma Watson. Maybe I was. I didn’t really think of it as an Emma Watson slam when I wrote it so much as a “celebrities who think being a celebrity automatically translates into being a thought leader and the supposed thought leaders who indulge them” slam. But I can understand how it could come off as unkind to Emma Watson. But the question is, is saying something a little mean about Emma Watson ruining the tenor of the comments section? I don’t think it is. If I were to say something gratuitously mean (not just critical) about HBC, however, that would more likely result in genuine derailing and the sort of argument which is uninteresting to anyone not directly involved.
I think it is primarily avoidance of the latter sort of situation (along with, maybe, keeping out of the meanest sort of general comments) at which a comment policy should be aimed. Scott may disagree. For him it may be more about keeping out people who make nasty generalizations about [women, nerds, blacks, feminists…]. That’s important too, but again, perhaps largely because it always leads to non-productive discussion.
Right now, I like SSC because the comments section is mostly free of the kind of ad hominem attack which infests most other online forums. But I think it is also possible to err too much on the supercilious, nitpicky side, especially when it is people other than the moderator doing the nitpicking. Almost everywhere else on the internet needs more policing for tone, but I think SSC already gets it about right and, if anything, errs more on the side of the nitpicky and uncharitable, not in terms of Scott’s own warnings and bans, which seem approximately correctly calibrated to me, but in terms of other commenters (and not just HBC).
In particular, so long as we’re trying to be kind, honest, and on-topic, I’d like to see us be a bit more charitable. I find there is a considerable amount of nitpicking of the sort which, I think, wouldn’t happen if everyone were operating under the assumption that no SSC commenter is a stupid jerk. That is, let’s give people the benefit of the doubt that they are not evil racists, that they do not want to kill all police officers, that they do not harbor secret Nazi sympathies, etc.
I think “be kind and charitable to one another” is probably the most important comment guideline I could think of, especially given the highly subjective nature of “necessary” and diverging opinions on what is “true.”
I tend to agree – being to quick to accuse someone of being uncharitable can itself be uncharitable.
That said if you think someone is being uncharitable (or unkind/untruthful/unnecessary), it’s fair to call them on it, but it should be of the form, “gee, I’m interpreting your comment to mean X, which seems bad because Y” rather than jumping to the conclusion that a post was intentionally offensive. If it’s really obvious just report it and move on.
@ onyomi
I think the “kindness” part should be understood as referring primarily to kindness and charitability towards the other commenters more than some abstract sense of “kindness.”
An easy distinction. Other distinctions worth considering include:
1) difference between abstract sense of “kindness” and other individual people
2) difference between other people who comment here and other people who don’t
3) difference between long-dead historical figures and Charlton Heston, er, current celebrities
But the question is, is saying something a little mean about Emma Watson ruining the tenor of the comments section?
Every little bit of meanness harms it.
“Every little bit of meanness harms it.”
But a comment section with a 0 tolerance policy on snark would also potentially be boring/insufferable in its own way.
I think Scott should try simply deleting more sub threads instead of blanket bans. I don’t think any of the commenters on that discussion should be banned, but it’s definitely a distraction from more productive conservation.
Also, I would be ok with banning the word “fuck”. It usually implies hostility and escalates the situation.
This seems like a good idea. A sports forum I frequent basically does that – if someone breaks the rules, the subthread gets nuked (or even the whole post locked). If someone was an obvious instigator or otherwise egregious, they can get their points docked or banned, but the other people involved also get served notice – “hey, your post got deleted – maybe you didn’t break the rules but you participated in a discussion that did, be more careful”.
That seems more effective (and more Reign of Terror-y) than banning individuals on a site without real sign ins (plus everyone has a bad day now and then).
Practically speaking, these posts are either asking for Scott to do a lot more unpaid work, or applying for the position of commisar. How can this be expected to go over well?
This reminds me of a funny RL norm I’ve read about recently, which seemed very relevant to the SSC audience.
As long as these accusations do, in fact, correspond to a real phenomenon, anti-accusation norms serve to protect the collective self-congratulatory illusion that of course our comments are generally kind, true, and necessary, what calumny is this?, which leads to the t/k/n norm degenerating from enforceable ideal to polite fiction. A first step towards a norm existing and delivering the promised benefits is for people to 1) believe in it and 2) be willing to enforce it.
On the other hand, the accusations can be themselves untrue, unkind, and unnecessary, even given the existence of comments which break the t/k/n policy, which state of affairs can be described by the dynamic of a race-to-the-bottom. You may have a point there. Perhaps the way out of this dilemma is for there to be a norm of people having to one-up each other in truth, kindness, and necessity when they’re making the accusation. Conspicuous signalling that not only do you disapprove of the norm being broken, but that you respect it yourself.
I support any norm which leads us to inventing more hilarious euphemisms.
“Perhaps the way out of this dilemma is for there to be a norm of people having to one-up each other in truth, kindness, and necessity when they’re making the accusation.”
I actually like that idea. But it really would take a great deal of finessing, community buy in and policing.
Because the simple case is to devolve to “I know you are, but what am I”, which is never pleasant.
I’m rubber, you’re glue, you never say anything kind, necessary, or true.
Well, if this was the only allowed phrase , I might get behind it!
My little brother is almost done with high school (in the US) and is looking at colleges. I’m trying to help him.
This is complicated by the fact that I think that college isn’t worth it anymore, at least not for someone like him. He does okay in school but he’s not incredibly gifted; he probably won’t go into tech or finance or medicine; he’s social and has an easy time making friends; etc. And it especially seems like a bad deal to pay private-school- or out-of-state- tuitions. Isn’t public opinion shifting towards seeing university-level education as a false promise of a good job four years down the line, just made to get your tuition money? And I have such a negative opinion of the caliber of education and research being done even at pretty good schools, too.
I’m inclined to recommend to him that he take a couple of years off and travel or get a job in a city or something, and only look at college if, later, he has a specific subject in mind that he’s passionate about pursuing.
I’m worried I’m too jaded from my time in school a few years ago, so I could use a second opinion. Do you think college is worthwhile, these days, for a relatively average 18-year-old in the US?
College is certainly not the life-opportunity cure-all that many would have your younger brother believe. But I’m pretty sure that lifetime earnings for generic college grad are still about double that of generic high-school grad.
The problem I worry about in his situation isn’t “college y/n?” but rather “no plan.” It’s just fine not to be drawn to intrinsically intellectual things. But if he isn’t going to college, he needs to be doing something else.
“Take some time off and go find yourself” is not always good advice. Sometimes the kid takes the time, supports himself for a while, decides on what he wants to do, and goes gangbusters for it. But a lot of the time, “taking a few years to find yourself” turns into “has to continue working this awful poorly paid job just to keep supporting himself” turns into “has to string together multiple awful jobs just to keep supporting himself and the cocktail waitress he married and knocked up” turns into “fuck I’m 55 with no skills, no prospects, a head full of regret, and a body full of aches.”
The kid knows if he wants to go to college or not. If not, learning a skilled trade is a fine way to go. Something unglamorous, remunerative, and un-offshorable. Fancy lawyer calls a plumber to fix his toilet. Plumber wrenches on it for twenty minutes, hands the lawyer a bill for $250. “That’s crazy! I’m a corporate lawyer and I don’t even make $250 for twenty minutes’ work!” the lawyer protests. “I know,” the plumber says. “I didn’t when I was a lawyer, either.”
There’s some truth there.
ETA (and this also applies to the Anonymous academic at the top of the comments): You don’t have to “change the world” or “make a difference” to have a happy, fulfilling life, and you certainly don’t have to do it via your day job. And, statistically, you almost certainly won’t even if you try.
For your little brother, happy could mean some aspirational vocation following his dreams. But it could also mean being a good parent, fine friend, and pillar of his community. Or it could mean old-fashioned craftsmanship and the satisfaction of a job well-done. Or it could mean a paid-off house, a nice truck, a bass boat, and the free time to enjoy them. I’ve known good, solid people who derive their happiness from each of those things. None of them require college, but all of them require figuring out how to support oneself, and the earlier the better.
I agree with The Anonymouse above.
As a concrete suggestion I would offer getting into some free university (are there actually any free-of-charge universities in the US?) and start fiending for a good job while studying. After getting that job, and becoming secured in it, optionally quit studies – they’ve served their purpose already. Job experience is a better qualification than a degree.
I don’t think there are actually free-of-charge universities in the US. There are low-cost community colleges, and I’m currently attending an accredited online school that keeps its costs fairly low (Western Governors University, if anyone’s curious).
1. Emigrate somewhere there are free universities.
2. Never leave.
3. ???
4. PROFIT!
Join us in Holland, dear Americans. You were hospitable to us, we will gladly return the favor.
Don’t bring mace?
For some reason, most people prefer emigrating in the other direction.
@Nonnamous
If by the other direction you mean Holland to USA, then that is probably because the USA has quite a lot more people than Holland.
Rome’s heartlands have a reputation for civilization and prosperity.
Most people aren’t (prospective) college students.
Cooper Union was free until very recently. It’d still be free if the Board of Trustees wasn’t criminally incompetent.* With the changes there, I think it’s just Deep Springs and Webb Institute now.
* http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2013/05/19/cooper-unions-shameless-trustees/
http://siderea.livejournal.com/1261773.html?format=light relevant new Siderea post
Is that post unironically linking to Scalzi’s post as if there were worthwhile content in it?
From the Siderea post:
So, probably, yes.
On the other hand, when there’s a quote like this:
I feel like I’m seeing the inverse of the Scott on SJWs issue here. Just as it’s really, really hard to get an objective measure of the good of an organization or group that turns on you and delivers all manner of painful, unjustified accusation, it is really hard to get a feel for the bad of a group that adopts you as one of their own, tells you that you are better and smarter than you are seen to be, and that those agreed-upon Bad People are the ones holding you back.
The difference is, I see a whole lot more math and citations in one poster, and a whole lot of “I heard this rumor which confirms my worldview!” stated unironically in the other.
I mean, guys, it’s two thousand fucking sixteen. Come on!
Sorry I had forgotten.
At this point, several years on and after John Scalzi has annoyed the bejabbers out of me on several other occasions, I have had a change of opinion on the “lowest difficulty setting” essay. I think something like that is actually very good for the sort of socially isolated, racially segregated person at whom it is aimed. For a person who has never really worked or lived among people of different social classes and ethnic groups, pointing out that a lot of America views “white people” as one huge undifferentiated mass who all have it easier than they do is something worth knowing.
That he thinks the lives of guys are easier than the lives of gals is another thing worth knowing…but I’m not really invested anymore in setting him straight.
Alternatively, I view Charitably!Interpreted!Scalzi as talking about averages. All else equal, he’s saying, Bob the straight white male will have an easier difficulty level than Bob the straight black male. Further, he continues, the mythical average straight white male has an easier difficulty level than an average straight black male. Repeat for other demographics. And, at least in the case of race, I agree with these claims in most cases.
Whether this is what Real!Scalzi meant? Well, I met the man once at a book signing, and he seemed nice in person, so… I hope so?
Men do have it easier in some aspects of life, particularly those having to do with jobs. Women have it easier in other aspects, particularly those having to do with sex.
Women have it easier in the aspects of sex related to getting some. There are other aspects of sex where they have more difficulties…
…which is why we give them the ability to call down metaphorical airstrikes on anyone who annoys them.
Unfortunately this privilege can be abused, and if it abused enough we (as a society) may start to reconsider affording them this privilege.
Given the disproportionate number of men injured and killed on the job, I am not so sure about the disadvantages women have.
The essay is wrong, though, and wrong in a way that is poisonous to understanding. Which is ironic, because he chose the exact, specific analogy best suited to describing the situation, then screwed it up with his own unexamined sexism and assumption that everything in the entire universe is a single linear scale that maps to his emotional affect.
“Woman” is the low difficulty setting of life. You will get through it with much less difficulty, and when you encounter problems there are much more mechanisms in place to solve them for you. You have an experience meant to protect you and carry you to the end but not challenge you at all. Your score will be very low, you won’t unlock any achievements or bonus content, and beating the game gives you no bragging rights. You will not be forced to git gud and you will not be rewarded for gitting gud. The game will put a lot of effort into making sure you are not in trouble and no effort at all into recognizing your skill.
“Man” is the high difficulty setting of life. There are far fewer mechanisms in place to help you when you struggle, and most of them are turned around to actively cause you more harm. There’s more enemies, they deal more damage, and your “crutch mechanics” are gone. The game is not holding your hand and showing you an experience, it’s just trying to ruin you. You are much less likely to beat the game, but if you do, you will be showered with high scores, achievements, and accolades because you beat a much harder challenge. If you cannot, nobody cares about you and nobody will try to help you, because you should git gud, scrub. The leaderboards just show the people with the highest scores, they don’t show how many people could never beat the game because of how hard it was. The game will put no effort at all into helping you when you are in trouble and all its effort into recognizing your skill.
Feminists are people who see that all the high scores are for playing on hard mode, and instead of concluding “people should be able to change difficulty to what they are ready to face” or “we should have dynamic difficulty that lets up on you if you’re struggling but pushes you when you show you can take it”, conclude this means hard mode is easier than easy mode, and easy mode should be made even easier.
@ DrBeat:
The way I see it, both you and Scalzi have some points going for you. These things cut both ways.
For example, you can ask: is it harder to get into Harvard as a poor black woman or as a rich Asian man? Well…it depends on what stage of the process you look at it. The poor black woman has a lot of pressures in her life that are going to push her away from being the kind of person who has a shot at Harvard or who even considers it an option. But at the same time, if she makes it even within the ballpark, Harvard is openly going to discriminate in her favor and let her in even if she vastly underperforms the rich Asian man in objective criteria.
So who had “easy mode” and who had “hard mode”? It’s really hard to say.
Or to change the metaphor, let’s say I am to race (pre-accident) Michael Schumacher. But I get a Ferrari F1 car and the help of the Ferrari team to tell me what to do. And he gets a Trabant with no pit crew. Who has the harder “difficulty setting”? I have nowhere near the level of natural driving talent as Schumacher, nor have I been pushed from an early age to train at racing to develop the talent I do have. But once I get in the race, I get a supercar and a fantastic amount of assistance.
Also, as I talked about in an extensive series of comments on feminism in a previous thread, we have to distinguish the question of who has more power under a social system from who has better outcomes. There is not a one-to-one correspondence.
Imagine a system of rigid gender roles, which places the husband as the dictator of the family and the wife as his obedient servant. It is perfectly conceivable that such a system, as bad as it might be for the woman in constraining her freedom, is more psychologically harmful for the man, upon whom it places more responsibilities than he can bear without an equal by his side. Nevertheless, it’s quite clear that men have the power under this system.
Or consider the concepts of “noblesse oblige” or “the white man’s burden”. Both of these say that a superior has more obligations and duties than an inferior, and indeed that his proper role is to serve the inferior and uplift him as far as he can. Nevertheless, it’s not hard to see how the superiors probably have it easier, overall. (And, of course, the obvious additional criticism of the system is that the power imbalance between the nobles and commoners or between whites and non-whites leads them to actually abuse their power instead of using it to help their “inferiors”. Feminism applies a similar criticism: the same power imbalance that was used to “protect” women openly was also often used to abuse them covertly.)
Finally, consider a positive example of power imbalance: that between parents and children. Parents undoubtedly have more power, but they do far more to serve their children than the children do to serve them. You could say the children “get more” out of the bargain.
At the same time, though, no self-respecting adult would want to be treated as a child forever. That’s why living in one of those luxurious Norwegian prisons is still a punishment. They live on “easy mode”, in that they are insulated from the troubles of the outside world. But they live on “hard mode” in that it is much more difficult to have a happy and fulfilled life as a prisoner than as a free person.
I know we have to distinguish “power” from “outcomes” and you know that. But feminism doesn’t seem to, as much as it protests otherwise.
(And it can’t acknowledge the concept of responsibility coming with power — traditional sexism says men have power and men have the responsibility to use it to benefit women. New sexism, which is feminism, says “Men have power, which is proof they hate women!” and seeks to take power from men without diminishing their responsibilities in any way. The old sexism was unfair but at least it had some semblance of balance to it!)
Us MRAs have been saying the entire time that men are worse off under the system, because “power” and “positive outcomes” are not the same thing; that men had power in order to use it to benefit women, they had all the rights and all the responsibilities and no support and their lives and well-being were inherently valueless outside of the utility they provided to women. That, indeed, the appropriate relationship to compare it to is not that of a master and slave but that of a parent and child, and no, it is not fair to those treated as children, and it is bad for them, and we seek to end it — but it is absurd and selfish in the extreme to claim that parents act the way they do because they hate their children, to blame the wickedness of parents for all ills, to ignore all the responsibilities they shoulder, and to do nothing to take away all of the obligations they are under while stripping away the ability to carry out those obligations. That we can’t actually have a society that allows women to be more than children, if we aren’t willing to allow men to not have to be women’s parents.
We’ve been saying that for a while, but nobody ever seems to hear us; they just prefer to lie about us and then talk to each other about what they imagine bad wrong evil people like us must be thinking.
And “Difficulty setting” is the wrong analogy to use for race, and the continued conflation of race with sex would be laughable if it wasn’t so successful. The point of difficulty settings is they make things harder in order to get more rewards for prevailing — this is how our attitudes toward gender work, and not how our attitudes toward race or sexuality work.
@ DrBeat:
Overall, I agree entirely with almost everything you’ve said here.
Absolutely. It is extremely common for people to conflate these two things. On the other hand, I don’t think it’s a very good tactic to attribute this to “feminism” and then attack and demonize “feminism”. The problem is that you get screwed by those who are going to equivocate between feminism in the positive and legitimate sense of the movement that seeks the equality of women with men—the feminism that you are part of—with “feminism” in the sense that sees all men as evil woman-haters who more or less consciously support the “patriarchy” in order to gain at women’s expense.
When you say you’re not a feminist, you mean you’re not the latter kind. But people interpret you as saying that you’re not the former kind: that you think women ought to be in a position inferior to men. Some of them are downright dishonest in this regard. But others just don’t know any better; it’s been impressed into them that anyone who rejects the latter type of feminism is just a crypto-woman-hater.
Usually, in most situations like this, the number of liars is far less than it appears.
Consider the attitude held seventy years ago by most Americans towards atheists (and even the attitude of many today). They had been raised to believe that Christianity is the basis of morality—and even of the political system of liberal democracy, based on individual rights. When they hear someone say that he rejects Christianity, they naturally interpret it to mean that he rejects morality, that he is not a decent person, that he is going to cheat you and steal from you the first chance he gets—and that he might be a Communist, too.
Now, there was certainly some dishonesty involved among people who were deliberately equivocating between “In my opinion, there is no objective basis for morality given atheism,” and, “As a matter of fact, atheists almost always reject morality and common decency.” But among most people, it was honest.
But when someone goes out and says “I’m not a feminist”, it provokes much the same reaction. People are told that feminism means that women should have equal rights and also that women make only 70% of what men make due to sexism, which can only be redressed by the government forcing equal salaries.
So when you say “The wage gap is a feminist lie”, you are taken as rejecting both that specific claim and the idea that women ought to have equal rights. Moreover, this seems unnecessary to me. While atheists couldn’t exactly say “I’m Christian, too, but you’re wrong about God and stuff” (and even there, the Unitarian Universalists…), it is perfectly possible to say “I’m a feminist, too, but you neglect the harms that this unequal system imposes on men as well as women.”
I think it applies to some areas where women and men are not represented equally. For instance, a female physicist who performs to the same standard as a male physicist will probably be given an easier ride. At the same time, social and cultural pressures from a very long age are much more likely to push the girl away from pursuing physics as a career.
Is it harder or easier to become a physicist as a woman? In some respects, harder. In others, easier.
Now, the idea that this is all some kind of conscious effort to hate women and push them away from science because men think they’re stupid is ridiculous. And a lot of popular “feminism” relies on this kind of nonsense.
Also, you disregard many of the ways how (especially in the past and in third-world countries), being a woman was/is not exactly “easy mode” with low stakes and low expectations. Sure, maybe for some women and some periods, a woman’s main job in her youth was to land a nice marriage. But if she failed, or was raped, or was seduced and then abandoned, she was unmarriageable, she had little means of support, and quite often had to turn to prostitution or, at best, menial positions like scullery maid.
You can’t conflate “being a woman in the past” with “being Marie Antoinette”. Quite a number of women didn’t exactly live in a “gilded cage”; the lower-class ones often worked just as hard as men but for less.
I don’t know anything about what happened there in the 90s, but MIT recently cut ties with a well-known physics prof (Walter Lewin) for sexually harassing students online.
Do you know any of the specifics? I was vaguely following the story and as far as I’m aware MIT just suddenly unpersoned Lewin and took down his online courses for unspecified crimes. It’s quite possible he was harassing someone, but we don’t have any confirmation of that.
It doesn’t seem like there’s much in the way of evidence that’s public; this is the best I can find. But it certainly sounds like there’s a lot of non-public evidence that people have vouched for the existence of.
That’s detailed enough to be convincing, yeah. Thanks.
I don’t care whether she cites Scalzi, the vast majority of the post is about highly specific details of figuring out how to make good use of college if you choose to do so, and much more about class than other demographic issues.
From what you’ve written, this probably won’t be terribly surprising, but Bryan Caplan puts it well: http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2014/09/what_every_high.html
As much as I think we overdo education on a societal level, unless we suddenly stop doing that all the research still shows it’s very important on an individual level.
…’mongst my people, the traditional choice for young men in your brother’s position is to enlist for a term in the military. He gets paid, his social skills will be valuable, and he gets the hell out of where he is. He may love it, he may hate it, he may not make it through boot camp. Either way, he has three to four years of food, bed and a steady paycheck to figure out what else he might like doing.
Maybe not a fit, but worth considering.
Also: GI Bill. It astounds me that there are apparently servicemen who don’t use this to grab a free education.
I have heard a lot of bad stories about the military (Canadian, I can kind of assume things are worse in America). One of my friends parents retired from what sounded like a prestigious career to work at walmart for a while, and was described as having the stresses of his career negatively effect his personal life.
One person I carpooled with had both of her parents take mental health leave from the military, she didn’t go into details and I didn’t press but I got the feeling that it was bad.
I remember a friend of a friend took a short program to do something environment related and now has a bunch of engineering students working under him. I also know a bunch of people who went into sales and are doing well.
I also think it is fairly common for people to work as one lower kind of nurse and then slowly build up education and training to get better jobs with more pay.
There’s a lot internal variation, by branch specialty, station and even unit.
Having a competent HQ section can make or break a tour. Meanwhile there are some duties that are going to be shitty and stressful no matter how many perks and bonus cheques you get tacked on.
Why ever would you assume such thing? US military needs to actually go to war on a pretty regular basis. And is rather good at it, all things considered. When was the last time Canadian military did?
There cannot be a bigger difference than between an organization that faces pressures related to how well it fulfills its stated reason for existence and one that doesn’t. Which do you expect is more dysfunctional/toxic, Google’s web search team, or the engineering department at let’s say some nationalized telcom?
Partially because going into combat is stressful (Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan all volunteered for their mission).
The possibility of actually seeing combat in unpopular wars has also led to a distinct decline in the quality of the people signing up, and people who have *any* other option taking it.
Seconded re: the military. It is remarkable the growing-up a young man does between the ages of 18 and 22–provided that the young man is working for a living. If you’re going to “find yourself,” you may as well do so while earning a decent paycheck, in an environment that keeps the chances of dissolution to a minimum.
Beside that, in the US at least, enlisted pay is quite good when compared to the earnings an unskilled high-school graduate pulls down. To the frustration of many an E-2, a lot of that upside is paid in terms of benefits, rather than cash (for example, if a young man has never paid rent or utilities or a commute, it is easy to overlook just how good a deal living in the barracks is; if you’ve always been on your parents’ health insurance, free health care feels like the status quo rather than an augment to your salary). But this non-cash recompense is probably a plus, anyway: 18 year-old E-2s are what keeps the dream alive for “we finance everyone!” used-car dealers.
On top of this, if you take some care in choosing your MOS, you can learn marketable skills in the military. (Sorry, anonymous–yeah, that anonymous–we’re talking positively about military service again.) Some of us go in for the infantry for non-job-skill reasons. But you don’t have to: the wealthiest person in my extended family learned to maintain helicopters in the Army and now runs a business maintaining privately owned helicopters; it is my understanding that if you can get into the nuke-tech program in the Navy there are quite a few well-paying options available post-enlistment; my most recent ex pulls down (low) six figures in the FAA from what she learned in the USMC’s air wing; my uncle became a heavy equipment operator in the service, and is quite happy with his excavation business. (Your anecdata may vary.)
For a certain subset of young men, particularly those coming out of a low SES or with a lack of positive male role-models, there is enormous benefit in learning life skills others take for granted: things like showing up on-time every time, taking pride in your work, and not back-talking your boss because he “disrespected” you.
In addition, should he decide at the end of his time to go to college after all, the Post-9/11 GI Bill is quite generous.
^ what he said
Too bad about the whole part where you have your personality destroyed (through imposition of discipline both official and unofficial) and replaced with a military-issue one.
I understand the need for the military but the cost of the whole process in terms of individuality makes me shudder. I suppose doing it young gives a chance to re-differentiate later on.
I suspect (and I am definitely biased!) that if an enlistment in the military manages to destroy your personality, it probably wasn’t a very good personality in the first place. 🙂
@ TheNybbler
“I understand the need for the military but the cost of the whole process in terms of individuality makes me shudder. I suppose doing it young gives a chance to re-differentiate later on.”
I doubt it. The younger you join, the less experience of other ways of thinking you’ve had … so the deeper and more permanently mind-killed you can turn out.
I suppose that might be a concern for some, but I wonder how many people actually value individuality versus just saying that they do in order to fit in with everyone else.
I mean, most people are a lot alike some other large group of people. If you decide ahead of time that the military contains the type of person you want to be, I don’t think there is any more loss of personality than someone who passively gets much of their mores and values from the pop culture–or academia, for that matter.
I’ve been in the Navy for 5 years. Aside from being forced to be more punctual I don’t think it’s had a significant impact on my personality. Or maybe it has in subtle ways, but I can almost guarantee that I never picked up the “military issue” personality you’re envisioning.
I’ve known a lot of servicemembers before and after their enlistment, and the main changes I’ve noticed have been better posture and an apparently overwhelming urge to make their beds in the morning. Sometimes exercise habits, too.
My posture is still terrible, I went right back to not making my bed after I got out of the barracks, and if anything I exercise less than before I joined.
TheNybbler says: Too bad about the whole part where you have your personality destroyed…
I’m actually kind of curious about where this perception comes from and if you see other “life changing experience” such as going to college or having a kid as similarly destructive.
Part of it is what I’ve read about the boot camp experience (a common theme is that it is _intended_ to break down your individuality) and part of it is what I’ve been told by siblings of people who went into the military, that they’re just not the same person afterwards.
@hlynkacg: That reminds me, Eliezer Yudkowsky’s wife recently published a story which compares having children to being infected with spores that rewrite your life goals.
WTF did I just read?
@TheNybbler: Let me just say, from first-hand experience, the whole boot camp process was much less personality-destroying and involved much less brainwashing than I expected. Someone I knew (who had already been through it) told me before I went that boot camp was basically a game. I had no idea what that meant at the time, but he was exactly right. There are a lot of rules, some of which might seem strange, but all you’re really required to do is play along for two months.
To add to that, I’m definitely no expert, but it appears to me that the real purpose of boot camp is to eliminate those who absolutely cannot perform under pressure.
Fits the pattern I’ve seen. My partner chose Vietnam over college, shopped for the best deal for electronic tech education, came out with good enough tech education for offers from IBM (which he refused). (And with PTSD and Agent Orange diabetes, but that’s another story.)
My impression is that the military’s on-the-job tech stuff will usually be more up to date than anything in a civilian college-type setting.
Still, if he can afford college, might as well do it while young; he could always join the military later at a higher status. Also, f or military training I’d think you have to choose a field and stick to it, where in college you can try out several before getting stuck.
There’s a decent argument I’ve heard claiming that any time a nation isn’t deploying troops, this is the biggest benefit of a standing army. You take aimless, possibly unemployed young men (the highest risk group for crime and revolution), give them some skills, offer them free education, and keep them busy learning to be responsible citizens for a few years.
Some hate it, and are motivated to get a job they don’t hate. Some love it, and build up your force of career soldiers. Pretty much everyone gets some profit out of it, especially with the GI bill floating around.
That was a common theory and practice in the past. We have since learned how to wage war much more effectively than we used to but which requires trusting your soldiers to keep doing their jobs when they aren’t being directly supervised, which in turn requires more intelligent and highly motivated recruits. You can have an army that turns shiftless borderline-criminal youths into tolerable citizens, or you can have an army that wins wars, but it isn’t clear that you can have both at the same time. The present United States Army very much does not want your socioeconomic rejects if it can possibly help it.
I mean shit, we’re not winning wars with it, our military might as well be an agent of positive social change.
@suntzuanime
Uhhh….
What about the positive social change of Poland not being run from Moscow? We aren’t actively winning a war there, but if we compromise our ability to do so (more than we already have, anyway), we might lose one, or someone else might who we’d rather didn’t.
I wonder if you could just have two separate institutions. One would be the actual military, optimized for fighting and winning wars, and the other would be a military-themed prison/jobs program, kind of like the public school system is an academic-themed prison/daycare program. Maybe the State Defense Forces could be expanded and reorganized into such an institution?
@Jamie: Part of what makes armies effective in the reforming-shiftless-youths role, if they choose to take on that mission, is the pride it can instill in them as the Watchers on the Wall or whatever. If it’s clear that they are at best a third-rate force that nobody expects to actually win a war, you lose that and I’m not sure that what you are left with is any better than a prison chain gang. Or maybe a lame high-school community-service “volunteer” program if you’re being less overtly forceful about it, but is anything on the axis between those two going to get the job done?
@ John Schilling
If it’s clear that they are at best a third-rate force that nobody expects to actually win a war, you lose that and I’m not sure that what you are left with is any better than a prison chain gang. Or maybe a lame high-school community-service “volunteer” program if you’re being less overtly forceful about it, but is anything on the axis between those two going to get the job done?
Which job? FDR’s Civilian Conservation Corps seems to have worked pretty well for the job of supporting and maturing needy young men, without military baggage till WWII approached. It “provided them with shelter, clothing, and food, together with a small wage” – per Wikipedia.
Conservation being out of fashion with Conservatives, infrastructure maintenance might be easier to fund.
I’m not sure I’d be totally against universal conscription (men and women) with various non-military options provided. Military, Peace Corps, a CCC-equivalent, infrastructure work, civil service, and the like. You’ll run into problems with the mechanized world having less need of unskilled labor; this is probably made up for by an expanded need for indoor-work civil servants.
I’m not worried about the need to train people–the military has shown that we can train young people to a pretty decent level of technical proficiency fairly quickly–but there would likely be a backlash by the current civil servants who would be replaced. Not to mention the inevitable push to pay at inflated rates.
Now, conditioning suffrage upon having served, that could be controversial. 🙂
@ Anonymouse
Why jump to conscription? I know nice young people who aren’t quite mature enough to get or hold jobs to support even an apartment for half a dozen of them together. College dorm life or youth hostel life would attract them if they could afford it and didn’t mind study and the other requirements of college. So a free or cheap urban hostel with no big hassle to get in or out and not a lot of regimentation, in exchange for part-time work … would probably draw such a long waiting list that you the administrator can tweak things to your preferences.
Why jump to conscription? I know nice young people who aren’t quite mature enough to get or hold jobs to support even an apartment for half a dozen of them together.
Presumably the main goal isn’t to provide free housing to dissolute young people, nor even primarily to get simple scutwork done. When I have heard the universal-conscription-with-options discussed, the primary goal seems to be in creating an active, engaged citizenry with some skin in the game, with a sideline of teaching universal life skills (discipline, self-respect, respect of people/cultures beside the one you grew up in). The actual work performed is almost secondary (but probably quite useful).
The idea does, however, run hard against libertarian notions about involuntary servitude, as well as the theory that the current military is able to improve people precisely because it is a volunteer force, and the right people self-select.
State conservation corps still exist, and seem to do some of the work of giving young people who are having trouble getting their lives in order a schedule, a somewhat productive/meaningful job, and room and board.
http://www.ccc.ca.gov/Pages/default.aspx
That’s kinda the secret goal of the Israeli army as well.
Out of each 7 soldiers in the IDF, one is in combat, two are in intelligence/tech or are useful officers and the other four are pretty useless. Why does Israel still have mandatory conscription? Because these “useless” people learn discipline, job skills and social skills while also integrating into the nation by getting to meet many people from a variety of backgrounds (social classes / ethnic / religious / geographic).
This is a also a big part of why life in Israel is much harder for Arabs and Orthodox Jews: their freedom from mandatory service is actually a curse that puts them a couple of steps behind on almost every social ladder in the country.
Not to stomp too hard on your theory, but modern combined arms are pretty non-combat heavy.
In the US Army, fewer than ten percent of the forces are in combat arms of any sort (artillery, cavalry, infantry). A seventh of the force as combat arms would be remarkably high for a modern military, and Israel definitely has that. The non-combat guys aren’t “useless”. They provide the infrastructure required to keep the relatively few grunts in the field supplied and supported.
The rest of your point may well stand fine on its own, but the relative scarcity of combat soldiers is not evidence for it.
If he’s social and makes friends easily, going into sales might be a good path. The better-paying sales jobs generally require a B.A., but that’s more for signaling than actual skills. Some technical sales jobs need a B.S. in a technical field so you can talk intelligently about the product you’re selling, but there are lots of sales jobs that you can learn enough about the product in a day. Some sort of plan is pretty important, though. Also, there are a lot of bullshit sales jobs that only the slimiest actually make any money. If he can figure those out and stay away from them, he’ll be better off.
This seems overstated to me. There is a lot of grumbling about the cost of college and about the global insanity of credentialism, but at this point it is mostly chattering. I hope it goes somewhere but it hasn’t yet. There are certainly other paths than college into the middle and upper middle class and beyond, but they require more luck and more determination than the tried and true method of going to college.
Taking some time off seems like a good idea, especially to a lot of us that didn’t and wish we had. But we don’t always consider that those paths have pitfalls and tradeoffs too. He could find himself 27, married with two kids, resentful of the paper ceiling put in his way because he doesn’t have a degree and walking around like a zombie because he was up until 1 AM doing homework, got woken up at 4 AM by a screaming baby, and still has to be at work by 7.
College is a good idea, if you take a good major or at the least can graduate on time. Its a great idea if Ma and Pa are shelling out the cash for it. Its an incredible idea if the government foots the bill.
College is still worthwhile unless you want to be a tradesman (which is a good option for the non-academically inclined, but it also requires a certain personality type and skillset). Because, while it shouldn’t be, a bachelors is the new high school diploma and more or less required for any reasonably remunerative (non skilled trade) job.
That said, paying out-of-state or private fees is dumb unless a) you’ve gotten into somewhere elite where the “connections” are worth as much as the degree itself, b) you’re smart enough / have some other desired trait that gets you lots of scholarships, or c) you’re fairly wealthy and can pay cash. It’s especially dumb if you don’t really know what you want to do in 4 years.
Best advice would be to enroll at a community college or small, inexpensive state school (e.g. not a “flagship” state U). “Sample the wares” for a couple years and transfer to a bigger school if that makes sense. Or don’t, and save yourself the bigger loans. Honestly the first two years are all general studies that are the same everywhere anyway, and a non-gifted student might do better at a smaller school for these (fewer distractions and smaller classes). Community colleges are especially flexible with class schedules (many students are working adults) so if your brother wants to move somewhere interesting and work somewhere while attending school part time, that’s an option.
Don’t go to private or out of state. It’s hardly ever worth it. When I had the choice what my dad did for me was show me a spreadsheet of the costs of going to a private school vs the in state public university. I immediately recoiled and went for the in state option. It was a test; either I was smart enough to pick the in state school or I wasn’t smart enough to do so and thus would be wasting money at the private school.
There are of course exceptions, but they are either the Ivy League schools or equivalent (MIT, Stanford, Chicago, that sort of thing).
That said, I’d highly recommend 2 years of community college and then an easy transfer to Big State U if your state has that. It saves a ton of money and my experience with community college teaching has been of the same or higher level as my alma mater (and much better than the teaching I had at GMU). It gives you a cheap way to explore a bunch of different fields and has no real stigma attached.
Seconding: the 2-year CC then 2-year State U track will by far give you the best bang for your buck. You’ll miss out on a lot of the typical “college experience” stuff, but the value of that is questionable.
Except that, as noted last thread, four-year residential colleges are finishing school for the gentry, upper middle class, whatever. Particularly if you are coming from a labor/working-class background, four years hanging out with the gentry learning their style and manners and making connections in an environment designed for that is not something to be trivially dismissed.
You can generally pick up any social cues within a year of college. Go, join a frat or a large social club and you’re set
I could be convinced of that, but I’d certainly need to see some data that overrides my experience on various state university campuses that seemed like the furthest thing from finishing schools for the gentry.
However, much of the value of college is having the degree. Even if the ultimate value of that degree comes from the manners of the average holder and you don’t have those manners, having the degree will still be valuable.
It is basically being a freeloader on the upper-middle class signaling system.
(Despite using the term “freeloader”, I am not making a moral judgement.)
The beginning of the answer is simple: If you can get into the state flagship, go to the state flagship.
The 2-year transfer from community college can be a nice money-saver, but how well it works varies quite a bit state by state.
Some states don’t have proper flagships (affecting something like a quarter of the US population). Some states (e.g. California) have more than one that fit the bill for our purposes here.
If the state flagship is not an option – then it’s painful tradeoff time. You get options that are horrendously expensive, or educationally iffy, or both. Eschewing college, temporarily or not, is a bit of a diceroll on the person’s character, unless they really are suited for picking up one of the skilled trades.
One thing I’m surprised that no one mentions: college is a pretty fun way to spend four years! Whatever the impact of college on your life afterwards, no one can take away four years of good friends, interesting clubs, intramural sports, hypercharged sex life, excellent libraries, school pride, pretty campuses and a ton of partying.
For a borderline student, a plumber apprenticeship probably has better ROI than an anthropology degree of East-Western XYZ-State, but the latter is pretty great while you’re doing it.
Whatever the impact of college on your life afterwards, no one can take away four years of good friends, interesting clubs, intramural sports, hypercharged sex life, excellent libraries, school pride, pretty campuses and a ton of partying.
Or even: being a away from family members who constantly yell, having the peace of mind that cannot be found at home, living in a place that doesn’t suck out your soul*, finding people who you can connect with and understand you, exposure to members of higher social classes, and being able to really focus on academic topics of interest.
*Note that some college campuses will suck out your soul. Choose wisely.
Completely disjointed question (if you don’t mind): Within Scott’s tribes framework, acknowledging its limitations, problems, etc.
What tribe do you identify more strongly with?
Well. My parents are immigrants from a part of Europe that might as well have been third-world, have just a few years of formal schooling each, and were mainly employed in factory work before retiring.
That said, I’m overeducated, under-employed, and lean liberal. I’d say blue tribe, but middle class America is just so . . . different, ya know?
(BTW, I don’t think going to college necessarily means being in a great social environment/living situation, but it can be an improvement for some.)
Let’s not. The more we’re going to start asking this about each other, the worse the SSC comment section is going to get.
This whole tribal-warfare/kulturkampf thing is catnip to SSCers (*pleads guilty*), and, incidentally, poison to any community worth spending time in.
@Anonymous:
Thanks!
@Dahlen
Dude, chillax. What did you even think I was asking for?
*shrugs* Anon’s “tribe”. Because you wanted to know. Dunno, never followed the discussion above, but I doubt anything good comes out of taking those categories at face value. They’re not real unless we make them real.
But whatever you say, I’ll chillax and leave you alone to talk of tribes.
Oh, yeah, the constantly being short of money, living in lousy housing, sleep deprivation, repeated cycles of sloth/procrastination/panic/rinse/repeat and constantly shifting your social circle as one semester ends and other begins are just awesome.
And all the great sex? Sure – between repeatedly breaking up with people, drunken hookups where she/he refuses to return your calls the next day, the STDs and the pregnancy scares – aside from all that all the sex is great.
I think it depends a great deal on the individual student’s situation.
(My experience was not so bad as all that, but I was rural L3 and bounced off the “mold people into urban G2” like a red rubber ball. YMMV.)
I didn’t exactly care for the intramural sports or “hypercharged sex life”, let alone the school pride or excellent libraries, and I didn’t exactly engage in wild partying (though I did go to a fair number of parties held by the main club I was part of, which was sort of a combination of a debate club and a fraternity) but overall I enjoyed my college experience.
It’s worth noting that college is a different experience for different people. Jacobian’s description doesn’t come close to fitting my experience at college. That was a long time ago, but it doesn’t fit my children’s more recent experience either, judging by their accounts.
Mine neither. His description seems to me like the way I imagine social science students to study (usually five years in Europe – 3 years of bachelor and 2 years of master). Not so much studying,a lot of partying, etc. I studied maths, mostly spending only as much time in Prague as I had to. When the last lecture of the week was over I traveled back home and on Monday early morning back to Prague, it is only about 50 minutes on the highway plus 25 minutes to get to the bus station form the centre so it was quite manageable. I had a girlfriend there in the second half of my studies (who was also the only girl I slept with during my studies) but I did this even before I met her.
I guess it is also a bit different if you live in a campus but in Europe there are few such universities, usually you have the university buildings within the city. Also, typically you study within a driving distance from your hometown.
I did not go to the library much, most of the lecture notes were available online for free at the websites of the lectures (who also wrote them) and the others I bought at the used books market (or online).
I made a few friends during my studies but mostly kept the friends from before I started college (I met some new close friends during that time but none of them in Prague).
Only one friend I made in college is someone I am still in contact with and think of as a friend.
Damn, nice job making me feel like a piece of shit for actually reading journals, going to class and doing research.
(Mostly kidding there.)
But yeah, one more datapoint for “Animal House was not a documentary” here.
2/8. The library and campus are nice. Few friends, no clubs, no sports, one somewhat sexual event, and one party that was rather mediocre. If college actually is the best years of my life, I might actually consider ending it if I didn’t have a life purpose more important to me than my own happiness.
“I can’t wait to ride Space Mountain!” said either Tom or Rowland.
“I wonder if she expects money,” Tom said horrifically.
“Where did my copy of The Ego and Its Own go?” Tom said sternly
Did anyone else read Evil God Average after Eliezer linked to it? Here’s a brief review.
Prior to 2016 I had read two “Summoned Hero” works of significance: “The Cross-Time Engineer” and “Dungeon Keeper Ami”. In both cases the theme was growth and reform: a character goes about solving problems, innovating, building a nation, and fixing everything they touch.
From that perspective, I have to say that Anri is a disappointment. The culture she shows up in is pretty toxic — for example they have a very active slave trade. If Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres had run into that, he would have completely flipped out: he would have made a whole bunch of grandiose threats, tried a series of schemes to permanently shut down the slave trade, failed several times, and ultimately hit on one that worked, cementing his reputation as a miracle worker. That’s what HJPEV would have done. What Anri does is she buys one slave.
So: Evil God Average is a story about a goddess who isn’t interested in world optimization, and instead spends her time playing with her dungeon. This turns up several very cute parts, mostly having to do with Anri being incredibly powerful but basically a nice person. It’s a bit of a tragedy, though, in terms of lost potential.
It wasn’t a bad story. I just wanted it to be about something else.
(Content note for The Cross-Time Engineer: as the series progresses it develops some really skeevy attitudes toward sex and women. At first I interpreted it as “this is my fantasy and I’ll have lots of sex if I want to” but there’s a pretty awful rape scene at the end of Book 3, which is where I quit the series.)
Tried reading it two days ago, and quit 2-3 chapters after she buys a slave. Amateurish and disappointing- when your protagonist comes off a bit like a sociopath, she better be funny or terrifying. If she’s neither, it’s a slog.
John Ringo’s “Paladin of Shadows” books are probably the biggest, most successful “summoned hero” books right now, especially if you limit it to “…who frequently goes in a skeevy direction.” They are like The Cross-Time Engineer on steroids and with 99% less improbable tech. (Don’t ask about Katya. I said DON’T ASK.)
Inasmuch as they aren’t pure testosterone fantasy, the struggle they depict for the main character is that he has needs/drives* which he sometimes cannot control, especially when he undergoes traumatic stress (e.g. when someone he loves is killed.) He hates this about himself and does everything in his power to restrain it. He doesn’t always succeed.**
The first time he goes from Action Hero to true Determinator, he introduces himself (to a room full of naked, chained female college students) like this:
NCFCS: “Who are you?”
Ghost: “A very bad man who is trying to be good.”
That is literally how he thinks of himself. He’s not wrong, in my opinion, although other characters try to tell him he’s a good man who has to do bad things. I think that trying to believe that there really are such people in the world makes a good test for how far you can stretch your “untypical mind” muscles. (There are such people in the world: most people have never met one or if they have, didn’t know it.)
*As in, he’s a sexual sadist. Not the polite, switch-flip-stimulation safeword kind. The real kind. One of the few really nice things that happens to him in the books is that he enters a long term relationship with a masochist who likes to be hurt almost as much as he likes to hurt people. Also he really likes killing people.
**I think my favorite thing about Ghost is the explanation he gives about why he is so protective of women (which he indisputably is.)
“If I don’t get to rape/torture/murder women, nobody gets to.”
Even I think he might be being a little hard on himself with that one, but it is certainly a novel justification.
Geez, I get comment of the week for that? I still haven’t even checked the replies to it, I’m a bit embarassed about it…
I’m on the bone marrow donor list, and they just called me in to give a blood sample for confirmatory testing. However, I looked into one of the donation methods, and I’m somewhat concerned about taking filgrastim (for five days) to raise white cell levels in my blood.
It seems, naively, that inducing faster cell division could raise the risk of cancer in the future. The drug was only developed in 1991, and it’s only been used in the marrow donor program since 1997. This brief 2007 paper from the donor program says they followed donors up to nine years without seeing abnormal cancer levels – would that be long enough for any side effects to manifest themselves? Meanwhile, this claims that taking it for longer than a year can raise your risk of cancer, but this informed consent form doesn’t mention anything about it.
I’d like to be able to donate, but I’m somewhat concerned – I don’t have any medical or biological background, so I’m not sure how to evaluate this research. Can any of you help?
While it’s impossible to say that the risk is zero, it seems reasonable to say that the risk is likely very small if they couldn’t see abnormal level of cancer after 9 years.
I’m basing this off of gut feelings on relative risk but the small risk of infection after they extract some bone marrow is probably higher than that of cancer.
So ultimately what level of additional risk, or how many micromorts are you willing to accept in order to help someone?
Is this also based only on gut feelings? If you can support this, it’d almost certainly tip the scale.
But my gut feelings, based on what I’ve heard about other carcinogens, go in exactly the opposite direction. If surviving a nuclear explosion can still cause cancer more than twenty years later, then assuming this is a carcinogen, why watch only for nine years? (Okay, a quick web search says that atomic bomb survivors who got leukemia, on average, got it after two years. I suppose this has to do with different cell division rates?)
It’s based off simply reading it.
Watching for 9 years would likely show up any *big* spikes in chances of getting a particular type of cancer or anything obvious but it couldn’t show up subtle changes.
The bigger problem is that cancer is really really common.
It’s like trying to tell if something causes drowning in the middle of a flash flood.
Unless treatments improve dramatically a quarter of everyone you know will die of cancer. That’s without anything special happening in terms of risk.
It’s also really hard to compare across populations, the people who were evacuated from around Chernobyl, apart from a small number of very rare cancers, had a lower cancer death rate than the average american because another factor is that cancer is one of the “default killers”, if you keep people from dying from more mundane causes cancer has a good chance of being their cause of death.
Nuclear radiation damages DNA, and the effect of it is partially cumulative. Getting a small dose every day for a year is just as bad as getting one every 10 days for 10 years (after the 10 year mark).
I don’t know anything about this drug in particular, but it’s unlikely the damage is cumulative. If cell division levels return to normal after stopping the drug, and the donation process removed the excess cells, I don’t see why there should be any long-lasting effects.
With some radiation types that may not be the case, if I remember the section on DNA repair mechanisms right there’s a process where enzymes can cut out and repair damage on a section of a strand of DNA based on the undamaged strand taking a little time to do so.
If nothing disturbs the process then you’ve got good chances of the repair being perfect.
What happens if something damages the other strand in the middle of the repair process? well it can cause an unrepairable mutation.
Hence 10 minutes of UV exposure spread throughout a day every day for a month can be less bad/damaging than 5 hours basking in the sunlight on a single day.
A wag at the results reported:
For a rare occurrence like cancers in young adults, their numbers are not large, particularly for people followed more than 3 years. (The dreaded “lost to followup” obscures a lot of information.) They give “9%” as the expected number of leukemia and lymphoma cases (as a percent of all cancers) for this age group, which would be about two out of the twenty cases reported. “Two” is a very small number and while they don’t give confidence intervals, working with tiny numbers like that lets a lot of things get missed or blown out of proportion.
From the link provided, I agree, they have no evidence to show that for the population and time studied, the treatment increased the cancers, particularly for leukemia and lymphoma.
For something like this, I wouldn’t hesitate to take the treatment if I was donating for a sibling or someone I cared about. Not sure if it would affect my decision in a donation for a stranger.
Last open thread many people said they believe that Donald Trump was a sign of things to come. Bryan Caplan has an answer to that:
“Populist policy preferences go hand-in-hand with intellectual laziness and intellectual impatience. As a result, populist voters fail to hold their leaders’ feet to the proverbial fire – allowing wiser, elitist heads to prevail.”
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2016/02/adhd_shall_save_1.html
I think I agree with him. What specific prediction could falsify this?
(Also, I’m ashamed to say that I still don’t know how to hyperlink here. How do I do that?)
One might propose an axiom: the more boring and hard to understand an issue is, the more elites will get to call the shots in that arena. A corollary seems to be: elites are ironically incentivized to make whatever they’re actually working on as obtuse and boring as possible–see CSPAN.
> One might propose an axiom: the more boring and hard to understand an issue is, the more elites will get to call the shots in that arena.
I would think that this should be “the more boring and hard to understand people _think_ an issue is”. In my observation, voters love assuming they know what they’re talking about on everything from climate science to Economics without actually making any attempt to achieve understanding.
This is true, but oddly irrelevant. Consider something like your examples. The greatest minds devoted to the issue might understand a hundredth of a percent of the issue. Politicians certainly less. With a level of ignorance that high, it’s not substantially different from someone who only knows a thousandth of a percent of the issue.
At some point, the veil of ignorance levels all people. The uneducated may be just as likely to strike on the “correct” side of an issue by sheer chance as the educated through a combination of science, tribalism and signalling.
I don’t see how it’s irrelevant. Regardless of the likelihood of actually understanding the issue, _thinking_ you don’t understand it is what determines whether you find it incomprehensible enough that onyomi’s theory kicks in. Whether or not people truly do understand something is neither here nor there.
Fair enough!
It seems like the greatest experts in those fields might understand a hundredth of a percent of an issue, but most of the important parts of the issue take up around one millionth of the issue. Not to say that that millionth is entirely within the hundredth of a percent, of course.
@ Onyami
“A corollary seems to be: elites are ironically incentivized to make whatever they’re actually working on as obtuse and boring as possible–see CSPAN.”
I think that generalizes much more widely than to elites. There’s a level of granularity that seems to be mostly cherries picked from brambles (and common sense is explicitly scorned).
This notion is a big part of David Foster Wallace’s “The Pale King,” that dullness can be weaponized. If Wallace had finished it I think it would be my favorite book.
Maybe he got too bored to finish.
I think your comment’s kind of in bad taste (DFW committed suicide before finishing the book), but I’ll note that the book’s “boring” parts are darkly funny, and I strongly recommend reading it.
What are the boring parts? I liked the geeky info dumps. I did not care for….well, was there even a plot?
This sounds like bikeshedding.
tl;dr People compensate for their “lack of influence on issues they don’t understand” (e.g. nuclear reactor design) by bickering over trivial issues (e.g. the color of the bikeshed).
Obligatory duck story.
We call it Alpha Dogging around here; any time you put together a project that has anything people can make a minor change to they want to put something on there. It was true when I worked in market research and it’s true in the energy consulting business.
“You have to let the editor make some small change. After he pees in it, he likes the flavor better, so he buys it.”
– RAH
A bare link like that just works, but if you want different link text like: google type [a href=”http://www.google.com”]google[/a] except with angled brackets instead of square ones.
Testing…
Thank you very much.
Since I can’t think of a better place to ask – how do I include a quotation in my comment?
With the html tag [blockquote] … [/blockquote]. (Replace squared brackets by angle brackets.)
Thanks 🙂
<a href=”http://www.something.com”>something</a>
yields
something
Edit: WordPress automatically puts in “smart quotes” instead of ordinary quotes, so don’t copy and paste the above, because you’ll get the smart quotes. Actually type the quotes.
Or leave out the quotes entirely.
Hm, I wonder…
<a href="http://www.something.com">something</a>It turns out,
"will prevent the smart quotes, and so will<code>tags. I’m curious how you managed to prevent the URL from being autolinked. I had to use my usual<i></i>trick, but from viewing source, it looks like you used something else.Why do you believe it? Does it predict the past?
Caplan cites Gilens as if he supported this position, but I believe that he talks about neither populist politicians nor the mechanism by which popular policies fail to be implemented.
The funny thing is that Trump has basically promised to turn over most political problems to the elites – he’s said he’ll find the “great people” or “smart people” to inform him about problems. Now, presuming he’s actually serious about immigration, he’s not going to ask Bryan Caplan about it, but he’ll find a smart person who agrees with his general direction to advise him. And on issues that weren’t part of the campaign, he’ll just find some establishment elite (because those *are* the smart, informed people) to tell him what to try to push.
Those of us who remember similar promises from George W. Bush of course find this the opposite of reassuring – even if we were to actually believe in the existence in general of actual capable elites.
On the other hand, Mr. Obama promised that he was smarter than all his advisors, and that hasn’t been too great either.
It depends on what we’re defining as “populist.” If we’re talking the Huey Long, race-and-class-envy-all-the-time model, then yes, populists have tended to have flocked toward charismatic leaders who say they can “save” the voters from their troubles, and not look too closely at the math before pulling the lever in the ballot box. However, there are also examples of quite focused and directed populist movements with clearly articulated goals. The Virginia Readjusters succeeded in getting the public school system formed and funded, pulling Norfolk Southern out of the hands of the Baltimore and Ohio, repudiating Virginia’s pre-war debt, and having the taxable value of land reassessed in order to accommodate the damage done by the war. The Grangers successfully implemented their sub-treasury system, whose eventual collapse came because it was a shitty idea instead of some co-option of the movement. The Russian narodniki performed herculean feats of organization and volunteerism when they sent doctors and teachers out to lift up the peasants. They failed because their conception of peasant life was hopelessly wrong, not because an elite manipulated them. Hell, even the populisms most associated with the cult of personality – Peron in Argentina and Vargas in Brazil – pushed through reforms which were demanded by the people before turning to kleptocracy and autocracy. Populism is complicated, but it’s complicated like most political ideologies are complicated. Pointing out that the footsoldiers of populist movements aren’t philosophes and tend to espouse wacky-sounding ideas doesn’t really set it apart from anything else.
Age of people who have Death when taking Viagra:
0-1 years old
0.81%
Live fast die young, right?
From a quick Wiki, sildenafil is also used to treat pulmonary arterial hypertension. Maybe babies can get that under certain circumstances?
Pulmonary hypertension is extremely common in many congenital heart defects, and any pediatric cardiac ICU prescribes sildenafil as a matter of course. Not coincidentally, many of those babies die.
ETA: One classic example of the sort of heart defect that can give rise to pulmonary hypertension is transposition of the great arteries, where the left ventricle pumps into the pulmonary artery rather than the aorta.
I’m interested in further discussion of Sniffnoy’s observations about regular people (who are sort of consistently unprincipled), psychopaths (who see no problem with being manipulative), nerds (who take stated social rules too literally), and rationalists (who see that the stated rules are not the “real rules,” but that that also doesn’t mean, as the psychopaths seem to think, that there are no rules).
I feel like my life has been a gradual move from “nerd” to “rationalist” (even before I knew any self-described “rationalists”), and I imagine that is a pretty common experience around here.
FWIW, since Scott liked the original comment, I’ve posted a followup with some additional notes back on the other thread. 😛
Just as another data point, that’s pretty much exactly my experience too. My main problem now is I can’t help avoid the side effect of withering disdain for the hypocrisy/dishonesty/misdirection (depending on how positive your opinion is) of those that foster this state of affairs. Maybe that’s just a phase in the progression as well.
Does the “nerd” group carry the same connotations as regular usage; specifically having trouble fitting in socially? That’s something that I personally never experienced, and I wonder to what extent that divide is explainable.
I think I transitioned through rationality to post-rationality somewhere in my late 20s.
I began to see the usefulness in many of the seemingly useless structures and rituals. And as I studied psychology, I came to see that humanity isn’t rational, and therefore it is not rational to treat them as if they were. Many of my friends are still stuck at the point where they understand that the world is irrational, but not the part where it is supposed to be, because everyone who lives in it is irrational. This seems to cause them great distress.
This is the stage that I went through to have a religious reconversion. I grew up in a devoutly Catholic household, become an agnostic, then an atheist, back to agnosticism, and a mellowing in later life and extensive reading of psychology convinced me that rationality doesn’t make people happy. Or least it doesn’t make me happy. Over the course of years, I just let go of it and let the irrational structures and rituals return. And to all the objections my rationalist/atheist self would make, now I would reply “So what? I chose to be a human and live in a culture and follow the rituals. That’s what I was made to do.” There’s a lot of institutional wisdom built into cultures even if no one person understands it.
even if no one person understands it.
I see what you did there.
This is a very similar observation to what I was trying to describe in part III of this post. I think good rationalism requires recognizing that human minds work irrationally and working from there.
Read your post and I recognize a lot of this. A problem I’ve had with proto-rationality (what you call anti-emotion rationalism), after growing out of it after my teens, is how dogmatic it can get while acting all anti-dogmatic. I used to be more like that, thinking the seeming irrationality of people was “failed rationality” rather than being a different way of functioning “correctly”.
Proto-rationality reminds me a lot of vulgar postmodernism, having seen through the myths and fictions of everyday life and “folk-philosophy”, you get stuck in nihilism and become unable/unwilling to pick up the pieces and see what can/should be saved and how things can have value without being philosophically bulletproof.
I’d say the defining core of the online rationality community, in contrast to general atheism/skeptic/freethought/bright-ism etc. is the focus of the nature of cognition, heuristics and biases, the idea that intuition is unreliable and irrationality is cognitive, not emotional. It’s such a major part of who we are that we should not demonize it of think of it as noise, but as the way the mind works. Being rational is not “sneering about emotion” but a lifelong attempt to understand your own mind.
I completely agree. I also like your use of the term “proto-rationalism” a lot better than my “anti-emotion rationalism” which I came up with from the top of my head when I was writing the post but was never very happy with.
after growing out of it after my teens
I intended but forgot to mention in my post that I also was a lot more proto-rationalist, as well as pedantic and argumentative, when I was a teenager.
I think that may be a common part of The Teenage Experience.
I don’t like the framework because it associates being self-aware with rationalists. In reality, the majority of people who have significantly better than average social skills, ie. non-nerdy, well-adjusted intelligent people, use them consciously and morally. This emotional intelligence stuff has been intuitively modeled by the very people who are considered the opposite of rationality since the dawn of time. Rationalists are newcomers to the game.
To steelman that quote, _are_ there any legal protections from being placed within some kind of next-gen high resolution FMRI machine and being asked a series of questions?
There are legal protections against being placed into any kind of machine against your will.
There’re legal protections against having your answers used against you in court.
I don’t think that commercial mind reading will ever be from FMRI machines. Where it might be widespread is if we develop sufficiently advanced eye tracking technology. If VR takes off commercially, and it looks like it will, there will be a push to get better and better eye tracking.
If you put sufficient data analysis behind eye tracking data, you can do a surprising amount of mind reading.
In the US, the fifth amendment ought to protect against that. I think even a literalist would conclude that mind probes are within the scope of the prohibition against compelling someone to be a witness against themselves; let alone a Supreme Court that managed to find a right to abortion within the fourteenth amendment.
In practice, however, I give a only a 35% probability to the Supreme Court banning mind probes, and a 70% probability to the US government making use of them for several years before they are banned – all conditioned under the mind probe being invented, of course.
Remember, the fifth amendment only protects against government intrusion into your innermost thoughts.
What’s the definition of the government?
Probably the bodies previously defined in the document to which the 5th amendment was added.
Yes, but that doesn’t mean there won’t be additional laws that forbid private citizens from doing mindreading. Polygraphs are the closest thing we have to mindreading, and they’re already forbidden in most circumstances.
I imagine actual mindreading, or any kind of lie detector that actually works, will be illegal entirely except in the case of vetting people for jobs working in the government.
I think this is a little pessimistic- I’d go so far as to say that there’s at least an 80% chance of sufficiently-advanced mind-reading technology falling under the Fifth and Fourth Amendments. Contingent, of course, on the shape of that detection. A nigh-infallible truth detector is likely to be much more accessible than a ‘this makes a printout of what they’re thinking from a distance!’ scanner.
(I’d pin my arguments mostly on the Fourth. No searching my mind without a warrant!)
For private mind-readers, I suspect that this would be partially covered under tort law- while you’re inside your house, anyway. It’s not clear to me if any existing anti-evesdropping or recording statutes would apply. Maybe a court could construe it as violating my state’s wiretap act, if the mind-reading is advanced enough.
In any event, the laws against mind-reading are likely to pass state legislatures before the technology is anything like that good.
I don’t believe you can be forced to take a polygraph test already, so I think the 80% is under confident.
The flip side is assuming that one can use high quality video and audio to do lie detection without having to touch the suspect. That seems more like analysis of what the suspect already agreed to give, and I’d guess it might be legal, assuming it can be shown to be valid.
To add: imagine a few cases being run through the media where a suspect is shown sitting silently in handcuffs being scanned … cut to heroic rescuers carrying a child out of a dank basement.
Or better, the same scene only the handcuffed mans lawyers fought it for weeks, … cut to sobbing police carrying an emaciated corpse out of a dank basement.
The next day a politician proposes a law including the name of the child “Janie’s law” or similar. What are the odds of it being shot down?
I can see them arguing that the brainscan itself cannot be used against a suspect but that it can be done and any evidence gathered as a result can be used against them.
Murphy, the law will pass. But the locus of sovereignty isn’t in the legislature – the courts will overturn or limit the law. The extent of that is somewhat less predictable.
I believe there exists voice stress technology which at least claims to be the equivalent of a lie detector. Assuming it’s true, do you think there would be any legal bars to using it while listening to someone?
There are companies that sell voice stress analysis (of CEO speeches, earnings calls, etc) to investors. So the quality of the technology is good enough that people will pay lots of money for the results.
@Anthony
if something worked reliably enough and led to a bunch of pedophiles, murderers etc being caught in high profile cases then people would keep trying and a great deal of the public would support it 100%.
Many many professions would make screening a requirement to work like a drug screen. (what do you think a politicians chances are if they stood up and declared that daycare workers shouldn’t be tested for pedophile-think?)
If something has enough support for long enough then the courts will come up with something.
I think a long-range fMRI would fall within the dicta of Schmerber v. California (1966):
“Some tests seemingly directed to obtain ‘physical evidence,’ for example, lie detector tests measuring changes in body function during interrogation, may actually be directed to eliciting responses which are essentially testimonial. To compel a person to submit to testing in which an effort will be made to determine his guilt or innocence on the basis of physiological responses, whether willed or not, is to evoke the spirit and history of the Fifth Amendment. Such situations call to mind the principle that the protection of the privilege ‘is as broad as the mischief against which it seeks to guard’ [citation omitted]”.
Not actually a holding, strictly speaking, but I’m not aware of any subsequent caselaw walking this language back. But see this guy, who thinks mind-reading is perfectly constitutional and ought to remain so.
But if we really had fast perfect mind reading, it might become the norm for anyone actually innocent to use it… And then anyone who refuses could still get a trial, but everyone would assume it was because they were guilty, which would severely undermine their position.
Depends on how focused it is. If you have to make your life an open book to be cleared. .. .
Truth detection would be simpler. Imagine a world in which the police asked for a warrant under a truth detector — including the questions they wanted to ask you. And you could clear yourself the same way.
In the links post, I find it delightful that Beat Cop describes experiencing the reverse of the “old lady/pie” scene in Blazing Saddles: (warning, satirical use of “n” word).
We have our minds involuntarily read all the time–deducing their content by facial expressions, voice tones, body movements. Probably a good thing. Would the fact that you couldn’t tell if someone was lying to you make you more or less willing to interact with him?
Well, you’re interacting with others on the internet, aren’t you? (personally, I’m more comfortable online, so being unable to tell is perfectly normal for me.)
I don’t know about you, but people misread my facial expressions all the time. Maybe I’m just that weird though.
I feel like actual mind reading would be much more scary and invasive.
I have been accused of being a mind reader on more than one occasion. I make no claims to being a true telepath (though when I’m in the groove my empathy is pretty good) and believe this to have been a case of throwing a lot of bandwidth at a relatively narrow problem (i.e. what the person was thinking/was about to say) and getting the right answer in a very short time.
If the way people react to my occasional really inspired anticipation is in any way indicative, I’d say that actual mind reading would be viewed as outrageously invasive. As in, if you get caught being a mind reader the read-ee might seriously consider assaulting you. I know I would.
Mind reading might be relatively harmless in the hands of an ameteur and devastating in the hands of an expert on a mission.
Also if you read something bad in someone’s facial expression you can always pretend not to notice if you want to be polite.
A more accurate method may not have that plausible deniability.
eh… I read books all the time, examining the cover, looking at who wrote it, what the blurbs are, maybe read a review. Nevermind I don’t actually open any of them.
She’s also factually incorrect. Anyone who thinks that involuntary mind reading won’t get immediately thrown out under fifth amendment concerns has no idea what they are talking about.
The legal hurdles involved just to get a wiretap are huge, for precisely the same reason. Courts are not permitted to use lie detectors in the US.
Anyone who thinks involuntary mind reading will ever be permitted in US courts is either completely ignorant of the workings of our court systems, or has an incredibly bleak view of the future.
“Courts are not permitted to use lie detectors in the US.”
Depending on how you meant this, it is probably false. Involuntary lie detecting is certainly not allowed, and even voluntary lie detecting is not admitted many places.
But the voluntary stuff being thrown out is due to accuracy concerns, rather than simple constitutional ones.
That’s not a bad point, but I’m not sure it’s so cut and dried as all that. Arguably mindreading is a form of observation. In that case, while other Constitutional protections may apply, it wouldn’t be forced self-incrimination.
If you mean the kind where they have to stick you in a big machine without your consent and tape wires to your head, it’s a much stronger argument. Now it’s almost like a password access case, and we have some “right to remain silent” cases on that.
If you mean the kind where I’m a telepath and I can look at you and see what you’re thinking like an ordinary person can look at you and see whether you’re smiling or frowning, then I think it’s a much weaker argument. Now it’s more like one of those “we pointed a heat sensor at the building and found that it was really hot in there for no apparent reason so we figured it was a marijuana grow” cases.
Of course I also think that in the latter case if the telepath isn’t working for the government, they’d be dead very, very quickly, so it’d be a moot point in some cases.
You mean their infrared radiation spilled over onto the sensors delicate instrumentation?
(Not sure if that is a legal distinction or not)
It totally could be in other contexts, but no, they don’t have to argue that in that particular situation. 🙂 If you can look at the house in the visible spectrum, you can look at it (with a passive sensor) in pretty much any spectrum. Actively x-raying it would be a different story.
Not necessarily – Kyllo v. United States, 533 U.S. 27 (2001).
To the larger question, I have more of concern that the government is going to use a certain technology even if it isn’t admissible just for information gathering. What are you going to do, file a Bivens action? Good luck with that.
Kyllo is still good law, but I suspect it would be quite weak since part of the justification was that the technology was not in general use and people had no reason to expect it. That’s no longer the case.
But, my rationalization aside, my answer was misleading at best and just plain wrong at worst. 🙁 Sorry. Under Kyllo, they couldn’t use the results of any such scan in court.
brad, my suspicion is even that if Kyllo still holds, passive scans probably wouldn’t get the cops in trouble, but active scans are arguably more of a warrantless entry. Thoughts?
I’m not sure if we are talking about houses or people at this point. Assuming the latter …
I think the fifth amendment is a red herring. No volitional act means no self incrimination. The action is in the fourth amendment.
As for where the Justices would draw the line, I don’t know. Active vs passive would be one way. External evidence versus internal would be another. I wouldn’t count out something similar to Sotomayor’s approach in US v Jones — more functional than formalist. Of course whatever the technology was it would have to get past a Daubert analysis.
Finally, just to reiterate this is all suppression hearing stuff. Given the degraded state of 1983/Bivens law I don’t think the innocent have much practical recourse against illegal searches and seizures.
Incidentally, I have a few colleagues who are much more in tune with criminal constitutional law than I am. When I ran the hypothetical by them they all thought that mindreading would be either a) a violation of the 5th or b) a violation of the 4th, in that order. They thought my “unique form of observation” argument was logical but did not think it would prevail.
They were undecided on the question of whether the inadmissible mindreading evidence could be used to look for other admissible evidence.
@Marc Whipple:
Did you make the form/technology that would be employed for mind-reading part of the posit?
I have to think that something that something that simply passively analysed eye movements, hand movements, using visible spectrum, etc. would be seen differently than something that sent radio waves through your brain and analyzed the resulting magnetic scatter.
IOW, people can already look at your eyes and hands and listen to your voice to deduce things about your state of mind. I think people can even testify to what they observed and what state of mind they concluded you were in. Yes? Would a machine doing it with provable accuracy make it less constitutional? Or more?
I did. They seemed to think that would probably be okay, although there’s a Kyllo argument to be made.
I put it in the context of the AI from Troy Rising, who are so smart that they can observe human beings and tell whether they are willfully lying with essentially perfect certainty. (They’re not magic: if the human thinks they’re telling the truth, the AI would get that they believed that they were telling the truth even if they were wrong.) They can also predict what humans will do in most situations with uncanny accuracy. (A big part of their control programming deals with preventing them from using these abilities inappropriately.)
I don’t see how the fifth amendment comes into play. The fifth amendment has no problem with requiring you to give a blood sample or a fingerprint. It’s only when you are required to turn over a password that it is considered “testimonial” and the fifth amendment kicks in. If the police are just looking at you, no matter how intensively or by what means, I don’t see how that is testimonial — though I think it may well be a search.
Anyway a fascinating hypo. Someone should run it by Orin Kerr …
@Marc Whipple:
Kyllo isn’t talking about things that can be seen with the naked eye though.
I doubt the government could set up cameras and microphones on every lamp post and traffic light and use visible light/audible sound analysis to detect criminal “thinking” on privacy concerns. But then again, “stop and frisk” has not been ruled unconstitutional so…. maybe?
@brad:
Isn’t it the fifth that prevents the police from being able to force you into a polygraph machine?
Even just using the voluntarily produced results is problematic, but I think that is due to accuracy concerns.
A polygraph machine, at least as I understand it, is something they attach to you and ask you questions. Then it is supposed to be able to tell if you are lying. It’s the forcing you to answer questions part that is problematic. That’s runs afoul of Miranda’s famous “right to remain silent”.
If there’s no compelled testimony/speech/volitional act, I don’t see how the fifth can be in play.
@brad:
The one of them who invoked the Fifth said that reading the thoughts of the suspect while they were thinking them, especially if you “primed” them by asking questions which they would, presumably, think about the answers to in their heads, was making them incriminate themselves.
@brad:
But, even if the suspect remained silent, I think the mere attaching of the polygraph would be ruled unconstitutional. The polygraph isn’t forcing me to answer questions, but it is drawing more information from me than I am willingly to give out when I do answer questions.
I suppose that might be considered 4th rather than 5th though, as presumably I don’t want to “appear nervous”, but it is not an unreasonable search for me to simply look at you and listen to you. Reading your skin temperature or galvanic response probably is considered search?
There would certainly be problems with the government hooking you up to a machine against your will and yelling questions at you. The only question is what kind of problems and whether and how they can be solved. If it’s a search that’s a fourth amendment issue and they need a warrant. If it’s eliciting testimony that’s a fifth amendment issue and they need to give you immunity.
In a sense there’s no right answer because it hasn’t been decided yet (though that gets into some pretty deep legal-philosophical questions) but I personally see it as more of search than eliciting testimony.
Usage in formal court proceedings is a very small part of how reliable mind reading could completely transform human life.
Well, yeah, but the question was whether there was currently some legal obstacle to its use.
@Marc Whipple:
But is there any legal precedent to prevent it being used by private citizens against other private citizens absent knowledge and consent?
I think that is the point squirrel is raising (which might even have been the point of the original quote).
@HBC:
If it’s “I can see what you’re thinking with my BRAIN,” then arguably, there is not.
If it involves sticking you in/to a big machine, then certainly.
If it involves using a machine at a distance, then maybe.
@Marc Whipple:
Well, “machine at a distance” is the only one that really is very interesting, wouldn’t you say? And I mean that not just from a legal perspective.
@HBC:
I think they’re all very interesting, but the machine-at-a-distance is the one that has both some reasonable (if small) likelihood of happening and is easiest to debate, so yeah, I’ll give you that one.
@Marc Whipple:
Perhaps nitpicky, especially since you are already giving me the win, so to speak, but:
“machine-at-a-distance is the one that has both some reasonable (if small) likelihood of happening and is easiest to debate”
I think we can dispense with the “I can read your mind with my brain” scenario as fanciful.
But the “put you in an fMri machine (or the like)” seems more likely to actually be possible. And it would be really interesting in terms of what we would could learn about psychology, biology and any number of other things. In fact, there is lots of work adjacent to this, it’s just not “reading your mind” level.
But, it’s really unlikely to be involuntary, which seems like the most important word in the original quote.
Here’s a scenario which I would consider not just plausible, but possible within the next 10 years:
Video cameras get hooked up to facial recognition software, which reads facial expressions to determine people’s mood. They begin to churn through this big-data style, gauging subjects’ reactions when they see different advertisements and adjusting accordingly. Department stores use this monitoring to alert their salespeople to customers who look lost, or on the fence between purchasing and not.
Later on, governments hook up the same software to all of those cameras they already have watching the streets. They use it to look for people whose gestures and expressions indicate that they’re up to no good. Of course arrests are not made based on this information; we just send a few cops to the area to indicate that The Law Has a Presence Here, So Don’t Try Anything.
@Jaskologist:
That is one of the less objectionable uses for it, but since the UK, for instance, already has cameras all over the place which frequently record people being robbed and murdered, and the assailants moseying away before anybody even notices let alone arrives to help, I don’t see it actually happening.
Usage in formal court proceedings is a very small part of how reliable mind reading could completely transform human life.
“Look at pediatric medicine – what a diagnostic aid for pre-verbal patients! Babies who can’t answer, Where does it hurt? What does it feel like? Or for stroke victims or those paralyzed in accidents who have lost all ability to communicate, trapped in their bodies. God the Father, you could be an absolute savior!”
“I’m more often regarded as a menace. No one I’ve met who knew my secret ever suggested any use for me but espionage”
“Well – were they espionage agents themselves?”
“Now that you mention it…”
Dr. Ethan Urquhart, Ob. Gyn, and a very suspicious mind-reader, “Ethan of Athos”, L.M. Bujold, 1986
This does seem to be the week for Bujold quotes. And seeing new technologies from a dozen different directions is one of her strong points, e.g. new uses for uterine replicators in about every second novel she writes.
Kind of a cool article about abortion laws working against feminism.
http://www.evangelicalsforsocialaction.org/sanctity-of-life/our-current-abortion-law-as-a-product-of-men/
Another one on the boring democratic debates and abortion.
http://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/latest-columns/20160129-charles-c.-camosy-sanders-clinton-havent-been-asked-about-abortion.-not-a-single-time
Apparently the link is broken but if you’re interested Google “Charles C. Camosy: Sanders, Clinton haven’t been asked about abortion. Not a single time”. It talks about the difference of opinion on abortion in the Democratic Party and the nation at large. Interesting food for thought.
The second link just leads to the site map.
Thanks I have no idea how to fix it sorry.
Here’s your second link.
Formatting it as an HTML link is what makes it work, rather than having the comment system try to figure out where the link ends. An HTML link goes like this: <a href=”http://…link goes here…”>these words will be the link text</a>
I liked the second one. I generally consider myself pro-life, but it looks like I have basically the same opinions as a lot (a majority?) of people who identify as pro-choice.
Basically the same opinions on other issues, I assume? Or are you saying that you differ more on your self-identification than your actual beliefs about abortion?
the second one (in that I’m probably okay with abortions up to twelve weeks).
If so, you’d be considered pro-choice by both sides.
Larry – really? If you proposed to ban all abortion after viability, and to significantly restrict abortion after 12 weeks, while subsidizing abortions before 10 weeks, do you think your local pro-choice organization would consider you an acceptable candidate for office?
On the one hand, my guess would be no.
On the other hand, that’s the arrangement that exists in pretty much all of the western world, and it seems like there isn’t that big of a deal about it elsewhere. Although this might be the AMERICAN internet signal boosting AMERICAN conflicts.
As I understand it, there are plenty of “pro-choice” politicians who are against abortions after the point of viability.
Restrictions on abortion after 12 weeks is exactly what Roe v. Wade holds to be acceptable, and I think “agreeing with Roe v. Wade” marks you out as “pro-choice”.
Maybe the people who run pro-choice organizations are more likely to be in favor of abortion on demand at any point, including five minutes before the birth. But most politicians are deliberately much more vague on exactly where they draw the line.
We’ve already talked about that in here in the comments before but I still find it incredibly funny that what I thought was a “progressive liberal abortion law” in the Czech republic (and most other EU countries) as opposed to the supposedly “fundamentalist anti-abortion mindset” in at least parts of the US actually turns out to be quite a “pro-life” legislation from the American point of view – i.e. legal abortions within the 12 weeks and otherwise only in special cases (mostly or maybe exclusively health concerns). I also think that making abortions legal after the 12 or so weeks (Italy and Germany have 13 I think, not a significant difference) would not be acceptable to most European voters (actually the “abortion legal until viability” does not make me feel very comfortable either and I am probably less socially conservative than most people).
I don’t know if there is a bigger misconception Europeans have about the US than this. I think that most Europeans imagine that in some US states the abortion laws are like in Poland (which are really hardcore anti-abortion). That makes me wonder if there are other such misconceptions.
@ Tibor:
One I can think of off the top of my head: the U.S. tax system is far more “progressive” than European systems, in the sense that proportionately much more of the tax money is collected from the rich.
Europe knows that you can’t finance a big welfare state by “soaking the rich”; you have to tax the poor and middle-class. That’s what the VAT is for.
@ Vox
Europe knows that you can’t finance a big welfare state by “soaking the rich”; you have to tax the poor and middle-class. That’s what the VAT is for.
As a small shop-keeper (retired) I’d rather have the factories doing the bookkeeping than each of my customers having to count out the pennies and me do the bookkeeping. As a Progressive, I’d like the tax rates being higher on yachts.
@ houseboatonstyx:
Well, your first point is why they have a VAT instead of a retail sales tax. It has the same effect, but it’s easier (and more popular) to enforce and harder to see than a 30-50% retail sales tax.
As for your second point, it’s just not possible to have the level of spending they want merely by taxing the rich and their luxuries. For one, the Laffer curve of the rich lies to the left of everyone else: if you tax the rich highly, they have the means to structure their income and/or leave the country. The poor and middle class generally do not.
Also, if you going to have a tax, a sales tax, VAT, or flat income tax that does not engage in double-taxation (or triple- or quadruple-taxation) of savings is just sound economics. These are all “consumption-base” taxes. Whether you tax at the source of income or the point of spending, you tax each dollar just once. If you use that dollar to buy a stock, then sell the stock, you don’t get taxed again. It doesn’t penalize savings relative to consumption.
I also like Dan Mitchell’s apple harvesting analogy.
@houseboatonstyx: You can tax the rich. And the next month, most of those yacht owners will start paying their taxes in Switzerland, some might even move there. A millionaire tax is something that simply does not bring the money to the state, as far as evidence goes it does the opposite. Really rich people are extremely flexible in where they reside and where they pay the taxes and even if you could tax them, there are simply too few of them to pay for the government bills (especially the bills of the non-Swiss European governments). Sometimes governments in Europe actually try to impose a millionaire tax (like Francoise Holland a few years back). The effect is exactly that the rich people stop paying the taxes in that country and the country has to retract that tax. The best they can do (and they do that) is try to force Switzerland to make it’s banking system less welcoming to foreigners.
As for the VAT, it is not just a tax on products. There are a few exceptions but usually any kind of service is taxed with the value added tax so this is a difference in more than in who does the bookkeeping.
@ Vox, Tibor
My yacht is The Synedoche and sails orthogonaly to a VAT; ie you can have a VAT set to either progressive or regressive or mixed or neutral. And a synedoche of ‘yacht’ does not mean taxing only the people who can sail away in their yachts and never come back. There’s a whole axis there for taxing upper middle class items at a higher rate than low class items, etc.
No, they’re not. Polish abortion law is the result of a somewhat uneasy compromise between the anti-abortion and pro-abortion factions.
@Anonymous: That may be, but are abortions not more or less illegal there (or rather allowed on an individual basis and granted mostly only for medical reasons)? At least that is what I hear and that is why Polish women often come to Czech (and possibly also German, but it is more expensive there and equally far away, so probably this is rarer) hospitals to have an abortion. Maybe the laws change since I last read something about it though. That was maybe 5 years ago and there was this case with this woman who was told by the doctors that if she gives birth she could become blind (no idea how those two things are connected but I’m not a doctor). She wanted to have an abortion, that was not allowed and after the birth she had something like 5 dioptries on one eye and 6 on the other and she was going to sue the Polish state.
AFAIK, abortion is permitted in three cases:
1) pregnancy is the result of crime (mostly rape, I think, but incest is illegal too), up to 12 weeks,
2) child is incurably malformed in a life-threatening manner, up to viability,
3) mother’s life in danger, up to viability.
@Anonymous: Are you sure? English Wikipedia says something else, specifically:
Abortion in Poland is banned except in the following three circumstances.
1. When the woman’s life or health is endangered by the continuation of pregnancy,
2. When the pregnancy is a result of a criminal act, or
3. When the foetus is seriously malformed
I don’t speak Polish to check the Polish wiki version but there is also a list with three conditions there and it looks like the English version of the article is more or less a translation of the Polish version (the formatting is similar).
@Tibor
I’m working off the Polish articles, and they are contradictory concerning the child’s age wrt mother’s life at risk (no restrictions vs until viability), but otherwise support my version.
@Anonymous:
That’s strange. I looked at the Polish wikipedia article again and tried to understand the first sentence in that list (Polish is about as close to Czech as Dutch is to German, so it is possible to get the basic meaning of something written in one language if you read a text in the other). If I read it correctly, it says the same thing as the English article – “Abortion is legally forbidden, then something something over a doctor in three cases”. Then I think the first point says something like: “if he declares a danger to the mother irrespective of the age of the fetus”, the second I don’t get but it mentions disease, so I think it means something like if there is a damage to the fetus, right? And the third says: If there is a suspicion (the adjective before the word for suspicion probably means something like “reasonable”, so reasonable suspicion) that something something from act which is “zabroniony” (until the 12 weeks after what I guess means conception, given the context – the word is “ciazy”). So that one I don’t understand well, but if “zabroniony” means criminal, then it almost definitely says the same thing as the English article.
So unless you have a different source then I don’t know where you get the information about legal abortion during the first 12 weeks. That seems to only be legal in Poland if the conception was a result of a rape (also probably incest or when the would-be father is 20 and the mother is 14 or something). Actually, this means that after 12 weeks the abortion is illegal even it if was conceived in a rape, so that makes it even stricter. And the article says clearly that abortion is illegal outside of these three cases.
That first article is fascinatingly horrible. (The second one doesn’t display.)
First of all, it makes heavy of use the standard Marxian-postmodernist tactic of saying “X was created by group Y. Therefore, X serves the interests of group Y at the expense of group Z.”
But the most fascinating thing is the attempt to make feminism synonymous with open and thoroughgoing collectivism:
Making “individual, autonomous decisions” about your life is anti-feminist!
Equality for women apparently means protecting them with paternalistic laws, because apparently, they just can’t manage to run their own lives when they are thrown out into the wilderness to fend for themselves as men’s equals:
There are definitely two very different ideas of feminism being propounded when one side that allegedly believes in the equality of women thinks that they can’t be given legal equality with men and need the state to watch over them and place them in a position where they are protected from the abuses of men. Hint: that is exactly what the anti-feminists and opponents of women’s equality believed! I quote one of them, James Fitzjames Stephen:
There is an argument to be made for this view, of course. But to spin it and call it “feminist” is absurd!
***
Also, from the group’s “About” page:
Talk about “immanetizing the eschaton”!
This is why I think, despite the arguments of many American Christian conservatives and libertarians, the moral message of the Bible lends more support to massive government intervention than it does to the forces opposing it.
Are these Davos quotes and the way they are presented supposed to be funny? They literally look like a parody of out-of-touch, over-manicured elites spouting deep-sounding platitudes, but sadly, I don’t think it is actually a parody. But I do take it Scott is making fun of them by posting that picture at the head of the thread.
Today’s book discussion will be over The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature.
Next open thread we’ll discuss The Rise and Fall of American Growth by Robert J Gordon.
This is not a political book but I couldn’t help but notice all of the political implications of what this book says. These aren’t new ideas to me since I’ve been hearing about these concepts for a while now but it does help crystallize some thoughts I have had.
For one, sexual selection is about the most definite molochian process that can be seen in nature. Natural selection is all about survival of the fittest but sexual selection is even worse because not only can it completely control the evolutionary outcome of a species, it can even be detrimental to its survival, possibly causing it’s own extinction. Conservative institutions fighting this through enforced monogamy seem to be a great way to keep it from consuming us. Keeping women attached to one man causes the men to provide for the family. Keeping men attached to one women causes more men to be married and lessens violence. Unfortunately, the trend has been going the other way in the last half century. One point from the book in particular seems to show why the trend won’t stop. Polygamy is probably good for career minded women because they can continue to work and have one of the other women look after her kids. However good it is for them it seems pretty clear that low status men will suffer greatly. But I don’t see a return to violence. We’re too pacifistic of a society for that to happen. Instead what will happen is they turn to virtual reality to satisfy themselves and probably drugs and suicide when that doesn’t help them feel better.
Maybe I’m being too pessimistic. Does anyone think that I’m overstating the case against polygamy?
You’re guess to what polygamy might look like fits with a lot of mainstream culture stereotypes, but I don’t think it matches up to the reality of what a decline in monogamy would actually look like. Mainstream culture is terrible at things it has little data / direct exposure to.
I really don’t think we have anywhere near enough data on non-monogamish relationships to really make much of any predictions on the long term effects.
You could look for parallels in the late Roman Republic and Empire. Admittedly, I get my impression of that time period from I, Claudius, but the book was written by a historian filling out the gaps. Society slowly dwindles, as men are not provided incentives to care about posterity, and less degenerate migrant peoples replace them over the course of centuries.
One issue with polygamy that I’ve seen is that it’s less efficient in generating children per woman – getting pregnant isn’t exactly effortless, and the poor man with four wives has a limited endurance, especially if he’s older (which will also affect his sperm quality). The polygamous Ottoman Empire had a huge population decline problem, which it ameliorated with slave raids on their enemies. Whereas the monogamous Ruthenians frequently had something like 10 children per woman to offset their huge mortality and other population losses.
(I figure that if Mohammed would step out of being dead for a moment, and declare polygamy to be no longer permitted, Muslim population growth would increase as a result. Not to mention the decrease in violence caused by low status men seeking mates where supply is short.)
My impression is that in Islamic societies, ancient and modern, most men had only one wife. A few very high status men had four wives plus, possibly, concubines.
The author of _The Modern Egyptians_, who lived in Cairo for a while in the 19th century, said that of the (non-elite) men he knew, perhaps one in a hundred had more than one wife.
Yeah, but every woman taken by a high status man is one less woman available to other men. Even if the number of such men is small, they remove a substantial amount of women from the market.
In the Muslim culture, the rich guy has two wives; in the Christian culture, he has a wife and a mistress. Is it really so different?
@Viliam
I think the relevant paraphrase would be–albeit, in a different religious context–something like: “Hey, a lot of you have multiple wives, too. The difference is that I don’t discard my first one destitute when I marry the second.”
Villiam – in Christian societies, the wealthy or powerful man tries to not get his mistress pregnant. In Muslim societies, he tries to get his second wife pregnant.
Albipenne – we do have some data on what the breakdown of monogamy looks like, in black ghettos in the U.S. Relationships are still generally monogamous, but short-lived. A few “playas” may juggle multiple concubines, and get some of them pregnant, but they won’t support the kids, and the concubines are somewhat transient.
“Is it really so different?”
In at least some of the Christian cultures—18th c. Italy, 19th and 20th c. France—the wife gets to have a lover, so it isn’t straight polygyny and doesn’t have as unambiguous an effect on the supply/demand balance on the mating market.
“we do have some data on what the breakdown of monogamy looks like, in black ghettos in the U.S. Relationships are still generally monogamous, but short-lived. A few “playas” may juggle multiple concubines, and get some of them pregnant, but they won’t support the kids, and the concubines are somewhat transient.”
That’s only somewhat true. What’s really driving the deadbeat dad phenomenon in the ghettos is women wanting children, and using their children as hostages until their “deadbeat” dads get better jobs. The problem is that, while they might not have a good job, the dad is attempting to be a good dad in non-monetary means. This non-financial care is worthless to these women so they keep their child from the dad until he earns more money or they trade the dad role for a higher-status or higher-earning male.
http://shriverreport.org/what-about-the-fathers-kathryn-edin/
This is a more specific example of the larger trend of women ending relationships/marriages more than men. Though they show some data going back to the mid 1800s so this isn’t exactly a new phenomenon.
AFAIK, Niger is the country that has consistently been #1 on the list of countries with the highest fertility rates (with about 7 children per woman) in the last few years. And polygyny has been posited as one of the causes of that. It’s a data point that runs contrary to the hypothesis that polygamy decreases children per woman (although I haven’t been able to find statistics on what percentage of the population of Niger practices polygamy).
I, Claudius is about the first days of the Roman Empire (and the very late Republic), two to four hundred years before its generally recognized decline depending on how you’re counting.
Roman culture during the Julio-Claudian dynasty had its problems, sure, but that period’s usually cited as its high point, not its low. A theme of the book is how the flaws of the republican political class led to its eclipse by a de-facto autocracy and finally a de-jure one, but that’s one thing and the culture as a whole is another.
Why would getting rid of polygamy increase population growth? The relevant statistic for population growth is average number of children per woman (unless the culture practices sex selective abortion or infanticide that doesn’t make the statistics). Would a woman have more children if she didn’t have sister wives?
@Furslid
How often a woman can get pregnant is highly dependent on how often she can have sex. An “intensely farmed” woman can have more than an “extensively farmed” woman. The average conception chance per intercourse is something like 2.5%, and there’s limits to how often a man can get it up.
I don’t know whether the difference is big or small, though.
@Furslid:
In addition to the points already made, if a rich guy with multiple wives has bad sperm or becomes impotent or whatever, it means multiple women will have a lower reproductive rate. Whereas if one partner in a pair has a reproductive failure, it just means one woman will have a lower reproductive rate.
Also, reading history, it seems to be somewhat common for polygamists to have “favorites,” which means that the phenomenon Anonymous mentions will be even more exaggerated. The favorites will reproduce at a higher rate – but if there are multiple non-favorites it seems likely that they will reproduce at a lower rate than average. Depending on the trend this could make the overall reproduction rate even lower.
Birth rates aren’t just driven by number of children a woman has, they are also influenced by how many women don’t have children at all. Depending on the country/class/culture, an unmarried woman is unlikely to extremely unlikely to have children, and not at the same rate as her married sister.
One husband/multiple wives is a useful answer to situations where there are fewer men than women – see: Russia post WWII.
Anonymous@3:04am – Getting a woman pregnant every two years requires an investment of about 40 incidents of intercourse (if the 2.5% statistic is correct); that’s not a lot. A man keeping a harem will have an advantage in capacity due to the Coolidge Effect. So it’s not unreasonable for a man with a large enough harem to be able to start at least one pregnancy per month. A Muslim, limited to four wives, should be physically capable of fathering about two children per year, for a period of well over a decade.
In a case of nominative determinism, Philander Rodman has had at least 28 children, only one of whom ended up in the NBA.
One Islamic legal source I checked suggested that a man should have sex with his wife every four days, I think based on what he could be expected to do if he had four wives. That should produce pretty close to the biological maximum reproductive rate, assuming no use of contraception.
According to the same source, interruptus is permitted but mildly disapproved of. I don’t know if there is an Islamic doctrine on the rhythm method.
@Anthony
Yes, but we’re talking about societal-level effects here. Will that same man not be able to get a higher number of children per woman from one woman, than four? With four, he’s almost guaranteed to have more in total, but there will almost certainly be fewer children per woman, which is one of the bottlenecks. I’m claiming that polygamy is advantageous to the individual man (defect) and monogamy is advantageous to everyone (cooperate).
Does anyone have any stats on who the most fertile groups of people are, and what their attitudes towards *gamy are?
@anonymous:
I think what you are missing is that getting a woman pregnant isn’t sufficient for population purposes–the child also has to be born and reared to reproductive age. Wombs are a scarce reproductive resource, sperm isn’t. But the resources used to provide food, housing, protection, are.
In a monogamous society, however rich a man is the number of children he can produce and rear is limited by the number his wife can bear, although he can get some additional extended reproductive success by helping to support nieces, nephews, etc. In a polygamous society, resources for rearing children are more evenly spread out because the rich man has his resources divided among the children of four wives instead of just one. The gain due to the rich man’s wife in a monogamous society getting pregnant a little more often is outweighed by the loss due to the poor man and his wife being unable to afford to produce and rear anything close to the number of children she could bear.
It’s worth remembering that, by historical standards, the modern world is incredibly rich. One estimate I have seen is that average real income, including the poor countries, is about ten times what it was through most of history—twenty to thirty times for the developed world. In lots of past societies men married late because they had to wait until they could afford a wife and children.
I don’t about groups of people, but country-wise it appears to be Niger. The majority religion is Islam, polygamy is legal and about 1/3 of the country’s women are in polygamous marriages. It’s also one of the poorest countries in the world (222 out of 229 in GDP per capita at PPP).
Although it has the highest birth rate (45.45 births/1,000 population) and total fertility rate (6.76 children born/woman) it is 4th in population growth rate (#1 South Sudan) .
The Old Order Amish in Ohio evidently have a fertility rate of 7.7. Other Mennonite sects also have had high birth rates but the Old Order Amish are the highest that I know of, although then again the depth of my expertise here is about 30s of googling.
They are all strictly monogamous.
I have read of a study that indicates that for every extra wife a man takes, his existing wives will have one fewer child apiece.
I also note that both Muslims and (schismatic) Mormons have found that legal monogamy makes the wealth of the man moot — the additional wives can collect welfare.
The 36 best quotes appear most mindless platitudes by poiticians and management style advice from the CEO’s with two exceptions.
The PM of Israel. “The key to tackling extremism is despair. Rob them of the hope their wild fantasies will win out the day.”
PM France “Don’t leave the EU UK!”
Some of the platitudes weren’t just mindless, they were embarrassingly nonsensical. “we’ve heard a lot about the Internet of Things; we need an Internet of Women” is way more unintentionally funny than “binders full of women”.
Also, I was surprised at some of the people there. Will.i.am? Kevin Spacey?
I found the placement of the Netanyahu quote in the list to be pretty amusing. Amidst all these hollow, uplifting sentiments, there’s grumpy old Bibi talking about how we need to create despair. That’s not a knock on his actual statement; it’s just a funny juxtaposition.
I think it’s ridiculous that Emma Watson has tried to turn herself into some deep thinker for women’s rights. You’re Hermione. That’s all you are. Live with it.
It’s kind of like if Martin Sheen decided to run for the democratic nomination. Except I kinda like Martin Sheen.
He wouldn’t be the first actor to run for political office…
What, this isn’t presidential material?
True? Clearly not. If you can’t tell the difference between the actress and the part it’s you who are suffering under delusion. Her positions should rise or fall on their own, not because you can accuse her of being a popular actress. That sword cuts both ways.
Kind? No.
And I see don’t see how it’s in any way necessary.
“True? Clearly not. If you can’t tell the difference between the actress and the part it’s you who are suffering under delusion.”
If you understand idiomatic English then you know what I mean. And it isn’t that.
I am confident you understand idiomatic English, so the question arises: why are you suggesting something which you know to be untrue, i. e. that I can’t tell the difference between an actress and her part?
“You’re Hermione. That’s all you are. Live with it.”
That idiom seems to mean, roughly, that Emma Watson is a talentless hack of a child star who is now acting as if she is “somebody”.
Is there some other “kind” interpretation I am somehow missing?
She went to Oxford and graduated from Brown, for pete’s sake.
See below.
Fuck everyone who smugly cites the comment policy at other commentors, with the possible exception of Scott himself.
@Suntzuanime:
Scott has his policy for a reason. The reason being that these are the rules we are supposed to hold ourselves to.
And in what way is my comment “smug”?
It seems like you are taking his comment personally but I don’t understand why.
HBC: Your on-topic comments are uniformly thoughtful and worthwhile. However, can you stop being That Guy Who Always Polices the Comment Policy? Please? After the first half-dozen times, the policing is more annoying than the rando one-offs that you are trying to police.
@The Anonymouse:
If I started making rando offensive comments about certain people, someone would call me on it, as they should.
Perhaps what you are saying is that you would like the comments section to be a comfortable place, where everyone can post things that are moderately offensive without worrying about whether they get called on it.
Well, those place tend to not have interesting back and forth.
But maybe this actually is an alt-right echo-chamber and I’m actually the asshole.
@ The Anonymouse
HBC: Your on-topic comments are uniformly thoughtful and worthwhile. However, can you stop being That Guy Who Always Polices the Comment Policy?
Maybe some more of us should pitch in to do more of that.
Second/thirded whatever.
It does no bloody good to be really annoyed by some non-constructive action by a community member and then just sit on ones flipping hands. Aren’t we always going on about how grey types are too literal and don’t read social cues?
Politely tell someone they are being non-productive, and then deal with the substance of the comment. We don’t have to be so afraid of being called SJWs that we give up on pointing out bad behavior – just like is being done here with HBC.
You can’t understand why HBC is taking suntzuanime’s “fuck everyone …” comment personally? It was blatantly directed at HBC and intended to cause offense. Most of suntzuanime’s posts are intended to cause offense because apparently the emperor has declared that subjects ought to cause offense. It prevents blight or something.
@science2
I’m talking about onyomis comment. i don’t understand why he’s so offended by the comment about Emma Watson.
Except, if all you are is The Chick Who Played Hermione Granger, is there something better you should be doing with that than, say, this?
I’m assuming she hasn’t actually given up on her acting career and still auditions for roles that would allow her to expand beyond TCWPHG, but until that happens, why not give give speeches on women’s rights to people who a crowd that will barely, cynically pretend to listen but might not even show up for a generic Not Hot, Not Famous, Feminist Spokesperson?
Yeah, I don’t actually so much blame her, personally, if that’s what she’s interested in; it’s more the degree to which others take her seriously just because she’s a celebrity. I know people who have devoted decades to studying women’s issues. Do they get to talk at Davos?
Isn’t this a commonly agreed fallacy? I feel Scott has brought it up before.
Yes, Emma Watson will get more pub and more quotes than less famous people with better credentials, but that doesn’t mean she should not speak. She isn’t even speaking as a feminist scholar, so it’s not clear she is taking the place of someone who is more worthy.
As I said, what bothers me is more the degree to which others listen to celebrity than that celebrities chose to speak. Nonetheless, the celebrities themselves bother me to the degree they give the impression of operating under the misapprehension that their ideas are being paid attention to for their merit, rather than because they are a celebrity.
How much libertarian scholarship have you done, onyomi? I get the sense this is not your area of academic expertise, but I could be wrong.
And yet you have strong views and deeply held convictions about the matter. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that.
And Emma Watson appears to have been employed by UN Women precisely because she is famous. She is a spokesperson for the effort, not too much unlike Joe DiMaggio was for Mr. Coffee. Perhaps she went to the UN and convinced them they needed to start a “HeForShe” campaign, but that seems less likely (and might actually be impressive).
She is a spokesperson for the effort, not too much unlike Joe DiMaggio was for Mr. Coffee.
Precisely. But that makes the whole thing as cynical, as exploitative, and as unlikely to substantially improve the human condition as any other Madison Avenue advertising campaign, and yet here it is being held as an example of the Greatness That Is Davos. A certain level of mockery is not uncalled for, and demanding that any part of such nonsense be treated with respect probably won’t get you very far.
The mockery should, I think, be more precisely targeted at the audience who I suspect had many better things they could have been doing with their time, than at the young woman who maybe didn’t. And at the silly propaganda that brought it to our attention.
@JohnSchilling:
There were a lot of Mr. Coffees sold, though. People got a decent product for a decent price. How cynical and exploitative it is depends on how the product compares to the marketing.
From a worldwide perspective, 1st wave Feminism seems like a pretty necessary idea to me. I don’t think the UN campaign is designed at advancing 3rd wave feminism in the developed world, which means we aren’t the target market.
Advertising is always going to look pretty awful to at least some people who aren’t in the target market.
I don’t think the UN campaign, or such campaigners in general, distinguish such forms of feminism, but rather consider them all the same thing. For instance, if you look at the web site of the UN Campaign for women, you find lots of figures referencing the developed world, as well as using terminology meant for the developed world in connection with the non-developed world, such as “safe spaces”. If you look at their 2015 timeline for women’s rights it includes such things as “Germany passes law for gender quota in boardrooms” and “Hollywood: gender wage gap exposed”. Even Watson’s own speech invoked unequal pay in Britain.
“Advertising is always going to look pretty awful to at least some people who aren’t in the target market.”
The complaint isn’t about the existence of advertising and spokespersons and celebrity popularizers. It’s about inviting a celebrity popularizer to a “world economic forum” that bills itself as a meeting of thought leaders in the realm of economics, not a meeting of spokespersons for social causes. Of course, some of the speakers seem to be claiming that feminism is an economic issue. Fair enough. Invite an actual thought leader in the realm of gender and economic development, not a spokesperson/popularizer.
Unless Davos isn’t really about advancing the state of economic and political thought, but rather about rich and powerful people preening and networking in a very public, ostentatious way. Which is what I’m strongly implying it is.
@onyomi,
The fact that Davos is nothing more nor less than “rich and powerful people preening and networking in a very public, ostentatious way” is universal common knowledge among everyone who pays attention to Davos, with the exception of those who actually attend.
From a worldwide perspective, 1st wave Feminism seems like a pretty necessary idea to me.
I quite agree. It’s the part where an enthusiastic young celebrity giving a generically uplifting talk at a gathering of global elites is going to advance that cause in any meaningful way that is laughable. Worth an afternoon of Emma Watson’s time if she doesn’t have an acting job that week? Yeah, probably. Worth bragging about in someone’s list of examples of why Davos is so great? If that’s the best they’ve got, or even in the top 36, the whole thing is looking pretty laughable.
@John Schilling:
If she is speaking at Davos, and you are not at Davos, you are not the target market.
I honestly have no idea whether Emma Watson speaking at Davos makes it slightly more likely that Saudi Arabia improves in 1st Wave Feminist metrics in the next 20 years. I’m not even sure whether Davos makes much difference in the course of events. But I’m not at Davos either.
Let me put it this way. If she were putting malaria nets or de-worming in front of 250 public figures (including heads of state or government, cabinet ministers, ambassadors, heads or senior officials of international organizations) people here would generally find it to be a good thing. Especially if she could speak eloquently on the issue and reference the relevant science.
In other words, I don’t think this has very much to do with Emma Watson or famous people advocating for causes they believe in, but has more to do with whose ox is being gored and whether it is (hypothetically) “yours”.
Obviously I can’t run the counterfactual, but if Watson wasn’t advocating for the outgroup of this blog, I think the original comment would have been much differently phrased, along the lines of “Do famous people advocating for their priorities do net good or harm?” And that is if the comment was made at all.
@Jiro:
This page seems to indicate much more of a developing world slant. But what do I know?
HBC: They’re obviously focussing on third world feminism at the moment, but that’s very different from only being dedicated to third world feminism.
If she were putting malaria nets or de-worming in front of 250 public figures (including heads of state or government, cabinet ministers, ambassadors, heads or senior officials of international organizations) people here would generally find it to be a good thing.
Of course people would support a cause they support. But that doesn’t mean that they agree that Watson is the one who should do that. She doesn’t have expertise on malaria or de-worming either, so it would still be stupid to have her talk about it.
It might actually be worse to have her talk about those topics than to have her talk about feminism, because feminism has already been celebritized and identity politicized to such a degree that one more useless opinion is a drop in the ocean. In a way, it is very fitting to have her talk about feminism. It’s actually an accurate reflection of how the field of Gender Studies is anti-scientific misandry, so why not just invite a celeb? It’s not like the average Gender Studies professor would make more sense.
@HeelBearCub
The criticism is two-fold: one is that Emma Watson is given a platform to speak about women’s rights when her comments about the issue are not particularly innovative, informed or thoughtful, even by feminist standards. This is not a criticism of Watson, but of the relationship that the general society has with celebrities.
The second criticism, more specifically directed at Watson, is that she uses women’s rights advocacy just to keep herself relevant, given than her acting career after Harry Potter has been less than stellar. Hollywood competition is cutthroat, and she has only a few years left to land a major role before her fame dissipates and she becomes The Kid Who Played Hermione forever. Spinning platitudes about social justice is a simple and safe way to extend her expiration date as an actress and possibly reinvent herself as a “cultural critic” if her acting career turns out to be unsalvageable.
Hollywood competition is cutthroat, and she has only a few years left to land a major role before her fame dissipates and she becomes The Kid Who Played Hermione forever
Doesn’t this make your second criticism, “more specifically directed at Watson”, also really about the relationship that the general society has with celebrities?
In the celebrity and motion-picture businesses as they actually, laughably are, and on the days when there aren’t auditions for substantive acting roles, is there anything Emma Watson could better do than this to steer her career away from “The Chick Who Played Hermione Granger, coming to a genre convention near you”? Probably not. Given Davos as it actually, laughably is, and that this year’s agenda included a generically uplifting feminist speech for everyone to claim Progressive Points from, is there anyone better than Hermione Watson to give the speech? Would putting Amanda Marcotte on stage instead have had Ashraf Ghani going back to Afghanistan with a greater commitment to first-wave feminism? Probably not.
There’s lots to laugh at here, or to seriously criticize. Just not Emma Watson’s actions or decisions given the circumstances, I think.
It always makes me think of Plato’s Apology of Socrates. While people who take celebrities seriously when they natter outside their area of expertise are at fault, the celebrities themselves are often at fault for not realizing that they are outside.
In what way is this outside of Emma Watson’s area of expertise? She’s not being asked to do original research in feminist theory, or to sit down with Ashraf Ghani and negotiate a treaty guaranteeing equality for the women of Afghanistan. Her job was to give an inspirational speech. Almost by definition, if there’s a person who is qualified for that job then any actor or actress who can convincingly play that person is equally qualified. Ms. Watson seems to be a talented actress whose range has perhaps not been fully explored by Hollywood but includes at least “Hermione Granger” and “Passionate Crusader for Women’s Rights”.
Maybe she’s secretly a bitter self-hating misogynist and utter intellectual lightweight who cynically calculated that hiring a speechwriter to put together some inspirational silliness to deliver in all the right places will get her fame, prestige, and a higher class of acting jobs in the future. She is still, to all appearances, qualified to give the speeches, and for that job appearances are all that matter. And at 25, she’s probably not that cynical yet (though, Hollywood…)
Economic forums are inappropriate locations for inspiring speeches.
Apparently those sponsoring this particular economic forum disagree.
If there’s anything going on at Davos that isn’t pointless, inspiring speeches for the cameras, it’s pretty well hidden. Probably in the secret forums where the E1 supervillains plot world domination.
And really, aside from the supervillainy, that’s probably a pretty good bet – most of the conferences and conventions I go to, the real action is in the hallways, and the formal presentations are at best to set the stage for the interesting sidebars.
But, again, check out the “36 quotes” bit that sparked this whole discussion. Part of what Davos does, at least for PR purposes, is give fluffy inspiring speeches with All the Right People being seen to listen and applaud. So there’s a need for people talented in the art of giving fluffy inspiring speeches.
If the speech is about first-wave feminism and the audience includes men of power in countries where women are still little better than chattel, I kind of want those speeches given by someone the audience might pay attention to. And look, here we are, proving that Emma Watson giving a speech is worth paying attention to…
“If there’s anything going on at Davos that isn’t pointless, inspiring speeches for the cameras, it’s pretty well hidden”
Then it’s a vacuity and a waste of time, and anyone who participates in any way is doing nothing but boosting the pride of those already arrogant.
Unfortunately, she doesn’t even have that anymore.
Are you guys trying to confirm the awful stereotypes the left has of the right in their head?
What?
Well, Michael Jackson grew up to be white. I don’t see why Hermione can’t grow up to be black.
The ghost of Godfrey Elfwick continues to haunt us…
HeelBearCub, the only person who seems to operate on stereotypes here is you. What exactly was bad about jaimeastorga2000’s comment?
jaimeastorga2000’s comment can be interpreted in different ways. The most basic one is that Watson didn’t get role of Hermione in the play, so she is literally no longer ‘the actress playing Hermione’.
Another interpretation is that Hermione being retconned to black makes it less likely that Watson will be cast as Hermione again in the future.
Neither interpretation seems objectionable.
A third interpretation is that he’s taking a piss at this trend of recasting white characters as black, in the context of further dissing Watson. Which is what HBC probably finds offensive.
For the record, I thought it was funny, but it isn’t really surprising that a Blue would find it offensive. Much to HBC’s credit, though, and I mean this 100% honestly, they usually get upset about pretty much every offensive comment, not just the ones directed at the ingroup.
“Another interpretation is that Hermione being retconned to black makes it less likely that Watson will be cast as Hermione again in the future.”
I guarantee that if the stage production was cast with a white woman playing Hermoine, Jamie’s comment does not get made.
And Emma Watson is never going to play Hermoine again outside of some sort of new material that brings back some segment of the original cast. So that point doesn’t hold water either.
Hermoine wasn’t retconned as black. It never states in the book whether she is white or black. People pointed this out. Hermoine was cast as black.
The original post is just laughing and pointing at this as if it is funny.
@Aajpe
Since the fact that a person who is not Emma Watson is playing Hermione in a stage production of Harry Potter is utterly irrelevant to the subject under discussion, it seems logical to assume that jaimeastorga has some other motive in mentioning it. Since the main point of the linked article seems to be that the actress playing Hermione is black, it seems that jaimeastorga wants to make some point about that. Due to the framing of the link (“unfortunately”), it seems that jaimeastorga disapproves of this state of affairs.
Because of all that, jaimeastorga comes across as having a bit of a bee in their bonnet about the casting of actors who don’t resemble how their characters are popularly imagined (to be generous). Being less generous, he seems like an edgy quasi-racist who doesn’t even make interesting comments.
@ HBC
Hermoine wasn’t retconned as black. It never states in the book whether she is white or black. People pointed this out.
I’m afraid this is the sort of thing that, if it were true, it would have been stated; or at least not totally ignored. A great deal is made of her Muggle blood.
@houseboatonstyx:
Rowling certainly knew that Hermoine would be read as white.
Whether she also intended not to leave her race actually unspecified is certainly debatable. But she put some serious thought into how she put the books together, so it’s not as unlikely as it might be otherwise.
It’s not whites, it’s specifically red-heads being replaced with black actors.
Little Orphan Annie, Jimmy Olsen, and Hermione. That’s 3, which as we all know, is a trend.
Why are red-heads being erased? Your guess is as good as mine.
@ HBC
“Whether she also intended not to leave her race actually unspecified is certainly debatable.”
Are all those words actually supposed to be there, or is it just past my bedtime? 😉
erasing red-heads
Non-serious reply: Clearly a
sinister plotsecret revolution to undermine the violent and racist sector of the American South which was descended from the Scots-Irish.More serious: I have known multiple people of multi-generation mixed African & Euro descent who had reddish brown hair and freckles with pale tan skin who reported no ‘white’ red heads in their families. I haven’t done a deep dive, but to me it’s far less of a stretch to shift a redhead to “light” African-American than it is to shift a blonde. Your mileage may vary.
(And while we’re at it – I’m still cranky about the gender swap in the latest version of My Friend Flicka. I felt that *completely* missed the point.)
@HeelBearCub
I guarantee that if the stage production was cast with a white woman playing Hermoine, Jamie’s comment does not get made.
You can’t know that. This is purely because you project an opinion on him.
And Emma Watson is never going to play Hermoine again outside of some sort of new material that brings back some segment of the original cast.
Which has now become less likely, due to retconning making this harder. So you really appear to be agreeing with my point here…
Fact is that Harrison Ford got a role as Han Solo in the latest Star Wars, which earned him mucho dinero. Imagine if that would happen with Hermione. The pro-black lobby would go crazy over the retconned retcon, in a way that wouldn’t happen if Hermione had never been cast as black. Hence, this retcon makes is harder for Watson to be cast as Hermione again.
Hermoine wasn’t retconned as black. It never states in the book whether she is white or black.
I. The movies are part of the canon too. Once a decision was made for the movies (with Rowling surely having big input), any later change becomes a retcon.
II. “Hermione’s white face was sticking out from behind a tree.” Prisoner of Azkaban. This description is incompatible with a black-skinned person.
====
Anyway, the most amusing thing about the Hermione = now black change is how desperately the PC crowd wanted there to be racism, to smugly denounce, while I didn’t see that (instead, merely the traditional complaining when any character is recast with a significant change).
“Which has now become less likely, due to retconning making this harder. So you really appear to be agreeing with my point here…
Fact is that Harrison Ford got a role as Han Solo in the latest Star Wars, which earned him mucho dinero. Imagine if that would happen with Hermione. The pro-black lobby would go crazy over the retconned retcon, in a way that wouldn’t happen if Hermione had never been cast as black. Hence, this retcon makes is harder for Watson to be cast as Hermione again.”
You saw that this was a play, right? If someone did a Star Wars Episode 6.5 play in London ten years ago and cast a black dude as Hans Solo, I don’t really see Harrison Ford’s role in Force Awakens being controversial or less likely.
I haven’t read the books, but on the cover of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban I see Harry has used his sweet ride to pick up a red-head. I assume the “bonnie lass” in question is Hermione. This raises the important question: are book covers canon?
@Nil
Given the current atmosphere around race, which showed in how people reacted to this (and the ‘black Oscars issue’), I’d say that this choice will impact any possible future casting choices for Hermione. Unless people lighten up in the future, of course.
@Jaskologist
Covers are generally not considered canon, AFAIK. Especially since their primary purpose is to get people to pick up the book and thus are more marketing than an accurate reflection of the contents of the book.
Besides, that’s the american cover. If any cover is going to be canon, it’s probably the british one.
Aapje:
It is true that I cannot know jaime’s truest internal workings. But I can make likely inferences and assign a high degree of probability to them. That is all a guarantee is anyway.
Indeed, you made the same inference. You are the one now suggesting that casting Hermoine as black was somehow such a drastic change that it warranted declaring that Emma Watson could never play Hermoine again, even if she were to star opposite Daniel Radcliffe in “Harry Potter: The Voldemort Awakens” wherein it is revealed that Harry and Hermoine are actually Voldemort’s secret twin children, separated at birth and hidden in the muggle world and that all those Hermoine/Harry shippers are sick incest fetishers.
@Jaskologist:
Hermoine was never a redhead. The Weasleys are the readheads.
From Rowling herself:
“Canon: brown eyes, frizzy hair and very clever. White skin was never specified. Rowling loves black Hermione”
@houseboatonstyx:
“Are all those words actually supposed to be there, or is it just past my bedtime?”
I skipped the triple-negative and went straight to the “triple-dog” negative?
Yeah, clearly hadn’t had my coffee yet when I wrote that…
@HBC
She was definitely red-headed in at least some of the movies (possibly with the aid of dye and/or magic). But we’re pretty much at the limit of my Potter knowledge now.
@Jaskologist: Also Wally West.
“Hermoine wasn’t retconned as black. It never states in the book whether she is white or black.”
I haven’t read the books or seen the movies, but I think this is mistaken. In the U.S., and I expect also the U.K., the fact that someone is black matters, is the sort of thing that would be mentioned about a major character if true, so if it isn’t mentioned one can reasonably suppose it isn’t true.
The same would be true of a character being a believing fundamentalist Christian, being deathly allergic to peanuts, having a photographic memory, anything sufficiently uncommon not to be the default and sufficiently important to get mentioned about a major character.
Is that really the case in Britain, though? From what I’ve heard, being black is a lot less significant there.
And even if it is in Britain, would it be the case in Wizarding Britain which has pretty much sealed itself off from the muggle world? Would it be significant enough that our sometimes-oblivious narrator Harry would notice?
(From a Doylist view, I agree Rowling was almost certainly imagining Hermione as white. But from a Watsonian view, I think there’s just enough room for debate.)
@Jaime — If you’re surprised that the play tried to make a Statement with its casting choices, I suspect you haven’t been exposed to much theater. It does stuff like this all the time. Sometimes it’s clever; I liked the production of Othello where everyone was cast as black except for the titular general, who was white. Sometimes it’s a gimmick. In either case, you shouldn’t mistake it for having some kind of Deep Cultural Significance; if you’re being charitable it’s about the type of people that make plays (who tend to be left-leaning and rather irreverent) having some fun, and if you’re being cynical it’s about advertising to the social class that still watches plays for fun. In either case it is not really worth thinking hard about.
@Jaskologist:
Here is a list of pictures, in book order, of Emma Watson from the movies. With a rather amusing attempt to depict her with frizzy her and very long teeth as described in the book.
At no point does she seem to be portrayed as a red-head.
@David Friedman:
As I said upthread Rowling certainly knew that Hermoine would be read as white. But she also put serious thought into how she put the books together, so the fact that she did not specify race leads to a reasonable debate about whether this was intentional or not.
It’s interesting that you are making the “white by default” argument, but from the other side of the fence.
Edit:
And this argument is made stronger because she very, very, very clearly is attempting to inject the idea of “racial purity” into the whole series. Pure-blood vs. mud-blood. Voldemort as a Hitler-esque figure of pure evil who is a half-blood leading a movement for racial purity. There are just too many themes there to deny the possibility of some intentionality on her part.
However, it is worth pointing out that Dean Thomas and Angelina Johnson (two characters portrayed by black actors in the movies) are both specifically described as black at various points in the novels. Why would she trouble to mention their races and not the far-more-significant Hermione’s?
@HBC
I’d call her red-headed in at least those first 3 pictures. Apparently, we’re working from different definitions, but clearly more people agree with mine, or they wouldn’t have recast her as black.
@Jaskologist Though Jimmy Olsen has, as far as I know, never been cast as a redhead in any live-action production. (Note: I didn’t watch Smallville, so I may have missed something.)
I don’t know why there’s been less interest in capturing that character’s iconic look than Superman or Lois Lane. (Especially since his comics look is, if anything, more distinctive and less generic than Lois’s.) But given that it is, race-blind casting seems unexceptionable.
The other odd thing is that the DC TV shows are now four for four in taking central characters with light blond hair in the comics and casting actors with darker shades. TV Supergirl and Rip Hunter may still be arguably in the blondish range, but they don’t have the kind of hair I read comic-book yellow as mapping to. Which is especially strange since light blond– natural or otherwise– seems extremely common in Hollywood.
Does Berlanti hate blonds? (And if so, why use only them as source material?)
I don’t really care in the sense that whiteness seems in no way integral to Hermione’s character (though if she had been not just a muggle, but a minority muggle even within the muggle world of England, it would obviously have been worth mentioning, especially considering SPEW, etc.), but there really is no way Rowling intentionally left Hermione’s race ambiguous so that she might later be played by non-white actors.
I’m sure the idea of retconning Hermione for some version of the story appeals to Rowling because of her own sensibilities, but I’m also sure she didn’t have that idea until this play came along. And of course the default character is white–it’s England!
In fact, I don’t think she ever states anyone is white anywhere in the books, except when describing traits which only white people but not all white people have–like red hair in the case of the Weasleys. Even for Harry we pretty much have to assume someone with green eyes is white. Race only comes up when someone is Asian or black (though it is interesting she never states Parvati and Padma Patil’s skin tone, but I think their names are supposed to make it obvious).
Did you know, for example, that in Story of the Stone, they never explicitly state that Lin Daiyu is Asian! Therefore, she could be white–you never know.
And again, a black Hermione doesn’t bother me in the least. I saw Hamlet played brilliantly by a black actor once. Doesn’t mean Shakespeare intentionally left the character open to him being a black Danish prince. It means, rather, that in acting, evoking the essential character traits of the character is important than physical resemblance to a description.
In fact, I don’t think she ever states anyone is white anywhere in the books
Someone not too distant from me on Facebook decided I really needed to see photos of various bits of text the HP series describing Hermione’s skin as “pink” or “white”. Not a huge number, but enough to make a compelling case that Rowling thought of the character as white, actually did describe the character as white, and expected the reader to see the character as white.
So, yeah, a retcon, and probably a dishonest one, but who here was ever going to see the play anyway?
Even for Harry we pretty much have to assume someone with green eyes is white
Pashtuns would be the obvious exception.
The thing that annoys me isn’t the retcon (which is perfectly reasonable if the actress they liked for the part just happened to be black, and somewhat irritatingly in-your-face if they went out of their way to specifically hire a black actress), but the dishonesty in claiming it wasn’t a retcon. Even if it’s not technically a lie in the sense that she was never explicitly mentioned to be white, it’s clearly dishonest, and in this case has the implied tones of “and you’re kinda racist for just assuming she was white”, which is irritating.
@HeelBearCub
From Rowling herself:
“Canon: brown eyes, frizzy hair and very clever. White skin was never specified. Rowling loves black Hermione”
Yes, that is what she said recently, despite the book and movie being different ….aka retconning.
You are the one now suggesting that casting Hermoine as black was somehow such a drastic change that it warranted declaring that Emma Watson could never play Hermoine again
No, I was suggesting that it is not racist to state that in today’s racially sensitive world, it would be harder to cast a white person in the future, after setting this precedent. Jaime surely has exaggerated this point, but that still doesn’t make it racist….which was your accusation that I thought was jumping to conclusions.
The point is not that I am defending Jaime’s statement per se, I am claiming that a person can make such a statement in good faith, committing no greater crime than exaggeration, which is something that we are surely all guilty of frequently.
I’ll bet a hundred bucks at even odds that the next actress playing Hermione outside theater is white. Or that she’s drawn fair-skinned, if it’s animated.
(Ambiguously brown is a realistic possibility for the latter, but I’d still take the bet.)
@John Schilling
The Rowling tweet doesn’t say that she anticipated Hermione being black when writing the book. It just says she likes the idea of Hermione being black, and that there is not canon statment that she is white. I don’t think there has to be any dishonesty here?
Aapje:
Does Hermoine being black make any plot point into something that wasn’t at it seems allowing a new plot to go forward? If you aren’t saying something significant happens to events, that’s not the kind of definition of retcon I think of. As I already said, I’m sure Rowling knew that Hermoine would be assumed to be white, but Hermoine’s whiteness is not particularly a plot point.
The cannonical retcon, in my eyes, is “The Return of Sherlock Holmes”.
Jaime was trying to make a funny. I get that. But “Emma Watson can’t even be Hermoine anymore because now Hermoine is black” in context of mocking Emma Watson for her role as a feminist spokesperson is pretty much a mindkill of a joke.
@ HBC
“I’m sure Rowling knew that Hermoine would be assumed to be white, but Hermoine’s whiteness is not particularly a plot point.”
Whereas, if a Black-Hermione in the books was never a plot point in the books, we should like to know the reason why not! Maybe all Blacks were Mudbloods, so it didn’t matter what color a Mudblood was. Maybe in the Potterverse, Black was not any kind of issue at all. Spending wordage and the reader’s time on explaining why something is unimportant … is not good narrative. Unless there were some interesting story about Black and/or Muggle origins … but in that case, JKR would have included it, or at least referenced it, very early on.
Speaking as someone who works in British theatre, I don’t really think this should be considered retconning. The current fashion is very much for casting without regard for physical appearance – “gender-blind”, “colour-blind”, “ableness-blind” and so on. The hip theatrical idiom du jour is proudly anti-naturalistic, and this casting (of a superb actress, as it happens) is simply the highest profile case in point. Mainstream cinema remains a far more naturalistic medium, in casting as in other respects, so I don’t think this has any bearing on what might happen there; this is not a case like that of Richard Sharpe, who mysteriously lost the constant references to his raven black hair and acquired a hitherto unknown Sheffield phase to his upbringing in books written after the casting of Sean Bean.
For what it’s worth, I think Rowling’s comments were both at least bordering on an outright (though well-intentioned) lie and simply a tactical error: what she ought to have said was simply that there are more important things in casting a role than what an actor looks like and Dumezweni was a great choice.
“ableness-blind”?
Shouldn’t that be “ableness-differently-sighted”?
@Tom Richards, that’s interesting. thank you.
@Richard
I think Rowling’s comments were both at least bordering on an outright (though well-intentioned) lie and simply a tactical error
I agree. I thought that her comment was the kind of PCness that just adds fuel to the fire. She should have reacted like Louis CK: ‘I don’t give a shit, (I) just pick the best actress.*’
Right now, she was just inviting people to comb over her books, which they did and found convincing evidence IMO.
* Although Louis thought the race of his ex-wife actually improved his story-telling, so it wasn’t color-blind casting, either.
Actually surprisingly believable. I find it very hard to believe that wizards would enslave other wizards, for several reasons. There is no point to having wizard rather than muggle slaves unless you allow them to use magic, in which case it becomes very difficult to stop them escaping (there’s the Imperius Curse, I suppose…). Capturing wizards to enslave them is even harder. Also, there are house-elves.
Therefore, any wizard in the UK with Black Caribbean ancestry (ie descended from slaves) would have to either be Muggle-born or descended from a Black Muggle-born wizard, or mixed-race with their Black ancestors having been Muggles. This presumably includes the only Black wizards we meet (Dean Thomas, Angelina Johnson and Kingsley Shacklebolt) as they have English rather than African names.
As for Black African wizards, they presumably tend to stay in Africa and are educated at the wizard schools there, most notably Uagadou, as they have significantly fewer reasons to immigrate- all wizards seem to do fairly well for themselves wherever they live.
Or James Bond, who IIRC only became Scottish in the books after the casting of Sean Connery.
@HeelBearClub
Generally, what disturbs the right is not that black actors get jobs, but that they get jobs because they are black, or more properly the ridiculous holiness-signalling of white elites to gain diversity cred. Nobody objected to Whoppie Goldberg, it was understood she got the jobs because she is actually good at comical roles and not because someone wanted a token black actor to put a checkmark into diversity and signal how nice tolerant he is.
And about your remark that the books did not specify Hermione’s color, do you really think settings in fiction or in real life DEFAULT to diverse, even if it is a magical version of Britain set in the past, judging from the steamy trains, about 1880? Do you think there were many nonwhite people? And they were going to colleges? Aside from the obvious historic fact of countries being far more monochrome in the past, diversity is mostly a PR photo op or the result of rather enforced progressive policies, the reality is that people don’t fall naturally into diverse groups, because they prefer the company of their own. Real white boys make friends with a black girl only if their minds had several generations of progressive workover and even in that case it will be probably a token black girl friend, i.e. just a signal that they are conforming to diversity. People are in natural conditions are so un-diverse that the most surprising thing I found out is that it is so detailed that even half-Jews mostly hang out with half-Jews because they share this defining life experience of not really belonging to either to the inside or the outside. I mean, kids are so big on ingroup conformity that they can deduce a lot of status points just for not wearing the latest fashionable shoes. So of course they like if they are also of the same sex and ethnicity and form groups around it. Prisons aren’t an exception for forming ethnic gangs, that is the norm in every place that does not employ holiness-signalling in the direction of signalling tolerance.
>And about your remark that the books did not specify Hermione’s color
The books did specify it, this is a non-issue, a meaningless squabble between:
-Canon purists… have you ever gone to see a HP movie with a book fan? Not fun.
-Internet Anti-racists, who jump at any chance they have to be offended.
-Internet racists, who also jump at any opportunity to be offended.
@theDividualist:
1940s or 50s. Steam trains were still in common use in Britain then- the locomotive used for the Hogwarts Express in the films was built in 1937 and withdrawn from service in 1963. Not to mention that we also see wizards listening to the radio and travelling by bus.
Plus, of course, that’s only the technological level of wizard society. The events of the books take place in the 1990s (this is canon based on the dates on Harry’s parents’ graves) and there’s a considerable amount of contact between wizard and Muggle society through Muggle-born wizards like Hermione.
@youzicha:
The Rowling tweet doesn’t say that she anticipated Hermione being black when writing the book. It just says she likes the idea of Hermione being black, and that there is not canon statement that she is white.
Which is false; there are canon statements that Hermione is white. Most explicitly, “Hermione’s white face was sticking out from behind a tree“.
I don’t think there has to be any dishonesty here?
At a minimum, careless disregard for literal truth and deliberate use of half-truth. Barring dementia or amnesia, Rowling knows perfectly well that she was envisioning a white girl and not taking great care to avoid textual descriptions of her race. She could have honestly said that Hermione’s race was no more important than the color of Harry’s eyes or Neville’s hair.
As dishonesty goes, it’s petty stuff and we probably shouldn’t be making a fuss over it, but here we are.
@John Schilling
Harry’s eyes are actually a relatively significant plot point – numerous comments are made about how they resemble his mother’s.
How do you know that Watson will not identify as black in the future? Check you cisrace privilege, you transracist shitlords! /s
OK, I realize that my argument was perhaps to aggressive, so I’ll apologize, and try to reframe it as follows:
It is glaringly evident Hermione is white, all arguments against this boil down to isolated demands of extreme rigor (I think that’s what it was called, right? sans the “extreme”). So the question is: Why? Going through many hoops to prove that there’s a minimal chance that maybe, in a parallel universe, Hermione isn’t white carries the implicit assumption that changing her race is somehow wrong.
And with this you’re giving racists all the ammo they need. “Yeah, retconning her race would be totally wrong, but that’s technically not what’s happening” falls flat when that is exactly what’s happening.
A much simple argument would be simply that, yes, the character’s race is being retconned for the play, and that no, there isn’t anything wrong with that.
@WHTA:
Your argument is perfectly good, but I don’t even know if this rises to the level of “retconning.” It’s not like they went back and changed the printing plates for all the books and digitally darkened Hermione in the master movie files.
It’s just that for purposes of this particular performance, we’re not going to worry that the canon says Hermione is white. Who cares? We know that’s Hermione, she’s doing a good job acting, let’s get on with it.
Now, if the play fundamentally changes Hermione’s nature to reflect her new ancestry, along with her personal history, that would be retconning. Not that I would care any more than I do now, but I am just pedantic like that. 🙂
I also find Rowling’s assertion disingenous, and I suppose if I thought about it long enough I could be irritated about it. But frankly, I have so many things to be irritated about that one little PC slip from a talented and successful artist who by and large seems to be a lovely person doesn’t even move the needle. 🙂
There is a long theatrical tradition of cross-race and even cross-gender casting on account of, hey, we’ve got a particular set of talented performers available and they don’t quite match the characters but who cares, look at the sets, we’re already asking far worse in the name of suspension of disbelief. Last (only?) performance I saw of “Cymbeline”, the Roman centurion was played by a black woman. I have no problem with this.
It is at least annoying for someone to say that this time it is a Great Step Forward for Racial Justice, and besides there were so black female Roman centurions all over the place.
@John Schilling
Well, there probably were black centurions (not female ones though).
@ Tom Richards
“For what it’s worth, I [British theatre worker] think Rowling’s comments were both at least bordering on an outright (though well-intentioned) lie and simply a tactical error: what she ought to have said was simply that there are more important things in casting a role than what an actor looks like and Dumezweni was a great choice.”
As a USian reader, I see these possible meanings in JKR’s remark.
a. If I’d thought of it first, I’d love to have specified Hermione as Black all through my books.
b. Any play X years after the canon is AU fanfic, so have fun with it and send my royalty check.
c. This actress is giving a good performance.
d. This particular production/script is good.
Insofar as she is actually Hermione, she’s acting in-character. Anyone who’s read the books rather than getting their ideas about HP solely from the movies or HPMoR knows about the whole S.P.E.W. thing.
“I think it’s ridiculous that Emma Watson has tried to turn herself into some deep thinker for women’s rights. You’re Hermione. That’s all you are. Live with it.”
That’s a rather nasty thing to say. Would you say it to her face? It adds up to “You don’t know how to think about large issues. Don’t try.”
Your comment supports the theory that what really pisses people off is seeing someone trying to grab more status than they’re (perceived as) entitled to.
Is this even a controversial theory? It seems to me that it is a common social norm to put in their place anybody who tries to grab more status than their position would entail.
Especially in cases where that person’s in your outgroup (or has you in theirs). Emma Watson is very clearly in both.
My immediate thought was that we already have an internet full of women, but those websites are generally considered impolite to talk about in public and professional venues, by feminists especially.
Seriously though, does no one get creeped out anymore by how absurdly hip and commoditized feminism is becoming? Because it almost seems to me like everyone’s decided such things are no longer worth making even token efforts at hiding. Women and women’s issues and society’s way of dealing with these are potentially highly important topics of conversation, not fucking wrapping paper. Why are today’s feminists so happy to turn themselves into wrapping paper? It used to be that all sorts of leftists criticized other leftists for “selling out” all the time. I never before considered that could be something I’d miss, but it seems preferable to current trends by far.
I guess it is inevitable when something becomes popular. At the beginning, only the people who cared about it deeply, have participated. Now there are also many people who merely want to take a piece of cake. Also, popularity brings uninformed fans who are easier to impress.
Shortly, “feminist geeks” are being pushed away from the spotlight by “fake feminist geek girls”. And they can hardly defend themselves, because they have already decided that complaining about “fake geek girls” is wrong.
Yep. Btw speaking as the biggest Firestone fangirl I know, she was, like.. the uber-arch-geek, both on the object level and as per this metaphor.
I’m with you on this, comrade. Shulamith Firestone wouldn’t have stood for this. No, seriously, I mean it.
Because given the choice between real change and making money people will sell out in an instant. Real change is hard after all, so a few changes to the overall aesthetic gives you the same feeling of accomplishment while the decorators make their payday.
One thing that probably contributes to it is that many feminists find spending time in non-feminist spaces mentally draining. It’s tempting to claim as much space for ourselves as we can, so we rarely need to venture outside of it. I definitely feel much better in the company of people who have unserious, lightly held positive attitudes toward feminism than I do with the rest. I’m the kind of person who might otherwise resent insufficiently serious discussion about my dearly held values, but I feel very complacent about this.
One thing that probably contributes to it is that many feminists find spending time in non-feminist spaces mentally draining.
That is actually evidence that feminism suffers from the echo chamber effect. And as feminists isolate themselves from criticism, their theories become even more indefensible outside that echo chamber, which makes it even more draining to interact with non-believers, etc.
Feminism is extremely polarized identity politics. When you attack feminism, it’s very hard to avoid also attacking feminists, the people, personally. Listening to that is going to be draining to feminists, always, no matter what. It doesn’t help that there are so many more unconstructive and uninformed criticisms of feminism around than there are useful external viewpoints, by at least one order of magnitude.
It’s not an ideal situation, but I’m not going to tell any person they have some sort of moral obligation to withstand the hell that being a feminist in a non-feminist space can be, and you really shouldn’t either. Let it be up to the individual how much of that they are willing to handle.
>Also, I was surprised at some of the people there. Will.i.am? Kevin Spacey?
Indeed. This is why I prefer Bilderberg, they don’t let the riff-raff in.
Fun fact: I stayed in the ‘Bilderberg’ hotel where they held the first conference.
Sad fact: They didn’t let me into the Illuminati….
or did they? …..Mwhuhahaha
“The Bohemian Grove, which I attend from time to time—it is the most faggy goddamned thing you could ever imagine, with that San Francisco crowd.”
– from the Nixon Tapes
@multiheaded – Bohemian Grove is near Guerneville, CA, on the Russian River. Guerneville has, for 100+ years, been the playground of San Francisco’s upper-middle-class.
These days – since the 1980s or earlier, San Francisco’s UMC is gay men. Almost entirely. So the Nixon Tapes are probably accurate. Though Guerneville is an interesting place, since a lot of the permanent residents are very similar to the typical redneck you’d find in most rural areas (even in California), but most of the town caters to the gay vacationers.
I forgot to mention that I also cycled by Bretton Woods, where the Knights Templar set up the precursor to the World Bank. Could I secretly be E1?
You will never know.
I would like to know more about this “Internet of Women” – is there some sort of chip I need to install? Will it create problems if other women I want to interface with are using Apple and I’m using Android (which might have to be renamed Gynoid, in this context)? Will I be able to use it to interface with men, too, or will I have to use old-fashioned methods like texting to do that?
Will.i.am is surprisingly sharp. He’s done tons of his own design work (from musical instruments to automotive design), extensive charity, and is a consultant for Intel. At this point he’s had so many different roles that his presence makes some sense to me – check him out on Top Gear for a fun intro.
Kevin Spacey, on the other hand… He’s a good actor, but he’s still just an actor.
Maybe they thought they were inviting his character from that netflix show.
Well, Hermione Granger certainly has a track record for social-justice activism, and if she were sufficiently motivated as to dispense with certain legalistic scruples and use the Imperious Curse against some of the more powerful and bigoted muggles in the audience…
@John Schilling, I think that’s a story that should be written: “Hermione Granger and the Methods of Enlightened Rational Compassion.”
Sounds good, but if there’s room for Kevin Spacey in it I want him playing an antiheroic Lex Luthor 🙂
Yes, I caught Valls and Netanyahu slipping bits of pragmatically useful advice in there. I have to wonder whether Mr. Santiago (the writer or editor of the piece) was having a bit of fun with his pointless task of stringing together meaningless inspirational platitudes.
I think my personal favorite was “We are working tirelessly to achieve a mutually acceptable solution” by Akıncı. It’s a completely nothing quote outside of context, so why’d they even include it? I can only imagine it’s to sound “balanced” about Cypriot reunification— but that’s totally undermined by the fact that they couldn’t even be bothered to spell the poor guy’s name right, let alone call him by his actual title (president of TRNC) instead of just “Turkish Cypriot Leader”. All in all, its inclusion is completely boggling.
Not calling him president of TRNC makes perfect sense if you’re trying to avoid being seen as recognizing TRNC or taking a position in the dispute, but misspelling makes it more likely an oversight.
The Israeli government seems pretty bad about following that advice. They don’t go nearly far enough to cause the Palestinians to completely give up hope. Of course, they do have to balance out their own ambitions with the desire to appease the international community.
The Palestinians are lucky that they live in modern times with mass media, so the Israeli’s can’t get away with genocide. The current racist climate in Israel is very similar to the climates that allowed for genocide in the past.
I also think that Netanyahu is wrong (as he typically is). A lack of hope often just causes people to react in anger, while opportunity allows people to stop focusing on their hate and be productive. Currently, there is no way for Palestinians to build up a good life in peaceful ways.
I think you want a two-pronged attack, where you give them hope for improving their situation by civilized cooperation, but cause them to despair of having any success in lashing out violently. Nothing in the quote seems incompatible with that; context is almost certainly necessary.
“The current racist climate in Israel is very similar to the climates that allowed for genocide in the past.”
Can you give 3 examples of “climates that allowed for genocide in the past” and evidence that the climate in Israel is very similar?
Because I am very skeptical of your claim. Significantly, there are people and organizations in Israel who openly advocate on behalf of Arabs. They may not be very popular outside of Tel Aviv but they are allowed to exist; they have access to the courts and other decision making bodies, and once in a while they win in the courts. It’s hard to reconcile this with a claim that Israel is on the brink of hauling Arabs off to gas chambers and such.
“Currently, there is no way for Palestinians to build up a good life in peaceful ways.”
Except of course for abandoning their terrorism; giving up on their dream of putting an end to Jewish Israel; accepting Israel’s most recent statehood offer; absorbing their so-called “refugees”; and investing the humanitarian aid they receive (10 times more per capita than any other group) into economic development.
Can you give 3 examples of “climates that allowed for genocide in the past” and evidence that the climate in Israel is very similar?
Wide-spread anti-[Ethnicity]:
“The majority of Israeli teenagers that we spoke to expressed unabashed and open racism towards Arabs. Statements like “I hate them,” or “they should all be killed” were common in this age group.”
Segregation:
“In its 2010 survey, it found that 46 percent of Jewish Israelis were unwilling to live next door to an Arab. ”
A belief that coexistence is impossible:
“When asked whether it was possible to make peace with the Palestinians, less than half of our respondents answered “yes.” ”
https://electronicintifada.net/content/video-survey-racism-rampant-among-israeli-youth/10286
Unequal legal treatment (like mock trials where guilt is assumed):
“99.74 percent[…] of cases heard by the military courts in the territories end in a conviction. […] The military courts, headed by Col. Aharon Mishnayot, deal with all criminal and security cases involving Palestinians, from their detention through their appeals. Only very exceptional, usually symbolic cases are heard by Israeli courts. ”
http://www.haaretz.com/nearly-100-of-all-military-court-cases-in-west-bank-end-in-conviction-haaretz-learns-1.398369
A feeling of existential threat caused by the other ethnicity:
“43% of Israelis think that Palestinian’s aspirations in the long run are to conquer the State of Israel and destroy much of the Jewish population in Israel”
http://www.pcpsr.org/en/node/611
I apologize for giving 5 examples instead of the 3 you asked for, but it is just too easy to find them (and I could give many more examples).
It’s hard to reconcile this with a claim that Israel is on the brink of hauling Arabs off to gas chambers and such.
My claim is actually the opposite. Israel is not on the brink of genocide due to mass media and international scrutiny, but would probably be if those factors wouldn’t exist.
They may not be very popular outside of Tel Aviv but they are allowed to exist;
No genocide has ever required an entire population to support it. You need a decent minority of people willing to do the killing. A large number of people that are willing to close their eyes to it. Once that is in place, the rest is bullied into submission.
“Currently, there is no way for Palestinians to build up a good life in peaceful ways.”
Except of course for abandoning their terrorism
Sigh, this is classic ignorant victim blaming of oppressed people.
Most Palestinians do not engage in terrorism, they get oppressed as well, making it impossible for them to prosper peacefully:
“Palestinian agriculture suffers from numerous problems, blockades to exportation of produce and importation of necessary inputs, widespread confiscation of land for nature reserves as well as military and settler use, confiscation and destruction of wells, and physical barriers within the West Bank”
“the occupation is the main factor preventing the tourism sector from becoming a major income source to Palestinians.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Palestinian_territories
giving up on their dream of putting an end to Jewish Israel
This doesn’t actually address my point (it feels like you just accused Palestinians randomly). How does accepting Jewish Israel make it possible for individual peaceful Palestinians to prosper?
accepting Israel’s most recent statehood offer;
If Israel would offer statehood in a way that is mostly consistent with the decisions of the UN on the matter, as well as follow international law on other matters (like letting the refugees return to their original land/homes, in Israel or in Palestine), the Palestinians would sign tomorrow.
This is a typical example of how the oppressed are blamed for not accepting less than they are owed.
absorbing their so-called “refugees”
It’s very telling where you stand if you have to use scare quotes to delegitimize people who fled their homes. The anti-Palestinians like to argue that these people fled to enable the ethnic cleansing of Jews, which:
A. Doesn’t make any sense. Fleeing violence in no way enables genocide, unless you want to argue that these Palestinians should have functioned as human shields. I don’t think that refusing to be a human shield is supporting genocide.
B. Requires all fleeing Palestinians to have fled for that reason, which in unknowable. So in actuality, it is projection/straw manning/stereotyping to claim that these people fled for that reason.
Finally, suppose that a peaceful Palestinian lets a refugee family stay in his home. How does this suddenly enable him to ‘build up a good life in peaceful ways?’ The added burden would seem to make this harder, not easier.
investing the humanitarian aid they receive (10 times more per capita than any other group) into economic development.
I remember when the EU build a harbor for the Palestinians so they could build up their economy. Guess what, Israel destroyed it. Israel typically hampers economic development by destruction, blockades, trade limitations, etc, etc.
Water is a crucial resource in the desert for agriculture. There is a huge imbalance in water allocation to Israel vs the Palestinian territories and even then, Israel takes more water that they are allowed to use:
“According to a World Bank report, Israel extracted 80% more water from the West Bank than agreed in the Oslo Accord, while Palestinian abstractions were within the agreed range.[17] Contrary to expectations under Oslo II, the water actually abstracted by Palestinians in the West Bank has dropped between 1999 and 2007. Due to the Israeli over-extraction, aquifer levels are near ″the point where irreversible damage is done to the aquifer.″ Israeli wells in the West Bank have dried up local Palestinian wells and springs”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_supply_and_sanitation_in_the_Palestinian_territories#Division_in_the_Oslo_II_Accord
“I apologize for giving 5 examples instead of the 3 you asked for, but it is just too easy to find them (and I could give many more examples).”
Umm, I think you misunderstood the question. I am asking for you to identify 3 times and locations where genocide actually took place and your evidence that the “climate” in Israel is very similar.
“No genocide has ever required an entire population to support it. You need a decent minority of people willing to do the killing. A large number of people that are willing to close their eyes to it. Once that is in place, the rest is bullied into submission.”
Please identify 3 states which engaged in genocide against residents/subjects/citizens despite having a respected court system which regularly ruled against the government and in favor of those residents/subjects/citizens.
“Most Palestinians do not engage in terrorism”
Well do you agree that much of their leadership supports it, either actively or passively?
“How does accepting Jewish Israel make it possible for individual peaceful Palestinians to prosper?”
Because as a group, they will stop wasting resources trying to put an end to Israel. For example, Hamas uses lots and lots of concrete trying to build terror tunnels in northern Gaza. If Hamas stopped it, that concrete could be put to more productive uses.
“If Israel would offer statehood in a way that is mostly consistent with the decisions of the UN on the matter, as well as follow international law on other matters (like letting the refugees return to their original land/homes, in Israel or in Palestine), the Palestinians would sign tomorrow.”
Assuming that’s all true, so what?
“This is a typical example of how the oppressed are blamed for not accepting less than they are owed.”
Blame’s got nothing to do with it. Sometimes the path to building a good life in a peaceful way means accepting less than what you think you are owed.
What you really meant to say is that the Palestinian Arabs have no way to achieve a good life in a peaceful way while at the same time having all of their claims and grievances satisfied in full. And that of course is 100% true.
“It’s very telling where you stand if you have to use scare quotes to delegitimize people who fled their homes.”
I use quotes because a very special and unique definition of “refugee” is used for Palestinian Arabs and Palestinian Arabs only. But let’s do this:
How do you define the word “refugee”?
“I remember when the EU build a harbor for the Palestinians so they could build up their economy. Guess what, Israel destroyed it.”
Would you mind providing a cite so I can read about this incident?
TIA.
Umm, I think you misunderstood the question. I am asking for you to identify 3 times and locations where genocide actually took place and your evidence that the “climate” in Israel is very similar.
That is a silly request though. The point of my examples is that these basic elements were present for all genocides, Nazi-Germany, Rwanda, Turkey, etc.
Please identify 3 states which engaged in genocide against residents/subjects/citizens despite having a respected court system which regularly ruled against the government and in favor of those residents/subjects/citizens.
Israel doesn’t have that. Any court with a 99+% conviction rate is a mock court.
Well do you agree that much of their leadership supports it, either actively or passively?
No. Fatah is working together with Israel to stop (Palestinian) terrorism. Even Hamas tends to keeps their promises during cease fires and stops nearly all rocket attacks. Unfortunately, Israel pretty much always violates it’s agreements… (and doesn’t seriously try to stop Jewish/settler terrorism either).
Because as a group
One of my main irritants is that pro-Israel people seem chronically unable to see Palestinians as individuals. Develop some empathy with Palestinians who are not part of this group, yet are punished as if they were.
For example, Hamas uses lots and lots of concrete trying to build terror tunnels in northern Gaza.
‘Terror tunnels’ that they use to attack soldiers, which I see as a right of those being oppressed. My country had resistance fighters in WW II. The US had resistance fighters when they fought for independence.
If you cannot distinguish between terror (attacking citizens) and resistance (attacking soldiers of an oppressing country), then I can’t take you seriously.
Assuming that’s all true, so what?
You do not find it significant that Israel is keeping peace from happening by abusing their power to take more than they were granted? I mean, you could at least pretend to be somewhat reasonable towards the Palestinians….
Blame’s got nothing to do with it. Sometimes the path to building a good life in a peaceful way means accepting less than what you think you are owed.
Does that go for Israel as well? Pot/kettle, etc.
What you really meant to say is that the Palestinian Arabs have no way to achieve a good life in a peaceful way while at the same time having all of their claims and grievances satisfied in full.
You’re being disingeneous again. Even the UN peace plan wouldn’t satisfy all their claims and grievances. You are playing rhetorical games to minimize basic human rights like the right for displaced persons to return.
The problem is that what Israel is offering is not a viable state. A simple look at the map of proposed solutions would show that, if you’d empathize with the Palestinians for a second. The sad part is that I think that a two-state solution is now impossible, so the only option is permanent oppression or a 1-state solution, which ironically would threaten the Jewish nature of Israel (which is highly problematic, btw. I am not a fan of ethnically defined states, as it is essentially racism….and surely makes people in such a country more racist).
I use quotes because a very special and unique definition of “refugee” is used for Palestinian Arabs and Palestinian Arabs only.
Well, the actual term the UN uses is displaced persons, which is more accurate. But I don’t see how a different definition is used for Palestinian Arabs. Can you explain?
Would you mind providing a cite so I can read about this incident?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_Seaport_plans#1994.2F2000_PA_plan
Disagree with a lot of that, but I’ll stick with the tunnels – they were very specifically made in order to attack civilian villages behind military lines. They don’t need to use tunnels to attack soldiers, if they were their target.
Saying that Hamas is sincere about peace because they stopped nearly all of their rocket attacks on civilians during a ceasefire is damning them with extremely faint praise. It almost sounds sarcastic.
(Don’t mistake that for pro-Israeli sentiment by the way. I’m not particularity fond of anyone in the Levant right now, with a possible exception for the Yazidis, and am against foreign entanglements as a rule.)
But yeah, the thing about saying that the Palestinians are striking out in righteous revenge for their oppression is that even if it’s true it doesn’t really matter at this point. Israel is not going to lay down and die for the sins of past generations: they aren’t going to stop their repressive policies until they’re damn sure that the Arabs are no longer a threat to the Jewish population of Israel. That means that the Palestinian leadership is going to have to do quite a bit better than most of a ceasefire. Maybe that’s unfair, but nobody ever said life was fair.
They might need to use the tunnels to attack soldiers from a tactically advantageous position, e.g. from behind and/or while they were moving between their fortified positions and a village to the rear. There is no requirement in the laws of war that one engage in suicidal frontal attacks against fortified positions, and if the only alternative incidentally endangers civilians even that is kosher so long as the danger is not deliberately magnified beyond the level required to accomplish the military objective, “kill those Israeli soldiers without being killed in return”.
Now, I think it is quite likely that Hamas built some of those tunnels with an eye towards needlessly magnifying the danger to Israeli civilians, but that does need to be established by something more than the mere existence of the tunnels.
“The point of my examples is that these basic elements were present for all genocides, Nazi-Germany, Rwanda, Turkey, etc.”
Ok, and what’s your evidence that the climate in Israel is “similar” to the climates in these places.
“Israel doesn’t have that.”
Ok, just so we are clear, you are denying that the high court in Israel has on numerous occasions ruled against the government and in favor of Arabs?
“No. Fatah is working together with Israel to stop (Palestinian) terrorism. ”
Funny then, that Fatah just posted the following picture on its Facebook page:
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ljyyn9_Ee98/ViYIV30bN_I/AAAAAAAAsZE/2TABMfHKCDI/s1600/fatah%2Bbethlehem.jpg
“Even Hamas tends to keeps their promises during cease fires and stops nearly all rocket attacks. ”
I’m a little confused. Do you deny that Hamas regularly engages in terrorism?
“Unfortunately, Israel pretty much always violates it’s agreements… ”
Can you please provide 3 examples of this? TIA.
“One of my main irritants is that pro-Israel people seem chronically unable to see Palestinians as individuals.”
Were you referring to Palestinian Arabs as individuals or as a group when you said the following:
“there is no way for Palestinians to build up a good life in peaceful ways.”
??
“‘Terror tunnels’ that they use to attack soldiers, which I see as a right of those being oppressed.”
Even assuming that’s true, it doesn’t change the fact that the concrete could be put to more constructive uses. As a group, that’s part of the path towards building a good life in peaceful ways. Stop with the terrorism; the blockade will be lifted; Arabs will be allowed again to cross into Israel to work; and the Arabs in Gaza end up better off.
“If you cannot distinguish between terror (attacking citizens) and resistance (attacking soldiers of an oppressing country)”
For the sake of this discussion, the distinction does not matter. Either course is counterproductive for Hamas. However Hamas also attacks citizens regularly. Do you deny this?
“You do not find it significant that Israel is keeping peace from happening by abusing their power to take more than they were granted? ”
I disagree that Israel has done so, but again, for the sake of this discussion it does not matter. Your claim is that “there is no way for Palestinians to build up a good life in peaceful ways.” Of course there is such a way, but it requires accepting less that what the Palestinian Arabs think they deserve.
“Does that go for Israel as well? Pot/kettle, etc.”
Yes, it goes for Israel too. Many of Israel’s Jewish citizens are descended from refugees who were chased out of Arab countries in the late 1940s. There are also many descendants of refugees from Europe. Heck, there were even Jews living in Gaza City who got kicked out in the 1940s.
Are those peoples’ descendants left to sit in refugee camps and encouraged to whine endlessly about their displacement from Baghdad or Gaza City or Beirut? No, they were accepted and absorbed as citizens and they’ve gone on to build decent lives for themselves.
“Well, the actual term the UN uses is displaced persons, which is more accurate. But I don’t see how a different definition is used for Palestinian Arabs”
For Palestinian Arabs, descendants of displaced persons are considered “refugees” forever. There are Arabs living in Gaza, J & S, Lebanon, and Syria who are considered “Palestinian Refugees” even though they have lived in these places for generations.
“Even the UN peace plan wouldn’t satisfy all their claims and grievances.”
I’m not sure what you mean by “UN peace plan,” but you are most likely correct. Any solution which leaves Jewish Israel intact will be unsatisfactory the the Palestinian Arabs.
“The problem is that what Israel is offering is not a viable state.”
How do I know if a state is “viable” or not? What are the criteria?
” am not a fan of ethnically defined states, as it is essentially racism”
So can I assume then, that any Jewish people who were born within the territory of any future Palestinian State, should be permitted to remain as citizens in your view?
“https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_Seaport_plans#1994.2F2000_PA_plan”
Do you happen to know what the “incident in Ramallah” was?
Infantry who want to survive on any battlefield of the last century never stop digging.
If you think you might be fighting in a built up area against an enemy invading with overwhelming armour and air supremacy, you tunnel like a rat until you can move from one side of the city to another without ever seeing daylight.
If someone builds a stockpile of 1000lb guided bombs that can be lobbed from 60km away while telling me I’m not allowed to dig a hole to hide in, I’m just going to assume it’s because he wants to kill me.
@Pku
“The UNHRC Commission of Inquiry on the Gaza Conflict found “the tunnels were only used to conduct attacks directed at IDF positions in Israel in the vicinity of the Green Line, which are legitimate military targets”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_tunnel_warfare_in_the_Gaza_Strip
The UN has basically no credibility on any issue.
@Dr Dealgood
Saying that Hamas is sincere about peace because they stopped nearly all of their rocket attacks on civilians during a ceasefire is damning them with extremely faint praise. It almost sounds sarcastic.
0. I didn’t claim that they are sincere about peace (and find that a silly thing to (dis)claim, as Hamas is not a single mind with 1 opinion), but rather that they are sincere about their peace agreements. A subtle, but very important difference. I think that generally, you make peace with people by slowly building up trust and changing minds, rather than having everyone magically support peace suddenly. You reduce the number of people against peace at first and isolate the remaining ones later. See the N-Irish peace process.
1. It’s quite likely that they did indeed stop all their attacks, assuming that there are a few resistance groups who don’t listen to the main leadership.
2. It’s a correction to the lies being told about Hamas. A key (right-wing) Israeli narrative is that there are no partners for peace, peace can not be achieved through concessions, the Palestinians are untrustworthy, etc. This is demonstrably false, as the (various) Palestinians groups keep their word much better than Israel, even Hamas. If you care about the truth, rather than rhetoric and ‘othering,’ you should distinguish between facts and fiction, even/also when it comes to ‘the enemy.’
3. It’s very popular for people to tell negative falsehoods about ‘the enemy’ and positive falsehoods about ‘our side,’ because most people of ‘our side’ are unwilling to stand up for the truth. Because if they do, they will get attacked as sympathizers with the enemy. However, this is an ad hominem attack that results in echo chambers, polarization and general anti-rationality. If you care about rationality, you should be willing to engage all falsehoods, not just those that don’t match your sympathies.
4. A lot of arguments in favor of Israel are ‘damning them with extremely faint praise’ IMHO.
Israel is not going to lay down and die for the sins of past generations: they aren’t going to stop their repressive policies until they’re damn sure that the Arabs are no longer a threat to the Jewish population of Israel.
This is why the subject of genocide comes up here. Every group of people is a threat to every other group of people to some extent. Some of my countrymen regularly get drunk and harm other countrymen. So it’s an absurd demand to ask that any group is ‘no longer a threat to the Jewish population,’ as this can only be achieved through annihilation. Any coexistence requires some level of tolerance to the bad seeds of the other side (which goes both ways, btw. Note that anti-Palestinian terrorism is quite severe).
But you are right that both parties are stuck in a stalemate. Israel has convinced themselves that the Palestinians are untermenschen who deserve nothing, cannot be entrusted with any economic prosperity (as it can be redirected to warfare), etc. The Palestinians have tried every method, from peaceful to violent, but no approach has been rewarded. There was brief momentum in Israel, but the assassination of Rabin ended that.
My sympathies are pretty clear. I believe that Israel has always rewarded terrorism by stopping the peace process whenever an incident happened, ignoring the majority of Palestinians, which is an approach that makes peace impossible. I also believe that Israel has the vast majority of the power (military, economic, etc) and that with more reasonable demands on their side, there would be peace. That’s why I support BDS, to force Israel out of the status quo, in the same way that it did for S-Africa.
@suntzuanime
The UN has basically no credibility on any issue.
The notoriously anti-semitic IDF says the same thing:
http://glz.co.il/1064-47425-he/Galatz.aspx
http://www.timesofisrael.com/soldiers-not-civilians-are-tunnel-infiltration-goals-says-senior-intelligence-source/
But I’m getting a bit tired of other people making claims with zero evidence, then me giving actual evidence to counter their argument, then people dismissing my evidence without any counter evidence.
It’s rather nasty debating behavior to demand that the other person proves his (counter)claims, while refusing to give evidence for the other side.
PS. And this is not just aimed at you.
I agree that it’s nasty debating behavior, but I’m not part of the debate. My quarrel is with neither Israel nor Palestine, but with the United Nations and the people who cite them as though their claims were something to take seriously, as though they were searching for the truth instead of for something politically gratifying.
@sabril
Ok, and what’s your evidence that the climate in Israel is “similar” to the climates in these places.
I’ve given examples of the kind of of attitudes and behavior that I associate strongly with a climate that makes genocide possible and think that a reasonable person would accept that these elements existed in those cases.
For example, anti-[Ethnicity] was obviously true for Nazi-Germany, Rwanda and Turkey. I’m not going to play a game where I prove rather obvious truths.
Ok, just so we are clear, you are denying that the high court in Israel has on numerous occasions ruled against the government and in favor of Arabs?
I never claimed that. You desperately want me to hold an opinion that you know how to debate, rather than my actual opinion.
Fact is that a high court is not ‘the courts,’ it is an institution that only handles a select number of cases (to set precedent). My claim is that there are separate lower courts for Palestinians. Which is a claim I made that you didn’t even deny. I claimed that these courts have 99+% conviction rates, unlike the lower courts for Israeli’s, which you didn’t deny. I’m claiming that courts with 99% conviction rates are mock courts, which you didn’t even argue against. Obviously, that also means that I’m arguing that the high court in Israel is not preventing this from happening, so in so far as Palestinians have access to it, it doesn’t prevent unequal treatment in the courts.
Debate honestly! Address my actual argument. Disprove my claims, argue that my conclusions are incorrect, etc. But don’t distort my argument so much that it has no resemblance to my claims!
“No. Fatah is working together with Israel to stop (Palestinian) terrorism. ”
Funny then, that Fatah just posted the following picture on its Facebook page:
That picture is meaningless, since I have no idea what it says and thus depicts. It doesn’t depict terrorism, but resistance fighting, at most. This is how you give evidence for your position:
http://www.haaretz.com/idf-pa-forces-still-coordinating-despite-fatah-hamas-pact-1.358708
My evidence is from a respectable news source and actually addresses the claim. Your ‘evidence’ doesn’t come from a reliable source, is unverifiable and doesn’t actually disprove my claim (even if some people in Fatah glorifies violence against the IDF, that doesn’t make it impossible for Fatah people to cooperate with Israel against terrorism).
“Even Hamas tends to keeps their promises during cease fires and stops nearly all rocket attacks. ”
I’m a little confused. Do you deny that Hamas regularly engages in terrorism?
There is no way for a rational person to conclude that based on what I said. I will not engage you when you refuse to apply elementary logic and/or reading ability.
Can you please provide 3 examples of [Israel pretty much always violates it’s agreements]? TIA.
1. “According to a World Bank report, Israel extracted 80% more water from the West Bank than agreed in the Oslo Accord”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_supply_and_sanitation_in_the_Palestinian_territories#Division_in_the_Oslo_II_Accord
2. Israel violated the ceasefire with Hamas in pretty much every way:
https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/maureen-clare-murphy/israel-violates-gaza-ceasefire-nearly-every-day
3. Israel refused to pay the tax they are obliged to collect and hand over to the PA, as punishment/abuse of power:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_the_Palestinian_territories
Were you referring to Palestinian Arabs as individuals or as a group when you said the following: “there is no way for Palestinians to build up a good life in peaceful ways.”
Individuals. A ‘good life’ is an individual property. A society can’t have a good life.
Even assuming that’s true, it doesn’t change the fact that the concrete could be put to more constructive uses.
This just leads to an argument whether oppressed people should make the best of their oppression or resist. I’m not particularly interested in that. I believe that in general, people have the right to resist oppression and that attacks on military targets of the oppressor is legitimate.
I just want to point out that in WW II, most Jews did exactly what you suggest: make the most of their lives given the circumstances rather than resist. That example rather disproves your point that cooperation will necessarily be the best option (although I’m obviously not claiming that the Palestinians will end up in gas chambers, but rather that Israel may perpetually want to keep oppressing them, even if they stop resisting).
Stop with the terrorism; the blockade will be lifted
They did that and yet Israel refused to lift the blockade. So history proves you wrong.
For the sake of this discussion, the distinction does not matter.
If you cannot distinguish between terrorism and resistance against oppressors, our respective views on ethics differ too much for a fruitful discussion.
However Hamas also attacks citizens regularly. Do you deny this?
No, but so does Israel: http://www.breakingthesilence.org.il/
Do YOU deny this?
Note that I’m not a supporter of Hamas or a defender of everything they do. I just argue against lies about them and make a distinction between terrorism & resistance.
For Palestinian Arabs, descendants of displaced persons are considered “refugees” forever.
You just argued against Zionism, my friend. The claim that Jews outside of Israel are a diaspora that have the right of return to Israel is also the idea that Jews are refugees forever, until they ‘return.’
So you have to choose, either the Palestinian claim is illegitimate or Zionism is….
So can I assume then, that any Jewish people who were born within the territory of any future Palestinian State, should be permitted to remain as citizens in your view?
That’s a complex question that depends on whether they live there legitimately or illegally. I’d say that most if not all settlements were created illegally and thus the Israelis there are illegal immigrants or the children of such. The latter group should most sensibly move to Israel when their parents do. I assume they would prefer that anyway (as they surely want to benefit from all the advantages of being Israeli) and Israel would want the same (due to a desire to remain a Jewish democratic state, which requires a majority of Jewish citizens).
Furthermore, you say ‘remain as citizens,’ but most of these people are not Palestinian citizens, but Israeli citizens. So for them, your question is nonsensical, as there is no Palestinian citizenship that they can keep.
Anyway, for Jews with Palestinian citizenship, my answer is yes. For settlers, generally: no. For Jews living outside the settlements with Israeli citizenship, the PA can require them to renounce their Israeli citizenship and become Palestinian citizens, to formally become a member of the Palestinian state.
BTW, I want to point out that citizenship by being born in a country is an American law, not international law. Many countries do not have such law and the child ‘inherits’ the citizenship from the parents. If Palestine would have such a law, that would be perfectly legitimate.
Do you happen to know what the “incident in Ramallah” was?
It’s irrelevant, since the incident could in no way have been enabled by the Port, as it was not operational.
@suntzuanime
I agree that it’s nasty debating behavior, but I’m not part of the debate. My quarrel is with neither Israel nor Palestine, but with the United Nations and the people who cite them as though their claims were something to take seriously, as though they were searching for the truth instead of for something politically gratifying.
I am searching for the truth and find your accusation that I am not doing so to be an ad hominem attack. Note that in this debate, I am the only person actually trying to provide evidence for many of my claims.
Furthermore, you haven’t actually provided any evidence that this particular report was flawed. As such, your attack on the UN was also an ad hominem, which in no way disproved the claims by that committee (and I gave other sources that corroborate their claims).
I was referring to the United Nations with my reference to people who were searching for something politically gratifying rather than the truth, but the carelessness with which you throw around accusations of “ad hominem” like you think it’s supposed to impress anybody is not really persuading me of your status as a sober truthseeker either.
Well, I do not find it fair to argue that every single UN person is not searching for the truth, but rather ‘for something politically gratifying.’ You can make that point for specific people/subgroups, but assuming bad faith in general for all people affiliated with the UN is wrong, as many/most of them definitely seem to have good intent.
I also find it rather amazing that you’d argue such here, as one of the goals of this blog is to point out how people’s ability to evaluate arguments, evidence and such is often dramatically broken. As such, a good argument can be made that most people do try to search for the truth, but simultaneously suffer from various kinds of irrationality, including an inability to judge evidence without overvaluing things that they find politically gratifying and undervaluing things that they don’t.
If you agree with me that this is the case for most people, then your dichotomy of searching for the truth vs searching for politically gratification is a false choice. People can do both and IMO most people do both.
@suntzuanime: My quarrel is with neither Israel nor Palestine, but with the United Nations
If your beef is with the United Nations, you would be well advised to,
A: Find or start a thread with people who want to talk about the United Nations rather than hijack a thread where people are talking about Israel and Palestine,
B: Scale down your criticism to something less obviously indefensible than “no credibility on any issue”, and
C: Actually provide some support for your criticism.
Otherwise, you’re just making the UN look good.
“For example, anti-[Ethnicity] was obviously true for Nazi-Germany, Rwanda and Turkey. I’m not going to play a game where I prove rather obvious truths.”
The trouble with your argument is that there is “anti-[Ethnicity]” sentiment all over the world and has been for a long time now. And yet it typically does not lead to genocide. For example, there is a lot of anti-Jewish sentiment in Greece. Are the Greeks close to genociding the Jewish population there?
Indeed, there is a phenomenal amount of anti-Jewish sentiment in Arab areas of the Middle East. In most areas, the vast majority of people have a “very negative” opinion about Jews.
Thank goodness for the IDF, to prevent Arab genocide of Israeli Jews. Agreed?
“I never claimed that. ”
I asked you to identify 3 states which engaged in genocide against residents/subjects/citizens despite having a respected court system which regularly ruled against the government and in favor of those residents/subjects/citizens.
You responded by saying that “Israel doesn’t have that.”
So it sounds like you are saying that Israel does NOT have a respected court system which regularly rules against the government and in favor of the Arabs. But let’s try to make things clear:
I claim that Israel has a respected court system which regularly rules against the government and in favor of Arabs. Do you agree or disagree?
“My claim is that there are separate lower courts for Palestinians. Which is a claim I made that you didn’t even deny.”
I deny that. Palestinian Arabs (and groups supporting them) have appeared in the high court in Israel.
” claimed that these courts have 99+% conviction rates, unlike the lower courts for Israeli’s, which you didn’t deny”
I did not address that point because it is not relevant to my claim. Besides, most criminal courts have extremely high conviction rates since prosecutors do not bring cases unless they have solid evidence and are satisfied of the Defendants’ guilt. In my country — the United States — conviction rates are probably well over 90%.
Are the courts in Israel biased against Arabs? I’m skeptical, so let’s see your evidence please. Even if they were, it does not indicate that Israel is on the brink of genocide.
“Debate honestly! Address my actual argument.”
Umm, you are the one who dodged my point and brought up the issue of conviction rates.
I claim that Israel has a respected court system which regularly rules against the government and in favor of Arabs. Do you agree or disagree?
“That picture is meaningless, since I have no idea what it says and thus depicts. ”
Let’s try again then. Here is a snapshot of Fatah’s facebook page with a translation:
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-uBaTvW08Dq8/VntPTtLuPXI/AAAAAAAAtxs/FN6n13XFLD0/s1600/qal3.png
Who are the “heros” Issa Assaf and Annan ABo? They stabbed to death a rabbi in Jerusalem in December.
Why is Fatah referring to them as “heros” if Fatah is against terrorism?
Here is a video for you to watch:
http://palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=157&doc_id=16933
Why is Fatah referring to terrorists as role models?
“There is no way for a rational person to conclude that based on what I said. ”
I asked you if you would agree that much of the Palestinian Arab leadership supports terrorism, either actively or passively. You answered “no.” It’s right there in black and white.
Obviously Hamas qualifies as “much” of the Palestinian Arab leadership. So you seemed to be denying that Hamas supports terrorism.
Let’s try again: Keeping in mind that much of the Palestinian Arab leadership is comprised of Hamas, do you agree that much of the Palestinian Arab leadership supports terrorism?
A simple yes or no will do.
“According to a World Bank report, Israel extracted 80% more water from the West Bank than agreed in the Oslo Accord 2. Israel violated the ceasefire with Hamas in pretty much every way 3. Israel refused to pay the tax they are obliged to collect and hand over to the PA, as punishment/abuse of power:”
Thank you for giving examples. I don’t the time to scrutinize all 3, but I did look at the third example, it says this:
” In June 2008, Israel retained a large part of the taxes to cover debts of the Palestinian Authority, and this extra withholding was done in an apparent retaliation for Prime Minister of the Palestinian National Authority Salam Fayyad attempting to undermine Israel – European Union relations.[5] During October and November 2011 in response to Palestine’s bid for full membership in the United Nations, admission to UNESCO, and Fatah’s steps to reconcile with Hamas in the Fatah–Hamas conflict, Israel refused to transfer about $200 million in taxes collected.[2]”
Assuming that’s all true, it appears that the Palestinian Authority itself violated the Oslo Accords and failed to pay its bills and Israel responded in kind. Do you agree that your cite seems to say that the PA violated its own obligations before Israel withheld monies?
“Individuals. A ‘good life’ is an individual property. A society can’t have a good life.”
Ok, then I would say the truth of your claim depends on where the Palestinian Arab lives. But certain in J & S he could work, marry, and otherwise live a decent, peaceful life by simply refraining from taking part in the Arab/Israeli conflict. In Gaza it would be more difficult due to the repressive de facto government there.
“This just leads to an argument whether oppressed people should make the best of their oppression or resist.”
Well there is also the question of who the oppressors are. In the case of Gaza, the oppressors are Hamas.
“’m not particularly interested in that. I believe that in general, people have the right to resist oppression and that attacks on military targets of the oppressor is legitimate.”
:shrug: You should have made your claim clearer. What you meant to say is that there is no way for the Palestinian Arabs to have peaceful good lives while at the same time engaging in attacks on their perceived oppressors. And that’s true. Attacking other people tends to undermine your chances of having a peaceful life.
“That example rather disproves your point that cooperation will necessarily be the best option”
Please show me where I made such a point. Please quote me. Failing that, please admit that I said no such thing and apologize.
“They did that and yet Israel refused to lift the blockade.”
I’m extremely skeptical of this claim. Please show me proof.
“If you cannot distinguish between terrorism and resistance against oppressors, ”
Distinguish for what purpose? Let’s suppose an individual Palestinian Arab living in Gaza decides to resist his oppressors (Hamas) by stabbing a Hamas policeman. It’s not likely to lead to a good, peaceful life for him. Same thing if he attacks a civilian, whether Arab or Jewish.
I’m not saying there’s no difference. I’m saying that the difference doesn’t matter for purposes of your claim.
Attacking other people tends to lead you away from a peaceful life, whether that person is military or civilian, Arab or Jew. Agree?
“Do YOU deny this?”
I deny that Israel directs military attacks towards civilians as a matter of policy.
But please stop trying to change the subject. Hamas regularly targets civilians, which you now seem to admit. This makes it more difficult for Palestinian Arabs — both as groups and as individuals — to achieve good lives in a peaceful way.
“The claim that Jews outside of Israel are a diaspora that have the right of return to Israel is also the idea that Jews are refugees forever, until they ‘return.’”
“The claim that Jews outside of Israel are a diaspora that have the right of return to Israel is also the idea that Jews are refugees forever, until they ‘return.’”
Lol, fortunately the governments of United States and Canada don’t require Jewish people to live in refugee camps and deny citizenship to Jewish people on the ground that they are “refugees”
Anyway, please stop trying to change the subject.
“So for them, your question is nonsensical, as there is no Palestinian citizenship that they can keep.”
Well they should be offered Palestinian citizenship, right?
“It’s irrelevant, since the incident could in no way have been enabled by the Port, as it was not operational.”
Ok, then let’s assume that the attack on the Port was retaliation for some Arab atrocity, agreed?
By the way, I think that “Aapje” is the same as “Machine Translation” from the last thread on this.
i.e. the guy who claims that the Israeli army intentionally ordered its soldiers to leave unexploded ordinance in Southern Lebanon.
“If you cannot distinguish between terrorism and resistance against oppressors,”
This particular bit struck me for reasons that have nothing to do with who, if any, are the good guys in the Israeli/Palestinian conflicts.
Terrorism is a tactic–harming people and stuff in a polity not because those people and that stuff are part of the enemy military you are trying to weaken but in order to get the polity to change its actions so as to avoid such harm. Whether it is done for good or bad reasons is irrelevant to whether it is terrorism.
If one interprets the bombing of Hiroshima and Dresden as primarily aimed at the civilian population rather than any military targets, those attacks were terrorism, whether or not one approves of them.
Similarly, shooting a bunch of people in a bus in Israel, or firing a missile at an Israeli city, is terrorism, whether or not one thinks the actions justified.
@ David Friedman:
You are exactly right.
I’m not against Hamas because they are “terrorists”. That is, I am not primarily objecting to the means by which they fight for Islamism. I am against them primarily because they fight for Islamism, by whatever means.
I don’t think Israeli soldiers deserve to die, any more than Israeli civilians. I am just against people who kill the former as the latter.
However, it is certainly true that the line of the Israeli government and most defenders of it has been “terrorism bad”. “Why do we know the Palestinians cause is bad? Because they’re terrorists, of course!”
And not only the Israeli government but the U.S. government (“War on Terror”), the British government (IRA terrorists; Nelson Mandela terrorist), and many other governments.
I don’t know why this is exactly. I suspect it’s because it’s easier to argue that the enemy is using certain tactic and to demonize that tactic than to argue that your side is actually right and their side wrong.
@Vox,
Because most people don’t live in a dispassionate thought experiment.
The idea that you might be targeted for death more-or-less at random at any point during your day-to-day life is terrifying. It brings the uncertainty and disruption of war into what is nominally peacetime, and can do so even in the presence of force asymmetry which would otherwise ensure safety from enemy militaries. And the more viable it becomes, the more likely that you or a family member will experience it.
@ Dr Dealgood:
But why hate terrorism instead of hating Islamism or whatever force that’s driving the terrorists?
I guess terrorism is just a more concrete thing to hate.
Moreover, condemning terrorism in itself leaves you open to obvious criticism. The U.S. firebombing of Japan was terrorism. Many Zionists engaged in terrorism in the founding of Israel.
It’s very similar to the controversy over Iran trying to get a nuclear weapon. People act like they want to get it just to suicidally attack Israel. No, they want to get it so that they can keep funding groups like Hezbollah in perfect safety, without fear of being “regime changed” by the U.S. That is, they want a nuclear weapon for the same reason as everyone else: security. And that’s the reason they shouldn’t be allowed to get it.
Edit: And this is weird because it’s people being inappropriately meta-level instead of object-level, when it’s usually the other way around. Instead of saying “terrorism is right when we do it and wrong when they do it”, they say “terrorism is wrong no matter who does it” (without being consistent in this judgment).
Most people outside of Islamic countries don’t have a good intuitive handle on Islamism. Certainly not enough to distinguish it from, say, the state Islam of Saudi Arabia — which looks, and is, pretty damned fundamentalist by Western standards, but which in many ways is better understood as a reaction to Islamist ideas.
So pointing to Islamism as a cause won’t actually give most people anything concrete to hate. Some of them will round off to Islam, which you can kinda get away with if the topic is refugees or something similar but which doesn’t give you enough ammunition for a sane foreign policy. But most will go looking for deeds rather than ideas, and the most obvious ones are the tactics of asymmetrical warfare.
(Islamism — especially in places like Nigeria — is also deeply entangled with anti-Western sentiment, and that opens its own can of worms.)
@ Nornagest:
Well, even more concretely, you can just hate Hamas. Why? “They want to kill us!”
You don’t have to say “we hate them because it is always wrong to target civilians in assymetrical warfare”. You can just say “we hate people who want to kill us for no good reason”.
@sabril
The trouble with your argument is that there is “anti-[Ethnicity]” sentiment all over the world and has been for a long time now. And yet it typically does not lead to genocide.
It is not a black/white issue, but a continuum. The stronger the elements I named are in a society, the more likely it is for a dynamic to develop that leads to genocide. On one end of the continuum you have a very low amount of “anti-[Ethnicity]” sentiment and strong counter-forces, at the other end you have strong sentiment and very weak counter-forces. Somewhere in between is a tipping point where processes start happening that remove the constraints on those with extreme ideas.
My claim is that there is very strong sentiment in Israel, for which I gave many examples and not very strong counter-forces. As such, the external counterforces (international attention, dependency on US help, etc) are crucial to keep Israel from reaching the tipping point.
For example, there is a lot of anti-Jewish sentiment in Greece. Are the Greeks close to genociding the Jewish population there?
AFAIK Golden Dawn primarily targets immigrants & LGBT people, not Jews. So it’s strange that you’d pick Jews as a possible target. Anyway, I’d say that they are closer than any other EU country, yes. Close to the tipping point, no. The political dynamic in Greece is completely different from Israel, with only a minority blaming minorities and most people blaming others (like the Germans/capitalists/etc). I’d say that there are strong counter-forces against genocide in Greece, although some of those are hate groups attacking other hate groups.
Thank goodness for the IDF, to prevent Arab genocide of Israeli Jews. Agreed?
Well, the oppression by Israel of the Palestinians and the colonialism by Israel is the main reason for the increase in hatred of Jews in the Arab world, so you seem to be confusing the problem with the solution. Before the establishment of Israel, many Jews lived in Arab countries and were not killed. Even as anti-Jewish sentiment grew, none of the Arab countries committed genocide against their Jewish citizens, but they allowed them to migrate to Israel. This undermines your claim that Arabs are itching to commit genocide against Jews. They had every opportunity then, but didn’t.
I also disagree with the view that the Arab world wants to commit genocide against the Jews now, this is popular rhetoric among pro-Israelis, but such claims seem to be based on very weak or false evidence. For instance, popular ‘proof’ of genocidal intent is that Ahmadinejad supposedly called for genocide, which was actually a mistranslation where he said no such thing. In actuality, I often notice that Arab leaders very carefully denounce Zionism, without calling for violence against Jews. I don’t see how this shows genocidal intent, anymore than Ghandi’s rejection of English colonialism showed that he wanted to commit genocide against the British.
I claim that Israel has a respected court system which regularly rules against the government and in favor of Arabs. Do you agree or disagree?
You are trying to twist my words so you can ignore my actual claims. Again, my point was that there is no equal or fair treatment of Palestinians by the Israeli legal system.
Severe unequal and unfair treatment under law of a minority is an important factor that shows that a society is pretty far along on the continuum towards genocide. The fact that there are courts that only judge Palestinians prove my point. The fact that these courts have much higher conviction rates compared to courts for Israeli’s prove my point. The fact that some laws are only applied to Palestinians (administrative detention) prove my point.
“My claim is that there are separate lower courts for Palestinians. Which is a claim I made that you didn’t even deny.”
I deny that. Palestinian Arabs (and groups supporting them) have appeared in the high court in Israel.
Your denial doesn’t address my claim in any way. I made a claim about lower courts, you countered with a claim about high courts. It is irrational to counter a claim about one thing with an argument about another thing.
Anyway, I am going to stop debating with you here, since you don’t meet my threshold of rationality. I cannot debate someone who cannot address my actual points or who denies that a 99.74% conviction rate is compatible with anything but a show court.
====
By the way, I think that “Aapje” is the same as “Machine Translation” from the last thread on this.
Oh dear, you are paranoid too. And no, I’m not that commenter.
@Friedman
If one interprets the bombing of Hiroshima and Dresden as primarily aimed at the civilian population rather than any military targets, those attacks were terrorism, whether or not one approves of them.
They were and in a just world, those responsible would have faced justice.
I also want to point out that there is strong evidence that neither the campaigns against German population centers, nor the nuclear attacks on Japan, were actually necessary and/or sufficiently useful to justify them over more effective alternative military choices. There was no clear reduction in Nazi morale due to the bombings; nor did those cause substantial damage to the nazi war machine. The Japanese were willing to surrender on 1 condition, that their emperor could stay. After the unconditional surrender, the allies let the emperor stay anyway. So forcing an unconditional surrender rather than a conditional one had no benefit, other than the stroking of some egos by having two extra letters (‘un’) on the surrender agreement.
In general, it is rather amazing how the extreme measures that the most aggressive war-mongers advocate, almost never work better in practice than approaches that don’t violate human rights (such as torture vs normal interrogations, violent uprisings vs non-violent ones, etc).
@Vox
I suspect it’s because it’s easier to argue that the enemy is using certain tactic and to demonize that tactic than to argue that your side is actually right and their side wrong.
…Especially when the other side actually has a point. Demonization makes you automatically right in the eyes of those who accept that ‘othering’, even when you are factually wrong.
Note that in many cases this demonization can just as easily be turned around. For instance, both Jewish settlers and Israeli soldiers use terror tactics against Palestinian citizens. So in my opinion, the Israeli rhetoric condemns their own side as much as the other side.
But why hate terrorism instead of hating Islamism or whatever force that’s driving the terrorists?
Because that is too limiting when you want to deligimitize all Palestinians. After all, Fatah is not Islamist, but the Israeli government wants to portray them as ‘not a viable peace partner’ too. The claim that Palestinians are all terrorists is a superweapon that can be used against all Palestinians, not just the Islamists.
“They were and in a just world, those responsible would have faced justice.”
Proof? Hiroshima was the headquarters for the defense of Southern Japan; if the bombs didn’t work, it would have been an important military target during Downfall.
“I also want to point out that there is strong evidence that neither the campaigns against German population centers, nor the nuclear attacks on Japan, were actually necessary and/or sufficiently useful to justify them over more effective alternative military choices.”
Yeah, it isn’t like the Japanese explicitly state in their deliberations the importance of atomic bombings in forcing their decision.
As for the bombings of Germany, I don’t know enough to comment, but blaming bomber command for something they couldn’t know until the war ended is… odd.
“The Japanese were willing to surrender on 1 condition, that their emperor could stay.”
And that they could keep Korea, Taiwan, no occupation… they had a list of conditions that their peace proposals through the USSR insisted upon.
@ Aapje:
Right, so if they’re cynical bastards, why don’t they use better rhetoric?
I’m not even arguing for or against them on this point. I am just saying that their rhetoric is stupid.
If you’re going to lie and say they’re all terrorists, why not lie and say they’re all Islamists? Or just that they all hate Israel and really aren’t viable peace partners? (Which is probably true.)
“It is not a black/white issue, but a continuum. ”
Then please show me your evidence that Israel’s position on that continuum is comparable to that of Nazi Germany.
“AFAIK Golden Dawn primarily targets immigrants & LGBT people, not Jews. So it’s strange that you’d pick Jews as a possible target. ”
I happen to know that there is a lot of anti-Jewish sentiment in Greece. I have no idea if there is a lot of anti-immigrant or anti-gay sentiment. But anyway, I’m just applying your reasoning. There is a lot of anti-Jewish sentiment in Greece, therefore — according to your reasoning — Jews in Greece are fortunate that modern media deters the Greeks from genociding them.
“The political dynamic in Greece is completely different from Israel”
That’s irrelevant to your reasoning — there is a lot of anti-Jewish sentiment there.
“Well, the oppression by Israel of the Palestinians and the colonialism by Israel is the main reason for the increase in hatred of Jews in the Arab world, so you seem to be confusing the problem with the solution. ”
That’s pretty much false, but anyway I could easily turn it around: Arab misbehavior is the primary reason for anti-Arab sentiment among Jewish Israelis. Therefore you are confusing the problem with the solution.
“Before the establishment of Israel, many Jews lived in Arab countries and were not killed.”
You are aware of the Hebron massacre, right?
“none of the Arab countries committed genocide against their Jewish citizens, but they allowed them to migrate to Israel. ”
And Israel never committed genocide against Arabs living there either. So much for your claim that Israel is on the brink of genocide against the Arabs.
“This undermines your claim that Arabs are itching to commit genocide against Jews. ”
I did not make such a claim, I was simply applying your reasoning to the situation. According to you, anti-X sentiment is an indication of a climate of genocide. Unsurprisingly, you have a double-standard.
“They had every opportunity then, but didn’t.”
Israel has had every opportunity but didn’t. Agreed?
“You are trying to twist my words so you can ignore my actual claims.”
Umm, you are the one who is ignoring my claims. I asked you a simple, reasonable, yes or no question. Rather than admit that your original answer was plainly and ridiculously wrong, you dodge and weave.
“Your denial doesn’t address my claim in any way. I made a claim about lower courts, ”
i.e. you tried to change the subject in order to dodge my point.
“Anyway, I am going to stop debating with you here, since you don’t meet my threshold of rationality. ”
i.e. I call you out on your dodging, weaving, strawmanning, and incessant attempts to change the subject.
The fact is that your initial claims are both wrong. Rather than admit it, you continually try to change the subject to other alleged wrongdoing by Israel.
Ultimately, the Palestinian Arabs do in fact have a path to build good lives in peaceful ways. But that path requires abandoning some of their claims and grievances –whether legitimate or not — and accepting less than what they think they are owed as a group.
“Oh dear, you are paranoid too. And no, I’m not that commenter”
:shrug: Your debating styles are very similar. (I actually meant “Machine Interface”) That poster also continually tried to change the subject constantly bringing up various alleged wrongdoing by Israel. That poster constantly threw out accusations of dishonesty when his position was scrutinized. It’s not like nobody has ever switched handles on a message board.
@ sabril:
I basically agree with you in this debate. But if I can “steelman” Aapje‘s point, it is that the Palestinian Arabs are not a collective entity.
Some of them want to make peace with Israel and are willing to give up their claims and grievances. But others are nationalists and Islamists bent on suicidal, self-defeating attacks on Israel. The people in the first group can’t stop the people in the second group. And when Israel breaks off the peace process every time someone in the second group launches an attack, it goes nowhere. Obviously, you can never have a deal with more than around 100 people if the whole thing is off the first time one person defects.
Now, I would agree with that but say that negotiating with Hamas and the PLO does not mean negotiating with the people in the first group. It basically means surrendering ground to the second group, which is in control of those organizations—or at the very least, those in the PLO who are in the first group are unable to control those in the second.
And therefore I think that Israel’s only real hope of ending this conflict is to make continued resistance to Israel’s existence and desired borders impossible. Israel does not have workable “partners for peace”. It has to simply achieve victory.
But a legitimate part of Israel’s problem is that they don’t clearly define what would constitute victory. If they don’t want a Palestinian state, and don’t want a one-state solution where the Palestinians become citizens eventually, then I suppose the only alternative to the status quo is expelling the Palestinians.
“I basically agree with you in this debate. But if I can ‘steelman’ Aapje‘s point, it is that the Palestinian Arabs are not a collective entity.”
I actually addressed this point, or at least one similar to it, by pointing out that an individual Palestinian Arab living in J & S actually does have a pretty good opportunity to live a good, peaceful life. By simply staying out of the Arab/Israeli conflict, finding a job, marrying, etc.
Of course it’s true that an individual Palestinian Arab living in Gaza or a refugee camp in Lebanon or Jordan does not have such an opportunity. The proximate cause of this, however, is the policies of Hamas, Lebanon, Jordan, etc.
“Some of them want to make peace with Israel and are willing to give up their claims and grievances. But others are nationalists and Islamists bent on suicidal, self-defeating attacks on Israel.”
It’s also worth noting that there is overwhelming support among Palestinian Arabs for the hard line position.
“Obviously, you can never have a deal with more than around 100 people if the whole thing is off the first time one person defects.”
In order to do deals between groups of people, they need to have legitimate representatives. In the last election held by the Palestinian Arabs, Hamas won decisively. That was like 8 or 10 years ago. Fatah is in power only because it basically ignored the election results and has refused to have further elections. As for Gaza, Hamas has similarly refused to have further elections.
Anyway, for there to be peace the entire Arab culture needs to change. The fact is that there are regular wars, repression, and brutality all over the Levant regardless of whether Israel is involved. What Arabs do to each other is far far worse than anything Israel does.
“But a legitimate part of Israel’s problem is that they don’t clearly define what would constitute victory. If they don’t want a Palestinian state, and don’t want a one-state solution where the Palestinians become citizens eventually, then I suppose the only alternative to the status quo is expelling the Palestinians.”
The status quo is probably the best option for Israel. Anyway, the Jewish population in J & S is rocketing upwards. Once there is a solid Jewish majority, the entire area can be annexed and the local Arabs offered citizenship.
@Skinner
Proof? Hiroshima was the headquarters for the defense of Southern Japan
AFAIK the goal was to kill a large number of civilians, not to disrupt the war machine. An argument can be made that attacks on Japanese cities were military attacks, given the fact that a lot of military production was done in small shops in civilian area’s, but then that has to be the actual reason for the attack(s). Legally, intent matters.
Yeah, it isn’t like the Japanese explicitly state in their deliberations the importance of atomic bombings in forcing their decision.
That was rhetoric to save face. Fact is that the Japanese government initially rejected the Potsdam Proclamation after the bombs were dropped. “The key concern for the Japanese military was loss of honor, not Japan’s destruction.”
but blaming bomber command for something they couldn’t know until the war ended is… odd.
You are confusing two things. I am blaming them for human rights violations, which is independent of the question about effectiveness. I noted that the bombings were not just morally wrong, but also military unwise. The first is what I blame bomber command for, the second is a lesson we should learn from it.
And that they could keep Korea, Taiwan, no occupation… they had a list of conditions that their peace proposals through the USSR insisted upon.
In negotiations, you always ask for more than the minimum that you will accept. Otherwise you have no room to actually negotiate. That is Negotiating 101.
We know from both Japanese and Allied sources that “The absence of any assurance regarding the Emperor’s fate became Japan’s chief objection to the Potsdam Proclamation”
This is what the allies thought about it: “On May 28th Grew informed Truman, “The greatest obstacle to unconditional surrender by the Japanese is their belief that this would entail the destruction or permanent removal of the Emperor and the institution of the throne”
“Stimson’s memo to the President advised, “I personally think that if in saying this we should add that we do not exclude a constitutional monarchy under her present dynasty, it would substantially add to the chances of acceptance”. ”
Unfortunately: “Pacific war historian Akira Iriye explains, “One reason for this change [the removal of the Emperor retention line] was the growing influence within the State Department of men like [Sec. of State] Byrnes, Acheson, and MacLeish – with no expertise on Japanese affairs but keenly sensitive to public opinion – and the president’s tendency to listen to them rather than to Grew and other experts.”
@Vox
Right, so if they’re cynical bastards, why don’t they use better rhetoric?
Because inside an echo chamber, bad rhetoric looks like good rhetoric.
If you’re going to lie and say they’re all terrorists, why not lie and say they’re all Islamists?
Because you can point to any violence coming from the West Bank to ‘prove’ that the PA are also terrorists, which is an easier thing to do than come up with examples of Islamization of the West Bank. Proper lying is about taking a few exceptions and pretending that they are the rule. This is similar to how the people who believe in a global Jewish conspiracy need a few powerful Jews to point too. Without them, their theories become silly even in the eyes of people with anti-Jewish feelings.
@Vox
But if I can “steelman” Aapje‘s point, it is that the Palestinian Arabs are not a collective entity. […] And when Israel breaks off the peace process every time someone in the second group launches an attack, it goes nowhere.
That was my point. In N-Ireland, the British didn’t stop the peace process when the Omagh bombing happened. They dis-empowered the hawks by continuing the peace process.
Israel generally does the opposite, it gives power to the hawks, while dis-empowering the doves. So what happened: the Palestinians saw that the doves in Fatah couldn’t make peace, so you got an Intifada, then another one, then people defected from Fatah to the more extremist Hamas and more recently you have Jaish al-Islam, who are ISIS sympathizers. Things are not moving in the right direction at all.
Current Israeli policy is only effective if you think that more polarization & more extremism (on both sides) is good thing.
Israel does not have workable “partners for peace”. It has to simply achieve victory.
A. No serious conflict ever had workable “partners for peace” at the start, in the sense that the opposition is willing to sign and immediately implement an agreement just like that. You create workable “partners for peace” during a peace process, by taking steps towards peace, proving the doves right, dis-empowering the hawks. This increased trust and power on the side of the doves allows you to take more steps towards peace, proving the doves even more right, etc. Key is that the doves on both sides need to stand together when the inevitable attempt by hawks to disrupt this upward spiral happens (instead of the side who who suffered from an attack retaliating against the doves on the other side).
B. Victory without genocide is impossible. You can only get a stalemate under the current Israeli strategy, with continued resistance and regular ‘out-breaks’ of severe violence (like the stabbings by Israeli Arabs).
I suppose the only alternative to the status quo is expelling the Palestinians.
To where? No one will take them.
Furthermore, ethnic cleansing will probably have severe consequences with regard to a loss of international support. It may lead Europe to institute full sanctions, for instance.
“AFAIK the goal was to kill a large number of civilians, not to disrupt the war machine.”
I typically provide plenty of leaflets to my victims and tell them ‘we are going to bomb you’ in an effort to get them to stay in one place.
“That was rhetoric to save face. Fact is that the Japanese government initially rejected the Potsdam Proclamation after the bombs were dropped. “The key concern for the Japanese military was loss of honor, not Japan’s destruction.””
No, we know what ‘rhetoric to save face’ looks like- declaring that the atom bombs don’t matter because the Americans probably have only two of them. Attempting a coup to stop the surrender. The people who pushed for a surrender did so because they realized the US was in fact now capable of simply obliterating them- previously they could hold out ‘they will back off once the casualties are high enough’.
“I am blaming them for human rights violations, which is independent of the question about effectiveness.”
‘Necessary/sufficiently useful’ is a question of effectiveness.
“In negotiations, you always ask for more than the minimum that you will accept. Otherwise you have no room to actually negotiate. That is Negotiating 101. ”
This wasn’t a negotiation. The US, UK, USSR had agreed to unconditional surrender. The Japanese refused to ask for anything remotely realistic in light of that agreement or the outcome for every other Axis power.
“We know from both Japanese and Allied sources that “The absence of any assurance regarding the Emperor’s fate became Japan’s chief objection to the Potsdam Proclamation””
I’m not sure stripping the Emperor of his divinity would have been acceptable to them either. Not to mention ‘the Emperor can’t be tried for war crimes’ is something that screams guilty.
@ Samuel Skinner:
I agree with you, but I wanted to point out something about this:
Dropping the leaflets is part of the terror tactics. Not least because it’s a way of magnifying force. They drop leaflets on more cities than they’re actually going to bomb (otherwise the Japanese would defend just those cities, right?), encouraging people to evacuate even the cities that aren’t going to be bombed. It creates more fear, uncertainty, and disruption.
This doesn’t contradict what you said in any way. The whole purpose of this was to disrupt the war effort. And it’s not just a matter of morale: if people are evacuating, they are not producing supplies for the war effort.
The U.S. goal was to win with as few losses as possible, not to kill as many “Japs” as possible. Killing and terrorizing them was the means to winning.
Also, the main fallacy with the argument that the second bomb (or even the first bomb) was evil and unnecessary is revealed in one simple fact: if it is still uncertain today whether they were necessary, then this sure as hell wasn’t known to the U.S. Army Air Corps at the time, going by only the information they had. It’s basic “fog of war”. You can’t engage in Monday-morning quarterbacking and then judge the people actually involved by all the information you have decades after the war is over.
” They drop leaflets on more cities than they’re actually going to bomb (otherwise the Japanese would defend just those cities, right?), ”
That requires cities we didn’t bomb. The only city over 60,000 people we didn’t hit was Kyoto.
@ Samuel Skinner:
I meant to bomb at any particular time, of course.
You didn’t exactly need a leaflet campaign to let them know that any given city had an extremely high chance of being bombed at some point.
That anger quickly turns in to resignation when their protests don’t seem effective. It’s a nice sentiment to say that violent repression just fuels resistance but history has shown time and time again that it’s the best way to counter protesters. But the important thing is that it has to be both quick and harsh. Leave one out and it can embolden protesters. China is really good at this. Saudi Arabia is too. North Korea has perfected it.
I’m sure that’s the grouping everyone wants to be in. Israel, like North Korea since 2016!
I don’t think that any modern democracy can get away with the kind of suppression tactics you are talking about, if I am understanding you correctly.
China, Saudi Arabia and North Korea don’t just practice mindless slaughter, they also force on their subjects totalitarian ideologies that give them some sense of purpose in their daily lives.
What ideology does Israel force on the Palestinians? That they are vermin that just need to disappear to make room for God’s Chosen People? This will hardly give then any productive purpose.
If you make someone’s life bad enough that it is not worth living, to the point where they feel they have nothing to lose, they may well try to use their last breath to kill you.
This seems to be the case of the current string of stabbings in Israel. The perpetrators aren’t radicalized members of militant organizations, they are common people who think that their life sucks too much to be worth living, and rightly or wrongly, they blame Israel for it.
Historically, colonizations of an already populated land succeeded if the native population was displaced, assimilated, exterminated or any combination thereof.
In this case Israel will not assimilate the Palestinians, and neither will any neighboring country, thus displacement is out of question. And of course the remaining option, extermination, is politically problematic, especially when your international PR is based on guilty-tripping Western people about Auschwitz.
Therefore I think that Netanyahu will not succeed at breaking the Palestinian morale and any further attempt to colonize the Western Bank is doomed to fail.
@Vv_vv
Why didn’t the slaves in America overthrow their owners? Was it because they believed totalitarian ideologies? Or was it because of lack of hope? I believe the latter explanation is much more convincing and applies far more often to history than the former. You can come up with your own ad hoc theories to why these examples don’t count but the evidence is not on your side.
Because they lived subjectively better lives than present-day Palestinians, presumably.
And yes, this is in part because their masters gave them a totalitarian ideology: Christianity. Work hard, obey your master, don’t cause any trouble, etc. and then Jesus will reward you in Heaven, or something.
While people generally prefer not to be enslaved, it is nevertheless possible for most of them to live productive and relatively fulfilling lives as slaves. Some will try to rebel and they will be killed, but the majority will accept slavery.
Present-day Palestinians who try to rebel are still a minority, but the Israeli policy of instilling despair in the general Palestinian population is going to make the problem worse, not better. Without making major concessions, Israel will never run out of Palestinians who will want to sacrifice their life to defect against it, unless it carries out a genocide.
If you honestly think that Palestinians are worse off than antebellum slaves then I don’t know what to tell you. I don’t know how you can honestly believe that they could live productive and fulfilling lives(even relatively). Slavery is like the ultimate example of a dreary and unfulfilled existence. It sucks to be a Palestinians but it’s not even close to the same level.
Also, I would not say Saudi Arabia has a totalizing ideology unless you are referring to Islam, in which case Palestinians are also Muslim. I don’t really see it for China either but that depends what exactly you mean by “totalizing ideology”, if it means “something giving people purpose in life” or “government propaganda” then basically every place has that in which case it’s meaningless to mention.
Evidence? From a modern Western point of view, where freedom is (at least ostensibly) considered as the ultimate value, slavery is the ultimate evil.
But historically slavery has been practiced for thousand years by many cultures, where it was considered as a “natural” condition. It seems unlikely that most slaves were depressed or desperate. Certainly most of them did not commit suicide or attempted rebellion. Data on the suicide rate of African-American slaves is sketchy, but some studies suggest that it was generally lower than the suicide rate of contemporary European-Americans (ref).
Empirically it seems that for a significant subset of Palestinians life is actually worse than the life of African-American slaves. They are indeed desperate. The problem for the Israeli is that desperation doesn’t lead to resignation, it leads to violence.
But there is no such thing as Islam, only a range of variant Islams. I don’t think it’s a wild exaggeration to consider the Islam that is promoted by the Saudi government to be a totalitarian ideology, even if the Islam that is most mainstream among the Palestinians doesn’t rise to that level.
“Evidence? From a modern Western point of view, where freedom is (at least ostensibly) considered as the ultimate value, slavery is the ultimate evil.”
It depends on the slavery, but I think mining and the Caribbean islands had some of the most horrific working conditions for slaves. Slaves who are not being worked to death were probably similar to other people who were tied to the land; however transitioning from one category to another is always a danger for slaves.
Israel will never run out of Palestinians who will want to sacrifice their life to defect against it
“It” is either grammatically or logically ambiguous in that sentence, I think.
But more than that, if someone sets up a rocket launcher and fires it off in the general direction of a bunch of enemy soldiers, then sticks around for the counterbattery fire, sure, that’s someone who wants to sacrifice their life. If someone goes out into a crowded civilian neighborhood and sets up a rocket launcher pointed at another crowded civilian neighborhood, with a remote trigger to make sure they can be far away when the fireworks start, I’m thinking that it isn’t their own life they want to sacrifice.
Historically, people who do this sort of thing generally do surrender rather than dying in pointless suicide once they lose hope in the whole “sacrifice other people but not myself” plan. There are Palestinians who are willing to sacrifice themselves and a few that are eager to do so, but those are actually scarce and will eventually run out if they aren’t getting results.
If the Palestinians actually want to make productive use of such sacrifices while there are still people willing to make them, I’d suggest a far more powerful approach than trying to kill a few more Jews with a knife or a bomb.
A lack of hope often just causes people to react in anger, while opportunity allows people to stop focusing on their hate and be productive. Currently, there is no way for Palestinians to build up a good life in peaceful ways.
Right, like the way the Germans kept fighting harder and harder until we stopped bombing them and offered them lots of Marshall-Plan assistance in building the good life.
There is no hope greater than the hope for victory in battle, save possibly hope for victory in the most divisive sort of identity politics. Hoping “to build up a good life in peaceful ways” means hoping for a few decades of ceaseless toil so that your children might have a better life, all the while knowing that the people responsible for their not having the good life here and now will “get away with it” unpunished. Hoping for victory means hoping that you get the good life up front, paid for by the labors of your enemies as punishment for their efforts to deny you the good life. Victory is best, and nobody who ever had a cause worth fighting for and victory within reach ever gave it up for a day job.
When, and only when, you take away people’s hope for victory, they start hoping for bloody revenge (yeah, yeah). When you take away their hope even for revenge, then they start hoping just to survive. Then your diplomats can start to offer them something that looks better than just survival, and you can negotiate a peace that won’t just be a time-out while they plot more revenge.
War is either pointless killing, or it is the process of manufacturing enough despair that surrender is preferable. If you’re not willing to reduce a population to despair, you almost certainly aren’t going to win any settlement that you couldn’t have gotten peacefully in the first place, so just do that. Even if it means surrendering yourself.
For identity politics, replace “killing” with “mind-killing” and it still holds.
Can you give examples since WW2 though? It seems like unless you have the political will to 100% commit to total war, winning through despair is pretty hopeless (e.g. Iraq/Afghanistan, where the US hasn’t really made long-term stability despite pouring trillions of dollars in).
The North Vietnamese made the United States despair of ever winning a victory in Vietnam, and then despair of achieving righteous vengeance against anyone deserving of such, and when we were reduced to caring only about whether our soldiers made it home alive, they won.
They had some help from American politicians, journalists, and even military commanders on that front, but using the enemy’s strengths against him is entirely legit in war.
Falklands War, same deal if you want one where the Anglosphere wins one. The Argies hoped to take and hold the islands, and when they lost hope for that they at least hoped to make the Brits pay for them in blood, and when it wasn’t the British who were bleeding, there was nothing left for Argentina to hope for except their surviving soldiers coming home alive. No trade deal, economic concession, or other “way to build up a good life in peace” was going to persuade Argentina to give up those islands short of that complete loss of hope; the invasion was never expected to turn an economic profit in the first place, only a profit in pride.
@pku
I’m not sure why you think Afghanistan/Iraq doesn’t support his point. Everyone knew that the U.S. was only staying temporarily so they only had to wait them out. For a successful example, look at the Mongols. They didn’t have a problem with Afghanistan. Earlier I said that the North Koreans were the best at utilizing repression but I take that back. The Mongols were the best because they showed that conquering territory solely through fear was very accomplishable. They had to kill a lot of people to do it but it got the job done.
My point wasn’t that this is impossible, it’s that doing it requires far more resources (and brutality) than modern forces are willing to commit. And the other requirement is that it should be open – Israel wouldn’t just have to be oppressive, it would have to be openly so in clear retaliation (that is, declare “yes, we deliberately bombed this building with civilian casualties in response to the attack yesterday”. Right now, Israeli assassination policy, when it happens, is to wait for a chance to do it with minimum civilian casualties, rather than take the first chance they get).
In another era Bibi would have pulled off an “Armenian solution” on the Palestinians and be done with it. People like sabril would just have turned the other way and pretended not to see.
But since we live in an era when everybody has a video recorder and transmitter in their pocket, this is not possible anymore, at least not without Israel losing international support (which would pretty much imply Russians in Tel Aviv within a month).
William F. Buckley once advised (unsolicitedly) Augusto Pinochet to declare himself a socialist; then all his crimes would be forgiven and forgotten by the international Left. If a nationalist-communist politician becomes PM in Israel, the option of expelling or exterminating the Palestinians will become much more internationally acceptable.
Sorry, but no. The Chomskyite view (the “international Left” no longer exists but this is the closest modern equivalent) is to oppose whatever the United States government supports, updated daily. So it would not be enough to call yourself communist, or even be communist, if you haven’t alienated the Americans yet. Otherwise it’s just a hollow front.
That, and Israel is colonialist and anti-colonialism is a cornerstone of leftism.
Israel isn’t colonialist; colonialism (in the non-reactionary view, at least), was europeans coming to countries, stealing their resources, and taking them home. The jews who came to Israel were people who were exiled/refugees from those countries and didn’t have much of an alternative. For europeans to accuse Israel of colonialism is kinda like Nelson going “why are you punching yourself?” (which isn’t to say that nobody would ever accuse Israel of anything. But colonialism is ridiculous).
Israel being conquered by Russia (I assume you meant a military occupation, since there are already about half a million russian immigrants in Tel Aviv) if it lost international support is ridiculous – they couldn’t even conquer Afghanistan, Israel has nukes, there are a bunch of other countries in the way, and they have zero interest in doing it in the first place. Iran or Egypt might well attack in those circumstances though, depending on how worried they were about the nuclear option.
Sending the resources home isn’t necessary for colonialism. There have been many colonies that were conquered for permanent settlement rather than to export resources; I live in what used to be one of them. There’s still exploitation of the native populace, which is what leftists are concerned about when they decry colonialism.
Israel isn’t your typical colony at all, but squint at it the right way and there’s the usual leftist narrative of lighter-skinned people coming in to steal land and resources from darker-skinned people.
(Tangent: the first Jewish settlers in what became Israel arrived in the 1880s. A lot of people seem to have the sense that Palestine was an entirely Arab land until the first ships full of Holocaust refugees arrived, but it isn’t so.)
@Anthony
Nationalist-communist seems quite similar to National Socialism. This isn’t exactly the sort of thing that tends to be popular with the “international Left”.
The Left has supported some movements, such as the ANC and the PKK, that repackaged ethnic conflict as class struggle (or at least that’s how they sold it to outsiders), but the Left was always on the side of the underdogs, the rebels.
After all, according to classical Marxism, ethnic divisions are superstructures created by the economic elites to facilitate exploitation of the masses, therefore it wasn’t implausible to interpret, for instance, the black-white conflict in South Africa as the struggle of the proletariat and the lumpenproletariat against a government that represented the interests of rich landowners, that is, the capitalists.
But in the case of Israel, a state power trying to expand its Lebensraum at the expense of a poor native population seems hard to reconcile with a leftist narrative.
@Pku
Colonialism, in the generally accepted definition, also includes permanent settlement.
Only a minority of the original Jewish immigrants to Israel were refugees, the majority immigrated for economic, ideological or religious reasons. This isn’t really different than the European colonization of the Americas: some of the European colonists were escaping persecution, most of them were not.
And in any case, from the point of view of the colonized population (Palestinians, Native Americans) it doesn’t really matter whether their land and resources are taken by a refugee or an economic immigrant, does it?
Anyway, I wasn’t really referring to the history of Israel but to present-day Israel. If the expansion of the settlements in “Judea and Samaria” is not colonialism then I don’t know what it is. Are you going to claim that the settlers are refugees?
That was a hyperbole. My point is that Israel won’t be able to preserve its integrity for long without international support. The economies and militaries of all countries are highly dependent and ultimately they depend on a few super-powers. Even North Korea, perhaps the most independent country in the world, heavily depends on Chinese foreign aid.
@vV_Vv
It’s more complex than that, as you have rebels who transform into dictators, rebels who fight other rebels, etc.
For instance, a decent number of leftists stood behind communism, based on the perception that it would liberate people from capitalism. Yet we saw communist countries become dictatorships. At that point, quite a few Western communists defended communist oppression and denounced those that rebelled against that.
Which is very unconvincing, as this explanation fails to account for the racial separation. Why would a capitalist give a poor white S-African more rights than a poor black S-African? Why make racial laws, instead of owner-ship laws? Furthermore, such an explanation would require you to dismiss the justifications given by the proponents themselves. It’s pretty ridiculous to claim that people use one justification, but their actual reasons are completely different. That’s conspiracy-theory level rationalization.
@Aapje
Yes, but the “international Left” was (is?) not opposed to dictatorship per se. They were opposed, at least in principle, to any form of government that they perceive as representative of the interests of the capitalists. Practical adherence to this principle varied, of course.
I guess because it was a convenient Schelling point. South Africa didn’t really have a sizable white middle class. Race was a good proxy for class: whites were mostly land owners and business owners, that is, capitalists, while blacks were mostly unemployed or employed in low-skill salaried jobs, that is, they were the underclass and labor class. There wasn’t a white labor or low-gentry class that could complain about wage competition from the disenfranchised blacks.
Because if you are a rich white capitalist you may have a streak of bad luck and become poor, or your children or grandchildren can, but you can’t become black and neither can your children or grandchildren (barring interracial admixture).
Well, that’s Marxist theory.
Anyway, I think you are straw-manning it. It’s not like it claims that the stated justification are false, it attempts to explain these stated justifications in a reductionist way. I think that Marxists tend to overdo it with these explanations, but they do generally have some point.
You could say that South African whites discriminated against blacks because they were racist. Ok, but why were they racist? Considering whether they had economic interests in maintaining a racially separated seems relevant.
@vV_Vv
Sure, but at that point they were not so much taking sides of the rebels, but taking sides against a ideology they considered oppressive, regardless of if that ideology actually was in power.
Good point, although I would argue that poor whites didn’t exist due to race discrimination and that in an actual capitalist oppression, a white underclass would automatically develop. After all, there are always people who lose their capital and get shunned by their family (like criminals), so the only way these people would regain wealth in an oppressive system was if they got racial help.
As an aside, a poor white underclass has now developed, after they got rid of Apartheid, but kept capitalism.
Well, I fundamentally disagree with Marxist approaches and how they tend to reduce complex issues to a simplistic oppressor/oppressed dichotomy. I feel that I have responded to how you described the Marxist theories.
I’d say that there are many reasons for that, which you can’t just reduce to economic reasons. It’s stereotypes, fear, legitimizing oppression, etc and also economic reasons. But not solely.
Bernie for Israeli PM 2019!
“In another era Bibi would have pulled off an ‘Armenian solution’ on the Palestinians and be done with it. ”
Israel has had the capability of doing this since at least 1967 but has not done so. So much for your theory about video recorders and transmitters. Either that or Bibi is uniquely evil. I’m happy to consider your evidence for this of course.
“People like sabril would just have turned the other way and pretended not to see.”
“like sabril” means “supporter of Israel”? Or something else?
The quotes are kind of unfair – if you give a long speech, you’ll probably say at least one vapid thing as an opener or closer. The woman in the picture, for example, was giving a very interesting lecture on neuroscience’s ability to detect lies and how it might evolve in the criminal justice system. I just thought some of them were funny, and she fits the Open Thread format better than the others.
But the irony is that these quotes don’t seem to have been chosen for their vapidity–quite the opposite, it looks like. Though this, of course, might say more about the person choosing the quotes than the speakers themselves.
Optimized for Facebook shareability, is my guess at their goals.
I wonder about that exactly. Some of them seem too stupid (at least out of context) to be chosen for reasons other than the comical effect. If you judged Davos based on these quotes only, you’d have to conclude that it is about as important for world politics as a banquet at Louis XIV’s court. Then again, the speeches might as well be anyway (even if they are not so terribly cliched and empty of content as the quotes), I guess that an important part of this conference is the breaks between the speeches when people there have a chance to talk to someone about something important for them.
I was still surprised that they invite actors and musicians. If they want to keep the image of being “a meeting of the elites” (actually, some people still feel out of place…what is the president of Cyprus doing at a meeting where the so called “world leaders” talk about global issues?) then this seems like a strange move.
I was under the impression these were selected for vapidity. If not, the quote-selector is definitely vapid, and the speakers might be.
Netanyahu’s Voldemort impression definitely stands out.
I wonder if they tried to find the most optimistic comment they could find and for Netanyahu, this was actually it.
That would be very surprising for an article hosted on World Economic Forum’s official website, no?
Actually, I thought the mind reading quote was interesting as well, and at least come from someone who is reasonably competent to express an opinion on the matter.
But as onyomi said, these quotes were chosen to be a positive reflection of the proceedings. If this is the best the event had to offer, then it bodes ill for the event as a whole.
Ok, so what is this Davos 2016 thing ? Their quotes, as they are presented, seem to imply that the answer is, “some sort of New Age woo gathering”; but perhaps they were taken out of context ?
Davros 2016! Why settle for the lesser evil?
I’m voting for Sweet Meteor o’ Death.
400 zettajoules of change!
Yeah, most all of them were worse than ridiculous. I mean, “Every country needs a Minister of the Future”? I can think of no better way to achieve the opposite of innovation than to put a bureaucrat in charge of it. But while that one was just dumb, many gave me this vibe that there is actually a creepy cult/conspiracy of elites so drunk on their own self-importance that they see no problem with just throwing away the existing social order and replacing it with a utopia, peasants just trying to live their lives be damned.
However, I liked the Schulman quote. Maybe it’s just my own particular circumstances, but it seemed insightful.
I don’t think they could have done any better if they had been deliberately trying to make Netanyahu look badass.
Right, Netanyahu’s quote stands out.
>PM France “Don’t leave the EU UK!”
Because of course the best way to convince a Brit to do something is to have a Frenchman say he doesn’t want it….
“the biggest obstacle to future success is past success” isn’t bad. Not actionable, but still an important truth.
SSC SF Story of the Week #7
This week we are discussing “Non-Player Character” by Eliezer Yudkowsky.
Next time we will discuss “By the Waters of Babylon” by Stephen Vincent Benet.
In the afterword, Eliezer Yudkowsky says that this is the kind of technology he would expect to see six months before the Singularity, if that. I can see why; the AI in the story is extremely advanced. Kinda makes me wish I could play a videogame with such an AI, but I guess Mitsuku will have to do for now.
Biographically, the story is noteworthy as an early indication that Yudkowsky could write excellent fiction as well as nonfiction. Comparing it to the science fiction that he was writing ten years earlier at the age of fourteen can serve as an inspiring reminder that we all have to start somewhere. Given some of the horrible old stuff that still sits on my own FF.net account, I can certainly sympathize.
For someone who doesn’t want to take the time to read the stories, is it possible to briefly summarize what kind of technology Eliezer expects to see six months before the singularity?
The story was written in 2003; I’m sure Eliezer’s views have changed substantially in the meantime. But to answer your question, the AI in the story is a video game NPC able to flawlessly understand spoken, natural language commands to reference events which happened earlier in the game and which are appropriate to the context of the conversation in which she is participating.
the story is noteworthy as an early indication that Yudkowsky could write excellent fiction
Oh dear 🙂
I really don’t want to insult anybody, and I freely admit he is vastly more intelligent than I am and is working out serious points, but I can’t say this is good writing. It’s a handy way of setting up the scenario for the point he wants to make; the author’s afterword is probably the most important part of the whole exercise (rather as sometimes Shaw’s plays seemed like an excuse for his very long forewords which explored the point he wished to make).
The weight of the story should be the relationship between Rilanya/Darin (or Mark as he is in real life) but there’s no relationship there. There’s nothing to indicate “the real tenderness I felt in you besides the cruelty” because for him, she’s exactly that – an NPC. Even the sexual element (and that seems to foreshadow the paths to have a romance with NPCs in some modern games) is less convincing to me as ‘the character of Darin feels affection for the character Rilanya’ and feels more like “another quest to level up and get the better artefacts, just like ‘Kill The Dungeon Ogre and Retrieve the Lost Magic Sword in Its Hoard’, this is ‘Rescue Princess, Deflower Her, Get Loyal Companion with Bonus Skills’ ” (like the pets in Torchlight or the animal companions in many games).
So I wasn’t convinced that Mark suddenly believed that Rilanya was now sentient; I would have expected him to continue with the view that “yeah, this is some kind of leg-pull, right?”, particularly as Janey, the real-life girlfriend, is shown to be exactly the kind of person who does exactly that kind of thing. And I don’t believe he would develop qualms about AI and computer game characters and the rest of it.
Personal preference for ending: pulling out again and finding Janey is also an NPC and Mark is trying out a new game that’s “just like life!” including that characters play games-within-the-game. Then again, that’s probably because I think Cronenberg’s movie, even though it was a bit of a mess, handled the whole “is this real? are you a player or a player character or an NPC?” much better and more ambiguously.
Donaldson’s “Thomas Covenant” fantasy novels, which also are a bit of a mess, take the line that Yudkowsky recommends about not believing the rules of the new world and sticking to rationality; the title character is adamant (through hard-won experience from leprosy, which is a disease that won’t let you deny the facts and punishes any slip-ups about daydreaming or carelessness) that the world he finds himself in is not real, is a dream or a fantasy, and he sticks to behaving like a person in our real world who is having a dream or a hallucination, and insists on “this character is based on someone I met in real life”, and ends up creating complete havoc in the Land, which somehow crosses over into our real world. Or not. Even if the Land is only a dream, do you have any responsibility for what you do in a dream?
Eh. Conclusion: it’s not great writing, but it’s perfectly serviceable to get the point he wants to make across, and it’s no worse than the bulk of a lot of SF short stories that got churned out during the 70s/80s/90s.
Wait, you can deflower your pet in Torchlight?
This was something that I liked about the story, actually–the protagonist was the person who saw faces in clouds instead of lecturing about pareidolia.
Well, from what struck me, Mark (or Darin) didn’t particularly care about Rilanya – she was the obligatory quest and now she’s his companion. Honestly, if she was replaced by the pet (even without sex), I don’t see a huge difference there – it’s not “an adult game” so the player doesn’t get sexy cut-scenes; it’s all there to – what? get Rilanya emotionally involved? Make her the weepy clingy girlfriend? I didn’t get the point of it at all.
Mark should be, while playing, subsumed into Darin, and Darin should be emotionally connected to Rilanya, but what does the dialogue say? First time they met in-game, Mark was too busy making wisecracks. Okay, it took some time for him to get into the spirit of things, I understand that. But when Rilanya starts (supposedly) deviating from the script, what is Darin/Mark’s reaction? “Oh, plot point coming up”.
There’s a distance between his playing experience and what he thinks and feels that makes the “Wow, she’s A Real Girl!” possibility unconvincing to me. Mark shows no signs of ever mistaking the NPC for anything else, so a few lines from her about “you’re not like everyone else”, “are you a god”, and “do you have a real girlfriend” should not make him start thinking “This is real sentient AI!”
That’s probably the point of the story, but it fails because I can’t believe Mark ever fell for it, or if he did for a minute nearly believe it, that his feeling Rilanya was ‘real’ survived beyond Janey telling him how she tricked him. The lip-trembling at the end about “Amnesty Interplanetary” and how he can never play a game again had me going “Yeah, sure”.
I can be pretty gullible, and am over-primed for an AI/alien buddy due to the steady diet of science fiction and fantasy that I grew up on. The Darin/Rilanya dynamic seemed realistic to me. It would have been better if we’d seen more prior indication of Mark’s…not empathy, but tendency to anthropomorphize? I don’t know if that’s a word.
Anyways. It feels like the same reaction I would have, given sufficiently sophisticated NPC AIs. I also enjoyed the story for its own sake.
I mean, I’ve had to slaughter my way through a Dwarven fortress and suffered pangs of guilt while doing it! I understand getting so into a game that you treat the characters as real!
But I don’t get that sense from Mark. There’s no “When Rilanya started saying and doing strange things, it threw me out of the world and it took me a moment to switch from Darin back to Mark”. There’s “Oh, something in the plot is going to happen here, must be big” instead. That’s why I’m not convinced about Mark believing in Rilanya as possibly a sentient character; he doesn’t speak to or treat her like that, he’s always got the “NPC, plot, quest up-coming” non-suspension of disbelief running in the back of his head:
Going with the ‘joke’ when Rilanya starts on about “You’re controlling things from outside” would mean that “Dain” tells Rilanya a fairy-tale about him being an incarnated god, or hinting at Further Revelations to come, or the likes of that, not a flat “Darin: “That’s not exactly how it works, Rilanya.” About as much imagination as a potato on show there, and to follow it up with “If you were real, I wouldn’t have spent as much time trying to get you to let me fuck you” was tin-eared in the extreme.
See, this is the bit I can’t believe: “I knew all that, and I was still disturbed.” That is, Mark knows all about the AI used in games and how NPCs can’t be anything approaching real, but a bit of tearful dialogue makes him twitchy – why? Because he treats Rilanya, despite all evidence, as a real person because he’s invested so much emotional energy in the game? My eye he did! He’s been perfectly aware all along that she’s a game device to move the storyline along, he doesn’t show any signs of identifying with Darin so much that he’s having trouble disconnecting from the secondary reality of the game, so I am not convinced he starts to feel troubled about signs of emotion in a generated character maybe signifying genuine sentience.
And that’s what I mean about this is not great writing. As a “here’s my point put forward for your consideration”, it works fine. But the writing fails to convince as it needs to do, because the character of Mark is too flat and knowing (yeah, I know all about how these games are laid out plot-wise! I pulled all the online info on Easter eggs and AI! you can’t pull the wool over my eyes!)
There’s “show, not tell” and we get too much of Mark telling how he can play games and knows about games and knows about the coding of the AI. When was the last time any of you talked about game character design and how it struck you while playing in terms of “her rendered graphic looked at my point-of-view”? That’s the technical specs from the instruction manual, not a character speaking of his experience in the game to convince us that he believes what he sees on-screen to have achieved sentience. It’s showing off, using jargon to evoke verisimilitude. God knows I can’t write, but it would be better to recast that as something like Rilanya looking pleadingly at Darian, and Mark having a background thought about Wow, this game has really cracked point-of-view interaction and keeping the graphics rendering holding up when it’s an NPC onscreen while interacting with Rilanya as Darian.
Would you still feel that way if AIs of that sophistication were in common use, though? The prank AI kit used in the story is conveniently available online for free, and said to be “fully tested and debugged”, meaning (a) AIs of similar sophistication must be already in wide use, and (b) there ain’t no way Mark is the first gamer to be pranked like this. There should be gamers talking up a storm about this sort of thing on the internet, and if Mark spends any time on gaming sites at all he’d hear about it.
(It’s possible that this particular advanced prank AI kit only just came out, but with a little more effort you can run the same prank with a much less advanced AI – it’s not hard to find out the key questlines in any given RPG, and once you’ve done your research and done a little pre-writing all you need the AI to do is act out the lines you feed it.)
@ Loquat
The prank AI kit used in the story is conveniently available online for free, and said to be “fully tested and debugged”, meaning (a) AIs of similar sophistication must be already in wide use, and (b) there ain’t no way Mark is the first gamer to be pranked like this.
But (b) makes a better story, so it’s the dialog supporting (a) that should be tweaked.
I should make myself clear here: there are two matters under review, the concept of the story and its execution.
Now, a sufficiently novel, gripping or ‘new twist on old scenario’ concept will go a very long way to offsetting poor or lacking execution. What I’m critiquing here is the way the story is written, mainly because of (sorry, jaimeastorga2000) the mention that this story demonstrates or indicates how Yudkowsky could write excellent fiction.
If we’re talking about excellence in the context of concepts – intriguing, novel, gripping, new twist on old tale, new light through old windows – that may be so. If we are talking about excellence in the context of execution – style, character development or demonstration, success or failure in getting point across, appeal of the written word as an experience in reading – I have to disagree.
Okay, plus points: it’s from 2003 so it’s early work. Every author develops as they go along, if the same story were to be written now in 2016 it would probably be different and would flow more smoothly. The story is more interested in and excited about communicating the concept rather than excellent prose style, which is the same interest the vast majority of SF stories were all about, so not fair to throw stones about that.
Negative critique: I’ve done two long comments about all that. Boiling it down, the story is not one I’d consider great because (a) the foundational concept is a little blurry – are we meant to be thinking about the possibility or likelihood of true AI developing in such a fluke manner, or about not being gullible and throwing away your hard-won tools of reasonable behaviour and thinking, even when you think you have covered all the objections to why This Thing Cannot Be So? (b) failure of execution – the character of Mark is paper-thin and unconvincing, I don’t find myself believing for one second he changed his mind on Rilanya being a plot delivery vehicle or had any of the scruples about game-playing he claims to have acquired at the end, the character of Janey is only tossed in at the end to be the deus ex machina as to why the NPC seems to be truly self-aware but in fact it’s all a trick (it could just as well have been a truly deep prank by the game designer, a loutish pal of Mark’s who pulled the same prank, or Mark having over-identified so much with the Player Character of Darin he started believing his in-game experiences were real) (c) as written, there is nothing in Rilanya’s dialogue or actions to convince me “Blimey, this doesn’t sound like a canned game character, this sounds like a person!” (weepy blithering by your busty bimbo sextoy about ‘does you weally wuv me?’ is not convincing, it just sounds like the kind of banner ads that are really bloody annoying and probably false advertising to boot). There is no moral dilemma or ‘can this possibly be actually real despite all I know to the contrary?’ tension in the story, because Rilanya is so plainly and flatly an NPC following a script all along, even if Mark falls for Janey’s “But I really love you, Darin!” manipulation.
Okay, that last bit is good: plainly, Janey knows Mark so well that she knows he will be unable to resist the appeal to his vanity (in-game or real world, he’s such a stud that he makes Fake Girls into Real Girls merely by ‘fade to black’ interaction with him) and so he’ll be more likely to believe Rilanya is real if she is lip-wibbling over “But I really love you, don’t you really love me, my big, strong, capable, sexy hero who saved me from peril and took my virginity?”
So to conclude: 6/10, perfectly fine run of the mill SF story, but great writing? Not so much.
Loquat and houseboatonstyx have good points; it would make Janey’s character more integral to the story if, instead of “prank AI kit used in the story is conveniently available online for free, and said to be “fully tested and debugged”, and Mark apparently being the first gamer to have his leg pulled like this (despite his on-line searching, nothing about “game AI used to simulate real sentience” pops up), Janey has something like “It took me two solid years of coding but it was worth it for the look on your face!” as she has custom-developed the kit for that particular game, tailored around Mark’s in-game character and the quest lines he’s been following. So Mark hasn’t heard about this from online groups or friends playing the same game because nobody else (so far) has managed to get it to work, and it works on Mark because Janey is using her personal knowledge of what pushes his buttons, and the particular game and quest series he’s playing, the character he generated, Rilanya, etc. to make it as convincing as possible.
@ Deiseach
I enjoyed those lacks as a feature! (The story reminded me of Niven’s about the nova, which I also liked.)
In lit-crit terms, I could say EY set Janey up as a contrasting bloodless token real world un-glamorous girlfriend who probably won’t ever come onstage, where if she did she’d have no more life of her own than Niven’ s Leslie — then pulled the switch of Janey suddenly showing brains and motive (“now to the next phase”). Hey, it’s Janey who suddenly stops functioning as an (offstage) NPC! Wakes up in the reader’s mind as REAL (and more real than Mark, nya)! EY plants a seed for Relationship Development(tm): “So that’s how after she finally proposed and we got married, that we built X Megacorp. Well, it is if you believe this story….”
Which is what a mid-century editor might have wanted, to wrap it up as a story.
I like the fact that EY didn’t bother wrapping his idea in any such predictable trimmings of Ye Lit-Crit Art-Form. If he had, I’d have been reading along at that all too familiar level looking for them (like Mark thinking ‘Ah, here’s a plot point’); as it is, I was just as surprised as Mark was.
@Deiseach:
I’m another who found it believable.
You: “It’s unbelievable because my mind doesn’t work that way.”
Helldalgo & me: “It’s very believable because our minds work exactly that way.”
So I think you’re just not the target audience.
This word choice of the narrator’s is an early sign that he’s suspecting she might be “real” and is fighting that suspicion by choosing terminology calculated to remind himself that nah, she’s just a cool piece of tech. That’s intuitively obvious to me, because I’m the type of person who does that.
To come up with the alternative interpretation that it’s “showing off,” I think you have to both lack (or be less primed to detect) that tendency compared to the target audience, and also be more alert to “signs of showing off” than the target audience.
Well, and we already know Eliezer tends to be unalert to “signs of showing off.”
But I’m not sure how he could’ve rewritten it to prevent triggering others’ “showoff detectors” but still achieve his goal of showing the narrator’s…well…I think many people would call it a “retreat to intellectualization,” but that’s not quite what it is. Really it’s more of a “retreat to semi-consciously reminding himself of the Official Facts through his word choice.”
Eliezer’s playing with that trope by using a conventional way of showing us a character doing something “wrong” (the trope defines this “retreat” as a “defense against recognizing reality”)…that turns out to have been the right thing to do after all (she really *isn’t* “real”).
The character would come off as much less “defensive against ‘reality'” that way.
First, he hasn’t been perfectly aware all along, he’s been desperately trying to remind/convince himself. Second, “having trouble disconnecting from the secondary reality of the game,” either because he’s identifying with the viewpoint character or in a *general* sense, is not the only reason someone’s heart might go out to a non-viewpoint character:
Because he’s especially inclined to anthropomorphize/have his “heart go out” even to non-humans/react strongly to displays of apparent emotion/etc.
” Even the sexual element (and that seems to foreshadow the paths to have a romance with NPCs in some modern games)”
FYI romance with NPCs was definitely around by 2003. Even if you meant specifically the sexual element or detailed character interactions, I know those were a thing at least in visual novels (just from my extremely limited knowledge of them, Fate/Stay Night from 2004 has romance and sex scenes, and I’ve never heard that referred to as being pioneering in that respect, it’s only famous for the writing of the rest of the game).
Fate had romance and sex scenes, yeah, and it wasn’t anywhere close to the first to do so, but the visual-novel genre was barely known in the West in 2004. It’s still not mainstream w.r.t video games; Westerners who’re mere nerds rather than obsessed mega-nerds buy VNs now, but they’re more likely to be anime fans than to be gamers.
On the other hand, romance options were around in Western RPGs by then, too — Baldur’s Gate II (2000) had four possible romance paths as major subplots, and Fallout 2 (1998) had less emphasis on the option but still allowed you to pursue various characters. But, significantly, sex scenes (even as tame as Mass Effect‘s) seem to have been taboo at the time, not that they’d have been very titillating in 800×600 isometric sprite graphics.
I am admittedly an outsider – never tried out HPMOR because I don’t really dig Harry Potter – but I have a hard time imagining someone thinking this story is in any way “excellent.”
(For the sake of calibration: I am digging UNSONG so far, but not creaming my jeans or anything.)
The good news is that not digging Harry Potter might actually let you enjoy HPMOR more, depending on what bothered you about it. The story’s about thirty percent parody, and not always a particularly affectionate one.
But it’s not great literature by any means. It’s pretty decent writing from a technical standpoint, especially by spec-fic standards, and I think it basically succeeds at what it’s trying to do; but it’s a weird fic in a lot of ways and there are places where it doesn’t quite gel. Eliezer’s about as subtle as a sock full of ball bearings when he’s trying to make a point, and he tends to have his characters go into occasional strange asides that do to characterization roughly what snapping an axle does to a minivan hurtling down the highway at seventy miles an hour.
Also, you really need to be tolerant of geek-flavored attempts at badassery. You’ll be seeing a lot of them.
Am I a horrible person* if my reaction to the push I’ve seen about “Nominate HPMOR for the Hugos” makes me go “Yes! This could be what breaks the Hugos for good!”
At this stage I think the Hugos need to be broken and something set up to replace them that is genuinely broadly fan-based and not “personal toy of WorldCon and people who know how the sausage is made by getting appointed to those committees and running the con from year to year”.
I also think – and this is grossly unfair because it’s based only on the extracts I’ve read of the work, not the entire work itself – that HPMOR** is so off-putting, if a flood of new members join simply to nominate it and it wins in its category, since it and they can’t be brushed off as “oh the same old white male racist sexist homophobic religious right-wing conservative nutjobs”, it may finally make people go “Okay, the system is badly broken and not representative of majority opinion” in a way that nominating and steering through their pet “have we ticked all the boxes on the representation checklist? Sure the main character is gay POC male, but does being male give him too much privilege? And if he’s able-bodied, is that ableist?” authors and works has not done to date.
*The answer to that is probably yes, not merely on this but on various other grounds.
**For one thing – and this is one of those idiosyncratic reactions a reader may have that has no reasonable justification – the triple-barrelled name comes off as horribly pretentious and trying too hard. Whatever the effect on the American side, over here it would definitely evoke “ghastly little oik” class-based reactions from the upper-middle/upper classes (if he can’t account for it with a light laugh and a deprecatory anecdote about an ancestor who had to add on to the family surname when inheriting a baronetcy, then it’s aping your betters), and “poncy git” from the lower-middle/working classes. It’s a bit too Hyacinth Bucket ‘It’s pronounced Boo-KAY’ and marks Harry out as very definitely middle-middle class and aspirational with it, which is not the impression I gather from his character (this Harry appears to be a complete know-it-all convinced of his natural superiority to everyone he encounters).
I can’t say that I disagree with your assessment, save that it would take more than just HPMOR to break the Hugos. I must be as bad a person as you are.
HPMOR does get three recommendations on the 2016 Sad Puppies list, and Vox Day hasn’t put out the Rabid Puppies slate for Best Novel yet…
While this all sounds like great fun, I am very doubtful that HPMOR would be allowed as a candidate. It is, to the best of my knowledge, an unauthorized fanfic. The Worldcon committee would be well within its rights to disqualify it on the basis that it is an unmitigated infringement of copyright. (The Worldcon committee for each Con, according to the WSFA Constitution, has pretty much unlimited discretion to determine the eligibility of a work for candidacy.)
The Philip K. Dick Award is the only sci-fi book award worth paying attention to these days; the original paperback market is pretty interesting and always overlooked.
Oh, I wish. Accusing HPMOR of racism and sexism is a favorite in the hatedom. Yudkowsky tried to appeal to feminists with his Society for the Promotion of Heroic Equality for Witches (S.P.H.E.W.) arc, which of course just got HPMOR denounced even harder for being insufficiently feminist (but, really, anything short of Hermione single-handedly killing Voldemort would have been considered insufficiently feminist by these people) and passages such as those that follow were used to decry HPMOR as racist:
In fact, reaction against the former was so bad that Yudkowsky eventually decided to edit it.
It’s not supposed to mark Harry that way; he didn’t choose his name. Rather, it’s supposed to mark his adoptive parents that way. And it does lead to this hilarious bit of dialogue:
>since it and they can’t be brushed off as “oh the same old white male racist sexist homophobic religious right-wing conservative nutjobs”
This statement is true for nothing and no-one that exists.
One of the more common criticisms of HPMOR is that it’s stuffed full of Americanisms that one wouldn’t expect from its characters’ backgrounds. Being American, even if I’ve read a lot of British fiction, most of these pass me by in roughly the way that a fish is unaware of water; but I think this might be one of them.
A double-barreled name in an American context is WASPy, and could be either very traditional (they sometimes happen in situations where a wife came from a family with no male heirs) or self-consciously modern (i.e. says you weren’t comfortable with the norm of children adopting the father’s name). I’ve never seen a triple-barreled name in the wild, and when it came up in HPMOR I read it as Eliezer poking some gentle fun at Harry’s Oxford background — along the lines of Rowling placing an excruciatingly middle-class family on “Privet Drive”.
I take it the connotations are stronger across the pond.
HPMOR’s SPHEW literally came down to “the women in this story get no agency.” I’m generally not a big fan of crying Xist but goddamn man HPMOR was terrible in many ways and it’s unintentional sexism was definitely a factor, albeit small in the face of the other factors. And yes, “everything is horrible that doesn’t come from Europe” is another issue of horribleness, especially when many felt the touch of the Enlightenment via the wonders of Colonialism.
@ Held in Escrow:
What’s unfortunate to me is that there’s so much “talking past each other” on this point.
It reminds me of the famous quote attributed to Gandhi (which he probably didn’t say):
One side talks up the glories of Western Civilization, pointing to the Enlightenment and reason and science and industry.
The other side denounces Western Civilization because it produced Leopold II and Hitler.
But they’re not actually disagreeing with each other on anything substantive! It’s just a question of what affect we ought to have toward “Western Civilization”. It’s a meaningless ethnic tension argument.
Now, the real dispute is between, on the one hand, those who think that Enlightenment and reason and science and industry are good things, and that Leopold II and Hitler are aberrations that don’t result from them as such. And, on the other hand, those who think that Enlightenment and reason and science and industry are bad things or at least “not the whole story”, and that Leopold II and Hitler are the inevitable effects of man’s reckless pursuit of unlimited wealth and knowledge. But this is obscured by the way the arguments are usually put.
I was in a debating society in college, and we had a piece of jargon we called a “bucket debate”. A classic “bucket debate” is something like “Resolved: the British Empire did more harm than good.” Yes or no? What you get in a debate like this is not people actually responding to one another. Instead, you just get one side throwing facts in the “good the Empire did” bucket, while the other side throws facts in the “bad the Empire did” bucket. But what’s really interesting are the facts about what the effects of the British Empire actually were. What’s not interesting is whether, given that you agree on those facts, you choose to label the collectivity “more good than bad” or “more bad than good”.
Agreed. SJWs are like Twilight Sparkle; if they can’t find a problem, they’ll make a problem.
@Vox
You’re massively missing my point here. If you say “these places are uncivilized” often the reason was because said civilization came in back when they had flourishing cultures and seriously screwed them up. The Enlightenment was not some glorious panacea and often times we ended up with zero sum games of resource extraction.
It’s like if we were going to play a game of golf. I was said I was going to beat you and that would prove my brand of golf club was superior for playing the game. but right before the game I take one of my clubs and beat you so hard you can’t walk. Sure, I win the game and the golf clubs had something to do with it, but it doesn’t exactly prove my point now does it?
@ Held in Escrow:
I don’t think I’m really missing your point.
Many people think that European civilization is superior to those places’ previous civilizations and “flourishing cultures”. That is, the non-Europeans would be better off abandoning their old customs and adopting European ones, like the Japanese. They think European civilization has some flaws, but these are non-essential and are a leftover legacy of primitive times. And that if the essential values of European culture are only applied consistently, they will eliminate these elements of barbarism within European culture.
Other people don’t think that; they think that the previous non-European civilizations were just as good in their own way, and that European civilization is founded upon false understandings of human nature, such as the idea of the “atomic individual”. Therefore, European civilization did not deserve to take over the world, and “globalization” and “Westernization” is something to oppose or at least regret.
Again, the debate is over what the victory of European civilization signifies and proves.
One view is that European civilization deserved to win and indeed ultimately won because of the good things about it, but that the bad things—which are non-essential—did cause a lot of unnecessary pain and suffering, and indeed held back the progress of civilization. To use your example, the Europeans were able to beat you into submission because they did indeed have a better golf club, but really they ought to have used that club to play a better game of golf, and everyone would have been better off.
The other view is that the Europeans didn’t have a better golf club at all. They won due to luck and contingent geographical features, and—having won—they spin the story that it was all due to their better golf club, which is in fact rusty and terrible.
nornagest, as you point out, putting the Dursleys living in a place called “Privet Drive” has a whole host of subtle connotations that are absorbed without notice by readers over here and probably don’t register with American readers; it marks out the middle-class, social climbing nature of Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon, and why they are so terrified of the attention Harry’s magic could attract – “don’t make a show of us in front of the neighbours!”
The first book certainly, and perhaps the next two, are written as the kind of Cinderella fairy tale with grotesque, exaggerated characters. Whether you want to say the series gets more ‘realistic’ as it goes on is debatable, but certainly Harry’s character changes, as does the tone of the books.
The Potter-Evans-Verres name just grates on my ear, whatever the intentions behind it. I don’t know if Yudkowsky was indulging in leg-pulling, it reads too much like the kind of faux-Brit novels Americans write (there’s one particular historical detective series which shall go nameless) where they manage to refer to people as “Sir Browne-Wigglesworth” without anyone picking up on why that is simply wrong, wrong, wrong (never mind writing the hero/heroine as 21st century attitudes in riding breeches or a corset), i.e. an American idea of what an Oxbridge professor’s married name would be.
And the “House Potter” thing is Game of Thrones, not old pure-blood wizarding Magical Britain families.
The trouble is, all the extracts I read are so off-putting (Harry is an odious little know-it-all smartarse who needs to be dumped into the nearest muddy puddle by a gang of Slytherin hearties; Hermione and Ron are treated as objects to be lectured by Harry; it supposedly gets better later on when Harry realises he is in fact an odious etc. but I could not bear to read an entire work to get that far; and if I want a tract dressed up as a novel for pushing the author’s hobbyhorses on the ignorant public, I’ll read Ayn Rand – and I’ll never read Ayn Rand).
Deiseach, I’m not going to say you’re a horrible person, but you’ve managed to really get on my nerves.
Eliezer has requested that people not get Worldcon memberships just to support HPMOR.
I’ve asked someone on the Hugo commuittee and HPMOR being unauthorized fanfiction doesn’t affect the novel’s eligibility.
I’m actually looking forward to an HPMOR campaign, just because it’s neither puppy nor anti-puppy. I think it will be less malicious than either of them.
I see no reason to think anything is going to break the Hugos in the reasonably near future, whatever breaking the Hugos might mean.
A side effect of the puppy/anti-puppy wars has been a lot of effort to get the word out about how the Hugos work and how to nominate and vote. This will probably bring in a wider variety of people.
I would like to see a vote from a larger electorate without a qualifying fee, but I have no idea how that would work. Any thoughts?
@ Deiseach
I also think – and this is grossly unfair because it’s based only on the extracts I’ve read of the work, not the entire work itself – that HPMOR** is so off-putting, if a flood of new members join simply to nominate it and it wins in its category [….]
That could crack the marketing link where Muggles who mass-buy for chain stores and libraries are an assured market for the year’s Hugo winner.
I expect that at some point Rowling’s lawyers might have something to say about it. Perhaps she’d sell EY a license.
I think Rowling has spent a decade said she is okay with fanfic as long as it is not sold and not porn. I think that would make it pretty hard to force a legal issue at this time.
This is sort of the (complement? converse? not sure the proper word) of those stories of Disney forces daycare center to paint over their princess murals.
For what it’s worth, I only tried reading a few chapters of it, but I found it too silly and stopped. And I like Yudkowsky’s nonfiction work.
I don’t like reading fan fiction like that. I haven’t gotten into Unsong, either. I read a couple of the interludes, but I didn’t find the main story interesting at all (I didn’t read much of it, though). Maybe I’ll change my mind.
You will know immediately whether or not it’s for you on reading it: it is a very love it or hate it work.
I personally couldn’t force myself through more than the first chapter, and I even had to stop reading an in-depth review of it because the quoted bits were too much. On the other hand, a lot of people who had never heard of Less Wrong enjoyed it so there has to be some appeal beyond liking the author.
I generally dislike self-insert fiction, and HPMOR is definitely that, especially if it’s anvilicious about evangelizing the author’s values. Same objection to Luminosity.
I was never blown away by Luminosity, but my problem with it was almost the opposite: the luminosity of the title is never deeply explored; it serves mainly as an excuse to dispense with what I gather are the main conflicts of the original and get down to superpowered fight scenes and storyboarding the future of vampire society. Which aren’t particularly interesting; maybe in another story they would be, but when you’re given a setting as badly broken as Twilight‘s is, it’s not much of a revelation to follow through on its brokenness.
HPMOR at least tried to be funny about snapping Potter canon over its knee like a stale churro.
If by “snapping canon over its knee” you mean creating and then burning a straw effigy sure?
I’m not trying to be unduly reverent to Eliezer here. Methods has problems; I’ve mentioned a few of them elsewhere in this thread.
But I don’t think straw is one of them. You could fairly accuse it of being mean-spirited or of missing the point of its source material, though; while you could fly the Space Shuttle through the holes in Rowling’s canon, that’s largely because it (like Twilight) isn’t meant to stand up to nerdy analysis. It isn’t that kind of story. You may as well write “The Physics of ‘Jabberwocky'”.
On the other hand, I also think that one of the Potter series’ major flaws as a piece of literature is that it’s meant to grow up with its readers, and while the characters and themes do, the setting doesn’t. Leads to quite a bit of dissonance towards the end. Though of course that would have been harder to pull off.
@Vox
My point with the golf club is that the quality of the golf club is completely irrelevant to the outcome of this game of golf. Hence the comparison to HPMOR implying that Enlightenment civilizations are the only true civilized people. It comes across as extremely ignorant of history and somewhat racist due to that.
Also, re: the bucket debates. I didn’t do debate in college because I hated the formats, but I did in high school. There was an easy enough solution in my debate of choice, Public Forum, in that the Aff had to actually prove their side. The argument wasn’t “The British Empire was great” it is “Is the Aff correct in their argument about the British Empire being great.” You could come at this with a bucket strategy of “their pros don’t outweigh these cons” but it was generally more effective to attack the Aff’s points head on and then use your own Cons to buff up your side.
Short science fiction stories still can grab me. The two things that immediately pop to mind are
-this has probably happened to him or someone he knows (if anime has taught me anything there will be someone who likes pranks in any group)
-this looks like he took the list of requirements of rationalist fiction and tried (and succeed) at making an ur-example. It is like 3 worlds- you read it once and the theme is meant to stick in your brain.
I do not even understand the following:
1. Internet of women (are women not on internet now?)
2. Minister of future (what would he do that OMB, BEA, etc cannot do?)
3 I don’t know how diversity is the engine of invention.
4. Revolution of values
5. Monopoly of waging wars should be taken from humans (and given to birds?)
It appears that they just built a short random phrase generator and allotted it to different people. Trudeau got multiple times.
On that third one, the charitable interpretation is that society gets the most innovation when it allows anyone who can contribute, to contribute. This is trivially true, though not so trivial in the losses we have suffered in denying it. One could weep long and hard over the creations we have doubtless lost because some genius was born to slavery and repression and never had the chance to give them to us.
The cynical interpretation is that by some secular miracle when you make sure that every group attempting to innovate has politically satisfactory demographics you’ll get increased output. At that point the word “synergy” will probably be used and I will rapidly lose interest.
I assume 1. applies to one of two things:
(1) the old adage that we need more women in technology (why? Who knows, we just need it)
(2) (and more likely) there’s a lot of talk as to how the internet is a hostile place for women. There’s not really any evidence for it (demos and pew both found the opposite), but I think it serves those who want to censor/regulate the internet well as it gives the common man a cause against the freedom and anonymity the internet brings.
Internet of women (are women not on internet now?)
So far the Internet has been made out of tubes. There is now a push to make it out of things. In the far-flung sci-fi era of the 21st century, this is not acceptable. The Internet should be made out of women.
Every female a portable Wi-Fi hotspot!
>tubes
>women
>internet
That makes me think of… an antropic multi-legged invertebrate.
Putting those together makes me think of something out of the Berserk manga.
Well, the internet of women being made of tubes isn’t contradictory although it is certainly fairly macabre.
Yeah, “the Internet of things” means the future in which every gadget will have a network connection so it can be remotely monitored and controlled.
Given that, “the Internet of women” sounds like some sort of girls-only borg collective. Perhaps that really is what we need, but I have my doubts.
Rixwomen?
@Soumynona:
Somebody thinks we need that very much.
Warning: NSFW.
http://mcstories.com/Authors/Doctor-MC-Mad-Scientist.html
Uh… yeah… I parsed that URL as McStories, as in bite-sized tales. While technically probably true… that’s not what it stands for. Just in case I’m not alone in this.
Oh god don’t let me be alone in this.
I don’t like the idea of the Information Superhighway being made out of women. It’s bad enough that the real superhighways are made out of Jimmy Hoffa.
Not Gyo?
Not Dutch cinematography?
Haven’t read Gyo. Can I change my vote to DyE – Fantasy?
(Very Much NSFW)
No, just the pregnant ones.
I volunteer as a portable WiFi hotspot!
Router? I hardly even know her!
@ Winter Shaker
Wait a minute, is that fetus a Wi-Fi hotspot or an unborn Scanner?
“he old adage that we need more women in technology (why? Who knows, we just need it)”
There’s plenty of lonely geeks who think they need it!
There’s been a small change of plans. I’ve decided to take out “All the Painted Stars” by Gwendolyn Clare and replace it with “I” by Philip Goetz. I’ve also added a couple more stories to the list.
And so long as I am making a meta-thread, I want to know what you guys think so far. Any comments or suggestions on the story selections, the discussion format, or anything else?
Keep doing what you’re doing. I’m not reading ahead, so I’m often too late to add constructively to the comments, but I am really enjoying this. A good add to the community.
I enjoy these still. Usually a pleasant way to spend my Monday lunch breaks.
As for story selections, one that stuck with me was Ian McDonald’s”The Days of Solomon Gursky.” I read it online a few years ago. One of the first stories to show me what transhumanism could really end up looking like. I haven’t checked the updated list, but if it is not on there, might it be considered as an addition?
If you care: I’m a mostly-lurker on SSC, and I always try to look at the stories discussed on these threads. I dig many of the stories, so keep it up!
I’m sure there is some LW term for the silent audience that y’all play to – I’m one. So keep it up, Jaime2K
Does anyone else feel like this is another case of a thing that keeps coming up in Yudkowsky’s fiction?
What I mean is that the girlfriend is all ‘hey, you know what, I’m going to psychologically torture my boyfriend because, idk, I’m a female characer written by Yudkowsky, my motivations don’t have to make any fucking sense’.
You mean like the tickling thing?
Is this about Hermione? Because I can’t remotely remember anything else in his fiction that remotely resembles this.
Do I want to know?
I’m strongly considering leaving academia to work for a hedge fund. Given my background, this would not be difficult at all.
What’s a good reason I shouldn’t?
I’m considering something like this too. The main reasons I have against it is that I’d lose any hope of believing I was doing something that actually mattered. OTOH, I’ve pretty much given up on that in academia too.
There are way too many variables to give a good response. We will need more details, else we will just be shooting in the dark as to what might matter to you. What kind of position are you leaving? Are you tenure track? What is important to you in your career? What kind of role are you aiming for in a hedge fund? Is there a specific job offer in mind, or are you talking generally?
One general reason might be that hedge funds are not actually a license to print money. They siphon off a percent or two of their client’s assets every year, and ten times that of profits, for the illusion that because they are Elite the clients are getting superior investment management but in fact underperform the market in good times and bad. If there was an age when hedge funds, operating below the radar, could offer superior returns and/or risk management, it is probably gone and not coming back.
If this year or next is the one where clients, en masse, realize this, you could wind up unemployed or stuck in a dead-end grind, having burned your academic bridges and never won a hedge-fund windfall.
At a minimum, try to find out whether the reason you are being given the opportunity to join is because the present insiders have decided this is the time to leave. Consider how much of what you are being offered is salary and how much is the promise of bonuses or promotions that may not materialize. And if you do follow that path, see if there’s a way you can keep a foot in the academic world as well. Consider that your personal hedge.
To counter some of your points, from the perspective of someone who has done this:
* Not all hedge funds are good hedge funds. In fact, most aren’t. So industry-wide aggregates may not be relevant for evaluating the particular firm you are considering working for.
* Investors are paying 2 and 20 (or whatever) not just for absolute returns but for attractive risk-adjusted returns that are uncorrelated with those of investments that they can manage themselves more cheaply (e.g. index funds). This point is not always but often lost on journalists writing about crappy hedge fund returns. While it’s true that many hedge funds are not, in fact, that well hedged — insofar as their “beta” to the S&P 500 is quite high (especially during bear markets) — once again this is a situation in which there is a lot of variation across firms, and depending on the job offer you have the industry average in this respect may not be an appropriate metric.
* Based on the readership of this blog and the way the question was phrased, it seems very likely that the hedge fund jobs under consideration are data scientist type roles at quant funds. The relevant skills you will learn (or further develop) working in such a role are transferable to other industries. So the prospect of potential unemployment in the face of mass redemptions from hedge funds (which is probably a fairly unlikely scenario at the moment, although not outside the realm of possibility) should not necessarily be terrifying.
Agreed.
I worked in a quant/data science role at a trading firm. When I looked for jobs in tech the response from interviewers was like, “Woah, cool we don’t know much about quantitative finance but everyone in that industry is super smart, when can you start?” (which they are totally wrong about).
But @Anonymous, there are other high paying jobs outside of academia that don’t fit the classic, “go work for a hedge fund” mold. Working in financial markets is a bit glorified by the media. It’s pretty high stress and not everyone makes a ton of money. Higher than average salaries for quantitative jobs, sure, but only a minority is getting rich.
In some ways two and twenty is worse if you are just looking for uncorrelated returns than if you are looking for outsized absolute return. If you are looking at an asset class with sub-equity expected returns (say 5% real) the two alone is going to really hurt. Whereas if you are hoping to invest in the next Medallion, well you probably won’t, but at least if you do you won’t care about the fees.
But hedge funds use high leverage and/or derivatives when they invest in things like fixed income.
There is an argument that hedge funds are actually *cheaper* than regular active management. You can achieve the same amount of tracking error by putting, say, 90% of your money in an ultra-low cost index fund and 10% in a hedge fund, than you would by putting 100% of your money in a regular actively managed fund. And 2 and 20 on 10% of your money is cheaper than say 1% of AUM on 100% of your money.
I was thinking of hedge funds as the uncorrelated asset with modest expected returns, not the underlying thing they invest in. If the fund uses leverage to try to achieve high absolute returns that moves it out of the “yes, the returns don’t look all that impressive but …”
I’m not sure I follow your second paragraph. Why would you want to achieve tracking error?
Well, there really aren’t any hedge funds that invest in low-return assets without leveraging them, for precisely the reason you describe; an investor would have to be an idiot to pay those fees for low expected return.
For the second paragraph – assume you have two managers who you believe have equal skill. Manager one runs a conventional mutual fund and will beat the S&P by 2% with 70% probability, and will trail the S&P by 2% with 30% probability; for this he charges 0.6% of assets under management. Manager two is equally skilled but because he is a hedge fund he can be highly levered and use derivatives; so he will beat the S&P by 20% with 70% probability and trail the S&P by 20% with 30% probability. For this he charges 2 and 20.
You could invest 100% of your money with manager 1 and get charged 0.6% of your money. Or you could invest 90% of your money in an index fund or ETF at about zero cost, then 10% of your money with manager two. This gets you a similar total return profile but the expected cost is 10%*(2%+0.7*20%*20%)=0.48%.
… and to finish the thought, if you are buying lack of correlation (“tracking error”), then you can perhaps get more lack of correlation per dollar of fees by buying a small amount of an expensive but completely uncorrelated hedge fund than you would by buying a lot of a cheap but moderately or highly correlated mutual fund.
Regarding the first point, I think we both disagree with Anon’s comment “This point is not always but often lost on journalists writing about crappy hedge fund returns”? If the returns aren’t there, the returns aren’t there. There’s little to no market for low absolute return hedge funds regardless of sharpe, beta, or whatever.
As for the second, I see what you mean now. Thanks.
Not all hedge funds are good hedge funds. In fact, most aren’t. So industry-wide aggregates may not be relevant for evaluating the particular firm you are considering working for.
Is there a way for an outsider to know whether the particular firm they are considering, is one of the minority of good ones? That would be genuinely useful advice from an inside perspective, which I cannot offer.
Absent that, if most of them aren’t good ones, the average newbie probably isn’t going to be working for one of the good ones. Particularly since the insiders will preferentially seek the jobs in the minority of good firms and leave openings in the bad ones. So taking the industry aggregate and discounting it a bit would seem to be prudent.
A bad hedge fund is particularly bad for the investors, not necessarily for the employees.
As a prospective newbie, your odds of working for a good one are not random; it depends on your skill set, credentials, contacts, etc., as well as how good you are at assessing firm quality while interviewing.
In terms of outside investors looking to invest only in good hedge funds, I don’t have any particularly good insider perspective. Someone who interacts more directly with clients would have a better sense. I basically think the ecosystem is similar to startups/VC in this regard: superstars at the top with a very long tail, and the dynamics are driven by investor preference for positive skew (they make negative EV bets on lesser-known VC funds / marginal startups / “hot new” hedge funds without strong track record, etc., in hopes of striking it big). This is a pretty robust behavioral econ finding. There is also the same adverse selection phenomenon at play: if a startup/fund/whatever is looking for your money, they are more likely to be bad than good, because the good ones quickly reach capacity in terms of how much capital they can deploy.
Anyhow, a point to make is that the distribution of bad vs good firms wrt open research positions is probably very different from the distribution wrt a marginal dollar of investor money. Better firms are likely to be somewhat bigger, have better hiring processes in place to find talent, have a stream of people who have already done well and decided to go start a startup or return to astrobiology research or whatever, etc. I think a skilled candidate is unlikely to end up taking a job at a poorly managed hedge fund “by chance” — it would rather be a function of their (real or perceived) ability relative to the rest of the applicant pool and how much due diligence they conduct.
Incidentally, if I were in charge of managing a pool of money like a large university endowment, I can think of much worse strategies for deploying it than polling the top STEM professors about which hedge funds their best graduate students end up going to work for. In other words, finding the good firms probably isn’t rocket science, even if it seems to be difficult for the median investor to do. Part of the problem is that even if I’m a guy with a relatively small amount of money (say a few million dollars) to invest and I know which investable firms/funds (i.e. ruling out places like RenTech that don’t accept outside money) are good by whatever method (polling STEM friends, say), I’ll probably have a very hard time getting them to take my call. But my golf buddy’s nephew who just started the next big thing? Much easier to get him to take my money…
It’s incredibly hard to be confident that a hedge fund you’re investing in is a good hedge fund. An easy definition of good might be a fund meeting the return and volatility targets it gives to investors, but just because a fund has met these targets in the past doesn’t at all mean it will continue too. Though most hedge fund indicies have gotten better about this, as an individual it’s difficult to control for survivorship bias: for example about half of the funds you might invest in will do better and half will do worse than average in the coming year, but significantly more than half will have done better than average the previous year since they survived when others didn’t.
You’ll receive only a few years of monthly returns from the hedge funds you’d be looking at, if any at all, and that breaks down the intuitive statistical analysis that would be nice to do. Trying to understand a fund’s strategy is a decent approach but until you hear 10 different managers talk about the same strategy, they’ll all sound identical (and very intelligent and competent) and figuring out which manager will be better at implementing their strategy gets very technical. Managers, especially newer managers, will give you references if they think you have a high probability of investing in their fund but they get to choose who you talk to so what’s the point. The manager’s past experience is about as good as you can get, though currently there is still a generation of PM’s (in credit more so now) leaving banks with very good, very expensive infrastructure and setting up their own hedge funds only to realize that maybe why they were doing so well previously was less about their skill and more about their seat.
A good manager may be a more subjective designation anyway: would you personally be happier with a fund’s returns if you understood why they behave the way they do? Are you looking for something very liquid that you can exit in a month but are therefore okay with high volatility? Maybe you think a few biotech companies are probably going to do extremely well in the next three years while the rest are flat but you personally don’t know which ones and would rather invest in a hedge fund with high vol, high correlation with the biotech sector, and low liquidity -which on their own are not great things but make sense to you.
@anon I’m very surprised to hear you say that you think you’d have a hard time finding a hedge fund that’d take a few million dollars of private money. Many hedge funds (maybe 750mm AUM and below) have minimum investments* of between 1 and 2 million and since most have a dedicated investor relations person or work with their prime broker’s capital introduction team, it takes marginally very little of their time to speak to you and answer questions. It is definitely hard for someone outside of financial circles to get information about hedge funds, but this is mostly due to relatively limited ability to advertise rather than reluctance to take your money.
*low minimum investments can be attractive even to larger funds because they allow investors to ease in and out without scaring them away with a initial monetary commitment, despite having lock ups and redemption structures.
From a employee perspective, there are a great many hedge funds (and similar institutions – investment banks, large asset managers, prop traders, etc) where you can be very confident that the firm will survive a rough year or three, whether that is because of sheer size, track record, reputation, or diversification. Probably most hires from academia end up at places like these initially and this greatly reduces their downside career risk.
From an investor perspective, I don’t really have any special insight. You do need to keep in mind that the typical dollar invested in a hedge fund comes from an institution with a *lot* of money to invest (billions of dollars) and they are allocating a small portion of it to hedge funds. Think pension funds, university endowments, insurance companies, etc. These aren’t trying to pick “a” hedge fund, they’re trying to pick a mix of several hedge funds that complements the rest of their holdings, their own liabilities, their liquidity needs, etc.
This sort of investor can also afford to do a much deeper type of due diligence on a fund than is going to be available to ordinary individuals.
@YL: I just meant that if I had $5M to invest it would be hard to get the *good* funds to take my money. That is, I’m suggesting the ease of investing in a fund and the quality of a fund are negatively correlated. (This is partly as a size effect, because I think many high-quality hedge funds are big enough that they only court individual investors who are extremely high net worth.)
I’ve heard part of the reason hedge funds fail to make their clients money is because all their employees are absorbing that cash instead. Choosing to hire a hedge fund is a very different decision than choosing to work for one.
I think this is correct. To the extent that the median hedge fund has zero alpha, it’s probably more correct to say that the median hedge fund captures all of its alpha in fees.
Long hours and stress go in the “con” column, from people I’ve known who’ve worked at them.
In my experience, most people who leave academia for finance (or for that matter, for anything else) end up thinking that they made the right decision. I’m very happy having left academia for a quant finance job.
But since you asked for reasons you shouldn’t go, this is what comes to mind:
1) Generally, your job is to make very rich people slightly richer. That isn’t necessarily very fulfilling.
2) It is likely that you will be forced to work with really unpleasant people at some point. This of course depends very much on company and team culture, but finance tends to attract assholes more than many other industries. If you’d really really hate being yelled at in front of all your coworkers on a crowded trading floor, then there are many firms you should avoid.
3) I’m guessing you’re looking at some sort of quantitative role. If you are a quant supporting a non-quantitative business (this is the majority of quant jobs), there’s a decent chance you will be seen as secondary and merely advisory; you’ll be kept away from the “real” decision-making and glory. This can be very frustrating for some people.
4) There is a ton of luck in your career outcome. Demand for what you do can skyrocket or collapse unpredictably. I know a guy who worked at Moody’s looking at CDOs pre-2007; he basically had to start his career over after the housing crash. Or the guy next to you might make a really bad bet and blow up your whole firm (this also happened to a friend of mine). On the other hand, you might be working in some niche product that explodes in popularity and makes you fantastically rich.
5) It may not be as easy to get in as you think. The industry is inundated with resumes from disillusioned PhDs from top schools.
6) The pay in finance is of course very good, but it’s not nearly as good as it used to be. And of course, everyone around you also makes lots of money so it’s easy to not appreciate it. In finance it’s worse than in most industries, and at hedge funds especially so. At any job in finance, you’ll work with people who make 10x your income or more, possibly much more.
7) Some finance jobs are extremely stressful and have ridiculous hours. Some aren’t. If you’re new to the industry and don’t have a network of people to talk with it may be difficult for you to tell which is which.
Having observed a large-ish amount of people who work in finance from a distance and from the perspective of an outsider, what’s remarkable about them as a group is how universally unhappy they seem to be. Much less happy than any other group I know of. The culture and values of that world seem to be very inconducive to human wellbeing. If you’re a robust type who finds their happiness little affected by external circumstances, it probably won’t make a difference to you, but if you already struggle with mental illness or just a melancholy temperament, you will likely be happier somewhere else.
Were the people you observed mostly in investment banking? My impression is that people in hedge funds, and especially in prop trading firms, are happier.
The work environment might be quite nasty.
Financial markets are in a very unstable situation (which however *can* be good for hedge funds).
It’s also a high variance strategy (which you might like, or not).
Also to quote the finance prof at my MBA: “You don’t want to be a quant.” (in one case, he then stared at me in particular, said “you could, but still, don’t” – at the time I had already decided that I wouldn’t)
Last I looked at it, it was pretty much only global macro funds that could point to some decent outperformance (and there it might well have been driven by a bunch of outliers). Most of the other strategies are bunk (in fairness, that was 2011 or so).
I know a lot (off the top of my head, nine) of people who have done this. Most of them dropped out of math Ph. D. programs, all but one of them became quants. Seven of those nine quit within a few years. When I talked to them about that decision, the generally said the work was long, stressful, and boring. I particularly had several of them say that they felt mislead about how intellectually interesting their work would be.
On the other hand, they made a lot of money and generally now have other jobs which they like a lot. If you’re going to spend a year or two figuring out what you are doing, it is nice to end that year with a big sum of cash.
One final note — if you don’t have your Ph. D. yet, and if the hedge fund will hire you without, I would suggest taking a leave from your academic program rather completing. Postdoc hiring, and fellowships, generally look at your year of Ph. D., so if you ever want to go back to academia, you are much better off having that degree look fresh than having it look several years old.
Oh I know this! I started working at a hedge fund this year having just finished up an undergrad in physics and economics at uchicago. To answer your question: the reason you shouldn’t is because of the level of stress. I know this differs drastically fund to fund and somewhat strategy to stately, but even attending what I thought was a comparatively strenuous undergrad didn’t prepare me for the level of stress involved in managing large sums of money.
The summer before I graduated I interned as a quant and was 1) shielded from stressed out portfolio managers making difficult (complicated, risky) calls on a daily basis, 2) didn’t have to know or care if the S&P was down, and 3) worked on projects that had a clear objectives and comparatively relaxed deadlines. Now that I work as an analyst, and since the market is down 5% since the beginning of the year, each additional hour of work contributes significantly more to my total stress – an extra hour of writing code or learning more econometrics doesn’t make your day much worse, but skipping lunch because what you’ve been working on is no longer as practical as it was and doesn’t help your PM in the way it was supposed to is less fun.
That said, if you’re leaving a PhD program to get a quant position at a prop shop with a good culture that happens to be spinning out a hedge fund, this doesn’t really apply to you. On the other hand the attractiveness of working for a hedge fund diminishes somewhat in this case because the career path of a senior quant isn’t a clear as it is for someone on a pure investment track because of the weird stigma the industry has against quants. My current role is fairly objectively quantitative but no more than would be expected and yet because of my internship and background in physics it’s easy to be somewhat typecast as a quant working my way up the quant latter to the a final title of Head Quant – though maybe the fact that I care about other people’s perception of my career path means that I’m part of the problem in stereotyping quants as people with limited career ambition.
Finally I’ll note that hedge funds, compared to the larger world of finance, are really weird things and while many are somewhat similar, they can vary drastically in totally unforeseen ways and unless you know the people at the fund beforehand, it’s extremely hard to tell what the expected quality of life at the fund you sign to will be like. If you make sure you like the strategy you’re working, which is more likely if you’re coming from academia, then it can only be so bad. As long as it’s a good part of the cycle for that strategy and your team is smart and you’re lucky.
Quickly, the pros are 1) a challenging career path, 2) the chance to work with very intelligent people, and 3) money. Honestly in the long run I can’t see money being as important as the other two, especially if you’re not a huge fan of making money off of bonuses – I’m not personally. I get that it’s meritocratic and all but if I put in work and make smart decisions, I don’t want a somewhat luck derived amount of money to determine how good I feel about myself. And of course the first two reasons are also great reasons to stay in acedima and I toy with circling back to acedima in a few years myself about once a week.
Also, to everyone else posting in this thread: producing in correlated returns is really hard. The whole event driven space shouldn’t be too correlated because of the nature of the strategy and yet it is because whenever you see a brilliant event driven opportunity, everyone else does too and if you’re not participating in the big name events then half the time your investors want to know why you didn’t pick up that obvious, easy money. Also remember that correlation not only increases in down markets but also with illiquidity, which is a fundamentally very difficult thing to deal with. I think a lot of people don’t realize that there are plenty of hedge funds that do a very good job even with 2 and 20 (and it’s hard to even describe performance well without context – high return, low vol, very liquid, zero correlation, are all accepted as good, but assuming you can’t have everything, what combination is better than the others and is it important to be able to decompose performance) but many of them are closed because the strategy can only put to work so much money so they have zero need to advertise – and anyway most people are much less interested in capital structure or reinsurance fund with decent returns than an easy to understand long/short equity fund that is down 20% so that’s what I’d write about if I wrote clickbait for Business Insider.
Summary: Don’t work at a hedge fund because of the stress. Do work at a hedge fund for the same reasons you’d work in acedima + money.
I would do it. Finance can be good are bad. Your experience will matter more about the team you are working with than anything.
However, I have made a rushed career decision in the past based on emotion and my overwhelming fear of failure/wasting my life. In my case my decision turned out for the best, but I could easily see how I could have ended up in a tough spot.
Don’t set yourself up for failure. Think about why you want to leave academia and make sure things are going to be different at the new job. Academia has it’s perks. A top research university is one of the few places you will find like minded intellectual inclined individuals. It might be a bit of a culture shock coming back into the real world.
Be patient, and take the best job that fits you. Also, don’t forget to run a wage comparison. Ann Arbor to New York