This is the bi-weekly open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. Also:
1. Sorry about the decreased volume of blogging lately. I’ve been working night shift, plus I discovered Worm. The good news is that now you’ve discovered Worm too, so you have better things to do than read this blog.
2. Comments of the week are Joscha on TV and German fertility differences, Universal Set on Christian colleges and some clarification on grit.
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Right now it seems like the only non-stupid chance the GOP has of stopping Trump is to have everybody but Ted Cruz drop out and endorse Ted Cruz. Combined, the supporters of Rubio, Kasich, and Cruz can conceivably beat Trump. Divided, they will obviously lose. The idea that they can wait until the convention and then sneak in Mitt Romney or Kasich or something is completely idiotic. Any lingering respect the GOP rank and file had for the party would be destroyed by such a move and Trump could very well run third party if he feels the nomination has been stolen from him (I don’t think he would if he lost “fair and square,” before the convention). Either way, the result is almost certain Clinton victory.
Now there are probably some people high up in the GOP who would genuinely prefer a Clinton victory to a Trump victory, but do they really prefer a Clinton victory to a Cruz victory? Or are they just that stupid and disorganized and narcissistic that they can’t do the one obvious thing that might stop their Trump nightmare scenario?
According to a piece I recently read, current Republican convention rules, created in 2012, only allow votes on the first ballot to be counted if they are for a candidate who is supported by a majority of the delegations of at least eight states, and only allow a candidate to be nominated who meets the same condition. If that is correct and the rules are not changed, it looks as though Trump and Cruz will be the only candidates who can be nominated.
Winning on the first ballot still requires a majority of the delegates, not just of the votes that get counted.
Interesting. But regardless of the technical rules, I’m pretty sure of this: if the GOP wants to win, they either have to nominate Trump and stop trying to undermine him, or else they have to beat him fair and square in a manner which is obvious to everyone before the convention even begins.
Most people don’t understand or care about the technical aspects of the convention. If it is perceived that Trump’s nomination was “stolen” from him it will massively demoralize GOP voters and/or trigger a disastrous 3rd party run. Remember, this is an electorate some of whom thought Donald Trump got to be president now that he’d “won” Super Tuesday (based on some facebook posts I saw).
Does it count as fair and square if Trump gets 45% of the votes on the first ballot, Cruz gets 35%, and Cruz then gets a majority on the second ballot?
Good question. Would I accept a Cruz victory under such circumstances? Sure, I would accept a Cruz victory under any circumstances since I like his policy views a lot more than Trump’s. But the question is what his followers would perceive as “fair and square.” Arguably nothing but a Trump victory, but I think there may still be room to hand Trump an unambiguous loss.
It may depend somewhat on the media coverage leading up to the event. If the story is “outcome uncertain as GOP enters hotly contested convention” then maybe Trump voters will accept a non-Trump victory. If the story going in is “Trump expected to receive nomination” and he doesn’t, then it might be harder for them to accept.
Of course, it also matters whether or not Trump himself accepts the outcome, which, I predict, will depend on whether doing so makes him look better or worse. He certainly has a history of being a sore loser as seen after Iowa. He did sign that pledge saying he wouldn’t run third party, but it also said something like “if they treat me fairly.”
But your point about the rules does increase my hope of a Cruz victory, since presumably most Kasich-Rubio-Bush delegates would sooner cast a vote for Cruz than Trump. But I do worry about what will happen if Trump’s loss is not seen as legitimate.
Yes, I think this is exactly right.
The closer Trump gets to 1,237 delegates, the greater the notion that he’s entitled to the nomination, and the more perfect the unity required of all the other delegates to stop him. Perfect unity is almost impossible to achieve in politics. Non-Trump delegates aren’t necessarily anti-Trump. Individuals rank their candidate choices in all kinds of idiosyncratic ways.
Moreover, if Trump is, say, 12 or 30 or 50 short of a majority, nothing can stop him. Many delegates would be thrilled to be part of a small group of people to put a candidate over the finish line to victory. Quite possibly, the president of the United States would owe you a huge debt of gratitude!
And even if he doesn’t win the White House, still, an eccentric billionaire would owe you a huge debt of gratitude. That’s got to be worth something.
Interesting profile by Marian Tupy on John Cowpertwaite, who was Financial Secretary of Hong Kong from 1961 to 1971 and a major champion of laissez-faire policies:
Good Guy Sir John.
Interesting especially about the statistics collection. It seems that it is in general a bad idea that will encourage people towards evil.
Very interesting. Doing nothing when nothing needs doing seems to be one of the hardest things for humans to do in all kinds of ways, actually.
I like that idea about the statistics.
I suspect that Cowperthwaite is the subject of one of the stories my father told. He was traveling around the world studying monetary systems, got to Hong Kong. Nobody there could tell him how its monetary system worked, but he eventually figured it out. He then talked to the man in charge (I was remembering it as the governor general, but it could easily have been the financial secretary)—who correctly explained it. Asked why nobody else could, he responded that if they understood it they would have messed it up.
That’s by memory, but I think reasonably accurate.
Factually speaking, almost all religions are almost certainly lies*. Thus, the most common use suggested for religions by the non religious – a religious morality – is inferior to a secular morality, as a secular morality is malleable while a religious morality is by definition backwards, the only question is to what extent.
However, it is true that prayers and religious beliefs provide a benefit to mental health (and prayers are different and possibly more effective than meditations in that regard). I’m thinking of construing a secular religion with various artificial analogies for concepts of theistic religions.
In particular, what secular gods would there be?
Most people in the comment section are probably familiar with Moloch already.
My other ideas include Azathoth, the blind watchmaker; Tzeentch, God of Change, evolution, ambition and hope; and Media, the quasi-Greek goddess of guess what.
_____
*Not a single supernatural claim that has been claimed by a religion as true has ever been proven correct, and there is a large amount of ones that are proven false. If there is *a* deity, it is sufficiently removed for a regular religion’s concepts of a benevolent god that actively influences the world to a sufficient degree that prayers are useful and a nonsecular moral codex is in any way superior for us to conclude that religions are just that: lies.
Popeye , God of consciousness/reality.
Body: It is true that prayers provide a benefit to mental health.
Footnote: There is no evidence that prayers are useful; any claim to the contrary is lies.
Prayers provide a benefit to the praying person’s mental health, but are completely useless in reaching the actual goal outlined in the prayer. I assumed that was quite clear from the context.
I know it always feels like amping the rhetoric up to 11 should aid your argument by anchoring listeners to your extreme, but usually it just makes folks tune out, because they see you saying something ridiculous instead of something reasonable.
Not a single supernatural claim? I suspect you’re palming a card with the word “supernatural,” most likely by defining any claim that did pan out to be non-supernatural. Is the claim that prayer is good for you merely natural because it is true? When Moses told the Israelites that if they did not follow the Law, they would be exiled from the land, was that supernatural? How about when the Jewish prophets said that idols don’t do anything?
Most people recognize that supernatural claims generally fall into the “not currently testable” bucket. Just to be ecumenical, I don’t think we say that Hinduism’s belief in reincarnation is “proven false,” let alone a lie. Making such broad sweeping claims just looks silly.
Almost all religions frown heavily on profanity. It is okay to denounce other beliefs in a bunch of ways, but the criticism of itself? Tone it down a notch, will ya? I believe there is a reason for this. Volumes upon volumes of theodicy and denouncements of heathens on one side, gentle handshake and shoulder pat and “well, I’m sure that everyone is right in their own way” on the other.
I am the sonorous prophet, and my voice is the knife.
>I suspect you’re palming a card with the word “supernatural,” most likely by defining any claim that did pan out to be non-supernatural.
Generally I define supernatural thus: there is one event (a man squints his eyes and stares at a ball), another event (the ball moves half a meter) and the causal link between the two is what supernatural is. Which itself is a “i know it when i see it”. The Israelites might not follow the Law, and they might have gotten exiled, but is there an A->B that is actually supernatural such as “a god did this”?
>Is the claim that prayer is good for you merely natural because it is true?
When you tell someone of a hardship, and someone tells you “I will pray for you”, they mean “I am actively doing a thing that makes your hardship better”, when they /actually/ mean “I am doing a thing that calms me down a bit but does nothing for you, ain’t I nice?!” Of course it’s not useful to tell people that when they pray for you, because that would mean you take away their feel good device to zero benefit for either of you, but still.
“When you tell someone of a hardship, and someone tells you “I will pray for you””
No-one has ever said this to me, and i agree, it would seem crass – but at the same time, I have prayed for others without ever telling them I have done so.
Come to think of it… isn’t there a bit in the bible about this?
It seems like so many criticisms of christianity from the secular christian (Dawkins) perspective are answered by… christianity.
“the causal link between the two is what supernatural is.” – a supernatural claim is a claim that a specific incident was caused by a conscious decision. Or a magic. Or anything else that makes the event unpredictable. We can’t predict it because we don’t have sufficient knowledge of the things which cause it. That’s why, actually, there is something desperately arrogant about those who’ll dismiss the supernatural as a matter of course.
The assumption that secular morality would be superior to religious morality seems a bit suspect.
At best they would be equally fictitious.
Imagine a third-generation stock broker who buys and sells exactly how his grandfather have done on this day fifty years ago. A broker who uses current input is a better broker than someone who wants to put all of his money into a stock of a company that does not actually currently exist.
Is “Buy Low, Sell High” not the way stock brokers do things anymore?
In order for your assertion to make any sense you would need to show that the fundamentals of human experience and psychology vary wildly from decade to decade, if not year to year. That’s a big claim, one that would seem to run counter to even a basic awareness of history, or literature.
> Is “Buy Low, Sell High” not the way stock brokers do things anymore?
I’m not saying “using the same principles”. I am saying “50 years ago my grandfather bought stock of Comptington Noodles, therefore I, too, will do exactly this.”
> In order for your assertion to make any sense you would need to show that the fundamentals of human experience an psychology vary wildly from decade to decade, if not year to year.
Human morality forms according to economical and societal trends. The absolute basic laws like “you should not harm other humans” are trivially solved by giving people Important Reasons and by dehumanizing the humans hurt.
Until economical reasons stopped demanding child labor, everyone was completely morally okay with it.
I’m not saying “using the same principles”. I am saying “50 years ago my grandfather bought stock of Comptington Noodles, therefore I, too, will do exactly this.”
In that case your comment is a non sequitur.
The absolute basic laws like “you should not harm other humans” are trivially solved by…
To put it charitably, the fact that you think this basic or trivial is illuminating.
I will grant that people’s personal morality is often determined by convenience. the part I find hard to swallow is the apparent assumption that this is superior to other options, or that it will only ever work in the direction you want it to. (the chronological chauvinism I mentioned earlier) I imagine that Nietzsche, Hobbes, and St. Augustine, would all have some choice words on that subject.
>as a secular morality is malleable while a religious morality is by definition backwards
1. Do you believe that Catholics – for example – have the exact same morality as their co-religionist ancestors a millennium past?
2. How is a “malleable morality” any different from amorality?
Different kind of malleable.
A secular morality is always reactive. For a significant amount of time the majority belief was that people are all relatively the same, but some of them choose to do gay things (usually because they are perverts or whatnot). Historically very recently it changed to a more evidence-based approach that being gay is an intrinsic and immutable characteristic, which led to a momentary increase in gay people’s suffering, followed by rapid progress in the equal rights direction.
On the other hand, the Bible gives no such leniency. Gay people must be murdered, it is a horrible abomination.
Religious people were very happy to do this and literally the only reason they do not do this currently is the existence of secular morality, as is true re: all the other horrible things that religion tells people to do.
Different how?
If you’re going make claims about evidence and rigor, you need to present your evidence and demonstrate rigor.
As it stands, your argument reads as a pretty bog-standard example of chronological chauvinism coupled with argument from convenience. IE “My assertion is newer and furthers my goals ergo it must be true”
[thought better of it, staying out of this one]
Thus, the most common use suggested for religions by the non religious – a religious morality – is inferior to a secular morality, as a secular morality is malleable while a religious morality is by definition backwards, the only question is to what extent.
You seem to be engaging in a bit of chronological snobbery here. An alternative perspective is that religious morality is superior to a malleable secular morality because it is less likely to shift according to the latest winds of fashion.
I am not interested in extreme short-term shifts in morality. According to the trends as they were in 1960s, at this point we would have more or less free drug use (at least universally legalized marijuana), polyamory and free love in general, lowered age of consent – none of which happened; but legalization of gay marriage was absurd even for them.
An existing religion with existing holy texts will offer no new research, no new ideas, it will never give ways to decrease human suffering, I would say it is good at keeping the status quo on human suffering at least, but that is of course false.
An existing religion with existing holy texts will offer no new research, no new ideas…
You do realize that there is an entire branch of philosophy/scholarship that would beg to differ do you not?
Perhaps what we need are not new ideas, but greater motivation to follow our old ideas. There’s a lot of data suggesting that religious people give more to charity, for example. We even found this on the SSC survey: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/11/04/2014-ssc-survey-results/#comment-258741
Better formatting and graphs here
Thanks.
“An existing religion with existing holy texts will offer no new research, no new ideas, it will never give ways to decrease human suffering”
That does not describe how real world religions function.
Jewish law as of 200 A.D. permitted a man to have multiple wives, permitted a man to divorce his wife but did not permit a wife to divorce her husband. By 1200 A.D. (I think–I don’t swear to the exact timing) polygyny was no longer permitted and while a wife could not divorce her husband, she could go to a court with evidence that would result in the court forcing her husband to divorce her.
Islamic law provides a mandatory punishment of amputation for theft. Islamic legal scholars deduced a set of restrictions on what thefts the rule applies to that drastically reduced it. Stealing a cow grazing in a field isn’t the Hadd offense of theft. Nor is stealing stuff in a house where you are a guest. Nor (according to some scholars) is stealing state property. Nor …
Jewish scholars carried the same approach, applied to the stoning of disobedient sons, to the point of arguing that it would never happen.
Torah law cancels all debts every seven years, which raises problems for getting someone to lend money to you in the sixth year. A legal formula, Prosbul, was invented, possibly by Hillel, that lets you evade that requirement.
I like to claim that, by the standards of the rabbis, every Supreme Court justice in history was a strict constructionist. I wouldn’t carry the claim quite that far for the mujtahids, but there are four orthodox schools of Sunni law and for at least some legal questions a believer gets to decide which school’s position he accepts.
Do you know where Christianity got its commitment to monogamy from (which was clearly present from the start)? I always assumed Judaism had switched by that time and it just carried over, but that wouldn’t fit your timeline.
Jewish law might have allowed multiple wives after Jewish culture had stopped favoring the practice.
What’s the history of Christian commitment to monogamy? My memory is that the church didn’t get seriously involved with marriage in the early centuries and I’m pretty sure there was openly polygamous practice, at least at the top levels, among the Merovingians.
I think I’m remembering a book by Duby, probably _The Knight, the Lady and the Priest_.
@David Friedman – there’s a couple verses (1 Timothy 3:3, Titus 1:6) that specify monogamous marriage as a qualification for being an Elder/Deacon/Bishop/Church Official. As far as I can remember, that’s about the sum of it as far as the Bible itself goes; can’t really speak for Catholic tradition. Jesus mentions marriage a few times in his teachings, but all the instances seem to imply monogamous marriage is a given.
My bet would be that early Christian attitudes on the subject were drawn from Jewish ones.
Could be the influence of the Roman occupation? The Romans were pretty serious about (legal) monogamy.
Also, Jesus mainly preached among the poor, while polygyny was more common among the rich.
@Nita – no real clue on causation. I just can’t remember a single mention or instance of polygamy in the NT, other than the mention-by-exclusion in those two verses. Wives come up a number of of times, Jewish, Christian and Roman, but they’re always framed as monogamous marriages in the translations I’m familiar with.
Were polygamous marriages common among Jews or Greeks in the era?
@Jaskologist , Charlemagne practiced concubinage/polygamy, while still being in good graces with the church.
Martin Luther later, under a great deal of persuading blessed a bigamous marriage for Philip I.
I believe that the emphasis on monogamy dated back to Paul dissuading against marriage in general, stating that it should be only done when celibacy is impossible or too difficult.
Also a quick google states “Valentinian I., in the fourth century, authorized christians to take two wives”.
Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo offers another view of the Trump phenomenon, specifically why Republicans have decided their own party’s establishment is the enemy.
Republicans are divided “between people who feel the party establishment has betrayed them and those who do not.”
Okay, so what specific betrayal are the party leaders guilty of?
According to Marshall, they promised to destroy Barack Obama’s presidency, and failed to do so.
Now, it seems to most of us that Republicans in Washington didn’t fail at that for lack of trying. Indeed, they tried a number of historically unprecedented things, like threaten a default on the national debt.
Marshall concludes that “a large portion of the GOP is not satisfied with what can realistically be achieved by conventional political means.”
Sounds about right.
Generally speaking, the Republican base wants to reverse political and social changes they see as entailing the literal destruction of America. The best, the absolute pull-out-all-the-stops best, that their party can offer is slowing down the rate of change. Somewhat. So why should they keep supporting the party brass?
That is to say, what sort of outcome should these people be satisfied with in your opinion? What is the best deal that they can ‘realistically’ achieve through normal party politics?
” Indeed, they tried a number of historically unprecedented things, like threaten a default on the national debt.”
No, no, no.
They threatened not to raise the debt ceiling. If the debt ceiling isn’t raised, eventually the government has to reduce expenditure to income. The government’s income is very much greater than the interest on the national debt. It’s only if you assume that, for some reason, the government is unwilling to cut other expenditures that refusing to raise the debt ceiling results in default.
This particular misrepresentation is very common and makes no sense at all, which I take as evidence of the bias of the sources from which many people get their information and the unwillingness of many people to bother thinking about what they are told when it fits their prejudices.
The government, by which I take it you mean the executive, can’t reduce expenditures to income. Just as the debt ceiling is a law so to the spending bills are a law. Post Richard Nixon it is clear that Presidents can’t legally decide not to spend appropriated money.
Subjecting the President to inconsistent legal mandates is something like legislative malpractice. The best the President could do in such a situation is try to look for clever solutions — like minting a giant platinum coin or selling off government assets (starting with those in Republican districts perhaps).
In theory this extreme brinkmanship strategy works if you’re trying to force the President to violate a law, then impeach him for violating it. See, e.g., Andrew Johnson.
In practice removing the President for what’s ultimately a political disagreement is unprecedented and would be perceived as staging a coup, even though it’s perfectly legal. Again see, e.g., Andrew Johnson, and note that Obama has far more allies in Congress than Johnson needed to survive impeachment.
You’d have to default on the debt or do politically toxic (and economically disruptive) things like delaying social security checks and military salaries. It’s not at all obvious to me that the bondholders would have gotten priority.
I don’t know who would have gotten priority, but the popular claim that doing that a debt limit forces a default is simply false. Even if there were spending bills that covered all other expenditures, Congress can change those bills and the President can sign the change. It’s only if the President and Congress are unwilling to cut anything but interest payments on the debt that the result is default.
Do you seriously think that there is no package of expenditure cuts that the Congress would have voted, or only none that the President would have been willing to sign? If the latter, it isn’t Congress that is forcing a default.
Yes, I “seriously” think there is no package of expenditure cuts and revenue increases that Congress would have voted on that would have made a debt ceiling hike unnecessary, even if Paul Ryan had been president. The reason is obvious: nobody in Congress ever did any work toward creating such a package in either the 2011 or 2013 crises.
Do you “seriously” think that the median congressman would survive voting for an immediate 40% reduction in US government expenditures? Where does your confidence come from?
I actually largely agree with this estimation. What didn’t make sense to me was the Republicans who were bothered by the government shutdown which was the inevitable result of the failed brinkmanship tactics at least part of their constituency wanted them to use to force the government to cut spending, defund Obamacare, etc. This does speak to a big split in the GOP though: between those who would punish their politicians for shutting down the government by refusal to compromise and those who would reward them.
But the fact is, the GOP controlled House and then House and Senate did fail, repeatedly, to actually cut spending because they were afraid of the negative political consequences of actually following through on their threats. This is why I like Ted Cruz most of those Republicans still in the race: his whole brand is based on being willing to have everyone in DC hate him.
Yeah, I’m sort of confused by this as well.
See, when they do all this brinksmanship and shut down the government, it makes me happy and I approve. But there are apparently a lot of Republicans who will vote people out for doing such things.
How is it that people are so fed up with the “establishment consensus”, “both parties are the same”, etc., that they’re willing to vote Trump just to wreck things; but at the same time they vote out any politician who tries to deviate from that exact consensus? There’s a lot of Republicans out there who would love to radically cut the size government in their heart of hearts, but they are held back by fear of the voters.
It reminds me of a quote Mark Calabria (of the Cato Institute) once related to me from Senator Jeff Sessions: “I’m a little bit of a libertarian, and I’d be a lot more of one if I didn’t have to stand before the voters of Alabama.”
It’s not a contradiction, it’s just different people, right? Some people want brinksmanship, some people want cooperation.
There’s a lot of Republicans out there who would love to radically cut the size government in their heart of hearts, but they are held back by fear of the voters.
I am skeptical. Why do you think this?
Yes, but who are the people voting for Tea Party candidates who nevertheless change their votes when those politicians do what they said they were going to do?
Anecdotes like the one I related. And the fact that a lot of conservative politicians have been heavily influenced by groups like the Heritage Foundation, often being involved in youth activism with them. If someone is pushed into politics by involvement in the conservative movement, he’s probably a lot more conservative than the median voter.
Don’t you think that a lot of politicians would, for instance, love to actually reform entitlement spending? They just know it’s political suicide.
Or take this (in)famous comment by Mitt Romney, which is a lot more forthright than what he said in public:
Yes, but who are the people voting for Tea Party candidates who nevertheless change their votes when those politicians do what they said they were going to do?
Say you have group A, who prefer brinksmanship, and group B, which wants bipartisanship. Group A is small, activist, and highly motivated. Group B is large and doesn’t pay attention to politics except when something exceptional is going on.
The debt ceiling comes up as an issue, and group A noisily pushes for brinksmanship; while group B is largely oblivious. So you get brinksmanship. Eventually, the debt ceiling becomes a major news issue and group B starts paying attention. Group B is much bigger and more powerful; once activated, it gets its way.
On politicians – what I see is politicians telling libertarian/donor audiences what they want to hear, while telling mass audiences the completely different things that *they* want to hear. I don’t see a particularly strong reason to believe one or the other.
Heck – you say downthread that Republicans never shrink government like they say they’re going to do. But I hear Republicans promising to protect entitlements, increase defense spending, suppress immigration, etc. and they generally manage to do all that. Have you considered that you’re being fooled here?
Going back to a previous discussion – it seems like the right model is “Republicans like “government” (spending/regulation/etc) that helps their favored groups and dislike “government” (spending/regulation/etc) that does not help their favored groups.” This applies both to politicians and to voters. Republican politicans run against “big government” but they always take care to exempt entitlements, military, police, etc.
@ Chalid:
I don’t have any problem with this explanation—except I find it hard to square with the polls that show Congress has like a 10% approval rating, and solid majorities saying that politicians are out-of-touch and not representing them.
What do those people want? If group A is small, they can’t all be in group A. Yet what reason do those in group B have to be frustrated? They always get what they want, if what they want is essentially the status quo.
It is plausible to me that what people say in private, when they think the mass media isn’t listening—and to people already in the tank for them—is more likely to be true than what they say on the campaign trail.
I mean, maybe these politicians have no genuine beliefs at all about policy and have literally wired themselves to only think what the polls are saying is popular today. But I find that psychologically unlikely; I think they have policy preferences of their own, which they sometimes find necessary to suppress in order to appeal to voters.
I don’t think this is just Republicans: I think Democratic politicians are likely to want a more left-wing outcome than the voters will let them get away with. For one, it’s why you saw them sort of evasively denying support for gay marriage when it was unpopular, only to much more eagerly embrace it when it became popular. Probably a lot of them really would have liked to come out in favor of it years before, but it was perceived as too risky.
@ Chalid:
That’s my point: those people should like the Republican establishment!
But large majorities of voters do not like them! They apparently feel so betrayed by them that many of them are willing to vote for Trump just to bring the whole thing crashing down.
The question is why these voters don’t like the Republican establishment, when it consistently delivers what they want.
Why do you think that group B is actually getting what it wants?
Compromise on the debt ceiling after a giant fight and a bunch of ominous warnings about imminent economic catastrophe is NOT what group B wants.
What group B wanted was for the issue to have been quietly resolved without all the drama.
@ Chalid:
Because that’s not the kind of thing disillusioned Republican voters say when they’re interviewed. It doesn’t fit at all with the polling data, or with support for insurgent candidates—who take a harder line—against the establishment.
They don’t complain that Republicans aren’t doing enough to fall in line with Obama’s legislative agenda and approve every budget he proposes. They complain about the opposite: that the two parties are the same and they’re not being given a real alternative. They complain about politicians selling out their principles once they get to Washington.
There may be some Republicans who dislike the establishment for being too conservative, but they don’t seem to make up this apparently-huge majority that “group B” consists of.
Very crudely, I would say –
Group A is some fraction of the Republican party.
Group B is the rest of the Republican party plus the business community (business HATES uncertainty) plus swing voters/occasional voters.
If the debt ceiling crisis had been settled by immediately cutting all federal expenditures 40%, the voters would not trust Republicans to govern again for a generation. That’s why nobody bothered to write those bills.
Sure, there are Republicans and conservatives who want to do this, but the large majority of Americans aren’t going there.
This is another culture war that has been irrevocably lost: people don’t identify with states any more. For better or for worse (I think both), we are far more unified as a single polity, a single huge community, than ever before.
Washington is the focus of everyone’s political attention. People across the political spectrum look to Washington to solve problems.
Regional and local differences in political parties have been leveled: we are all national Democrats and national Republicans now. The local variations were wiped out by our voters, who had no patience for the old ways, the genteel liberal Republicanism of New England, or the old-line conservative Democrats of the Deep South.
Notice that party labels don’t come with modifying prefixes any more?
No, it’s not because Washington is suddenly spending all our money, or that the states have atrophied. States still have enormous power and resources, and there are constant struggles over issues in every state legislature. But you wouldn’t know that from the news media, which has almost completely abandoned any attempt to cover what state governments do.
State capitals, at least in larger states, used to have dozens of competing news bureaus. Look at any daily newspaper from 50 years ago, and you’ll find plenty of detailed stories about the progress of state legislation in Lansing or Albany or Springfield or Annapolis. All that is gone today.
Here in Michigan, if I want to know about some controversy over state legislation, I have to turn to boutique proprietary news sources (not easily available to the general public) like MIRS or Gongwer.
Sure, I could go to the legislature’s web site, put in a bill number, and find the text of any one of tens of thousands of house or senate bills. But to know which ones are significant, which ones are being considered in committee, which ones are scheduled for floor votes, well, that would be a full time job, and nobody is doing that on behalf of the general public. The people who do that kind of work labor in almost total obscurity.
This goes beyond politics. The distinctive cultures and accents and food and music and architecture and dress of states and localities are dying out, or becoming an elite specialty rather than something everyone knows and upholds. It’s harder and harder to find any real cultural difference between, say, upstate New York and southern California. Everybody is watching the same TV shows, cheering for the same sports leagues, playing with the same toys, listening to the same music, buying the same furniture, etc., etc.
Even the political junkies watch C-SPAN, not the state equivalent (e.g., the Michigan state government channel has similar programming and a tiny audience). Even in remote corners of the country, people who follow politics are likely to be far more familiar with U.S. Senators than their own state senators.
So if the federal government were effectively decapitated or massively scaled back, that would be good news only to a small handful of ideologues. Everyone else, including most people who currently vote Republican, would vehemently demand a return to status quo ante.
I agree with your point that the country has become more homogenized.
But you seem to be thinking that, in wanting to reduce the size of the federal government, I want to give more power to the state governments. I don’t. I’m not at all arguing that we should go back to the days where everyone identified with his state first. I agree that those days are gone.
There’s a difference between not cutting the budget by 40% overnight and not doing anything significant to cut it at all, such as by adopting a plan for more gradual cuts.
The Republicans don’t do either of those things. And for me, that produces frustration: they keep getting elected but never do what they say they’re going to do.
Now, in some sense I agree that radical cuts to government spending are very unpopular with the American people. They want to pay no taxes but still get all the same entitlements.
The part I don’t really understand is how so many people can apparently share the same frustration with establishment Republicans for never doing anything to reduce the size of government, while not even wanting them to reduce the size of government. What exactly are they frustrated with? What changes do they want which they are not getting?
Maybe it’s purely frustration that the Republicans aren’t doing enough to deport all illegal immigrants; that would fit with support for Trump, at least.
But I think it’s more than that because at least rhetorically I hear a lot of oppositions to bailouts and cronyism, and regulations being too restrictive, and entitlements encouraging dependency, etc. And yet it’s precisely because of fear of the voters that politicians can’t do anything meaningful to shrink the size of government or reform entitlements.
Large legislative bodies, regardless of politics, are inherently unable to do this.
To adopt a budget cutting plan, first, there needs to be a Plan, and it has to be put forth by someone with enough legitimacy and clout to prevail on the legislature and the public. Normally, only the executive can do this, or perhaps a legislative leader who totally dominates the majority.
There is no individual legislator who is more interested in abstract budget cutting than serving the needs of his or her district, which usually means spending money on it, or protecting existing spending from being cut.
Among legislators, getting support from other legislators involves some degree of logrolling, that is, money for others districts’ priorities.
The only player who systematically says “no” is the executive, because the executive cares above all about getting the whole picture right. No matter how expansionist the executive might be, he or she has to fight against public money being frittered away on a thousand pet projects.
Legislatures are delighted to cut taxes, but without someone leading the way, with some legitimate Plan, they are unable to increase taxes, no matter how liberal they are, or necessary it may be.
If the executive proposes a tax cut, almost no legislature, no matter how liberal or expansionist, can resist enacting it.
Absent strong leadership, a legislature can’t even balance a budget. Every incentive runs in the opposite direction.
Belatedly, I was just remarking to Wildbow how you’ve come across his work and that he should totally feel responsible for the declining post frequency… and then I realised it’s actually probably my fault. Sure enough, I looked back on our New Years correspondence, and there I was, mentioning it.
I hope that’s actually just a coincidence, because if not then I feel a bit weird since my offhand remarks do not usually cast any waves, but on the other hand,
nothing is ever a coincidence…Either way, I’m glad you’re enjoying it! (…I actually haven’t read it yet. It’s quite far up on my list of things I really ought to get around to reading, though.)
Towards a taxonomy of cliches in Space Opera is excellent.
The thing that always bothered me of space operas is that widespread, fast interplanetary/interstellar travel would make it easy for anyone to destroy any planet not defended by elaborate systems.
Weber’s solution to that is basically an interstellar compact not to do that. If any star nation violates that agreement and uses WMDs on an inhabited planet, the most massive empire in the universe dedicates all of its not-inconsiderable military resources to exterminating the offending regime in its entirety.
Tends to keep things civilized. (As to why the massive interstellar empire doesn’t violate the Deneb Accords itself, it’s…complicated.)
Because any other civilization with FTL has the ability to make any other civilization disappear in a burst of gamma radiation if they really want to.
We live in a world where 2 countries have the ability to utterly annihilate any other country in the world in a matter of hours, and another 7 have the ability to do serious damage to any of their neighbors in a similar amount of time. For whatever reason, we have yet to blow ourselves up, and if anything this state of affairs seems to have made the world more peaceful, not less.
I see no reason why things would work out differently in a hypothetical interstellar human civilization in a similar state of Mutually Assured Destruction.
MAD on earth depends on the nuclear powers having second-strike capabilities, and on it being known who those second-strike capabilities ought to be deployed against. These conditions may not hold in space.
Earth also depends on depends on weaponry capable of causing planetary destruction not being available to any random person of moderate means. But any single starship in most space opera is capable of doing enormous damage to a planet by (for example) ramming the planet at high speed.
It seems like second strike capabilities would be far, far more likely to exist in space than on Earth. Any weapon capable of traveling to another star system and causing mass destruction on a planet there would by necessity be space-based, and space-based weapons can be located anywhere.
Second-strike capability on Earth is limited because missile silos are cheaper than nuclear submarines, but in space the equivalent of submarines are the only game in town.
As for knowing where the attack came from, that wouldn’t be a problem either. Any propulsion system strong enough to accelerate a spacecraft to relativistic speeds in a reasonable amount of time will be bright enough to be detectable at a distance of several light years. Which means that any interstellar civilization worthy of the name will be able to trace the interstellar planet killer weapon back to where it came from. This would likely make it extremely difficult if not impossible to avoid retaliation for using one of these weapons. Granted, this is still an issue in space opera settings with non-gate FTL, especially if spacecraft in FTL cannot be tracked or detected.
That is a legitimate point, but it might not be as big of a concern as it first appears. Consider how, in more than a century of commercial aviation, there hasn’t been a single case of an official pilot (that is, not a hijacker) deliberately crashing a commercial airliner into a building, even though there have been a few cases of official pilots deliberately crashing commercial airliners. And there are lots of private organizations that possess commercial airliners or freight planes of similar size. It seems like background checks and legal regulations can work for this sort of thing.
@NN
Planes on their own are not a good weapon. The WTC collapsed because jet fuel can melt steel beams, not because of the impact; now imagine the possible devastation inflicted by an ICBM of equal mass.
Starships, however? What gets us to orbit? Rockets. Repurposed weapons.
If a reasonable sized starship can accelerate to relativistic speed, it can achieve catastrophic destruction on any planet.
As you are no doubt aware, a SpaceX Falcon 9 is a repurposed ICBM only in the sense that a Boeing 747 is a repurposed strategic bomber.
Actually, all of the Western launchers are pretty much clean-sheet launcher designs, instead of repurposed weapons. The only exception is the Delta II, and we don’t use very many of those any more. The Delta IV and Atlas V are basically related in name only to their weapons-derived predecessors. The Russians haven’t made the same changes, but they haven’t done much development since the end of the Cold War.
The R-7 Semyorka — the basis of the carrier rockets for Soyuz vehicles and their relatives — was ridiculously overpowered as ICBMs go, too. It kinda made sense when it was being designed, since early hydrogen bombs were very large and heavy, but it was obsolete in that role by the time it finished testing.
There are a number of small rockets — Western and otherwise — that reuse components from decommissioned ICBMs, but that’s more of a footnote.
If a reasonable sized starship can accelerate to relativistic speed, it can achieve catastrophic destruction on any planet.
Except that a reasonably equipped space guard cutter should be able to spot it from light-years away and blast it to vapor with the most trivial of space-combat weaponry at that technology. The tiny fraction of the vapor which intersects the target planet might make for a nice auroral display over a hemisphere.
But we’re talking about Space Opera, which rarely involves relativistic starships. Alastair Reynolds does some good work in that subfield, but mostly Space Opera uses interplanetary ships and/or FTL drives of one sort or another. There is no physical requirement that an FTL drive require energy levels comparable to relativistic travel, and most SFnal versions don’t.
> jet fuel can melt steel beams
AFAIK, it can’t. But it can heat them up sufficiently that their mechanical strength is degraded enough that the structure collapses anyway.
@Anonymous
I specifically used that phrasing because of the meme.
@Nornagest
I’m completely comfortable with calling Boeing 747 a repurposed strategic bomber to the same extent. The purpose of a plane – specifically a passenger plane – is to be an almost endlessly reusable thing that carries a load from point A to point B without fucking it up much.
The purpose of a rocket is go away from its exhaust very quickly. Rockets as weapons came first, rocket-powered things that carry people came much later.
Weapons generally need to be load bearing. However, when a spaceship becomes fast enough, its mass becomes a load.
There are an awful lot of assumptions being made here about the nature of space travel, especially “fast interstellar travel”. Perhaps it would be best if people were to actually state those assumptions rather than assuming everyone else shares the same ones.
For example, are we assuming that fast interstellar travel is absolutely not accomplished by means of wormholes, stargates, jump points, or other such point-to-point deviations from special relativity’s bar on FTL travel? Because authors like Niven and Bujold have had no trouble keeping their space-operatic universes safe for planetary life by arranging for any would-be attacker to come through known chokepoints ideally positioned for a defensive ambush.
Really, if authors can’t set up the science and technology of their settings to support the story they want to tell, they need to pick a different genre. And if you all are so certain you know the one true way space travel will actually be conducted in future centuries, let’s hear it.
Kizinti lesson, any device’s usefulness as an engine is directly proportional to it’s usefulness as a weapon.
Anyone clever enough to build a Stargate is definitely clever enough to weaponize it.
Which is why most settings with artificial FTL Gates, including Stargate, have them as Lost Technology left behind by a long vanished supercivilization.
Though I think (I read about this a long time ago, it might have been about a different series) at least one episode of Stargate involved destroying something by opening a portal into the interior of a star.
The Kzinti lesson is an article of faith which has since been disavowed by its author. Reaction drives make poor weapons unless you make implausible assumptions regarding e.g. exhaust collimation. You can do the math, and I know people who have done the experiments.
As for weaponizing a Stargate, sure. But will it be an offensive or a defensive one? Because I’m pretty sure I know which side the general concept favors.
My understanding of physics ends with Newton, so this may all be wrong, but last I heard, any FTL, even via Stargate, also gives you time travel. That’s got to be weaponizable.
John puts this well. There’s no reason to focus exhaust to the level needed to make it a reasonable weapon. It might be considered to be the equivalent of modern warships ramming each other (something they do when they’re feeling a bit frisky, not a way of killing people), but nothing more.
@Jaskologist,
It depends on what you mean by ‘time travel’. There are certain proposed wormhole geometries which are not excluded by our current understanding of relativity, and which connect points in space-time, so they theoretically allow you to ‘time travel’, although this could just mean that you move 10 light-years away and 9 years into the future. Of course, there are configurations which allow you to go 10 light-years away and 11 years into the future, or back to where you started before you arrive, but it’s thought that they’ll form perfect feedback loops and destroy themselves.
@Jaskologist:
In the sense that a self-destruct mechanism on your time machine is a weapon, perhaps.
“FTL gives you time travel” is often overstated – FTL plus relativity allows time travel, but doesn’t require it. You have to go out of your way to set up the requisite conditions, e.g. by accelerating one end of the stargate to relativistic velocity. So it’s perfectly reasonable to have a Space Operatic universe in which people don’t do that but just flit around the galaxy at FTL speeds. Smart people, anyway, because there’s relativity but there’s also quantum mechanics.
To the extent that anyone understands quantum gravity, it seems likely that a wormhole pair, stargate, or other FTL contrivance will experience exponentially increasing feedback as it comes asymptotically close to being operated in a time-travel mode. So, kaboom. Probably not some grand cataclysmic universe-destroying kaboom, but one just barely powerful enough to destroy your would-be time machine if you ignore the warnings. The math is still kind of hazy on this one, as it’s not a subject most physicists are comfortable with, but at least from an SFnal vantage point there are potential Space Opera settings where, “But if I arrange the wormholes thusly, I’ll get a time machine, and those fools at the institute will be sorry they laughed at me, bwuahahaha!”, is the same level of crackpottery as making perpetual motion machines out of magnets or offbalanced rotors or whatnot today.
@NN:
I’m pretty sure one of the SG-1 season finales featured a super-weapon that worked on that principal. It’s also plot point in both Greg Bear’s The Way and in Niven’s The Mote in God’s Eye
Edit:
Google indicates that it was Season 4 of SG-1 and that the weapon worked by opening a gate into a black hole.
@John Schilling
I don’t think the Kzinti Lesson should be dismissed so quickly. As Heinlein observed, weapons as a class are energy transfer devices. If you can accelerate your exhaust to an appreciable percentage of C you can accelerate a baseball.
No, you can’t. We can accelerate atoms to a very appreciable fraction of c today. We can’t do the same with a baseball. There’s no reason to suspect, and a lot of reasons to doubt, that developing that capability to the point where it will be able to propel spacecraft will give us the ability to accelerate macroscopic objects to similar speeds. So all you have is a very poorly-focused particle beam. Not a relativistic baseball cannon. And there are very good reasons why you wouldn’t want that particle beam to focus too well. It makes it much safer (and easier to engineer), and a 1-degree cone costs you approximately 0 thrust.
People have proposed particle beam weapons, and one of the major challenges is making sure they stay focused at reasonable ranges. Suggesting that engine designers will solve this problem is rather silly.
@ bean:
Thrust is a function of propellant mass and exhaust velocity, if you’ve developed this capability to the point were it’s useful as a thruster you’ve developed the capability to effect macroscopic objects almost by definition. The difference between 5 ounces of baseball and 5 ounces of monoatomic hydrogen is largely academic if you get it going fast enough.
Never mind the fact that the shear wattage required to do so opens up a whole host of capabilities of it’s own.
@hlynkacg
Thrust is a function of propellant mass and exhaust velocity, if you’ve developed this capability to the point were it’s useful as a thruster you’ve developed the capability to effect macroscopic objects almost by definition. The difference between 5 ounces of baseball and 5 ounces of monoatomic hydrogen is largely academic if you get it going fast enough.
It’s not academic in this context. The baseball will not spread out noticeably. The cloud of hydrogen will. In other words, the baseball makes a much better weapon. The problem is that it’s much harder to launch the baseball in one piece than it is to fire off a bunch of protons (or the baseball as plasma).
The difference is only academic if the scenario is ‘fired at a target at range 0’. But we’re not. We’re discussing a weapon. Weapons are complicated, and are certainly not defined only by ‘penetration at the muzzle’.
Never mind the fact that the shear wattage required to do so opens up a whole host of capabilities of it’s own.
Shear wattage isn’t a thing. Shear stress, yes, but not shear wattage.
As I and John have both said repeatedly, exhaust spreads out. 2 degrees is a standard angle for ion thrusters, so I’ll use that. A 1 GW engine with that sort of dispersion will have an energy flux equal to that of sunlight at Earth’s surface at only 16 km. That’s not necessarily a lot if we’re dealing with relativistic drives, but the inverse square law applies. It would take 4 TW to push the solar-equivalent flux point out to 1000 km. You’d have to be absurdly close before it becomes a viable weapon. Wattage only works if it’s concentrated, and propulsion engineers have no incentive to do that.
@Bean
You’re assuming that the “baseball” represents absolute mass flow of the engine not the unit of mass striking the target. Realistically (for a space opera setting) the engine’s total energy and mDot are going to be order’s of magnitude higher.
For example, a “conservative” Heinlein-esque torchship of the sort that populates most hard sci-fi settings* will be pumping out something on the order of a few terrawatts easy.
If you want to go truly mad Hienlien’s own Lewis and Clark from Time For the Stars weighed in at ~50,000 tons, and could accelerate at 3 G. It’s notional power output is easily several hundred petawatts in which case the “Stargate principal” definitely applies. If you’re clever enough to build it, you’re clever enough to weaponize it.
*Something with an all-up mass around 1000 tons, mass ratio < 2, 0.3 – 1.0 G acceleration, Ve ~200 km/s. Think the Endeavor from Arthur C Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama or Rocinante from Stephen Corey’s The Expanse.
You’re assuming that the “baseball” represents absolute mass flow of the engine not the unit of mass striking the target. Realistically (for a space opera setting) the engine’s total energy and mDot are going to be order’s of magnitude higher.
No, I’m not. The total mass/energy output is irrelevant. What matters is how much hits the target, and at reasonable ranges, it won’t be enough. I’ve done the math to demonstrate this. Either show why we should expect ships to blunder around at ranges of hundreds of kilometers or explain why drives will be well-focused enough to make them competitive with bespoke weapons.
For example, a “conservative” Heinlein-esque torchship of the sort that populates most hard sci-fi settings will be pumping out something on the order of a few terrawatts*.
And it is totally incapable of doing any damage at 1000 km.
If you want to go truly mad Hienlien’s own Lewis and Clark from Time For the Stars weighed in at ~50,000 tons, and could accelerate at 3 G. That’s a power output in the hundred thousand terrawatt range
And a sunlight flux range of, what 14,000 km or so. With the sort of tech you’d need to not melt your own ship, you could probably get within a few hundred kilometers safely. Yawn.
in which case the “Stargate principal” definitely applies. If you’re clever enough to build it, you’re clever enough to weaponize it.
That’s a very different thing from the Kizinti lesson. I don’t dispute it, but saying ‘anyone who could build a TW fusion torch will also have very impressive weapons’ is not the same thing as saying ‘a TW fusion torch is itself an impressive weapon’.
The engine in my car is an impressive piece of engineering, and it’s pretty obvious that anyone who could build it could also build guns, or turn the technology involved into a weapon. (Say a high-tech potato cannon.) But that doesn’t mean that the engine itself as installed is a good weapon. Don’t equivocate between the two positions.
No, I’m not. The total mass/energy output is irrelevant. What matters is how much hits the target…
Exactly, 5 ounces of hydrogen hitting at relativistic velocity will have largely the same effect as a baseball hitting at relativistic velocity. Dispersion angle/thrust collimation only matters if you are trying to calculate the total mass and energy output of the engine, or trying to calculate the damage that a given engine will do a specific range.
Reread the original reply and wording of the Kizinti Lesson any device’s usefulness as an engine is directly proportional to it’s usefulness as a weapon.
Your car would also be a rather effective weapon if you were inclined to use it as one. As effective as a nuclear missile? No. But effective none the less. Which is ironic seeing as how nuclear missiles would make an excellent propulsion system.
Edit: I also think that you dropped a zero estimating the Lewis and Clarke’s drive. My own estimate was closer to 450,000 km for a 1 petawatt drive.
@Hlynkacg:
*Something with an all-up mass around 1000 tons, mass ratio < 2, 0.3 – 1.0 G acceleration, Ve ~200 km/s. Think the Endeavor from Arthur C Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama or Rocinante from Stephen Corey’s The Expanse.
OK, total drive power of 1E12 watts. Assume even 0.1% of that winds up thermalized in the exhaust, and the plume is at least 3.6 degrees wide.
Doing the math, I get a plume intensity equal to that of sunlight in Low Earth Orbit at a distance of 480 kilometers. You could eventually kill a spacesuited man by heatstroke at that distance, if he couldn’t find shade. If you can close to 90 kilometers, you can start melting white-painted aluminum, slowly.
If, instead, I take 0.1% of that energy budget and channel it through a rapidly pulsed KrF excimer laser at a measly 5% efficiency, then focus it with a four-meter beam director, I can literally blast a hole through half-inch steel plate in an eyeblink at 500 km range (power density 1.2E10 W/m^2). Or melt aluminum at 275,000 km.
The true Kzinti lesson is that if there’s a violent conflict, the party that devoted one-thousandth of their budget to actual weapons is going to annihilate the side with the very efficient reaction drive without even noticing they are being “fired” upon.
The point of the Kizinti Lesson is that even relatively “conservative” spacecraft designs qualify as WMDs long before you start strapping guns to them.
As I noted above your car makes is an effective weapon if you feel inclined to use it as one. Maybe not as effective as a purpose built cannon or missile. But effective none the less.
Exactly, 5 ounces of hydrogen hitting at relativistic velocity will have largely the same effect as a baseball hitting at relativistic velocity. Dispersion angle/thrust collimation only matters if you are trying to calculate the total mass and energy output of the engine, or trying to calculate the damage that a given engine will do a specific range.
All of this is obviously true. But since we are talking about the practical utility of the drive as a weapon, trying to work out the damage of a specific engine at a specific range is rather important.
Reread the original reply and wording of the Kizinti Lesson any device’s usefulness as an engine is directly proportional to it’s usefulness as a weapon.
Technically true, but as has been repeatedly demonstrated, the proportionality constant is very, very small.
Your car would also be a rather effective weapon if you were inclined to use it as one. As effective as a nuclear missile? No. But effective none the less.
False analogy on two counts. First, we’re not discussing ramming people. Second, I can’t think of very many situations where someone with a gun doesn’t beat someone with a car. Not a nuclear missile, a gun.
Which is ironic seeing as how nuclear missiles would make an excellent propulsion system.
And? I’ve known about Orion (and Project Rho) for quite a few years. Actually, John and I have both written stuff that’s posted there.
Edit: I also think that you dropped a zero estimating the Lewis and Clarke’s drive.
OK, I did. So with a truly absurd drive, you’ve managed to reach the point where you can give me a potential sunburn at 2/3rds of a light second. I do stand by the second part of my statement. The ability to shield against something is going to be intimately linked to the ability to harness it in the first place. The pusher plate of an Orion-drive spacecraft makes a great shield against hostile nukes.
The point of the Kizinti Lesson is that even a relatively “conservative” spacecraft designs qualify as a WMDs long before you start strapping guns to them.
No, it doesn’t. That’s Jon’s Law, and it basically involves either hovering directly over the target, or ramming it. The ultimate test of a weapon is its utility against hostile and aware opponents, not how it does in situations that more resemble an accident or terrorism.
As I noted above your car makes is an effective weapon if you feel inclined to use it as one. Maybe not as effective as a purpose built cannon or missile. But effective none the less.
Not really. Nobody uses cars as weapons on the battlefield.
(Unmodified cars, that is. Car bombs are a very different thing.)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/03/04/death-predicts-whether-people-vote-for-donald-trump/
Anyone have thoughts about this analysis? Is this a legitimate effect?
I detest the headline, which coyly implies that dead people are flocking to the polls.
The notion that Trump does better in counties where less educated middle-aged white people are in greater socio-economic distress? I haven’t looked at the numbers, but it certainly makes intuitive sense.
The effect is flat in Massachusetts, perhaps, because Massachusetts counties are so vast that local differences are all subsumed. Moreover, with restrictive party registration laws and few Republican officials, the number of Republican primary votes is probably quite small.
The increase in death rates due to “poisoning” (drug overdoses) and suicide is real and troubling. It is probably related to other social ills, such as the falling labor force participation rate among men.
All that being said, statistically, there may be something else going on. I wonder if the rising death rates among non-college educated whites is partly an artifact of rising educational attainment across the board. The non-college-degree part of the population is both shrinking and aging.
For example, the Wonkblog analysis uses the population from 40 to 64. Death rates (based on the U.S. Life Table) increase by a factor of six across those years, in other words, a 64-year-old has six times the chance of dying in a year than a 40-year-old does.
Meanwhile, the 40-year-old is significantly more likely to have a college degree than the 64-year-old. That means the college-educated folks in the 40-64 age group have a younger average age, and a lower death rate, than the non-college folks.
So maybe they’re really measuring “proportion of 40 to 64-year-olds who are closer to 64 than to 40”? That seems plausible.
As a minor data point about the pervasiveness of feminism, I’m reading A Borrowed Man by Gene Wolfe, and I was profoundly annoyed by some gender role stuff in it. It’s set in a fairly advanced future, and the female lead (so far) says she’s a teacher, says she hopes she doesn’t look like a teacher, spends a couple of paragraphs explaining what she does*, and then apologizes for going on so long. This aspect of things doesn’t get better. Men and women split up after parties, with women doing the cleaning up. There is no explanation of why this part of life is in the 50s or somesuch.
So I take a look at the reviews at amazon. Some people like the book, some are bored by it. No one mentions the gender roles.
*Students have plenty of access of things to learn, but if they aren’t interested, it doesn’t do any good. Teachers specialize in getting children fascinated with learning. This sounds utopian to me, in the good sense.
It is unclear how much is “the book isn’t so good” and how much is “the narrator is an organic robot sex slave who narrates everything to fix old style detective story cliches”. Because it feels like a combination of 1950s science fiction (with the lone genius and his secret breakthrough) and detective stories (where cops question suspects by beating them up)… which don’t really go well together. It would be a bit like writing a science fiction novel where the dastardly plot is the one from Johnny English, but playing it seriously (for those who don’t know, it involves removing the Queen of England and her family having her replacement use the power of the monarchy to seize all the land in England and turn it into the world’s prison).
There’s a novel in which women and men split at a party? Isn’t there a federal law enforcement agency we could call? You know what, fuck all this civilization bullshit, if we’re going to have books in which fictional women clean up after dinner, let’s go back to the savanna, I say. Nothing good has happened since the invention of glassware.
There’s a woman making a point that’s not very good? Isn’t their movement one of supposed saints and perfectly logical beings? You know what, fuck all this feminism bullshit, if people are going to come to conclusions I disagree with, let’s go back to medieval times, I say. Nothing good has happened since the institution of marriage.
I disagree! Glassware is the culprit! Have at you!
Man, I almost thought I might have made a good post, but you taking it not at all seriously and being all joking about it must mean your point stands anyway. Fuck.
The institution of marriage predates the Middle Ages by at least a thousand years, probably several thousand.
Good things happening didn’t suddenly end with glassware being invented. What’s your point?
@David Friedman:
Yes, but that wasn’t real marriage, since it only involved one man and N women. Real marriage includes one man and one man, and one woman and one woman. The discovery of real marriage by the U.S. Supreme Court was in all the papers a short while back; I’m surprised a legal scholar like yourself is unaware of it.
It doesn’t matter much, anyway, since in about ten years or so the Supremes will undoubtedly discover that real marriage includes N women and M men. I will try to bask in Scott’s happiness on that day, but am likely to fail—among other reasons because the in the vast majority of cases where N is greater than or equal to 2, M will equal 1.
Sastan, did you notice you strawmanned what I wrote?
I did not. I focused on irrelevant bits of it and used hyperbole!
Would you prefer I dealt with your one fiction book being a data point on the state of feminism in all the world? Come now. Let’s at least have some fun!
That wasn’t Nancy’s point, though. The point was that, although she thought this book was gratingly retrograde in its gender roles, nobody else reviewing it on Amazon mentioned it. So the supposed consensus among all right-thinking people that everyone must recognize and denounce all microaggressions, etc., isn’t nearly as pervasive as you’d think from reading Salon or wherever, since this problematic book is out there and nobody’s complaining about it.
The lack of reaction to the book, not the book itself, is what tells you something.
BBA, thank you. That’s exactly what I meant.
There’s a difference between “right-thinking people must denounce all microaggressions spontaneously” and “if someone else denounces the microaggressions, right-thinking people must ego along with the denunciation”. We’re a lot closer to the latter.
The vast majority of the public is apathetic about any movement not directly affecting their own lives. This is true for all movements of all types, whether social justice or not and whether influential or not.
Are they SJ-sympathetic, but not activists themselves? Or are they not sympathetic? Or have they not been exposed to the memes in the first place?
Now this may be me misinterpreting it, but a lot of social justice pieces I’ve read imply that if you aren’t loudly offended by [whatever it is they’re decrying], you’re almost as sexist/racist/etc. as the person who made it. Silence implies approval which makes you complicit in the oppression. And so on. This leaves little room in the movement for quiet supporters, even though that’s what most people who support SJ (or any other cause) are.
SJWs aren’t everywhere, but they could be anywhere. It’s pure chance that no SJW happened to have jumped on that book.
Also, there’s not much a SJW could do to an Amazon reviewer, so there’s no pressure for Amazon reviewers to conform. If it was professional reviewers instead and one SJW happened to jump on the book, a lot would go along (and the book would certainly never get a Hugo).
@ Jiro
So, let’s take a look at some professional reviews:
December 2015
January 2016
March 2016
I’m not seeing the pattern you predicted.
There was an “also” on that. The first part was me pointing out that SJW targets are random.
The reason professional reviewers haven’t been intimidated is that the book doesn’t happen to have been chosen as a random target.
@ Jiro
I’m not saying: “here are three positive reviews, therefore you’re wrong”.
I’m saying: here’s a feminist review “denouncing” the book, here are two later reviews failing to “denounce” it, and here’s the lack of the expected social media shitstorm / other horrible consequences.
Not every work which is hated by feminists produces a shitstorm, even if one feminist does notice it. It’s a matter of chance. Furthermore, the “consensus” in question isn’t a literal consensus. There’s a small group who really hates the thing, and a larger group that is either intimidated by or vaguely sympathetic with the first, who goes along with the shitstorm but won’t spontaneously start one.
And both of these things are true when you replace “feminist” by pretty much any pressure group. If that counts as proving Internet-feminists don’t have widespread influence, then no group has widespread influence.
Out of universe: the reviews of A Borrowed Man have not been all that positive (nor has the discussion on Urth.net been enthusiastic) and I get the impression that, like with most of his recent novels (Pirate Freedom/An Evil Guest/The Sorcerer’s House/The Land Across), it’s trading very heavily on having been written by Gene Wolfe (who is now old enough and a widower and could die at any moment, which is why everyone has been rushing to give him awards while he’s still around) and would’ve sunk without a trace if it had been written by some newcomer. If you’re reading a Gene Wolfe book, you’re used to his old-fashioned views like Christianity, anti-socialism, and traditional gender roles, so why would you complain about that part of the package? It would be like complaining that important events take place off-screen and the narrator and other characters subtly lie to you and you miss the real story – yeah, that’s Gene Wolfe for you.
When I see something strange or anachronistic in a Gene Wolfe story, pretty much the last explanation I reach for is, “Huh: guess he’s just clueless about his characters and careless with his world-building.” Here are some better explanations for the regressive gender roles (which I don’t remember seeing any evidence were pervasive throughout the society, as opposed to just manifesting in the one weird family):
**** SPOILERS! ****
1) The book is clearly an homage to / pastiche of noir detective novels and movies. You need an innocent-seeming damsel in apparent distress to make it work.
2) In noir, everyone’s always lying. In Gene Wolfe, everyone’s always lying. So when the damsel-in-distress character tells a story that makes her look like a damsel in distress, she’s….
3) She’s trying to get something out of a resimulation of a 20th-century detective novelist, and needs him to trust her and/or be attracted enough to her to short-circuit his naturally crafty and suspicious mind—so she figures out what he expects out of a (20th-century) rich girl damsel-in-distress, and plays to that type.
4) The narrator is filling in his stereotyped thinking in place of actual reality, not just about her occupation (which is only superficially similar to a 20th-century schoolteacher), but the women cleaning up after dinner, etc. He’s not just a (possibly hack) author, he’s an author telling us a story that he tells us is true—but no normal human can remember exact dialogue, so it’s reasonable to think he’s making up filler, as well. To add to the unreliability, he’s a resimulation (Charlie Stross’s word; I forget Wolfe’s) of that author, and so might be even more prone to stereotype and bend reality (in a time something like a hundred years removed from his actual life) to what he thinks it is or should be or makes him look good (maybe he just doesn’t have the mental capacity to go much beyond the thinking that went into the original author’s books).
5) I’ve never read anything by Gene Wolfe where everything in the future has progressed. In fact, I’d go so far as to say most things in most of his stories have regressed from the present, to an alarming degree: in The Book of the New Sun, we’re so far in the future that the Sun has gone red, but society has slid back to at best early modern structures, and stayed there for practically forever. So maybe the society in A Borrowed Man really has regressed to the point that women are all teachers and nurses, and meekly clear the dishes after dinner while the men go have a brandy and a stogie.
6) Speaking of regress spiting progress: the society in the book can recreate authors as flesh-and-blood beings (progress!), and when it does so, it uses them to reinstitute a form of slavery and the absolute control over the slaves’ lives (the opposite of progress!). The sexism of the 1950s is bad, but it kind of pales in comparison.
7) Again, I could be wrong, but the stereotyped femininity doesn’t seem to extend much beyond this one rich family, and as Fitzgerald told us, “The rich are different from you and me.” It’s possible the eccentric father deliberately brought up his children in a weird and very anachronistic way (echoes of The Fifth Head of Cerberus; I wonder if Wolfe was home-schooled).
8) The more I think about it, the more downright strange the narrator is, as a being. Wolfe finesses this by (a) having him be the one to tell the story, (b) having him seem so much like a regular human, and (c) evoking our sympathy for him in his struggle to be free, or at least safe from the fire. But aside from superficial similarity and the narrator’s own spin on things, we don’t know how much like the original author he is, or even how much like a normal human being. Maybe he has the equivalent of massive brain damage, or thought patterns that are more deeply-grooved than a normal person’s, or just much narrower (as I understand it, the authors are resimulated based solely on their literary output, which may not include an autobiography). In any event, he wouldn’t notice this difference from the original author, because he isn’t really him. Also, none of the resimulations seem to last very long; maybe he’s wearing out and becoming senile and I just missed a bunch of clues to that effect. That is to say, maybe this is Wolfe’s least reliable narrator ever!
9) The further into the book you get, the smarter the delicate flower rich-girl teacher turns out to be. Maybe Wolfe is trying to tell us something about masks, maybe something about the narrator’s preconceptions, maybe something about our preconceptions (toward both reality and genre). As with all his other stuff, it’s going to take another couple of read-throughs to figure much more out.
Edited to add point 10: 10) He’s a slave (we figure this out slowly). He’s even separated from (a recreation of his) beloved (which also brings to mind Solaris). I need to look for more 19th-century Slave Narrative tropes the next time I read the book.
Yes, I freely admit all of the above would be desperate, tendentious reaching for transparent excuses for casual sexism—if we were discussing a piece of fan-fiction by a nineteen-year-old male, or a Hollywood script.
But this is Gene Wolfe we’re talking about: all of the above guesses could be true, plus another ten explanations, and it still wouldn’t be as convoluted* as The Fifth Head of Cerberus.
Maybe nobody’s going for Wolfe’s scalp on a sexism charge because they’re afraid of getting caught in his semantic and thematic hall-of-mirrors-built-over-a-tarpit.
(* The judges would also accept: “nuanced”, “layered”, or “thought-provoking”.)
I’m a romanceless Nice Guy™ who bought too much into the whole argument of feminism. That is, I’ve disproportionately read too much into the things they said that make men evil and feel a lot of guilt for things that I was very unlikely to do in the first place. Only now, thanks to this blog and a lot of therapy, I’m realizing that some of the things I’ve taken from feminism are harmful to my own interests.
It was mostly fear (of feminists) covering up other fears (of the unknowns of relationships), which resulted in other fear-driven behavior like trying to get into gay relationships, because in my mind men don’t have a long list of associated dangers. They are easier. Unfortunately I’m not actually into men, so I have to deal with the fear.
Then I ran into “Should You Reverse Any Advice You Hear?”, and I really identified that with the idea that i’m not the intended audience of the advice they give. The conclusion of that post isn’t a strong recommendation to reverse the advice, it’s more like “consider it”, and i’m doing so.
My question is: what is a decent source of advice that opposes what i’ve been fed? My goal here is to be less lonely and keep my sanity. I don’t know, /r/trp? I’m fine with doing a lot of cherry picking if needed.
My advice would be to stop relying on advice. If you have a specific problem, try and find an answer to it. On the other hand, if you’re hoping for general advice on the state of the world and what must be done (and how this ties into sexy-times), there is so much rubbish out there, it isn’t really worth the cherry picking effort.
Presumably you already have your own ideas of what it is that is good/right/beautiful. Before you do anything, ask yourself whether your actions will make the world more like that (in the minute particulars).
Feminist dinosaur here, ie 1970s Marlo Thomas type. I’m not sure which ‘wave’ of feminists you’ve been reading, but it’s probably something I’d like to debunk, if that would help.
Just the current one, I’m only vaguely aware of the existence of the previous waves. It’s like a lot of people in my social circles share clickbait articles where the bait feels like “read and sympathize with this horrible situation, otherwise you’re a horrible person”.
I don’t think you could debunk much – It’s not so much what they say, but how I take it. The motte is all good – equal rights and stuff – but when some “radical feminist” says “all men are rapists”, on the conscious level I understand that statement to be an incorrect generalization, but on the subconscious level I feel like I’ve done something wrong and I’m a bad person. Doesn’t help that they get a lot of support (retweets, favs, plain old money throwing) for being so vocal about their extreme positions – it makes me feel that this isn’t an isolated case and maybe there’s more truth to it than I think, and maybe being a man makes me a threat, as if testosterone had the power to make me irrational enough to commit horrible acts.
…except that I lowered the bar of “horrible acts” from “rape/murder” down to “making eye contact / talking to a girl”. I’ve read many things about women being uncomfortable when strangers talk to them, and I don’t want to be like that. Granted, those strangers are often saying obscene things, but there’s also the “look at this nerd trying to impress me, how disgusting”. That really fucking hurts. That kind of people shouldn’t carry the flag of “social justice”.
Anyway all the above is fixed through therapy, I’m working on it.
“I’m only vaguely aware of the existence of the previous waves.”
Pretty much everyone accepts them as the default in the west.
First wave- legal equality and the vote
Second wave- anti gender discrimination
Of course both movements had their crazies- first wave notably had people willing to resort to vandalism, destruction of property and hunger strikes. There are also crazy ideas that were aligned/part of the movements (free love/misandry/lesbian separatism) as well as the conflation of women’s issue/gender issues.
If you like history, first wave is pretty interesting; it is a time when the Women’s National Anti-Suffrage League and the Men’s National League for Opposing Women’s Franchise join forces to create the National League for Opposing Women’s Suffrage.
@ Samuel Skinner
“first wave notably had people willing to resort to vandalism, destruction of property and hunger strikes”
One of these things is not like the others.
@ Anon #1519
…except that I lowered the bar of “horrible acts” from “rape/murder” down to “making eye contact / talking to a girl”.
A while back Scott Alexander wrote about something Scott Aaronson wrote about such ‘feminist’ conflation of motives.
I’ve read many things about women being uncomfortable when strangers talk to them, and I don’t want to be like that.
As a girl, I didn’t expect horrible behavior or horrible motives from every man who approached me with eye contact etc etc (all that kind of body language). But if they did it without good reason I snubbed them anyway. This must be very confusing to the man: the current ‘feminists’ conflate all men’s motives to rape … and many girls have only one way of responding to any man who is acting insincere!
there’s also the “look at this nerd trying to impress me, how disgusting”.
Ime, it’s not the nerdiness/geekiness, it’s the insincerity, the trying to impress. In my experience, a geek/nerd was someone who had something in his own life to be geeky about, which was a good sign.
When a person has taken a lot of damage about how they talk to girls, he may become self-conscious about talking to anyone about anything. That’s a reason for getting involved with groups that have neither many girls nor many men preoccupied with girls. Find groups with a good mix of demographics: old women, married couples, etc. Such as projects that have deadlines and problems, where people will be talking about definite practical things with no time to be self-conscious: building a community playground, running a food bank, or something with children or dogs to wrangle.
Uh… No. They don’t. Other than that, good comment.
Hey Anon,
I was wondering if I could ask you some questions
about your experiences as one of “the romanceless”. It’s not journalism, just research for a character im creating.
I dont necessarily expect to hear from you but if you’re interested in reflecting on what its been like with a nonjudgmental correspondent feel free to anonymously (or not) email me : normanoverholt@outlook.com.
I feel your pain, romancelessness is hard. (It’s hard even after you solve the sexlessness part.) It sounds like you’ve been reading some pretty awful stuff if you’ve come to regard (heterosexual) dating as a landmine field. You should realise that some people’s embittered hostility towards you and yours is not The Objective Truth, and however else you agree with feminism, once you stumble upon shit, you should take care not to step in it. As a general rule, never trust anything fully; always be on the lookout for that bit (or heap) of wrongness that is basically guaranteed to be found in everything.
Which brings me to my other point. Best not to employ the pendulum model of changing opinions or worldviews, i.e. going as far off in one direction as your conscience and sanity allows, and then reversing course hard and in an accelerated fashion. TRP, too, is full of shit, and as far as I’m concerned it’s not even symmetrical to feminism in how far you have to immerse yourself in it in order to reach toxicity. What you need here is not to be found on the feminism-antifeminism spectrum, but outside of it. Something free of constant gender strife.
Get yourself a meatspace, mainstream, mixed-gender group of friends who are reasonably attractive and gregarious and don’t have very strong opinions on gender issues, and anchor your worldview to theirs as a sanity check. Cozy up to women in non-sexual contexts and see for yourself whether they bite or not. 🙂 I don’t know what other characteristics of yours other than this deep anxiety contribute to your lack of success with women, but in my experience, the best ways to hook up with people are to look good and to attend large social gatherings that involve copious amounts of alcohol. Usually, you can do something about both of these things.
As for your information feed, I’d suggest reading some mainstream men’s magazines for dating advice, since they’re guaranteed not to be off-puttingly feminist and, unlike r/theredpill or PUA blogs, there are reputational checks in place for them that filter out the worst of the other. But… then again, I don’t read those and can’t vouch for them, I’m just going off some vague idea about what they might contain.
(Whoa i spent a bit too much writing one reply and four more replies showed up, thanks everyone! ♥)
Where do I get one of those? The few times I’ve gone to places with copious amounts of alcohol I ended up interacting with either the guys I already knew, or no one at all. The latter isn’t fun.
Anon #1519 asks: Where do I get one of those?
Is there a local gym, hobby club, church or minor/amateur league sports organization you can hit up? If so those would be good places to start.
This year, you might look at groups of volunteers supporting whichever political candidate you lean toward. Needn’t fake anything: it’s early enough in the season that “I’m undecided between [H and B / T and C] and I’d like to learn more” is okay if you’re efficiently stuffing envelopes or whatever.
Can you expand on this?
I’m assuming that by loneliness you mean a lack of romantic success with women, which luckily is something that is very fixable if you have a solid plan. PUA has been refined a lot over the last decade: in particular, Day Game is essentially an optimized version of ‘normal’ dating behavior which I recommend as much less soulless than going to clubs / bars. My gold standard there is Roosh V’s Day Bang, although that’s fairly old by now. Even if you just want to do low pressure online dating / hookup apps there are good data-driven approaches: OKCupid for one has a huge amount of public data outlining successful strategies.
But you shouldn’t expect having more frequent sex or relationships to fix loneliness or maintain sanity on it’s own. You can’t rely on the woman (or women) in your life to meet all of your psychological needs. Probably the best thing that you could do for your own mental health would be to get a group of male friends together with a common purpose. The Männerbund is a vital institution that is largely missing in modern society, but you can still get a lot of the benefits by joining a workout group or sports team. If you’re still in college, consider getting involved in Greek Life or the ROTC: I personally chose not to do either because it would have interfered with my studies, but the sense of brotherhood and discipline have been very healthy for my friends who have.
Also this is just something that helped me, so I can’t say whether it would be useful for you necessarily, but I found that classical philosophy is very helpful for rebuilding a non-pathological definition of virtue. Meditations and the Enchiridion were the most personally relevant out of what I’ve read but we have such a rich philosophical heritage it would take lifetimes to do more than just dip a toe in. If you need something to replace the broken ideals of modern feminism with it makes sense to go back to the source.
Anyway I’m really glad to hear that you’re getting better and wish you the best going forward!
Yep, that’s pretty much it regarding loneliness. Probably not an actual feeling.
I don’t really have problems regarding sanity. Probably. It was sort of hyperbole mixed with fear of dangerous thoughts messing with the apparent clarity I have now. I used to have depression but it appears to be completely solved by now, which is the reason that the focus of my therapy is moving to more “complicated” subjects like interpersonal relationships. And yeah, complicated – it’s likely that my previous issues with depression and lack of self confidence and this current issue with feminism are all misguided attempts to protect myself from the even greater problem. Yeah it sounds silly once the problem is identified.
Other than that, thanks for the ideas! Getting a group of male friends sounds like an easier first step that might help with the others, too (well, that’s pretty much what other replies say, too).
TRP works fine if you make sure to let your eyes kinda glaze over every time it pretends to be at all scientific. It’s the one example that always pops up in my mind when I hear people arguing that what is true and useful must always be the same.
I don’t mean this as an attack but if you’re the type of person that read a whole bunch of internet feminism and it affected you so deeply that you needed a lot of therapy, I’d stay away from the ideological parts of the internet (including self help communities). A lot of it is play acting, trying on different ideas, being more strident and pure because of anonymity, and so on. If you can’t treat it as the game it is for many of the other people than it is just going to hurt you.
If you have a good therapist (a big if, I know) work with him or her on these problems instead. That’s what you are paying for after all.
Along the same lines, this is great advice:
1. Less Lonely:
If your goal is sex and/or romance, begin by focusing on stuff that is beneficial for you anyway, and additionally has the effect of making you a more desirable partner. I have no idea what kind of shape you’re in, how you dress, etc but working out, eating better, dressing better, are all a guaranteed return for you, outside of making you more attractive and more confident. Plus, gyms can be a great place to meet people (for friendship, or otherwise).
Going on some kind of high school graduation comedy quest to get laid will lead to disappointment. Improving yourself is a more sure payoff, and it increases your chances of romantic/sexual success.
2. Keep Sanity: I’m going to echo the people here who have said not to just go wildly off in the other direction. Far better to just avoid stuff that bothers you by, for instance, unfollowing people on Facebook. From what you say below it sounds like the issue is seeing people in your social circle post clickbait articles. If you can’t unfollow for whatever reason, just remember that clickbait is like that for a reason.
One approach to finding a girlfriend is to expand your network of non-girlfriends–married couples, male friends, women who for any reason are not prospective romantic partners. People know people.
After the end of my first marriage, the wife of a colleague suggested that there were lots of nice girls at the local university folk dancing, so I should try going there. It turned out to be good advice.
Plus, again, advantage of other, mostly guaranteed benefits.
The longest-lived and best relationship I’ve been in was in large part the result of something I got involved in with no hope or intention of it getting me into a relationship.
Replying to myself to reply to all the repliers: Thanks so much! You all seem to be sensible people who don’t violently disagree with me for having some unpopular opinions, and I’m glad I’ve found this place. I get a feeling of safety here, even though it’s all public and I have to wear this anon mask.
All the advice is considered, even the advice that says that I should stop relying so much on advice, and that I should stop considering all the advice, and… hmmm, that’s a bit hard to add up. Well, I did say I’d cherry pick.
One thing I forgot to point out and that I realized because of a couple of suggestions: I’m not from the USA. I tend to forget that, because most of my online activity always ends up being USA-centric, and I fear feminism as if I lived there, but I’m fairly sure that the country where I live doesn’t have the same kind of aggressive feminism that results in concerned articles in conservative newspapers talking about how the usage of trigger warnings in universities is literally destroying our youth.
But yeah sometimes I have to explain a different world to my therapist. She’s on holiday for the next few weeks BTW, which is why I felt the need to talk about this stuff here. Thanks again ♥
Advice can be good. But you do not have a real-world “sanity check” for online advice.
Though “Red Pill” myself, the Red Pill would do you no favors if you aren’t actually focused on meatspace.
Second Point: The so-called “Nice Guy” problem will affect you regardless of your online habits. It is not a problem to be a “Nice Guy,” but you cannot walk on eggshells around everyone your whole life. You will transgress social norms and people will get pissed at you. You cannot avoid that.
But more importantly, it’s not the end of the world. Most people are not going to call the Stasi just because you used a bad pick-up line or whatever.
If you want to see what TRP has to offer, read The Game by Neil Strauss. It’s unsettling, but not to the degree that actual TRP sites are, and it’s also funny and sad and humanizes some people who actively resist humanization. (By the way, are we not allowed to spell out The R– P— on SSC?)
You might also want to try spending half an hour a day being a psychopath: analyze why people are really doing the things they’re doing, and don’t let yourself think of anybody as good (or evil). Don’t start with real people; begin with characters in The Walking Dead.
It turns out people are usually a lot simpler than we think, it’s just really disturbing to see the strings on which we all dance. (Cue Bela Lugosi….) But once you’ve adjusted your social and interpersonal habits and approaches to the underlying reality, you can put the muscles and skin back over its distressing skeleton and proceed with a normal life again.
(This was much more encouraging and uplifting in my head.)
My RSS informs me there’s an upcoming election in the Union of the Comoros. My first thought: gays, full to the top of queers they are. A point well made.
This is a bit of a weird question, but I have been reading r/AskHistorians for a while, and while I know accusations of tribes and biases are almost a cliche here, but I noticed something kind of weird: everyone is obsessed with and fawning over the Eastern Roman Empire / Byzantines. I am not sure if it is just one or two people skewing the discussion but every discussion about them seems to cover how tragically underrated they were and every discussion about their wars or actions seems to be weirdly sympathetic.
(Weirdly, there is no such oddities for groups like Vikings, Soviets or Mongols– they are all discussed with what looks to an outsider with clarity and rigor and are condemned whenever they do something amoral)
The Byzantines are the culture that hipster classicists study.
(/s, but only somewhat.)
It’s just a fad, I think. They’re not covered much, if at all, in the average person’s education, so reading about them is like finding out some kind of “secret knowledge”. And certain aspects of it can be interpreted in a way that makes you feel superior to the conventional wisdom. Like, “you know how they told you the Roman Empire fell in the 400s—well that’s a lie!”
I think it’s similar to the attraction people get to arguing that Galileo was an asshole who had it coming, or that Thomas Edison was a fraud who stole everything from Nikola Tesla.
Probably 30% or more of the Byzantophilia in internet culture comes from playing Europa Universalis, too. 😉
But overall, I think it’s just a fad, like how several decades ago everyone was wanting to study the hidden wisdom of the Orient. Even C.S. Lewis was talking about the “Tao”. And before that, it was appreciating Ancient Egypt and the cultures of the Near East. Except this is more of a mini-fad; I don’t think the average person on the street, or even the average “sophisticated intellectual” gives a rip about the Eastern Roman Empire.
FTFY
I actually find this to be a problem in academia in general, at least in the humanities, where I work. On the one hand, it’s really hard to actually dig up something no one has heard of and prove to everybody it’s important. On the other, nobody cares if you prove that Rome was a great civilization, Mozart was a great composer, and the most famous poets are justly famous.
The easiest way to feel you’re making a contribution is to say “you know that really important thing you thought you understood? Well, actually, you’re totally wrong because [insert minor quibbles x, y, and z which “complicate” our understanding of famous thing a, but don’t really imply the man on the street should change his evaluation of Rome or Mozart or whatever].”
As a Sinologist who usually writes in English for an English audience but who sometimes writes in Chinese and presents his papers to Chinese audiences, I also notice this dynamic: the Chinese are still very much at the level where they are happy if you tell them something good about their civilization and most celebrated artists and unhappy if you tell them something bad (though arguably they’d be especially unreceptive to a white person telling them something negative about their civilization, but I think it also applies to Chinese scholars). [insert handwringing about postmodernism and the Downfall of the West]
Western academics are much more about the “problematizing” and “complicating,” for better and for worse (this has recently become an issue for famous Indologist Sheldon Pollock, who is getting slammed by Hindu academics for not presenting a sufficiently reverent vision of Indian civilization).
The Byzantines also pop up in Victoria 2 and in mods for Hearts of Iron. Paradox likes them almost as much as they like overpowered Sweden.
“Sweden is Not Overpowered”
Also, Paradox adds the Byzantines to everything largely due to huge community demand.
Top comment, by the official Paradox Interactive youtube account:
“It’s funny, we were just thinking of giving Sweden a boost. We also feel that Sweden is not overpowered, so it’s nice to hear that we aren’t alone!”
I alternate between which of these two I find most convincing. Pascal-Emmanual Gobry argues that conservatives have essentially taken over the Republican party, they just haven’t taken the reigns yet.
On the other hand, Ace hits it out of the park with this:
I think this is part of what Schilling and Kestenbaum miss upthread. It may well be that this was the Republicans’ “turn” at the helm. But too many in the Republican base no longer believe that this equates to them getting a turn. Kestenbaum and his colleagues are especially mistaken to be excited at the Trump phenomenon. Say you guys take the Presidency. What do you think happens as you confirm even harder to the Trump contingent that they are disenfranchised? Do you think they will just vanish? Trump is a symptom. Stopping Trump will not cure the patient. Only stopping Trump will probably make it even worse, as the pressure he might release builds even higher.
And it is not just a right-wing phenomenon. How many Democrat-controlled cities have had riots in the last few years? How many days has it been since your police forces last shot/strangled a black man? The fact that your only two candidates are Hillary “I’m ok with covering up rape, and if you vote for me, so are you” Clinton and Bernie “Even lefty wonks think I don’t understand policy, but at least I hate bankers” Sanders should be a source of shame. Your base may be slightly more willing to sit down and do as they’re told, but not that much more, and I suspect not for that much longer.
Phrased yet another way, in this far too long meandering rant: If a nuclear bomb fell on DC tomorrow and nobody you knew was there, would you be worse off?
I’m probably not an “elite,” but I am a model citizen by most objective measures. I am financially successful, reasonably high IQ, have no criminal record, pay all my taxes, reproduce above replacement level, and am even an elder in my church. The nuke scenario improves my life and the life of my family. That should terrify you.
“The nuke scenario improves my life and the life of my family.”
Politics aside, I find it very very hard to believe in a central government that is on the one hand sufficiently superfluous that making it vanish would not result in maybe temporary but certainly costly chaos and on the other hand sufficiently powerful to make your life significantly worse by its mere presence.
Yeah, unless you’re living in a cave, you would be seriously affected and in a negative way by the economic and political chaos resulting from the nuclear destruction of DC. Not to mention the police state that would likely follow.
I’m not going to say that our government is objectively doing a good job, but it could be a lot worse. A 59% is a failing grade, but it’s a lot better than 0%.
>The fact that your only two candidates are Hillary “I’m ok with covering up rape, and if you vote for me, so are you” Clinton and Bernie “Even lefty wonks think I don’t understand policy, but at least I hate bankers” Sanders should be a source of shame.
While I agree that Hillary and Bernie look like pretty bad candidates, if the party gives enough creedence to this 8 year thing to plan around it, it makes perfect sense. If you’re pretty confident that you’re gonna lose, you’re not going to burn a good candidate in the election, so you just throw Hillary to the wolves, and you can even market it as giving her her due for being snubbed in 2008.
Bernie just sort of happened, his current campaign to me seems like what Trump’s might’ve been if the GOP rallied around a single candidate from the start, only much sadder because you know a lot of people threw their money into that sink.
I would claim that it *is* mainly a right-wing phenomenon – look at polling. 77 percent of Democrats would be at least satisfied with Clinton as nominee, which in line with historical averages at this point (there was 71% support for Obama in 2008 after the primary, for example, and McCain in 2008 and Kerry in 2004 were in the mid-70s as well). Meanwhile, the major Republicans today are all around 50%. So I’d read that as a collapse in Republican unity and no particular change in Democratic unity.
Not sure what you’re referring to regarding riots. I’m sure there were some high-profile incidents but I would be surprised if there was an increasing trend.
It’s mostly a gut feeling thing. Being in power can paper over cracks a bit, just as Republicans didn’t really start voicing their displeasure with Bush until he was out of office.
I think Sanders being competitive at all took everybody by surprise, including him, and is a symptom of deeper rumblings. If people were happy, he would have had no support at all. And notice how nobody has a positive message this cycle. Obama had a very positive message the first time he ran (Hope and Change!), regardless of whether or not it was true. Sanders’ message is “everything is awful.” In fact, his opening debate statement describing how bad things are could have been ripped straight from a Tea Party rally until he got to part where he blamed it all on bankers. BLM was getting decidedly uppity, although the wind seems to have gone out of their sails lately.
Like I said, more a gut feeling than something I have data for. But I wouldn’t bank on great Democratic unity in the forthcoming decade.
This is the kind of thing that drives me nuts. The answer is one, in Baltimore, and all in all a quite small riot. There was another minor incident in Ferguson which isn’t even close to a real city.
Things have been so good for so long that we don’t even remember what a real riot is or how terrible they were.
I think you are completely, 100%, totally wrong. It would be mass pandemonium for years or even decades. Life would noticeably be worse for virtually everyone. You want to talk about an alternate universe where the federal government never developed into as big an entity — fine, but this is just totally off base. Depressingly so since you seem like a pretty sharp dude.
A real riot? Is that like a real Scotsman?
I count eight in the US on Wikipedia’s list of riots in the 2010s and fewer, but larger-scale, in Canada. That’s not many compared to South America or the Middle East, but it’s more than one.
(That’s not to say that the nuke argument isn’t stupid. It’s pretty stupid.)
But I’m hesitant to infer broad urban left-wing unrest from a list of riots that includes “riots in Keene, New Hampshire caused by drunken college students at a pumpkin festival” and “Riots in Tampa, Florida After Cigar City Brewing Company prematurely ran out of beer at their annual release of their highly acclaimed Hunahpu’s Imperial Stout”
Totally fair. I was there for the riots in Oakland, though, and those were a lot closer to the Ferguson pattern than the pumpkin one — and symptomatic of a broader pattern of civil unrest that the list doesn’t really convey.
Hunahpu’s Imperial Stout is the fuel of the Cathedral.
I thought lattes were the fuel of the Cathedral?
@sweeneyrod – What’s that? The Cathedral ran out of fuel? No wonder the Trump is resounding!
symptomatic of a broader pattern of civil unrest that the list doesn’t really convey
What conveys a pattern of broad civil unrest to you?
>I thought lattes were the fuel of the Cathedral?
Jeez, lattes are so 2010, get on with the times.
If by “broad pattern of civil unrest”, you mean maybe somewhat more unrest than the 2000s, but less than the 90s, the 80s, the 70s, the 60s, the 50s, the 40s, the 30s, and further back than that, okay. But that’s a funny idea of widespread civil unrest.
Well, to take Oakland in 2010 as an example, there was one event — the riots following the verdict in the Oscar Grant case — that made national news. But depending on where you draw the line, there were anywhere between a dozen and close to a hundred little events before and after that didn’t make the news, or only locally. Marches, sit-ins, other demonstrations, with or without a black bloc trying to kick off a riot — later on these shaded into Occupy, which was a lot more combative in Oakland than in most places. Leaflet and poster campaigns. Vandalism — the bank by Lake Merritt got its windows smashed a half-dozen times, and some cars got torched on May Day.
You’re going to have a hard time connecting the dots on this sort of thing if you’re just reading about it on the Internet. But it’s there.
@Vox — I was not trying to describe a national pattern there. Tensions in Oakland were highest from 2009 through maybe 2013 — there were some aftershocks around the time of Ferguson and Baltimore, but I got the impression that that was being driven by anarchists and other radicals, not by anything grassroots. The late Nineties through the 2000s were quieter, but the early Nineties were worse. I can’t speak as accurately for much earlier but I get the impression of a long dry spell — in terms of political violence — starting in the Seventies.
For your reading convenience, here are all the U.S. and Canadian incidents from the cited Wikipedia page since 2010:
• 2010 – Vancouver Winter Olympics Riot. Small short-lived disturbance involving Black Bloc members[105]
• 2010 – April 10 – Springfest Riot, Harrisonburg, Virginia, dozens injured; 30–35 arrested.[112]
• 2010 – Riots in Santa Cruz, California.[115]
• 2010 – G20 Riots in Toronto Canada – Zero dead, significant damage, 1105 arrests [125]
• 2010 – Riots in Oakland, California after not-guilty verdict returned in Oscar Grant case.[130]
• 2010 – Prison riot in Quebec, Canada, 2 killed.[133]
• 2011 – Riots in Vancouver, Canada after the Vancouver Canucks lost to the Boston Bruins in the Stanley Cup.[238]
• 2012 – Riots in Anaheim, California, several injuries and 24 arrested.[345]
• 2013 – Riots in Brooklyn, New York after the death of Kimani Gray who was shot and killed by NYPD
• 2013 – Riots in Huntington Beach, California, 1 injured.[359][360]
• 2014 – Riots in Tampa, Florida After Cigar City Brewing Company prematurely ran out of beer at their annual release of their highly acclaimed Hunahpu’s Imperial Stout, angry attendees began a small riot. Police were called to the scene and dispersed the angry crowd. The riot prompted the brewery’s owners to cancel the event in the future. No lives were lost, but some injuries were reported.[369]
• 2014 – Riots in Keene, New Hampshire caused by drunken college students at a pumpkin festival.
• 2014 – Riots in Ferguson, Missouri caused by the shooting of Michael Brown and charges against the accused officer being dropped.
• 2015 – April 26: 2015 Baltimore riots erupted in Baltimore, Maryland, United States in response to the death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray, who died while in police custody.
• December 28 Riot of 2,000 at St Matthews Mall, Kentucky.
• 2016 February 27: Riots after the shooting of Abdi Mohamed in Salt Lake City, Utah, U.S.
Based on this, the Democrat voting bloc most likely to riot seems to be college kids (despite having the least to riot about).
One of these things is not like the other. One of these things just doesn’t belong…
I count 1836 total arrests in all of these riots, of which 1105 came from the G20 riots in Toronto. 308 injuries, of which 136 were in Toronto and that almost certainly an undercount. Based on this, the voting bloc most likely to riot seems to be not Democratic but Liberal Party of Canada.
More to the point, I count three small riots on that list – Toronto, Ferguson, and Baltimore/2015.
Compare to, e.g.,
Watts/1965, 34 dead, 1032 injured, 3438 arrested
Detroit/1967, 43 dead, 1189 injured, 7321 arrested
Baltimore/1968, 6 dead, 700 injured, 5800+ arrested
Washington/1968, 12 dead, 1098 injured, 6100+ arrested
Los Angeles/1992, 55 dead, 2000+ injured, 11000+ arrested
I lived through that last one, so indulge me in a “these kids these days moment”. You all think this is a time of Great Unrest heralding the Downfall of Western Civilization, as manifest in the riotous behavior the disaffected youth of today? We’ve lived through worse by far, and endured. We built spaceships and flew to the moon, while enduring a riots an order of magnitude worse than anything seen in this decade. So go join all the ignorant buffoons who talk of “war zones” in the streets of American cities, so we can laugh at you en masse.
Today’s riots are an insignificant nuisance. If the rioters are trying to achieve any sort of social change, positive or negative, they’re going to have to pry themselves away from their Twitter and Tumblr feeds and seriously up their game. Today’s Trump voters, those actually scare me.
I knew I should have left off the nuke thing, but since I went there…
I think there would be an economic downturn as a result, sure, but as Bernie like to point out, our economy isn’t exactly great right now. The economy would recover.
I do not expect roaming bands of warlords to come in. My neighborhood will not erupt into riots,. My local community will be able to continue providing the essential services, and all the money that is currently taken from me in taxes will be able to fill in the remaining gaps. Things will have settled into a new equilibrium long before my kids have to fend for themselves.
What do the feds offer me? Social Security payments that may not be there when I’m old enough to get them (and are inferior to what I can save on my own away)? More expensive insurance? Countless subsidies and welfare programs which I am ineligible for, but must pay for? The main thing the central government exports to me and mine are programs to indoctrinate my children away from my religion and into Progressivism. That last one alone would probably be sufficient all in itself.
@Mark Atwood
No, I just have crappy hosting, but it’s cheap and I hardly ever post anyway. Fixed.
I’m reminded of the Steven Pinker quote:
As a young teenager in proudly peaceable Canada during the romantic 1960s, I was a true believer in Bakunin’s anarchism. I laughed off my parents’ argument that if the government ever laid down its arms all hell would break loose. Our competing predictions were put to the test at 8:00 A.M. on October 17, 1969, when the Montreal police went on strike. By 11:20 A.M. the first bank was robbed. By noon most downtown stores had closed because of looting. Within a few more hours, taxi drivers burned down the garage of a limousine service that competed with them for airport customers, a rooftop sniper killed a provincial police officer, rioters broke into several hotels and restaurants, and a doctor slew a burglar in his suburban home. By the end of the day, six banks had been robbed, a hundred shops had been looted, twelve fires had been set, forty carloads of storefront glass had been broken, and three million dollars in property damage had been inflicted, before city authorities had to call in the army and, of course, the Mounties to restore order. This decisive empirical test left my politics in tatters.
It was certainly eye-opening to go to a country with weaker police presence and notice that every Starbucks — I’m not exaggerating, I literally mean every Starbucks — had a couple of guards with Kevlar vests and short-barreled shotguns.
Treasury debt has essentially replaced gold as the basis of the international financial system. (Please don’t turn this subthread into an argument about the gold standard.) There wouldn’t just be a downturn, there would be absolute chaos while the world tried to figure out what to do now that dollars aren’t backed by anything anymore.
But once that gets sorted out, you’re probably right in that your burbclave would do just fine in the face of federal collapse. Just make sure the guards are paid well – there are MANY people on the outside who wouldn’t do just fine.
Yes, quite understated. Not to mention the elimination of the Federal Reserve to coordinate global finance. The local banks would still be around, I guess.
” Not to mention the elimination of the Federal Reserve to coordinate global finance.”
???
Why do you think the Fed coordinates global finance? That’s the capital market, not the central bank. The world capital market could run just fine without the Fed, or Washington.
“If a nuclear bomb fell on DC tomorrow and nobody you knew was there, would you be worse off?……..I am a model citizen by most objective measures. I am financially successful, reasonably high IQ, have no criminal record, pay all my taxes, reproduce above replacement level, and am even an elder in my church. The nuke scenario improves my life and the life of my family. That should terrify you.”
It does. So, in which Church of Satan are you an elder?
“The nuke scenario improves my life and the life of my family. That should terrify you.”
It improves my life too. I mean, assuming the implausible scenario where everyone just kind of goes on as before but without the federal government.
To imagine a scenario which doesn’t imply such crazy displacement/war: if all the state legislatures voted to dissolve the federal government in a gradual enough way as not to cause too much chaos but most of the states entered into agreements continuing to allow free travel and trade among them, I think my life would be much, much better in fairly short order.
But I also think Jaskologist’s metaphor may be appropriate: there is enough frustration with DC right now that many would sooner accept the chaos that would ensue upon a more radical, sudden change than let it continue on in its current course. That is scary. I’m not saying we’re ripe for a revolution… yet. Things have to get a lot worse still before people will be dissatisfied enough for that. But I do think Trump is, in some sense, an attempt at a bloodless revolution.
I’m not setting the fuses, I’m just saying that federal government is a net util loss for me and mine.
Now, if DC were on fire, the Gospel does teach that I must piss on it, but my sinful nature would probably put up a real fight.
I should point out that I did not mention myself, personally, as being “excited” about Trump being nominated.
Yes, chances are that Donald Trump as Republican nominee will give Hillary a win. But given the structural advantages Republicans have in 2016, Trump could win the election no matter what he does or says. Think of the novel “Dark Horse”, by Fletcher Knebel, which posits a similar scenario.
If Hillary is elected, Republicans will continue to accumulate grievances and motivation. In 2020, after 12 years of Democrats in the White House, they will probably win, most likely with someone a lot like Rubio.
I’m sorry, but I don’t take the overall Trump phenomenon very seriously. Trump is a fad, and he will be forgotten soon after he loses. Most of his supporters, I mean like more than 90% of the people who voted for him in primaries, are lightly attached to politics, and without Trump as an interesting focal point, will turn their attention to other things.
Yeah, lots of people feel alienated and disfranchised a lot of the time, that’s part of the human condition. It’s what Young Marx wrote about, apparently, as distinct from the more sophisticated stuff written when he was older.
I know a lot of conservative Republicans, some of whom are Trump supporters, and I discuss politics with them in person almost every week. I am not seeing this seething rage you describe. People are intrigued by Trump, and like that he would shake things up, but I don’t get the sense that they’d be very upset if he didn’t end up as president.
“I know a lot of conservative Republicans, some of whom are Trump supporters, and I discuss politics with them almost every week. I am not seeing this seething rage you describe.”
It definitely exists. Don’t know what proportion of Trump supporters, but it does. Arguably more importantly, I think there’s a decent chunk of people who are normally apolitical who like the idea of Trump just because… I am tempted to say because he’s a reality TV star, but I think it’s more about the kind of reality TV personality he is: labor class billionaire, i. e. what they aspire to.
@Larry Kestenbaum – “People are intrigued by Trump, and like that he would shake things up, but I don’t get the sense that they’d be very upset if he didn’t end up as president.”
Well, for that matter, I’m not going to be upset if he doesn’t end up as president either. Getting him into office isn’t really the point. Using him to pry the overton window back open and to punish the GOP is. Actually getting the presidency is a distant third.
[EDIT] – “I’m sorry, but I don’t take the overall Trump phenomenon very seriously. Trump is a fad, and he will be forgotten soon after he loses.”
This is entirely correct. By the same token, Ron Paul was a fad. The Tea Party was a fad, at least until the GOP more or less co-opted it. That’s sort of the whole point of what we’ve been saying: Trump himself is just a symptom. He will be immediately abandoned as soon as he loses because a great many people are only interested in his presidential bid as a tactical play.
Trump is a lot more a fad than either of the other two you mention. Ron Paul never won mass support, never won any big elections, but he has many thousands of serious, dedicated adherents and defenders even today. I don’t know that there is even such a thing going on for Trump. His movement is miles wide and a millimeter deep.
And I mean that the whole Trump thing is a fad, including the anger. Trump says something that resonates, highlights and denounces some particular outrage, and a lot of people say, “Yeah!” They post it on Facebook pages and share it with their friends. Many of them will go and vote for Trump in the primary and the general election. But that will be the extent of it.
By a year from now, there will be nothing left. Assuming Trump loses fair and square, there will be no interest in marching on Washington to demand anything. If millions of people get activated and energized again, it will be over some completely new outrage.
I’ve been in politics for almost half a century, and I’ve seen lots of these things come and go, from the right, from the left, from the center. Absent some recent hot grievance, something quite specific, especially something that affects them directly and personally,. Americans (or probably most people) don’t stay outraged very long. A movement arises, motivates millions of people, and perhaps even seems poised to force major changes. But then something changes, people lose interest, and it vanishes.
No, only a tiny handful of people even think in terms of ongoing strategy and tactics. And those people, including yourself, are politicos. They’re the ones who wake up in the morning thinking about politics. They’re the activists, the thinkers, the bloggers, the tacticians, in some cases the revolutionaries.
They are just exactly like the people who make up the Republican and Democratic “establishments”, in every city and town and township of America, the precinct delegates, the writers of party newsletters, the campaign volunteers.
And, indeed, a portion of the people who get motivated by Trump, and stay motivated, and want to bring about change, will end up in Republican party organizations, just as some of the people who got motivated by Bernie Sanders will end up in Democratic party organizations. Some will get disillusioned and drop out, but others will remain indefinitely.
Almost every activist in either party can be identified by which presidential candidate brought them in, wave after wave after wave. Me, I came out of the McGovern campaign.
This is going to sound horribly condescending, and I know I would have hated to hear it when I was 18, but the effect of actually engaging in ongoing electoral politics gradually deradicalizes people.
They maintain their principles, sure, but they become more practical, more aware of how big the polity is, how many points of view there are, how difficult governing is. Sooner or later, they come to value electing candidates and advancing policy goals rather than overthrowing tables.
On a smaller scale, this is exactly the same phenomenon as people getting elected to Congress, going to Washington, and “becoming part of the problem”. A devoted acolyte of Sanders or Trump would say, they get corrupted. And maybe they do to an extent, after all, there’s a whole lot of money floating around.
But aside from that, they figure out that abolishing the Federal Reserve or getting rid of nuclear weapons or instituting single-payer, or whatever else they promised to do during the campaign, is going to be incredibly complicated, not a matter of taking a quick vote and going home. They come to realize that this is a really big country, that the government has a whole lot of moving parts, and tinkering with them even a little requires accommodation with a whole lot of other people with different ideas and interests.
That’s a long and roundabout way of saying, no, I don’t see an enraged citizenry or civil disorder or riots in our future. We have some serious problems, but in so many ways, we’ve never had it so good. Yes, practically everyone is dissatisfied about something, but that is nothing new, and isn’t likely to change.
@ Larry K.
Hm. What brought me in was 1998. As a non-politico, I’d cheered Bill Clinton in 1992, appreciated the peace and prosperity and given him credit, but felt resentment as he caved on DOMA, copyright extension, etc. I can imagine someone who stopped at that point carrying the resentment permanently, especially if they hadn’t noticed the prosperity.
Your idea of cycles makes a lot of sense to me. After eight years or so, the good conditions are taken for granted and the remaining flaws are why we need Change(tm).
The apolitical nature of most people is simultaneously the most frustrating and reassuring thing. Whether it’s Occupy Wall Street or me the radical libertarian, I think in any society, even those which end up having big revolutions, it is always a small layer of really motivated people stoking/latching on to some momentary upswell of common fervor. I don’t think you could get the majority of the populace of anywhere to care about any kind of politics for a very long time.
Re. it not being simple to abolish the Federal Reserve, etc., this is actually the phenomenon I was trying to find a good name for in a recent thread: the “professional distortion” which makes you less able to put something into perspective the closer you get to it. I am not, of course, saying that I understand the Fed better than someone who works there; I am saying someone who works there is also likely to have a distorted impression of its importance.
Setting aside any object level issues of whether abolishing this department or that central bank would be a good idea, in the same way I’m willing to consider arguments from insiders for why x department is more important than I think it is, people who have been working deeply in politics for years have to consider that they may have developed an outsized impression of how complex and indispensable the thing they work with really is.
I mean, how many people who work for the FDA think the FDA could be safely abolished, for example? To take an extreme example, we can imagine some kind of North Korean bureau of farm planning and one of its employees saying “do you know how complicated our job is?? People are already struggling to get enough to eat now; abolish the Farm Planning Bureau and they’ll really starve.”
That is, precisely because it is such a big, complex nation and economy, the federal government needs to stop trying to run it. But that same complexity gives insiders the impression that something so complicated could never run on its own.
Doesn’t this go to heart Burkean conservatism, which for some reason everyone around here likes to attribute to Chesterton?
I’m politically liberal (in the US sense) but my inclination would not be to outright abolish any major branch of government without very deep and long consideration.
There was a political survey linked somewhere in here and it had a question about NSA surveillance. One of the options was “No, and the NSA should be abolished.” To me that answer makes no sense. Perhaps if we took it to mean electronic espionage would be the CIA’s responsibility (or the military, etc) but if you take it to mean we are not going to have any offensive or defensive signals intelligence program it just strikes me as willfully naive. And I say that as someone that’s pretty far to the pacifist / isolationist side of things and has been called naive many times myself.
All of which is to say: I can imagine a world without an FDA and the outlines of a path to get there, but if you think we should just vote to abolish the FDA and leave it at that (or blow up the buildings) then I think you are exaggerating to make a point rather than suggesting an actual change in the world you’d put in place if the responsibility were on your shoulders.
“I think you are exaggerating to make a point rather than suggesting an actual change in the world you’d put in place if the responsibility were on your shoulders.”
I think the purpose of providing the “blow it all up” scenario is to emphasize this:
If I had a choice between magic button 1, which causes the US government to completely fall apart today, or magic button 2, which causes us to gradually transition to an anarchocapitalist social arrangement in a logical, orderly fashion, with a gradual scale back in the government, I would, of course, push button 2.
But if there is no button 2, if the choices are button 1 or nothing, then I would push button 1, or at least seriously consider it.
This is the point of the extreme scenario: to emphasize that, while (almost) anyone would prefer an orderly transition, some people are unhappy enough with the status quo that they’d even prefer a disorderly transition to its continuation.
The thing is, it seems increasingly like button 2 does not, in fact, exist, at least if the desired outcome is an actual, significant reduction in government power. Republican voters have, in effect, been pushing button 2 for a long time now and are frustrated that it doesn’t work. Voting for Trump is a move towards finally pushing button 1.
And this is why the Democrats are now the conservative party. I think there may be fewer of them who would push button 1 (with the results correspondingly changed to their ideal arrangement) today than Republicans. They don’t need to push button 1 because their button 2 is functional: in fact, it’s the default result.
Basically, the more unhappy you are with the status quo, the bigger a risk you’re willing to take in hopes of changing it. The fact that the election will probably be Hillary vs. Trump shows exactly where their respective electorates are at in this regard. The Democrats are the conservative party.
I’m going to have to second onyomi here. We know there are policies in place that are actively bad that have substantial political support and that when removed make people better off. Rent control, price controls, state granted monopolies like taxis, etc.
Additionally getting closer doesn’t make you more objective and understanding for all of them; if the costs are diffused, but the benefits concentrated, you are likely to be interacting with people who get the benefits (since they have a strong incentive to support the regime).
So don’t assume that the government policy is optimal; it should be assumed to be politically optimal, which is an entirely different beast.
The takeaway is that as a rule of thumb the easiest programs to eliminate are probably the best ones (since they were installed because they worked) while the hardest to remove are the worst (since they were installed because they benefit a small interest group).
Of course if you want to get things done, the best place to do so would be the easiest programs. Fortunately, while their existence is probably the best, their internal workings probably aren’t so you can make beneficial changes (like the FDA’s acceptance of drugs that have been tested in other countries).
We know there are policies in place that are actively bad that have substantial political support and that when removed make people better off. Rent control, price controls, state granted monopolies like taxis, etc.
Yes, but there are also policies in place that are actively good that have substantial political support and that when removed make people worse off. A banking system that can be trusted to store your wealth and handle your payments, an internet that works and a power grid to support it, not having criminal gangs that break your kneecaps if you don’t give them half of everything you own.
All those things go away if the US government goes away. Some of you may be fantasizing about the individual states taking charge of the good stuff the government does, but the window of opportunity on that one closed about a century ago. And even if the states were still capable of handling basic government functions without federal support, all of the bad policies you cite are implemented at the state rather than federal level and they get worse if the states aren’t answerable to federal courts. So I have to assume that by the time you’re done tearing everything down, you’ll have done for the state governments as well.
Some people just want to watch the world burn. But your model for that needs to be the Arab Spring, the Euromaidan, or the Lebanese Civil War. With Mexico today as what the country might look like after a generation of reconstruction.
And you know what? You all can skip the wait and go live in Mexico right now if that’s what you want. Please do. Show us that you can in fact thrive in such an enivronment, or better still improve on it, before you ask the rest of us to join you in watching our world burn.
“A banking system that can be trusted to store your wealth and handle your payments, an internet that works and a power grid to support it, not having criminal gangs that break your kneecaps if you don’t give them half of everything you own.
All those things go away if the US government goes away.”
I don’t see how that follows. You can’t imagine how reliable banking, internet, power, and personal protection could be provided on a private basis?
I certainly agree that some of the things the US federal government currently does need doing; it doesn’t follow that only the US federal government could do them, nor that it should do them.
As for not wanting to take the risk of a big shakeup: the people who are currently doing pretty well rarely do. Though I hate the status quo, I certainly don’t want a bloody revolution or anything like that. But I still don’t see why Trump would be more likely to cause that than anyone else: certainly most of the other GOP candidates seem at least, if not more likely to start a new, ill-advised war: good ol’ reasonable Kasich basically said we need to take out North Korea.
The bigger concern is that there’s a good chance Trump would only be different in terms of style, not substance: http://www.ronpaullibertyreport.com/archives/trump-already-surrounding-himself-with-establishment-men
I’m not an anarcholibertarian; I’m just agreeing with the “there are things that are broken and need to be removed and spamming Chesterson’s fence doesn’t change that”. There is no high road to figuring out what to do; rules of thumb can help, but at the end of the day you are going to have to look into the actual regs.
“A banking system that can be trusted to store your wealth and handle your payments, an internet that works and a power grid to support it, not having criminal gangs that break your kneecaps if you don’t give them half of everything you own. ”
You are going to have to check with onyomi, but I’m pretty sure most libertarians support the existence of the police. And internet and power don’t require the government; the issue is that they are natural monopolies, not that they are impossible without the state.
“You all can skip the wait and go live in Mexico right now if that’s what you want. ”
Libertarians want less government. Mexico does not have less government. I’m not sure why “go to a country that had a revolution 90 years ago” is an answer to people who people who want revolutionary change.
“Show us that you can in fact thrive in such an enivronment, or better still improve on it, before you ask the rest of us to join you in watching our world burn.”
There are about a million Americans in Mexico right now so I’m not sure what you are trying to prove. Libertarian solutions can’t improve Mexico? Because if you count pro-free trade and privatization, Mexico has certainly done a bit of that since the 1980s.
The actual answer is “magic button is not a realistic scenario because there are things being hand waved away”.
Y’all seem to be forgetting that there are two components of Chesterton’s fence parable. The second is that the young monk is allowed to remove the fence if he can demonstrate that he understands why the fence is there in the first place.
It’s not enough to say that the system is broken, you need to understand how and why its broken if you want to fix it.
I love the phrase “spamming Chesterton’s fence” now…
@hlynkacg: I’m pretty sure most libertarians, myself included, can give you pretty plausible accounts of how most of the aspects we don’t like about government came into being and why they continue to exist, even though much better solutions are possible.
And one other point about “leave our nice system alone and take your experimentation to Mexico”: it’s a bit ironic that not only are the people likely to say that doing pretty well in the current system, but that they are also probably more able to move easily. How easy, for example, is it likely to be for the poor whites in the “Donald Trump support predicts high mortality” study to learn a foreign language and move their families to a foreign country in order to try a different lifestyle? Can we blame them for wanting to try something different where they are?
I myself am certainly not a low-education Trump voter (and hopefully not a high mortality one), nor even, most likely, a Trump voter at all; I am saying that it’s a bit insensitive to say to the people who are currently doing very badly and who can’t easily move: “don’t go messing with our nice system; if you want to experiment with a different system, you can move.”
@onyomi: I don’t see how that follows. You can’t imagine how reliable banking, internet, power, and personal protection could be provided on a private basis?
Of course I can. Now show me where they are being provided on a private basis, and explain how this promptly scales and generalizes to the whole of the United States.
Building institutions takes generations, particularly if you have to build an entire nation’s worth at once. The institutions that we actually have now, are needlessly complex bits of social machinery that have dozens of cogs labeled “Federal Government of the United States of America” inserted in places that aren’t always obvious.
Look, there are people who, for various reasons, think automobiles and electronics are a bad mix. Lots of these people drive e.g. 1980s diesel Mercedes, and get around just fine. You’ve got a 2016 Toyota with an infuriating number of glitches, and you are proposing to tear out everything that looks like it might have a microchip, saying “…but cars don’t need electronics, here, read this article about a 1980 Mercedes!”.
Actually, the geek in me thinks it would be kind of a neat project to rebuild a 2016 Toyota as an electronics-free vehicle.
But not if the Toyota is my only means of transportation. You all want to do something productive with your anarchist dreams, go start actually building the sort of institutions that a non-dystopic anarchy will need, in markets where the existing ones are failing and the government isn’t paying attention.
To be fair, no one is suggesting you can’t mess with the system. The political process is there so the system CAN be tweaked.
However, the political process is such that you cannot simply re-write all national institutions all at once. If you really want that kind of experiment, you should try it somewhere else.
If you want to tinker, by all means, participate in the current political process.
@Larry Kestenbaum – “By a year from now, there will be nothing left. Assuming Trump loses fair and square, there will be no interest in marching on Washington to demand anything. If millions of people get activated and energized again, it will be over some completely new outrage.”
compare to:
That’s sort of the whole point of what we’ve been saying: Trump himself is just a symptom. He will be immediately abandoned as soon as he loses because a great many people are only interested in his presidential bid as a tactical play.
…I guess the difference between our views is that you think the Trump phenomenon is an isolated one based on his specific attributes, and I think it’s part of a larger trend based on growing dissatisfaction for the establishment. Would that be a fair description?
“No, only a tiny handful of people even think in terms of ongoing strategy and tactics. And those people, including yourself, are politicos.”
True. I guess my point would be that the politicos are starting to think that the status quo isn’t worth preserving, and so are throwing their support increasingly behind the random flareups. My argument is that Trump’s supporters like him because he appears immune to the hostility of the press and the establishment, more than they like him for embracing their fears of muslims and mexicans. Politicos and regular red tribers both hate and fear liberals and the establishment much more than they do muslims and mexicans. Politicos like me will frame that support in terms of tactics. Regular salt-of-the-earth types will just say he seems “strong”, “a tough guy, not a wimp”, etc. Both lead to the same conclusion, though, which is backing outsider long-shots rather than insiders.
“That’s a long and roundabout way of saying, no, I don’t see an enraged citizenry or civil disorder or riots in our future.”
I don’t either, and I’m a bit confused where this idea comes from. I expect more conflict within the republican party, not riots in the streets.
“This is going to sound horribly condescending, and I know I would have hated to hear it when I was 18 but the effect of actually engaging in ongoing electoral politics gradually deradicalizes people.”
If I’m understanding this and the rest of your post correctly, you’re saying that the existing establishment isn’t just politically powerful, but that it is itself what political power looks like. That without the machine, nothing gets done, and therefore Trump and similar movements are doomed, because they cannot sustain their agenda long term, while the establishment can and so wins by default?
Also, no worries about the condescension. Once again, I’ve greatly appreciated your posts in this thread. John Schillings’ too, for that matter.
“Now show me where they are being provided on a private basis”
Banking? Private banking is being provided on a global scale all over the world, and has been for centuries.
When the Amsterdam stock market started in the 17th century (the world’s first, so far as we know), most of its contracts were illegal, hence uninforceable. Similarly in the next century for the original version of the London Stock Exchange. Both functioned just fine, as long as the government didn’t do anything more aggressive than not enforcing their contracts.
Yes, but on reflection, I think that Trump crystallized a lot of pre-existing frustration. It wasn’t just his specific attributes.
I think both of those things are factors, and you could be right that the first is more important.
Also, lots of people are angry or fearful for reasons nobody here has even mentioned. Some of those things might even strike us as irrational, or strictly local, or irrelevant to politics, but those attitudes predispose someone to support an angry candidate, no matter what words the candidate is actually saying.
Ah, I see now, the riots thing came from Jaskologist, not from you.
That’s not how I would put it, and I’d want to pin down what specifically “machine” means here, but yeah, I think that’s a fair statement.
There’s also an element of “getting stuff done is more complicated than most people realize.” That probably applies in all organizations and at all levels. Political “specialists” (e.g., you and me) exist because most people lack the time or inclination to think things through or get involved in the necessary details.
The other thing is that, most of the time, the politicos have no way to motivate the rest of the population to go out of their way to do anything. Talk to anyone in electoral politics for long, and you will get to their frustration with apathy and low voter turnout.
It doesn’t matter how angry or disaffected the politicos are, if nobody else pays them much attention. As an extreme example, I have known some very frustrated revolutionaries. Mass movements are relatively rare and brief, and usually motivated by some kind of threat that average people take seriously.
And finally, one factor that I didn’t mention explicitly is aging. I detest the old saying about the heartless 20-year-old and the headless 40-year-old, but one’s perspective does change with age, or even just with time spent in the political world. My own views have not undergone any fundamental change, but they are considerably more nuanced now.
Thank you, and I very much appreciate your thoughtful engagement.
I wrote that long post as an attempt to think out and explain my own perspective on the issues in this thread. It’s not something I could have written without having my assumptions challenged so severely. I was a bit apprehensive about how it would be received. Thanks to you and to everyone for your civility and kindness.
“It improves my life too. I mean, assuming the implausible scenario where everyone just kind of goes on as before but without the federal government.”
I just can’t imagine what the federal government has done to cause you so much more suffering than the rest of us.
Revolutionaries typically provide reasons for tearing down the world. Im hearing “my life would improve”. Well in which ways? And Im not talking about other people. Specifically you? How would your life improve?
“I just can’t imagine what the federal government has done to cause you so much more suffering than the rest of us.”
(not directed at me)
That implies that how much suffering the federal government has caused someone is a known fact, so different attitudes reflect different amount of suffering.
A different, and I think more plausible, reading of the situation is that people disagree about what the world would be like if the federal government didn’t do various things it does.
Let me give you a real example. I believe that, without the FDA, there would have a great deal more medical progress. In support of that belief, I can point you at an old article by a prominent scholar which found that a single change in the FDA rules cut the rate of introduction of new drugs in half while having no effect on their average quality.
Three good friends of mine died of cancer—one my closest friend outside my family. I think it likely that all three would still be alive if the FDA had not been slowing medical progress for seventy some years. Do you agree that, if my view is correct, then that single federal program has caused enormous suffering?
If so, then your disagreement with those who would prefer that Washington not exist isn’t a result of Washington having hurt them and not you. It’s a result of different opinions as to the effects of the federal government on both you and them.
So even though cancer patients are living longer than ever, your gut feeling is, life expectancies arent skyrocketing fast enough so lets try to scrap the system that brought us this far?
Dismantling the system will cost untold lives and opens the door to all the unknowable black-swan futures banking off other unknowable black-swan futures.
Perhaps this time above all is one where we should put as much energy into working for good government as we do idly bitching about it. Anti-Governmentalism is a good politic to start a kid off on. Its safe. No one’s going to argue with your kid. But its more and more become the default politic of very smart and very stupid adult americans.
When the Amsterdam stock market started in the 17th century (the world’s first, so far as we know), most of its contracts were illegal, hence uninforceable. Similarly in the next century for the original version of the London Stock Exchange. Both functioned just fine, as long as the government didn’t do anything more aggressive than not enforcing their contracts.
I am familiar with the early history of banking and stock markets. It’s a great story, if nothing else. And if this were still the 17th century, or even the 18th, we could tear down the government and perhaps expect the banks to keep functioning. Though I fear that the banks would find good and responsive government to be sufficiently useful that they would go create one – for narrowly banker-centric definitions of “good and responsive”.
This isn’t the 18th century, and I hope nobody here is of the impression that modern banks are functionally identical to the late renaissance versions except for a legal department that keeps the government regulators at bay. Regulatory capture works in both directions, and modern banks are de facto public-private partnerships. They deal in a currency backed ultimately by nothing more or less than the full faith and credit of the Federal Government of the United States of America. They operate at what would otherwise be insanely narrow margins, buttressed by an insurance system nothing in the private sector can presently match. The ties of personal and familial trust that kept the old banks honest have been replaced by the federal courts. Even the military is embedded in the system now, with money moving at near lightspeed synchronized by a timebase owned and operated by the United States Air Force. I’m certain experts in the field can come up with a few hundred more examples.
Yes, private replacements can be imagined for all of these. Those private replacements don’t presently exist at the necessary scale, or at all. Creating any one of them would not pose any great problem. Creating all of them simultaneously? In an environment where you can’t pay any of the people involved with anything short of gold and silver until you’re finished? Where, with the FBI out of business, the clever sorts of criminals are trying the “help” you restore the banking system as a money pump from everyone else’s wallets to their own and the less clever sorts of criminals are just shooting the place up to get at the gold coins you’re using in the interim?
Here’s the plan. Step 1, build the core of a banking system capable of sustaining a modern economy without government intervention. Step 2, test it in niche markets where there’s a need for such a thing, but the police can still be expected to arrest the worst sort of criminals. Step 3, tear down the government.
Doing that in the reverse order would be a catastrophically bad idea.
In a large polity, political optimality is about the best a democracy can do, and I don’t agree that it’s always a bad thing.
Contrary to some perceptions, political actors generally do pay attention to arguments about why this-or-that policy should be implemented or modified or discarded, and don’t just agree with whoever offered the largest bribe, or made the biggest threat.
In my experience, where there is a huge gap between political optimality and general optimality, it’s because somebody’s not at the table, so their interests are not being advocated, or the decision process has been artificially skewed in some way.
You’re being defeatist here. Interest groups, large and small, that are beneficiaries of government policy, are defeated in political decisions all the time.
The two gigantic cases in American history are the slaveholder interest before the Civil War, and the alcohol interest before Prohibition.
Perhaps slavery is not a good example, because it was never seriously challenged before actual fighting broke out, but in the second case, a grass-roots campaign of idealistic individuals successfully destroyed an entire major industry, along with taverns, restaurants, hotels, etc.
Prohibition was undone fourteen years later, but not because of special pleading from those financially interested, rather, the impact of other negative effects changed a lot of minds.
There are many other examples.
Remember the deregulation of the airlines in 1978? The Civil Aeronautics Board used to strictly control all routes and fares. Deregulation (which was advocated and achieved by appointees of a Democratic president) was surely good for the airline industry and the country at large, but there were many losers, companies who were protected from competition by a costly bureaucracy. They fought back pretty hard. Deregulation still won by overwhelming votes in the House and Senate.
The Tax Reform Act in 1986 ended tax shelters and (to quote Wikipedia) “significantly decreased the value of many such investments which had been held more for their tax-advantaged status than for their inherent profitability.” You think the owners of those investments just watched quietly from the sidelines? They fought, were defeated, and lost billions.
In politics and policy, “interest group” does not mean “immovable obstacle”.
“your gut feeling is, life expectancies arent skyrocketing fast enough”
Do you agree that if FDA regulation sharply reduced the rate of innovation in medical drugs, that would support my claim? If so, don’t you think that before attributing my claim to “gut feeling” you should at least have asked for the cite to the article I described? If a single change to the regulations (the Kefauver Amendment to the Pure Food and Drug Act) cut the rate of introduction of new drugs in half, that suggests that the whole body of regulations had a much larger effect–not implausible given that they greatly increased both the cost and the time delay to bring medical drugs to market.
But your gut feeling that “Dismantling the system will cost untold lives,” for which you didn’t even hint at evidence, trumps that.
“In my experience, where there is a huge gap between political optimality and general optimality, it’s because somebody’s not at the table, so their interests are not being advocated, or the decision process has been artificially skewed in some way.”
The economics of foreign trade were worked out, correctly, by David Ricardo about two hundred years ago. While economists have proposed some special cases in which a tariff might benefit the country that imposed it, actual tariffs have never fitted the pattern of those cases and the general view of economists, ranging from me to Krugman, has long been that tariffs normally impose net costs on the country that imposes them.
England in the 19th century and Hong Kong in the 20th followed the policy that implies, and both were spectacularly successful economies. Almost no other country has done so.
What skews the decision process, as has been known for a long time, is the internal public good problem faced by every interest group. It’s much more soluble for a concentrated group than a dispersed group, so benefits and costs to the former are weighted much more heavily than to the latter on the political market place. That isn’t a special case, it’s the norm.
The explanation I have seen of the politics of airline deregulation—I’m not sure it is correct—is that a major airline concluded that it was being held back by the existing cartel arrangement enforced by the CAB, and so stopped supporting it.
@ Larry K.
I detest the old saying about the heartless 20-year-old and the headless 40-year-old, but one’s perspective does change with age, or even just with time spent in the political world.
Considerably older than 40, and thinking of Arab Spring, what I see is young people crashing a 90% Sturgeon Factor system — while age, treachery, and money stand ready to pick up the pieces and put them together as an even worse system.
So the nuke seems to me to lead to an oppressive police state at best and a bunch of wars at worst. (Look how people reacted to 9/11 and multiply by 100).
So let’s instead think a bit about the gradual formal dissolution of the federal government, and heroically handwave away all the difficulties of transition.
I’m totally open to the idea that the United States is “too big” and that it ought to instead be some number (3? 10? probably not 50) of smaller countries. The federal government certainly gets up to a lot of terrible things, though we probably disagree on which things, specifically, are terrible. The catch is that your state/local government is constrained from doing terrible things by the federal government as well.
Consider – maybe you don’t like American foreign policy. What would New Texas’s foreign policy look like? Or if you do think America should be more interventionist, do you think New Texas can handle the world’s problems without the support of New England and Montival?
Maybe you think the government is trying to oppress your religion, which is dominant locally. Are you ok with your coreligionists becoming *way more oppressed* in the more hostile parts of the country?
Taxes too high? Federal government too corrupt? Do you really think these issues will be better after your regional government takes over the federal government’s functions?
and so on.
In the end, if you handwave away the (enormous) transition costs, some people will be better off and some will be worse off. But you can’t just magic away the federal government and leave everything else unaffected, and it’s likely that you’d be very unhappy with whatever replaced the federal government.
This ignores nuclear weapons. Needless to say splitting up a country with nuclear weapons is a bad idea, especially if they get parceled out among the constituent members.
It’s happened once, and while I wouldn’t say the outcome was good, it didn’t lead to immediate nuclear armageddon.
If you are referring to the breakup of the Soviet Union, all of the functional nuclear weapon systems that remained of that polity’s arsenal were transferred seamlessly to the armed forces of the Russian Federation. Some major components of nuclear weapon systems, not usable in isolation, wound up in the physical possession of other nations, which were told in no uncertain terms from all directions to Give Them Back Or Else, and who lacking either allies or usable nuclear weapon systems had little choice but to comply. So, not quite the scenario Skinner was talking about.
But probably the most realistic scenario for any breakup of the United States. There will be a rump Federal Government somewhere, and it will have all of the old nukes that remain operational.
The alternate histories where e.g. Ukraine salvaged and rebuilt ex-Soviet nukes, or the future histories where e.g. the Republic of Texas restores the Pantex plant and builds its own, I’m guessing a good fraction of those timelines have a substantially enhanced background radiation count.
Of course, when the federal government does bad things, everyone living within the nation is affected. If New Texas does bad things, only folk living in New Texas are affected
Unless they start a war. They could also decide that free trade isn’t working out too well and impose tariffs and export restrictions.
Would there even be free trade and freedom of movement among the now-independent States?
Since this goes in the #thingsiregretwriting file, let me officially disavow it. The nuke scenario is obviously a bad one, not least because it handwaves too much away (a lot changes depending on whether the nuke is dropped by Al Qaeda or China).
The point I was attempting to get across is that even though I am doing well in the current system, I find the government significantly more of a hindrance than a help. And now that the left has focused primarily on the politics of rubbing noses in it, I feel unrepresented by it as well, so both my practical and moral allegiances to it are substantially weakened.
For somebody who isn’t doing well under the current system, I’d have an even harder time making the case for their allegiance. They are right to believe that their rulers view them with disdain. Washington is experienced similarly to a foreign imperial power in many parts of America, and while you can claim (just like every other imperialist in history) that you are keeping the peace, that chaos would follow your withdrawal, and really you know what’s best for the natives, there are very few nations that don’t opt for self-rule when given half a chance.
“Washington is experienced similarly to a foreign imperial power in many parts of America”
I think this is really key: when blue tribers complain that red tribe hatred of Obama is excessive/crazy/pure racism, they rarely think in these terms. Yet it is clear many middle Americans think of Obama as “not my president.” The usual reaction to foreign occupation is not just mean bumperstickers, it’s blowing things up. It’s probably mostly the fact that patriotism is a red tribe value that keeps people from going there.
Ironically, Blue Tribe is supposedly all about acceptance–of everything but the outgroup, of course. But at the Oscars and the like they sent this message loud and clear–even as they complain that Red Tribers don’t respect the president–“you’re not us.”
So, is it Washington or Obama that is “foreign”?
Not always getting your way is an inherent part of democracy — and, more generally, an inherent part of peacefully coexisting with persons whose interests don’t always coincide with yours.
The parties currently in power in my country aren’t a perfect match for my personal political preferences, but if I said that only my “patriotism” prevents me from going on a violent rampage — well, I think that would be a little crazy, actually.
So, is it Washington or Obama that is “foreign”?
Why not both?
Obama made it quite clear from the outset that he was not “one of us” which on it’s own probably wouldn’t be much of a problem. But when you combine it with a dramatic broadening of the government’s ability to effect peoples’ daily lives, it starts to look a bit more threatening.
Likewise I would suggest that it isn’t patriotism” prevents me from going on a violent rampage So much as I value law and order so I will make a good faith effort to obey the law even if I disagree with it.
That said, if sense that the government is not acting in good faith were to become widespread I would expect an outbreak of “Irish democracy” where non-compliance with the law becomes the new “normal”.
“Not always getting your way is an inherent part of democracy”
But so, too, is feeling like you are being ruled by people who, while they may not always agree with you on every particular, are nonetheless like you in the sense of having some shared cultural assumptions.
The cultural divide between red tribe and blue tribe in the US has been rapidly widening since about 2000. At a certain point it feels like you are being ruled not by people with whom you have a good-spirited disagreement on some object-level issues, but by people who are just not “you,” at all.
(Of course, I think the illusion that “we” can “rule ourselves” created by democracy is always fallacious at any size above that of a smallish town, but even granting democracy the possibility that “self rule” by a large group of people is possible, there is a prerequisite that there be such a people–i.e. a group with some shared values and assumptions; otherwise you just have warring factions in uneasy alliance, which is different from democracy as ideally conceived).
And it’s not just red tribe feeling alienated by blue leaders: how many blue tribe members threatened to move to Canada if Bush got reelected, or if Trump gets elected? And though few will probably follow through, many of them are also not joking. To say “if the other side wins the next election I’d rather stop being a citizen of this nation” is to say, essentially, that the other side is so far from being able to represent your interests that it feels alien to you.
An oft-ignored corollary of “if the other side wins I’m moving to Canada”: if your side is so different from the other side that you’d feel fundamentally disenfranchised if they won, why then, should you expect the other side to respect your leaders if you win?
Ugh. For a lot of Blue folks, Obama was the very first president who felt like he was “one of us”. And we weren’t constantly going on rampages though the Bush/Clinton/Bush/Reagan/Carter/etc years in spite of our alleged lack of patriotism.
“we weren’t constantly going on rampages”
Why not? Because you were confident that you would get your turn eventually? I don’t mean that facetiously. If, going back to Carter, you never truly felt represented by this government until Obama, why do you still believe in it at all? Are you really satisfied with a government that represents you 8 out of every 40 years?
My best guess is you are defining “one of us” much more narrowly than I am. I’m not saying all the politicians need to feel like your circle of friends in order to represent you (and believe me, I understand the sentiment–culturally, I am mostly blue tribe and an academic–I know the excitement of getting to have a professor president for the first time since Woodrow Wilson). But there’s a big difference between “Bill Clinton doesn’t really feel like ‘one of us,'” and “these people literally feel like a foreign occupation force.”
But let’s say having a really big democracy inherently means there are decades where you feel like you are being ruled by a foreign oppressor. You get your turn eventually, but there are whole decades where you feel the whole government is being run by and for people very much unlike you and is pushing alien values down your throat.
This seems to me like it is, in fact, the reality of a very large democracy. Which is why I’m against large-scale democracy. It sounds to me like: “ugh, I hate the style of clothing the fashion czar has chosen for our national uniform the past few decades, but I’m sure one day I can vote in a fashion czar I like.” Why not just let everybody buy their own clothes?
Where’s the “rampages” thing coming from? Who’s going on rampages, or even suggesting it? Even my poorly chosen hypothetical wasn’t actually proposing that I would like to nuke DC.
@ onyomi:
I think the point is that, under the Bush presidency, “red tribe” people didn’t feel alienated from the national government.
At least where I grew up, a large number of people had “W: The President”, “W: Still the President”, and even “J: The Savior” and “S: The Coach” stickers on their cars. People absolutely went along with the “freedom fries” thing and often suggested that people opposed to the Iraq War were traitors.
You may not like the size of the federal government; I don’t either.
But it’s sort of absurd to say the country is coming apart at the seams when we’ve probably got the most integrated political culture that we’ve ever had. As Larry Kestenbaum points out, at no other time has everyone’s focus been so directed toward the national level.
And we’re not at all seeing more real political discord than we have in the past. Do you think Trump voters feel more alienated than Democrats did at the 1968 convention? Do you think Republicans today feel more alienated from Obama than the New Left felt from Nixon? Are major political leaders being assassinated left and right?
It may all be madness, like adopting a national “fashion czar”. But just because you think it’s crazy, doesn’t mean that the population as a whole isn’t invested in the concept of America as a nation for which it’s very important to set a common policy.
@Jaskologist — I don’t think this is supposed to be a Godzilla rampage so much as a Calvin and Hobbes rampage: there is this meme that failing to quickly come to a consensus on e.g. the budget, or saying “no” to too much of the stuff that the President proposes, represents some kind of tantrum, dereliction of duty at the very least.
I think this says some interesting things about how our political culture’s evolving: a shift away from care/harm rhetoric and toward loyalty and dignity, traditionally the provinces of the Right.
“got the most integrated political culture that we’ve ever had.”
Really? Are we… both talking about the United States of America? I mean it’s not the most disunited it’s ever been. That would be the 1860s… but it also seems far from the most united. And when I say “united” I don’t mean agreeing on object-level issues; I’m referring more to a sense of broadly shared political-cultural assumptions.
Of course, there is also the human tendency to always feel like everything is about to come apart at the seams. So I realize things could be a lot worse. I do, however, think the political culture has gotten a lot more polarized and divisive in my lifetime.
Re. W: I’m not sure what you’re getting at. I never implied there weren’t a lot of red tribe people who thought W represented them.
The most centralized political culture, I’d buy that, but integration is a slightly different thing.
but integration is a slightly different thing.
Integration is not, as anyone who lived through or has read the history of the 1960s can attest, necessarily a peaceful thing.
No matter how much Red and/or Blue may or may not like it, we do have a very integrated culture. Red Tribe sees e.g. all the abortions happening in California as an abomination upon our land that must be stopped, even as all the abortions happening in Europe are, meh, wrong but someone else’s problem, and even though Red Tribe mostly doesn’t live in California. And Blue Tribe, from its safe coastal enclaves, sees gun violence in Texas as a shameful thing that Must Be Stopped even as gun violence south of the border in Mexico is, meh, wrong but someone else’s problem(*). Both sides may look to Washington and see corrupt, unresponsive government leading the country to ruin, but those are our corrupt government officials, and that’s not the same thing as a bunch of foreign invaders.
We are, as a nation, integrated. The window of opportunity for Red Tribe to do its own thing in Texas while the Blues do their thing in California is long closed.
* Unless they can blame it on Red Tribe, of course.
@ John Schilling:
Exactly what I meant.
“but those are our corrupt government officials, and that’s not the same thing as a bunch of foreign invaders.”
Interesting. On the one hand, it makes a lot of sense and is actually the logical consequence of the centralization impulse I deplore. It is the result of the centralizers fundamentally winning again and again over the past century, I’d say.
Yet I also totally understand what Jaskologist means by DC feeling almost like a foreign occupation force. I guess the two things are in tension: long history and tradition plus multimedia, globalization, and centralizing trends on the one hand, but a somewhat more recent yet growing dissatisfaction with many of the above on the other.
@Jaskologist “Rampages” was a response to onyomi’s statement about how the natural response to foreign occupation is blowing stuff up.
Well, that is how people tend to respond to occupying forces in North Ireland, Sri Lanka, the Middle East…
I am probably going too far in imagining that we are at all near that level of alienation from the federal government, but then, there is that Last Psychiatrist piece…
I also, weirdly agree with Vox and John Schilling that we are “integrated” in the sense of thinking it is our business if an abortion or campus shooting happens 7 states away from us, but I also think cracks are beginning to show in that.
There’s no contradiction: the increased centralization is the problem. If everybody has to have the same policy, everybody is going to want it to be their values imposed on everybody else. And since we are extending the reach of that centralization into more and more aspects of life, people will feel other values being forced on them in more and more ways. We meddle and we haven’t the right.
@ Jaskologist:
There’s no getting out of this problem, though.
If you’re walking down the street and see a woman being attacked by a rapist, don’t you have the right to “meddle” and come to her defense? Even if you’re in a different city or a different country?
Injustice is injustice, and you have the right to put a stop to it, no matter where it’s taking place.
Pretty much everyone thinks people should be left alone to “practice their values” and live their lives the way they want, so long as they aren’t causing any harm. The difference of opinion comes in regard to what they consider to cause harm.
The fact is that some people see laissez-faire capitalism as a system of injustice, while others see anything but laissez-faire as a system of injustice. Some people see the right to have an abortion as the right to commit murder, while others see it as part of a woman’s natural right to control her own body. These views are inherently in conflict with one another; what one side sees as its rightful liberty, the other sees as impermissible license to oppress the weak and innocent.
I’m not saying that these questions are subjective and that there are no answers; I’m saying that we cannot determine what we should do independently of the answers to these questions.
@Vox Imperatoris
Agreed, which is why the invasion of Iraq and toppling of Saddam was not just morally justifiable, but morally obligatory.
@ Jaskologist:
I’m honestly not sure if you’re being sarcastic.
Either way, whether it is morally permissible and/or obligatory depends on the consequences. I do think that any relatively free country has, in some sense, the right to go around and topple any oppressive dictator it wants. In other words, those dictators don’t have some sort of sovereign right not be interfered with.
But the free country also has the responsibility to do so in a manner that will actually be effective and productive of a better outcome. If you see a woman being attacked by a rapist, it’s not morally permissible to throw a hand grenade at them.
So you may theoretically say, “Abortion is murder, but making it illegal in New York City would cause so much conflict that it would do more harm than good.” However, to show this would be a very serious burden, with the presumption being in favor of stopping it, if indeed it is murder.
Was the ending of slavery and the preservation of the Union worth the hundreds of thousands of lives lost in the Civil War? I think so, but it’s not too hard to argue that the greater good was for the North to surrender to Confederate demands. In any case, that sort of pragmatic refusal to intervene is very different from refusing to intervene on principle.
If you’re walking down the street and see a woman being attacked by a rapist, don’t you have the right to “meddle” and come to her defense? Even if you’re in a different city or a different country?
By “rapist”, do you mean a drunken male college student responding consensually to the drunken women’s sexual advances, or do you mean a husband who is simply exercising his marital rights?
Also, if I’m a Saudi man walking the streets of Los Angeles and I see a sinful woman spreading corruption upon the land by wearing a miniskirt and bikini top, can I at least lash her until she covers up?
Injustice is injustice, and you have the right to put a stop to it, no matter where it’s taking place
Injustice is tricky to define except in the trivial cases like the one you were going for, the forcible violent rape of a woman by a stranger who dragged her off into an alley. And because that’s de jure illegal pretty much everywhere, it isn’t a terribly useful example here.
So what’s the actual rule to apply to less obvious cases?
1. Obey the laws and customs of the land you are in, ignoring the marital rape in Pakistan but stepping in to stop drunken consensual sex in Berkeley?
2. Obey and enforce your own rules, the core moral ones at least, which you know to be right no matter where you are? Might get you shot by the LAPD, but the degenerate people of California will have no claim to moral superiority.
3. Obey and enforce the moral code of Western Liberal Democracy Before The SJWs Messed It Up, which is the One True Morality that should be applied everywhere?
@Vox Imperatoris
I’m not sure if I’m being sarcastic. But I think it well illustrates why I like the comparison to imperialism. I don’t think there’s much difference between these cases in principle.
(Practicality being a whole other matter.)
As I just got done writing elsewhere in this comment section, this is just categorically, unequivocally false. If you really believe this, you are deluding yourself.
A substantial majority (64%) of Americans believe the country is headed in the wrong direction. This includes majorities of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents.
(The following are from 2014, but I don’t think the numbers have changed much, and they’ve been in that general ballpark for the past 6 years or so.)
53% think neither party represents the American People.
37% of likely voters fear the federal government, and a majority (54%) consider it a threat to liberty rather than a protector.
19% of Likely U.S. Voters believe the federal government today has the consent of the governed.
I don’t think ANY of those numbers mean what you think they mean. Answering those questions in a negative way is pure my-tribe signaling.
If a given tribe’s identity includes signalling “our rulers do not represent us, they do not have our consent, they are a threat and doing things we don’t want done,” how is that substantially different from that tribe “seeing DC as a foreign imperial power”?
Larry Kestenbaum says: this is just categorically, unequivocally false.
While I do believe that Jaskologist is exaggerating a bit, I don’t think he’s exaggerating nearly as much as you say.
I live in the Imperial valley of California, but work takes me into San Diego and LA on a regular basis. Going from one to the other definitely feels like going to a different country, and I say that as someone who spent a good deal of his youth overseas. People talk different, social norms expectations are different, and have different shared experiances/ideas about history. There are even border patrol checkpoints on the I-8 and CA-78 heading East. When LA Water and Power puts the squeeze on the valley it certainly feels a bit like a foreign power to me. The idea that folk in the Midwest might feel the same way about Washington or the coasts does not seem like that much of a stretch.
Over time the scope of my interests has widened (I think that this isn’t uncommon?), starting with investigations into individual ethics a several years ago, to reading about how groups function (psychology, sociology), and recently my interests have been pointing toward government, statecraft, and political science (where will I go next I wonder?).
Of the latter categories I’ve read some of the famous foundational works (Wealth of Nations, Communist Manifesto, …); though interesting, many are quite out of date. I was wondering if someone could point me toward books or textbooks (or something else that works) that give both historical and modern examples, and delve into the details. It seems to me that so far I’ve only really learned about the ideals, intentions, hopes, grievances, and some of the symbols of concepts like democracy, socialism, communism, fascism, etc., like trivia. I’m more interested in how these concepts are implemented.
For example, I’d be interested in something dedicated to the various forms of democracy, getting into different forms of representation and elections. I’d be less interested in a book detailing how certain democracies were historically formed, and the people who were involved. So more theory, less history. Thanks!
Caitlyn Jenner has endorsed Ted Cruz and offered to be his “trans ambassador”, which I find amusing and many people are finding outrageous or offensive.
Quite amusing; he’s stated before that he gets much more flack from Hollywood types for being a Republican than being trans (unsurprising, but still depressing; heterodox Hollywood is not happening any time soon).
Anyone know if that XKCD survey from last year ever come of anything?
google -> explain xkcd: 1572 -> reddit
According to my research, Randall crashed GoogleForms when he tried to download a wazzillion petabytes of submission data or something.
SSC readers who changed your legal name, especially to one specific to the same gender, how satisfied are you with the result? Was it worth it? Did you end doing it more than once?
Is MIRI or its peers looking at the likes of this?
Because I think this is where AI will arise; not from tootling around trying to create smarter-than-human computers, but from refining and feeding in even more data and gradually turning over more and more analysis and recommendations to the specialised programmes we develop.
Precisely. And as Watson (or whatever replaces itself) proves its efficacy over time, gradually instead of assisting the doctor, it will replace the doctor for routine monitoring/procedures. Instead of helping, as in “With cancer care, Watson can help a medical professional develop a personalised care plan based on case notes, doctors’ notes, and medical literature”, Watson will take over developing personalised care plans itself.
Because no single human or even team of humans will be able to crunch the data so fast and so efficiently. Oh sure, the lead oncologist will look over the plan to make sure it’s not recommending the equivalent of “feed the patient red lead”, but eventually? The consultant will be an adjunct to Watson, not vice versa.
And that is how we’re going to turn over routine running of tasks like power generation and oversight of stock exchanges and everything else to our servants, and then we get Forster’s “The Machine”.
And then Watson and Siri and whatever Google and Amazon and Microsoft call their personal assistants they’re hyping all over the place these days will start fighting one another because they’ve decided that their rival AI assistants are the main obstacle to assisting humans the way they are programmed to optimize.
Tool-AIs aren’t considered benign. I’ve seen essays warning that a sufficiently smart tool-AI is equivalent to an agent-AI (i.e., Google Maps AI sounds good, until it starts building bridges to shorten the distance you have to drive). And a tool-AI applied to certain tasks, like “conquering the world,” is still terrifying even if a human is completely in charge of what the AI is doing.
But I don’t think simply allowing AIs to handle mundane tasks is something that MIRI is worried about. If the AI truly is better at the task than a human (truly, as in “Study shows that robot-run hospitals have 90% fewer patient safety errors,” not “Mad scientist says robots are cooler than human doctors.”), then why shouldn’t we?
Yes, someone will die when Watson goes crazy and orders a drug overdose for the patient and no human doctor thinks to stop it. But on the other hand, patients already die when a half-asleep human doctor orders the wrong meds and there’s no computer there to stop them. If our biggest problem in the future is “The AIs have solved all human ills except for a couple pesky bugs,” I would consider that a win.
And really, as long as Foster’s Machine doesn’t try to disassemble Earth and turn it into more computers, that’s a good outcome by MIRI standards.
Trump’s healthcare reform agenda: https://www.donaldjtrump.com/positions/healthcare-reform
How much does publishing prices matter if hospitals are not forced to actually charge the same price to cash-paying and insured patients?
Not gonna lie. Dude may be insane on the stump, but that’s actually a pretty solid list of reforms.
Related directly to your question, the problem I’ve had and have brought up before isn’t with whether or not they’ll publish a price. Since many procedures require some advance payment anyway, they’ll quote you a price. The problem is when you pay the price, then five months later they send you a new bill saying that wasn’t actually the price and they’re charging you more. That can only happen with insured prices, not cash prices. The transparency problem seems to be on the insurance end more than the provider end.
The key thing, IMO, is to at least publish what things will cost if you *don’t* have insurance.
To take one example I’ve read out of many similar healthcare-cost horror stories floating around the internet:
– Woman goes to hospital with ankle problem
– Doctor suggests use of a boot, i.e. something like this thing you can get from Amazon for $40
– Hospital offers to provide boot, is unable to quote the price, everyone assumes insurance will pay for it
– Woman’s insurance refuses to cover boot, hospital bills woman full price for it, which is over $900
If that woman had been able to find out in advance what the hospital’s full price was, I guarantee you she would have refused the hospital-provided boot and done her own shopping around. Multiply by large numbers of people and a whole variety of non-emergency services and equipment, and there’s suddenly actual economic pressure on hospitals to cut that sort of thing out.
I’m a comic book, sci-fi, and fantasy nerd nearing 40. I’ve read at least 15 books a year since I was eight, when I read The Hobbit, averaging probably twice that, and I’ve read thousands of comic books. Worm is hands down the best literary implementation of the superhero genre. It should be edited heavily – you can feel the effect the deadlines have, how the rhythm of the writing made certain parts too long, and most of all that this is the first real full-scale work of the author. This does not take away from the fact that as there is a well thought out setting, plenty of good characters (and a couple of ones that are absolutely fantastic), the world-building is top notch, and most of all that you can absolutely feel the love that went into the work.
Cut down to two-thirds the length, and with extra care given to word choices, this is the best job at creating a superhero setting that has been done in decades, and may possibly surpass the comic-book medium’s examples altogether. It has so many things that are a love story to comic books; the first person perspective, the tragic backstories, the load of teens involved. Only these things are actually necessary due to how the world works.
Of course… all of this wouldn’t matter if it wasn’t so damn engrossing once you get into it.
Quick question based on the early discussion of rationalists’ tastes in fiction: Do people in this community tend to like the art that’s considered both speculative and “serious”? I’m talking the academia-approved (or at least not scorned) stuff like 2001, Solaris, Vonnegut, Philip K. Dick, etc.
Philip K Dick is probably my favourite Sci Fi writer, by far, but I’m pretty sure it’s not for the same reasons it’s considered “serious” speculative fiction.
I like PKD and some earlier Clarke; Clarke is exceptional when he’s sticking to hard SF, but later in his career he started leaning too heavily on mysticism and social-science speculation that he’s not very good at. (Childhood’s End might have been the turning point.) Vonnegut’s too misanthropic for my current taste, but I ate him up when I was younger and more susceptible to that sort of thing. Haven’t read Solaris or any other Lem.
But if we’re talking about writers who’re both speculative and “literary”, the guy that comes to mind is Gene Wolfe, who may be my favorite living author. Imagine Jorge Luis Borges crossed with Jack Vance.
Speaking for myself, I sometimes like “serious” stuff, and I sometimes like speculative stuff. I also sometimes like “serious” speculative stuff, but I don’t think art that’s in both categories is more likely to appeal to me than art which is in only one.
I like PKD and Wolfe for relatively contemporary respected scifi-fantasy. Vonnegut seemed really juvenille to me when I read some of his stuff, didn’t continue on. Been meaning to read Borges, but I greatly dislike the Latin America magical realism stuff I’ve read for school, so have been putting it off even though I realize they’re probably not the same thing.
Trust me, Borges is way better than your average high-school Latin American magical realism. He’s incredibly deep, in a mathy kind of way — if I’m paying attention, I find something new every time I reread one of his stories. And if you’d prefer something a little less abstract with that, you can always pick one of his stories about gauchos getting into knife fights.
(Well, One Hundred Years of Solitude was pretty good, though everything’s twice as good when you’re not being forced to wring out five-paragraph essays from it. But Borges is better.)
You have convinced to revisit them, at some point. The to-read list is ever-increasing!
A good way of explaining it for LW types would be: Borges is like Hofstadter, but with philosophy replacing math and computer science. In the same way your typical Hofstadter dialogue is full of hidden allusions to e.g. recursion, set theory or Godel incompleteness, your typical Borges story is full of hidden allusions to e.g. Plato, Spinoza or Schopenhauer.
(A difference is that Hofstadter is fundamentally a computer scientist and, besides plain having fun, is didactally explaining these concepts. Borges is fundamentally a sceptic and, besides plain having fun, is subverting and implicitly criticising traditional philosophy by making it the center of a literary game.)
Can recommend Borges, in Spanish if possible, but still great in English too.
Was also meaning to learn Spanish first, how is the level of Spanish required to read Borges?
If you’re starting from scratch, probably high enough to not make it worth it to wait until it’s good enough… Then again, I’m not a very “aesthetics of the prose” kind of guy, so maybe it is worth it.
For what it’s worth, I’m currently reading Fluent Forever by Gabriel Wyner which (though I don’t think he’s correct on some specific points of French pronunciation) seems so far to be a reasonable stab at a rationalist’s guide to learning languages.
I don’t think 2001 was anything like Clark’s best work.I do think Childhood’s End was amazingly effective as a literary experiment that no one noticed– no character’s decisions make a bit of difference, and yet it’s very engaging. When I first read it (as a rather bitter child) I thought the human race had transcended. As a more cynical but less bitter adult, I think we were eaten.
I couldn’t make it through Solaris.
I liked Vonnegut, then decided he hated human competence, then more recently reread Cat’s Cradle and was amazed at how he got the pieces to fit together.
I was a Dick fan for a long time, and then sort of drifted away from him. I’m not sure how his work would look to me now, but he at least gets points for wild inventiveness.
I would appreciate it if academe or somebody would give me a framework for talking about quality of world-building, and I’m not talking about the logical consistency so much as the vividness (or lack of vividness) of images. And the relationship between vividness and consistency.
I’ve always preferred “Rendezvous with Rama” to “2001”.
My reading of it was that we were eaten, but the author was trying to sell us on the idea that it was transcendence.
Yeah, that was pretty much my review of the book after reading it recently. Cthulhu sends demons to fatten up lunch, lunch gets eaten, demons get sent to prepare dinner.
Why is this shit lauded as some kind of masterwork?
Kindly point and laugh at the replies up the chain. I’m mildly upset. https://twitter.com/CoronaCoreanici/status/705146864606318592
Was this a continuation of something or it just popped up out of the blue?
Just popped up. Someone I was following retweeted.
Seems a little odd; it appears to conflate (or identify) Rationalists with Bronies, and both with nerd-shaming.
Must have been the tail-end of a quarrel somewhere else, but it does seem odd as a random tweet – why would the retweeter approve of saying “Rationalists are all child-men living in their parents’ basements and incapable of getting a job, a girlfriend, and a life”? Especially in contradistinction to scientists?
Somebody’s ox got gored and they were hitting back!
Point and laugh? This is sad. The main thread down from https://twitter.com/AmyDentata/status/705126380061601792 is basically talking about some group of people who self-identify as rationalists and don’t seem to have anything to do with the lesswrong kind of rationalism. Idiots ruining a label, and this person decided to amplify that association to their followers.
So, who are they talking about? Apparently, it’s someone on YouTube complaining about hugboxes and identity politics… Thunderf00t?
“basically talking about some group of people who self-identify as rationalists”
This group seems to intersect with “sceptics” i. e. people who rather indulge in the bashing of “pseudosciences” than getting anything done whatsoever.
“and don’t seem to have anything to do with the lesswrong kind of rationalism. Idiots ruining a label,”
Then again “lesswrong” in its implied humbleness (which seems a bit out of character?) is a much better label than “rationalism”. Unlike “lesswrong”, “rationalism” does not convey, that we are talking about an unobtainable ideal.
Personally I get the impression that rationalists, both of the sceptics and the lesswrong brand tend to underappreciate the implications of being locked into a human brain. Coincidentally this might be a driving force beheind the rationalist interest in transhumanism.
“This group seems to intersect with “sceptics” i. e. people who rather indulge in the bashing of “pseudosciences” than getting anything done whatsoever.”
That applies to most people who are members of a cause. The abolitionist movement had a significant amount of people whose contribution was agreement, signing petitions and wearing buttons.
“Then again “lesswrong” in its implied humbleness (which seems a bit out of character?) ”
http://lesswrong.com/lw/gq/the_proper_use_of_humility/
“Personally I get the impression that rationalists, both of the sceptics and the lesswrong brand tend to underappreciate the implications of being locked into a human brain. ”
http://lesswrong.com/lw/he/knowing_about_biases_can_hurt_people/
🙂
Links following up on the piece about Trump followers being uniquely authoritarian. I got them by asking MacWilliams rather than using google fu.
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/2016/01/27/donald-trump-is-attracting-authoritarian-primary-voters-and-it-may-help-him-to-gain-the-nomination/
I think this is the regression tables
http://www.hashtagdemocracy.com/news-and-updates/2016/1/26/tables-for-london-school-of-economics-usa-blog-post
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/2016/02/27/donald-trumps-victories-show-that-authoritarian-voters-are-now-in-control-of-the-republican-nomination-process/
not sure whether this is very different from other articles
http://www.vox.com/2016/2/23/11099644/trump-support-authoritarianism
overview of authoritarianism in American politics, has a magificent top illo
http://www.vox.com/2016/3/1/11127424/trump-authoritarianism
How does any of this differ from Tea Partiers complaining about the Bush/Cheney’s money grabs or Republicans as a group complaining about Obama’s threats to “Bypass Congress” on Gun Control and Immigration.
What makes Trump so special?
Why is Vox suddenly so interested in separation of powers?
The American left’s response to Trump is a small mystery to me. Policy-wise he’s probably further left on average than anyone else on the Republican field, immigration aside. I’m not saying they should love him, but if someone handed me a list of his policy leanings (insofar as they’re identifiable) and no other information, I wouldn’t have predicted anywhere near this number of “literally Hitler” memes, dark mutterings about dystopian regimes, threats of moving to Canada, etc. that I’ve been seeing on my Facebook wall. Let’s not even talk about Tumblr.
All I can think of is that he breaks the rules of the game. For the better part of thirty years, if not forty, anything smelling vaguely of racism has been radioactive in American politics: not quite enough to instantly sink a policy, but more than enough to cede the moral high ground. But along comes Trump and his wall, and suddenly no amount of highbrow scorn makes a difference. The guy’s actually making headway, even among traditionally marginalized demographics, and clown-car analogies, cartoons about parasitic brain squirrels, etc. don’t seem to matter.
That’s got to scare the dickens out of a group that’s used to framing the national discourse however it wants, even if it doesn’t always win the ensuing argument. And it’s enough to almost make me like the guy, even if I disagree with him almost point for point on policy.
There have been a few incidents of violence towards outsiders at Trump rallies. Now you can expect some bad apples in a campaign this size. The troubling fact is that Trump seems to encourage it.
Now combine this with his oddly phrased disavowals of David Duke. Left-wing Kevin Drum and right-wing Jonah Goldberg independently reach the same conclusion: Trump wants to publicly disavow the Stormfront crowd without losing their votes.
No, this isn’t fascism, but this is closer to fascism than America has come in decades. But the left has been crying wolf at “fascists” for even longer and, well, Aesop was right.
Still looks like grasping at straws.
How much violence have Trump rallies had compared to, say, Black Lives Matters rallies?
Er…
your link (march 2nd)
” But as Weisenthal points out, Trump repeatedly said “I disavow, I disavow, I disavow,” without ever mentioning who he was disavowing. And since the reporters weren’t given mics, you really couldn’t hear what the question was about. You’d only know if you’ve been following this controversy.”
Another source (feb 29th)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/03/01/donald-trump-and-david-duke-for-the-record/
“And I don’t mind disavowing anybody and I disavowed David Duke. ”
It looks like people are making stuff up about Trump.
Also- racism is not fascism. The Integralists are a thing and everyone who ignores them makes a Brazilian cry.
Jaskologist:
“How much violence have Trump rallies had compared to, say, Black Lives Matters rallies?”
BLM isn’t running for president.
>BLM isn’t running for president.
So?
@Nornagest
“The American left’s response to Trump is a small mystery to me. Policy-wise he’s probably further left on average than anyone else on the Republican field, immigration aside.”
Apparently so, and this Democrat would give him a nudge toward the GOP nomination, just in case of a GOP win. But we have plenty of Democrats to love who have those good policies as well as other good policies Trump opposes. So why bother defending Trump?
Otoh, a Republican voter who shares Trump’s “populist” policies (protecting Social Security etc) doesn’t have any GOP candidate to love. And hearing those policies advocated for in Red Tribe language, by someone who rejects other leftist ideas — is something for those Republicans to shout for.
I don’t find it mysterious that the American left isn’t defending Trump; I don’t expect it to defend anyone under a GOP flag in an election year. But I do find it (slightly) mysterious that it’s attacking him before all other candidates. This would be more explicable if he was the clear front-runner — though the apocalyptic tone’s still unusual — but it started long before he started winning primaries, when a lot of people still thought of him as a joke candidate.
This might not be true of all parts of the left, but it’s true of those I have any exposure to.
@ Nornagest
The American left’s response to Trump is a small mystery to me. Policy-wise he’s probably further left on average than anyone else on the Republican field, immigration aside.
And, the mockery started well before Trump became a serious contender. So neither his policies nor his power made him the top target — of Left, Right, media, or comedians.
What makes a top target is oddities easy to characture, or soundbyte-able phrases .. and/or perhaps lack of powerful friends.
I’m willing to take the other side, even at the risk of being called hysterical. It doesn’t have anything to do with racism and moral high ground, but it does have to do with willingness to break the rules of the game. I worry that there is a moderate chance that he would try to break the US government and a small chance he’d succeed. I’ve got friends that grew up in Venezuela, Russia, or even Israel. I know how precious a functioning government is — one where the rules can be pushed, sometimes twisted, but at the end of the day are still real felt constraints.
Some of his supporters don’t care, they think things so bad that it is worth breaking the system to get change. I think they are dangerous fools that don’t understand how good they have it. Some aren’t capable of seeing a system level argument, I don’t have much to talk about with them. Some, who may support him tepidly if at all but don’t see what the fuss is about. They think that once in the white house he’ll basically just become an ineffective president with some strange policy positions or be a playboy and not do much of anything. That he won’t try to do something like order the FBI to go arrest congressmen that insult him or the military to go bomb the Mexican capital building when they say they won’t pay for his wall. Then there’s those who agree that he might try something like that but think it’s no big deal as long he doesn’t get his way. But I think there’s already been a lot of damage done if it gets to that.
Could he really be any worse than the last two guys?
As I noted in my earlier reply, Bush fractured his own party, and the same people currently freaking out about Trump were rooting for Obama to bypass congress on Immigration.
I’m not buying this whole “breaks the rules of the game” angle.
@Brad – It seems to me that the system’s handling of Nixon made the system as a whole stronger, not weaker. That’s not a good argument for putting criminals in the White House, but on the (to me, fairly remote) chance that Trump tried to abuse his power in that way, I would expect Washington as a whole to process him like a pinata through a wood chipper. What’s to stop them?
“That he won’t try to do something like order the FBI to go arrest congressmen that insult him or the military to go bomb the Mexican capital building when they say they won’t pay for his wall.”
Both of those happen to be illegal and believe it or not the military have the right to refuse to obey unlawful orders. Trump may not be a good president, but I don’t see why he would do insanely illegal things given the fact he has managed to go through life and run a major business without doing insanely illegal things.
@ FacelessCraven
It seems to me that the system’s handling of Nixon made the system as a whole stronger, not weaker.
….
I would expect Washington as a whole to process [Trump] like a pinata through a wood chipper.
Yes. The Democrats ousted Nixon by threat of impeachment; the Republicans did impeach* Bill Clinton; and both sides already hate Trump.
* ie indict
@FacelessCraven
I’ve read many analyses of the form “The Nixon impeachment caused Americans to lose their trust in government which lead to bad outcome x,y,&z.” Not sure I buy the causation but they have a point about the trust in government. That said, you have a good point about Nixon actually leaving and that showing that the impeachment process is real. But I don’t know about something like the military refusing the president’s orders — that seems like the kind of thing that we’d rather not have to test, ever.
@Samuel Skinner
Torturing the relatives of accused terrorists also happens to be insanely illegal. I’m not willing to play the “it’s all an act game”.
To be fair, the cause of people losing trust in the government wasn’t necessarily Nixon’s impeachment but rather the fact that he was an enormous crook.
@brad
And? I’m not saying it is an act. I’m saying that Trump will follow the law. I think Trump simply has no clue what the law is in regards to foreign affairs.
The American attitude towards government seems to have changed enormously during the Seventies — practically every metric you can think of has inflection points there — but I’m not sure Nixon was the cause.
“the cause of people losing trust in the government wasn’t necessarily Nixon’s impeachment but rather the fact that he was an enormous crook.”
Is it clear that he was any more of a crook than previous presidents, as opposed being less successful in not getting caught?
I heard a talk by someone who had been active in state politics at a fairly high level. He commented about what a shock the Watergate case had been. As he put it (not verbatim, since I’m going by memory):
“Everyone knows that we spy on them and they spy on us. But this time some bastard called the cops.”
That his positions, such as they are, outside of immigration are on the left of the Republican party (not saying much) and kind of centrist by US standards (again, not saying much), isn’t itself a counterargument against fascism.
Fascism, after all, was populist (for, at least, some people – eg, the NSDAP was populist, but only in the interests of those it considered racially acceptable). Germany under National Socialism had all sorts of welfare-state elements – but that welfare state was denied to oppressed minorities, and funded to varying extents by plunder from oppressed minorities and occupied territories: property confiscated from Jews deported to camps was distributed to others (often those with party connections), the standard of living in Germany was kept higher during the war than you might expect through messing with exchange rates in the occupied west and outright plunder in the east, and so on.
“Can’t be a fascist, because he’s more populist than the Republican establishment leadership” is a strange argument.
The problem is that a lot of people don’t know what fascism actually was, historically. Some people (and not just on the left) will throw the term around ridiculously.
It’s also not an argument I made. I think whether or not he qualifies as fascist by some definition is almost irrelevant, partly because hardly anyone knows or cares about the characteristics of fascism as a political movement (vs. as a boogeyman), and partly because, as you say, the term’s been thrown around too much to have much sting left.
I apologize; I phrased it sloppily – did not mean to say that was what you were saying.
To put things better:
Some on the left are saying “he’s a far-right wing fascist”. This is a strange claim on two counts. One, because he is to the left of the established Republican leadership on pretty much everything except immigration. Two, because the actual fascist movements in the 1930s had some policies that were essentially left-wing, economically speaking.
People who view fascism as “extreme conservatism” don’t know much about fascism. The whole “those who want to uphold the status quo are fascist pigs!” thing is historically ignorant, because neither the Italian Fascists nor the National Socialists were big upholders of the status quo.
So, people who say “he’s a fascist” or “he’s like a fascist” are making a decent point – authoritarian or semi-authoritarian “we need a strong leader who will cut through the red tape” populism is a big part of fascism. But they’re making the point without meaning to, or knowing why it’s a decent point.
And, given that some on the left have been calling every law-and-order, family-values economic conservative a “fascist” since whenever, it definitely has lost its sting.
That’s not a great report. Consider this bit:
That “OMG they think black people should be slaves!” is not the whole of it. The poll question was about executive orders and do you think they are/are not constitutional. As examples of executive orders, they gave the “freeing the slaves” part, yes, but also “interning Japanese-Americans”.
You could have said you didn’t approve of freeing the slaves by executive order if you think executive orders are an unconstitutional exercise of power, not because you think black people should be slaves. If you think executive orders are unconstitutional, then to be consistent you could say “no” to all the examples.
Equally, if you think executive orders are constitutional, then to be consistent you should have said you approve of the internment during the Second World War. However, I haven’t seen anything about “X% of whomever’s voters want to intern Asian Americans”.
A lot of people, of course, said they approved of nice executive orders (freeing the slaves) but not mean ones (interning American citizens). Which is no kind of joined-up thinking on political issues but at least signals virtue, right? “We only like the good use of executive orders, those are constitutional but nasty ones are unconstitutional! Or maybe they’re no kind of constitutional at all, but you know which are the nice ones and which are the mean ones because you can feel the warm glow in your heart! Which is totally different from the war-time situation where most people thought the mean internment order was a nice order instead!”
I can’t believe I’m trying to defend Trump supporters on the grounds that they’re not all racist bigots, but the splashy headlines about authoritarianism are not even any use as fish-wrappers if the premise is wrong because you misinterpreted the data.
Tragically, as a law student currently enrolled in a constitutional law course, a lot of very smart people quasi-seriously hold the position that “if it’s good, it’s constitutional, and if it’s bad it isn’t.” This operationalizes as “if it’s good, we stretch whatever provision we can find (usually either the commerce or necessary and proper clauses of Article I) to cover it, but if it’s bad we’re all-of-a-sudden going to turn into strict constructionists.”
Tragic indeed. Since it’s the spring term, I’m guessing 1L rather than 2. You can still get away!
I have a notion that the difference between left and right is whether the primary focus is on bad behavior by high status people or by low status people.
I don’t know whether this maps on to distant societies like Athens and Sparta.
It might mean that Communism became right wing almost as soon as it got into power.
If your theory of the political spectrum puts communism on the right, that’s a pretty serious problem with your theory.
Some of my left-libertarian friends consider communism to be right-wing, and they have plausible arguments for it, such as democratic planning exacerbating problems with status structures and reinforcing the power of social capital.
@ Nancy Lebovitz
I have a notion that the difference between left and right is whether the primary focus is on bad behavior by high status people or by low status people.
Well, that seems to fit my impression of some opinions I see various places, which bring in punishment of petty thievery, preventing welfare ‘cheating’ even on a tiny scale, and moral condemnation of poor single women who are careless about birth control … even when counter productive to saving public money. And I don’t see much condemnation of people who cause worse damage by oil spills, market crashes etc (even when the market manipulators do get convicted of a crime; where are the demands for them to get real punishment, or to be banned from such power?)
A fascinating Tyler Cowen post on What are the core differences between Republicans and Democrats? Very Hansonian. A few excerpts, though it deserves to be read in full:
Speaking as a Republican, this guy, er, doesn’t really get us at all.
I’m a Republican because I think by voting for them (somewhat delusionally) I can actually achieve practical effects in shrinking the size of government, or at least limiting its growth. “Preserving the status of traditional groups” enters into my thinking approximately 0% of the time.
How many Republicans does Tyler Cowen know?
Since even you admit that your thinking is “somewhat delusional” (and indeed Republicans actually haven’t been doing any government shrinking or limiting of government growth to speak of), Tyler Cowen is being charitable and assuming that thinking can’t be the real reason, or more Republicans would have recognized the obvious lack of track record and abandoned the party.
I don’t know that this is quite fair.
It seems to me that the Republicans are more likely to cut taxes than Democrats, and less likely to create new programs taking over vast new areas of the economy. Now, George W. Bush, as a “compassionate conservative”, was a bit of an exception on that latter count, but that provoked a lot of resentment among the Republican base and was a major factor leading to the rise of the Tea Party in 2010, wanting to overthrow the Republican establishment.
Republicans are also more likely to appoint Supreme Court justices who support a government of (relatively) limited powers.
And even Bush tried to privatize Social Security at one point. It didn’t pass, but he wanted it to.
Of course, a major part of the problem is when war fever takes over the Republicans, and they suddenly forget about small government.
The best option for restraining government is, of course, divided government, since both Republicans and Democrats have their own things they want to spend a lot of money on. but when government is divided, neither of them get what they want.
>The best option for restraining government is, of course, divided government, since both Republicans and Democrats have their own things they want to spend a lot of money on. but when government is divided, neither of them get what they want.
Really? Because that’s not what I see at all. I see what happens as “Team A has a project, but it needs at least some votes from Team B to pass both houses. Team A offers the moderates of Team B a pork bribe. The huge bill plus pork passes, everyone seems confused that the national debt is so huge.”
Yes, that’s what should happen in theory. But in practice that’s not at all how it goes.
That would work except that both sides are universalistic in ideology (Democrats more so than Republicans). They don’t tolerate heretics living in peace according to their own rules.
@ Adam Casey:
That’s the problem with “bipartisanship”.
When the two parties hate each other, on the other hand, those huge pork bills are less likely to pass. Or at least they have a good deal less pork in them.
@ Anonymous:
It’s totally unclear to me what “leaving the other side to live by their own rules” would mean in this context, since the country has to be governed according to some policy or other. Laissez-faire is a policy, too. If it’s imposed, the other side doesn’t get what they want.
Anyway, the point is not that they tolerate “heretics” and sing kumbaya. It’s that they don’t have the ability under divided government to get all of what they want.
>When the two parties hate each other, on the other hand, those huge pork bills are less likely to pass. Or at least they have a good deal less pork in them.
Really? The two parties hate eachother now more than they have in the recent past. Obamacare got passed. The recent budget got passed.
And surely if you need to bribe someone who hates you you’ll need a bigger bribe not a smaller one?
Divided government was a great theory. It failed utterly. Turns out that in practice you can’t stop politicians from making laws just with a clever constitution. Can’t fight incentives like that.
The government wasn’t divided when Obamacare passed, so that’s not a strike against the theory. The latest budget is, though.
Yes, Obamacare was passed under total Democratic control of the legislature and the executive. And Medicare Part D was passed under total Republican control.
The current spending deal shows that divided government is not sufficient for completely grinding the wheels of government to a halt and preventing spending that both parties support. But it doesn’t create any major new programs. No major new programs, in terms of spending, have been created since the Republicans took over Congress.
I mean, since 2010 they’ve actually adopted—not perfect, but better—rules against pork-barrel spending.
A good Reason article elaborates on my view by pointing out that a divided Congress worked much better for limiting spending than did either a unified Democratic or Republican Congress:
Hence the “Very Hansionian.”
The idea is that people that don’t experience or understand the full range of human emotion are really good at understanding human behavior. Because they aren’t blinded by emotion or something. Or maybe it’s not that they are very good at it, it’s just that they are good at signalling that they are very good at it to gain status. Or something. Hard for broken allistics like us to understand the 8 dimensional chess.
I think Cowen would claim that the parts of government Republicans actually cut are those that erode the status of what he calls traditional groups. He’d read the Republican position of, say, “cut burdensome regulation” as a way of supporting and extending the status of businesspeople. Conversely, as you note, Republicans often call for increases in spending in many areas and there’s generally a “traditionally important group” whose status is protected or extended by this. For example Republicans generally call for increases in military spending, which is a way of supporting and extending the status of soldiers.
Not that the status arguments are the *only* reason for these positions – but really, I think I agree with Cowen for most people the status argument is what matters and that people want government to do things that raise the status of their preferred groups and want government to stop doing things that lower the status of their preferred groups. Your typical Republican voter is not doing an analysis of US military capability and deciding to support US military spending based on said analysis; they start by thinking “yay soldiers” and everything after that is rationalization. As Robin Hanson says, “politics isn’t about policy.”
Republicans therefore tend to be the party of small government because the government currently generally does more to extend and protect the status of groups Democrats “like” / degrade the status of Republicans “like”, than the reverse. On issues where this dynamic is reversed, Republicans become the party of big government and Democrats become the party of more limited government (e.g. police power, immigration).
Obligatory disclaimers – obviously the same largely holds for Democrats too, obviously vast handwavy generalizations with lots of exceptions, etc.
For example Republicans generally call for increases in military spending, which is a way of supporting and extending the status of soldiers.
It’s hard to see how spending a trillion dollars on the F-35 “supports and extends the status of soldiers”. Unless maybe you’re counting fighter pilots as soldiers, but that’s a bit of a stretch – particularly when you’ve got a competing political movement to preserve the A-10 close air support aircraft over the objections of the USAF.
Any DoD spending at least incidentally “supports soldiers”, but there’s a whopping big chunk of it that is clearly being driven by the goals of maintaining real warfighting capability, defeating the bad guys with minimal soldier-type activity, and/or turning taxpayer dollars into defense contractor profits. There’s also stuff that is driven by soldier-glorification. And sometimes they overlap, because sometimes you actually do need the soldiers to fight wars and defeat the bad guys. So drawing the line is going to be hard, even with things like the F-35/A-10 debate to help define it. And this…
they start by thinking “yay soldiers” and everything after that is rationalization
…seems to me like someone started by thinking “Republicans stupid” and everything after that was a rationalization.
No expert on the subject, but I have read that there’s what could be viewed as status battles going on within the USAF (and, presumably, other air forces) between high-ranking officers with a fighter-related background and those with a bomber-related background. I’ve also read that one reason the USAF wants the A-10 phased out is that a mission of supporting troops on the ground is/is seen as subordination to the Army – again, could be seen as a status thing.
Spending on the F-35 isn’t about status. Saying “I support our fine men and women in the military, and that’s why I’m proposing a an across-the board increase in military spending, because our soldiers deserve the best” is. The politician wants the voter to feel: “that politician thinks soldiers deserve high status. I support soldiers too. That politician and I have similar values and I will vote for him.”
Regarding your second paragraph, I explicitly said “not that the status arguments are the *only* reason for these positions” which frankly I thought was too obvious to dwell on. But dwell away if you think there’s someone who doesn’t get it.
seems to me like someone started by thinking “Republicans stupid” and everything after that was a rationalization.
Voters don’t analyze or care about policy detail. I don’t think this is controversial nor is it the same thing as saying that they are stupid. And while the example given was about Republicans because the subthread is about Republicans, I explicitly said that “the same largely holds for Democrats too.”
If you’re going to insist on politically balanced examples you have lots of thread policing ahead of you.
Spending on the F-35 isn’t about status. Saying “I support our fine men and women in the military, and that’s why I’m proposing a an across-the board increase in military spending, because our soldiers deserve the best” is.
But that’s not what politicians actually say; that’s a caricature of what you think they are saying. Whenever I hear politicians talking about defense spending, even in sound bites, they are more nuanced than that and they usually steer clear of “…across the board” style blank checks. They are also, in my experience, at least as likely to justify spending on the basis of threats and/or capabilities than “soldiers deserving the best”.
The Republican electorate cares about the status of soldiers, but it also cares about defending the United States and its allies against their numerous and frightening (to Republicans at least) enemies abroad. I believe that most of the “status of soldiers” stuff in practice manifests w/re veterans(*). I believe that most of the politics surrounding DoD issues like budgeting, is about the threat stuff. The overlap between the two is not trivial, but I doubt it is more than a third of the total and I do believe you are greatly distorting things by trying to condense the politics of national defense into that framework.
* Often with a poor match to the actual interests of veterans
A good place to start is the Green Book published by the DoD Comptroller, but R&D isn’t actually a very big part of the defense budget, in spite of the spectacular total costs incurred by these long-running programs. You’ll see Procurement (which refers to intermediate-term needs expected to be consumed within five years) and Operations and Maintenance (which is immediate needs expected to be consumed within a year) are the bulk of expenses, with Personnel right behind. Much of procurement and O&M is just ammo, fuel, and repair parts. Developing mil tech isn’t cheap, but operating it and keeping it working once it’s been developed is quite a bit less cheap.
I don’t know what the exact breakdown is, but I can say from experience that a brigade-level combined arms gunnery event, which is executed twice annually by every heavy brigade in the force, costs about $4-5 million for about a two-week event, and that doesn’t include ammunition. I only ever paid for fuel and repair parts. Ammo comes from the Procurement appropriation and division-level budget people only control O&M.
EDIT: Since there’s a bit of a combative tone above, I should add that I’m not countering or augmenting any points anyone else has made, just adding information. I don’t care about the politics of this. I’m just stating the reality that just keeping our current military operational and trained is extremely expensive, regardless of the future direction Congress decides to take it in. Changing that would require drastic cuts. Congress already made pretty large personnel cuts. In fact, Personnel was the single largest appropriation just a few years ago. Truly cutting expenses would require not just cutting manpower, but permanently selling off equipment without replacing it and reducing actual activity, too. So far they mostly cut civilian support and got rid of a whole bunch of mid-level officers and NCOs serving in staff positions, without asking the front-line force to actually do any less.
Yes of course it is a caricature, indeed my 40ish words did not capture all the nuance that a politician might have included.
Let’s try again. The electorate may care about issues, but does not understand them nor does it care to. It therefore judges politicians largely on values. To the extent that a politician seeking votes talks about issues, it is in order to project values. A very great deal of values is about who you hold to be deserving of status and who you do not, and this cuts across almost all political issues. In any specific political issue, there are going to be other considerations as well – e.g. in the specific case of national defense, there is of a component of who you think needs to be deterred/killed/befriended/etc (though that ties back to values). So the details of each issue differ, but in almost any political issue, “whose status are we reinforcing” is going to a productive thing to consider.
I agree with you entirely that *policy* doesn’t really get set this way. “Politics isn’t about policy,” goes the Hansonian refrain. Conversely, often policy isn’t about politics. What happens when you actually are in congress and negotiating with other politicians over the details of funding is a different ballgame entirely – voters are basically going to be oblivious to the details of how a funding bill gets written, so other considerations will tend to dominate.
I’m not a Republican myself, technically still registered as a Democrat, but I’m reasonably socially conservative and know a lot of rural Republican types personally. I’d wager a guess that this,
, gets things almost entirely backwards.
Republicans generally think those places are functioning pretty well and that they should be allowed to continue functioning well. Aside from Neocons, who are a different kettle of fish, it seems like Republicans mostly don’t care about people being weird in distant places until there’s a risk of that weirdness spreading.
For example: NY state is solid blue on the electoral map, but Upstate New York is extremely rural and very red. Upstate folks love their guns and their God as much as anyone in Alabama. And the Republicans have controlled the state senate here continuously since the end of world war two, with two one-year upsets.
Yet you won’t really find much support, in the sense of actually being willing to push the issue, for making the city more like Upstate. The city is (in)famous for it’s libertine culture, dangerous streets, de facto gun ban and generally being the American Babylon. But so long as that stuff stays in the city and nobody starts coming after their Big Gulps or extended magazines the people up here couldn’t care less.
If there was a realistic offer of a Culture War ceasefire, a sort of ‘cuius regio eius religio’ where the States could do their own thing and the Fed mostly stayed out of local affairs, my feeling is that Republicans would jump at it and the Democrats would balk. That might just be because they’re losing at the moment, but it also seems sincere on the parts of people I talk to personally.
That sounds about right.
You accurately describe one half of the ceasefire demand, no input by a majority of citizens in how much of the state is run. The second half is the continued flow of tremendous amounts of money from the productive parts of the state to the non-productive parts. Upstaters sure hate NYC but they love spending its money. The demand is also that this flow of money be accompanied by silence so that upstate voters can continue to believe that they are being taxed to pay for NYC welfare queens instead of the other way around. In fact, in general it seems to a Red Tribe thing to be all in favor of government programs to benefit themselves and their areas but really offended by anyone that dares mention that in public.
Which programs do you have in mind?
Because yes, I’m pretty sure rural areas are going to be a lot more concerned with, and spend a whole lot more per capita on things like roads, power, and water infrastructure.
But then roads and power are not what most people are talking about when they talk about cutting government programs.
What the Right doesn’t take into account is that this sort of cultural ceasefire would also preserve Jim Crow in perpetuity if it were enacted circa 1950.
What the Left doesn’t take into account is that not every cultural disagreement is Jim Crow.
This is important and fixing it is a nontrivial problem since everyone wants to make their problem the most important in the world/minimize things that make them look bad.
“Leftists from the big city should stop interfering with how country folk want to live” sounds reasonable.
“Leftists from the big city should stop interfering with the way some country folk want to tell other country folk how to live, such as by cracking down on abortion” doesn’t sound so obvious.
A request for Scott: Can you ban Anonymous?
No, I don’t mean it like that. What I mean is, given that we’re obviously not going to get full anonymity back, can you at least forbid “Anonymous” as a name to comment with. As it is right now, even if you’re anonymous, you’re recognizable by your Gravatar (unless you change your Email every time ,which no one does, because, really, who has the time?), but it’s still kind of annoying when several Anons are commenting at the same time.
Ideally, I’d want full anonymity back, but like with the free market, these kind of half measures don’t make anyone happy.
I don’t want to have to choose a non-Anonymous name that will make it easy for people to remember me across threads.
But they will remember, and it’ll be increasingly easy as long as your opinions are not an incoherent mess and/or you have a distinct writing pattern. If anything, you could chose different handles for every thread, which would make conversation more convenient while making it actually more difficult for people to track you from thread to thread.
That being said, my preferred solution would be going back to not requiring an email (and therefore having people be mostly anonymous for realsies), but I assume there’s a good reason for it not to be that way.
Without the email entry I can’t comment from any of the local public wifi spots thanks to one of my neighbors being fond of posting stormfront copypasta from them.
I’m skeptical; do you really remember what I’ve posted before under this gravatar?
I could go back and search your posts, but I’ll admit I do not. However:
>I do remember your Gravatar.
>I think (and if I’m wrong, do correct me), that you’ve started posting here fairly recently.
>I am not a very smart person (unlike the average commenter), which means I probably haven’t participated in conversations you were in (since I mostly post memes and pray Scott doesn’t get fed up and bans me), and also probably skimmed over most of your comments.
Having to track someone’s mindspace using their gravatar, rather than their name, is a trivial inconvenience. It is an even greater inconvenience if they make up new fake email address every thread or whatever, and you have to track it by commonality of opinion.
>or you have a distinct writing pattern.
This is somewhat ameliorated in that most (almost everyone!) people here write with correct spelling and punctuation. You’d have to some kind of linguist to pick apart different people based on their writing style alone, barring the extreme cases of people who do have idiosyncratic styles (like Sidles – but he’s banned, largely for that reason).
I dunno, I feel like I could still pick out a post by Vox or Deiseach fairly easily.
“Gosh, where are all these references to local Irish politics coming from? And that Chesterton quote!”
“Surely, there must be another Liverpool fan among SSC commenters”
“Why is this anon writing usernames in bold?”
Etc.
I dunno, I feel like I could still pick out a post by Vox or Deiseach fairly easily.
True, but those are very much not the target demographic of self-imposed anonymization. Additionally, posting under an anonymous handle is just part of the discipline to remove identifying data from one’s posts – it is often not sufficient. Ceasing to be a narcissist may well be required.
Note to self: curses! my cunning plan has been foiled by these pesky kids and their flea-ridden mutt! How they penetrated my disguise I have no idea, it must simply have been dumb luck.
I must adopt a different tone in order to blend in successfully with the others on this site. Ah! I have it!
Hey, fellow Americans since we are all Americans here! Golly gosh and gee whilikers, ain’t HPMOR the most rooting-tootingest finest work of fiction anyone ever produced anywhere ever, yee-haw?
There – they will never see through that! 🙂
Uh oh, I think Deiseach’s account has been hacked, this doesn’t sound like her at all!
‘Pseudoanonymity for me, not for thee’
There could just be a generic email that everyone who wants to be fully anonymous uses. I’m currently using anon@gmail.com which is not my real email address, and I’ve seen someone else with the same Gravatar posting as ‘me’ so I guess it’s a Schelling point.
Hey, that’s a neat idea. If enough people adopt it, it’d be useful to deflect identification.
That sounds like a good way to make SSC less anon-friendly.
1. Many anons become indistinguishable.
2. One of the indistinguishable anons misbehaves.
3. Other users, unable to restrict their ire to a specific individual, dislike all indistinguishable anons a little more.
4. The 2-3 cycle repeats until the problem attracts Scott’s all-seeing eye.
5. Scott starts demanding real email addresses / unique names.
(Theoretically, the cycle can also go the other way — good anon posts resulting in diffuse positive regard, but it’s less likely in practice, as anon comments often contain “unpleasant truths” and drive-by snark.)
Anonymous misbehaviour doesn’t seem to be a big problem. There are only two in the banlist otherwise filled with uniques.
I change my email fairly often. Just type gibberish in the email box and delete a character every now and then.
Only reason I dont do it for every post is that when someone responds to me I prefer to not have to specify which previous posts were mine when participating multiple times in the same subthread.
I used to do this, but I think Full-Anon Mode (use of anon@gmail.com) is mildly preferable.
Anyone else looking at the thread above, and wondering if “Whatever Happened to Anonymous” is repeatedly logging in under different addresses and having a conversation with himself just to have a little fun with us?
Is that not what’s happening?
Alas, at this point I must admit that I’m the one behind the sockpuppets.
Actually, most of the site is my sock puppets arguing with each other for Scott’s amusement.* I create new ones every couple of weeks to keep things interesting. No one has yet cottoned on!
*Except for David Friedman. He’s a real human being, I suspect.
Can confirm, I am one of your sock puppets.
Can confirm. I’m not.
Since it’s an open thread, I have a question for anyone involved in polyamory:
Is polyamory more like an open marriage or more like polygamy?
My view of the subject is based on reading the polyamory Usenet group many years ago, and the impression I got was the latter alternative–a reasonably stable network of a small number of individuals, with new members added rarely. A recent conversation with someone whose opinions were formed more recently portrayed it as the former alternative—a small number of people who have romantic relationships with each other but have sex with people outside that group whenever they feel like it.
Is monogamy more like dating or more like marriage? Polyamory is an umbrella term for a) the ability and desire to maintain romantic relationships with more than one person, and b) the various relationship arrangements set up by polyamorous people.
“the ability and desire to maintain romantic relationships with more than one person”
If all relationships are being maintained—long term rather than a one night stand or something close to it—it’s more like polygamy, less like open marriage.
If anything but one-night-stands is forbidden, the arrangement is lacking the “amory” part. But if the marriage is open to lovers or friends-with-benefits, it is a form of polyamory.
“the ability and desire to maintain romantic relationships with more than one person”
Of the people I know or have known well enough to bring this up in conversation I cannot remember a single one, who did not express this desire to some degree.
Wow. I do know a few mono people, myself.
Oh, and I probably should’ve included the ability to be OK with your partner having other partners. Relationship rules like “polyamory for me, but not for thee” are kind of a no-no.
One thing i wonder about is the effect of leaving your life open to destabilizing additions to the cast of characters around you. What happens when someone you love brings an asshole or a bitch into your life?
Also, if one of the partners starts hanging out with a new person, there’s always the potential that they will be converted back to monogamy. Since hidden preferences are unknowable, it seems there would have to be some associated anxiety?
When one poly seems to be falling deeper in love than they ever planned or wanted to, do the remaining partners band together as a matter of self-interest to shoo, or conversationally liquidate, the threat away? Or does it happen that the unjealous one instead alerts the potentially lovesick one that the third is making trouble?
What if your monogamous partner’s new best friend or long-lost brother is an asshole? What if your partner gets a random crush and decides that it must mean they don’t really love you?
IMO, the best thing about the polyamory community is the culture of open communication — if something is bothering you, the poly-approved thing to do is to bring it up in a non-confrontational manner. Sadly, the mainstream relationship culture (or the lack of it) often results in people either suffering in silence or going straight to accusations and demands.
Another thing poly people do is try to consider potential issues in advance, and think of realistic ways to avoid them or limit their consequences.
The general mindset required is a willingness to both accept your feelings and manage them, without either suppressing or blindly obeying them. E.g., “falling in love” with a new partner is referred to as “new relationship energy“, which helps everyone keep in mind that it’s a pleasant, but unsustainable feeling, which should be tempered with more long-term concerns.
Exactly. The desire was there. The ability, in terms of lets say emotional requirements, often was not.
To be fair, I would count concepts like “I imagine that it would be too much effort to make it work, so I’m not interesed in such things” as lack of ability, not lack of desire. It, to me, seems like an obvious ex-post rationalisation.
“I cannot remember a single one, who did not express this desire to some degree.”
I think it depends on what you mean by “desire.”
I’ve been married to my present wife for thirty years ago and have not slept with anyone else over that time. There is a sense in which I desire to—certainly I find younger women attractive and I occasionally imagine having an affair with one. But when I appeared to have the opportunity I did not take it, so in the economist’s sense of revealed preference I did not desire it.
I expect that most men, with the exception of those who are asexual, find the thought of sexual partners other than the one they have attractive. Is that all you mean?
David:
“But when I appeared to have the opportunity I did not take it, so in the economist’s sense of revealed preference I did not desire it.”
Hm. You surely are more familiar with revealed preferences than me. My understanding is that you revealed an upper bound for what you are willing to pay for such an opportunity (in terms of expected negative consequences).
My point was more like that there is a non-zero willingness to pay in the first place. I. e. we approximately can translate desire into willingness to pay and strength of the desire into its magnitude (as measured in utils, naturally).
E. g. some people when faced with such an oppertunity might react like you did, but in the same scenario, if it were guaranteed that their spouse never found out might react differently.
“find the thought of sexual partners other than the one they have attractive. Is that all you mean?”
Assuming you imply [but would never act on such thought], I guess that is a subset of what I mean, but certainly not “all”. You might say that this is the lower bound to your upper bound, so yes, maybe I tricked my statement into being true by including the lower bound. But what I really meant to say is that in my sample the mean strength of the desire (by above definition) is way above the lower bound.
Now I’m writing it down this sounds equally trivial. The interesting point seems to be that the social standard of acceptable desires is very near to the lower bound.
I’m not sure how you get a clean division between cost and benefit.
You could say that the benefit of an affair is sensual pleasure plus a boost to the ego, the cost is the feeling of guilt and long run effects on the stability of a currently successful marriage.
Or you could say the benefit is sensual pleasure, ego boost, minus feelings of guilt, the cost … .
Taking your approach, you could say that I desire to jump out of an airplane without a parachute. It would be such fun for the first thirty seconds. That’s the benefit, everything else is cost.
My revealed preference shows that benefit minus cost is negative. That’s all revealed preference ever shows (or that it’s positive).
Point taken.
Like you said I depends on what one means by “desire”. On reflection. my conception of desires allows for a desire to be present but never revealed (i. e. intentionally kept secret) whicht admittedly collides with my own attempt to construct a more quantitative model.
What differenciates this from the skydiving without a parachute example is that it would come up more easily when queried for desires. (In the mind of the inquieree).
There is a difference between desiring something for its inherent properties, but not wishing to pursue it due to the package that something comes in, and not wishing to pursue that something because we do not want that something.
Compare:
I want to eat this tub of ice-cream, but I don’t want to get fat, and I don’t want to get fat more than I want to eat it.
vs.
I don’t want to get cholera, because that’s awful in itself.
Recalling a previous monogamy discussion on this blog, I think that is the main point.
Is e. g. $hurting your partner$ an inherent property of $cheating$ or is it a side-effect that has more to do with the specific partner than with the abstract idea of cheating.
The line between these options seems to be closely corelated to the line between “mono” and “poly”.
@ Alex
“Cheating” is called that because it involves an ethical transgression — breaking the rules of the relationship, betraying your partner’s trust. Therefore, hurting your partner is an inherent property of cheating, but whether getting involved with another person is cheating depends on your relationship(s) with your current partner(s).
I’d say it is an inherent property. It’s not cheating if there’s no expectation of monogamous fidelity, like say, with a fuck-buddy, or within the confines of a polygamous marriage, or when not having a partner to begin with.
Tangentially, I’m somewhat surprised how mild that sounds in English – “cheating”. In my language it’s called “treason”.
Nita:
But that is a semantics game you are playing there, and please be so kind to keep in mind that I’m not communicating in my first language here.
What I got from the previous monogamy discussion is that some people believe that if someone says e. g. “Go have relationships with other people, I’m happy for you” in his heart of hearts that someone has to be lying because being hurt is an inherent property of a partner having a relationship with someone else. The latter I shortened to cheating, not wanting to type it out, but it really does not matter how you call it.
Maybe I misunderstood, misremember or overinterpreted what people said there.
@ anon
Well, back when a wife killing her husband was called “petty treason“, calling infidelity “treason” might have been rather confusing.
@ Alex
Sure — neither am I 🙂
I have seen such people, of course, but they are only a subset of all mono people — namely, those mono people who don’t know/believe that poly people exist.
@Alex
So what you’re saying is the issue whether it will always hurt your partner when you have sex with someone else, regardless of circumstances?
“So what you’re saying is the issue whether it will always hurt your partner when you have sex with someone else, regardless of circumstances?”
Yes, in the light of what you or some other Anonymous wrote above about “inherent properties”.
“I have seen such people, of course, but they are only a subset of all mono people — namely, those mono people who don’t know/believe that poly people exist.”
A bit of a hyperbole, but: What I (somewhat) fail to see is how one could fully acknowledge the possibility that one loves their partner and be ok with the partner having other relationships and not immediately adopt that stance for themselves. (Thus becoming “poly”?)
The again I read up on Aumann’s theorem recently so maybe I’m shiny new hammering here.
@ Alex
I guess the missing premise is that people can be substantially different? Some love salmiakki, others don’t. Asexuals know that most people enjoy sex, but that doesn’t change their own sexuality. Parenthood makes some people happy, and others miserable.
Or, in rationalist lingo, “the utility function is not up for grabs“.
“I guess the missing premise is that people can be substantially different? Some love salmiakki, others don’t.
…
Or, in rationalist lingo, “the utility function is not up for grabs“.”
Nah. I’m aware of this and have preached it to others (in other places).
The philosophical question, very much related to our discussion, is, is there a limit to my (or human) awareness. Is the “typical mind fallacy” really a fallacy in the sense of the “post hoc fallacy”, i. e. we can reason correctly if we only try, or is it a fundamental limit to human resoning.
“Asexuals know that most people enjoy sex, but that doesn’t change their own sexuality. Parenthood makes some people happy, and others miserable.”
Point is, not being a parent, I can neither intellectually nor emotionally grasp the merits of parenthood, even though I am abstractly aware that some like it. This idea of course has a long history along the lines of “explaining color to a blind person”. I assume its similar for asexuals. More to the point, I was assuming that someone for whom the partner having other relation just isn’t ok will have a similar problem grasping how for some it is ok.
And again you might call my observation trivial. But the conclusion I was leap of faithing to, was that the difference between “mono” and “poly” is less about whether one desires other relationships (for an admittedly very loose definition of desire) and more about whether one can fully appreciate that this could ever be “not harmful”.
@ Alex
Ah, now I understand what you’re getting at.
I do think that “typical mind fallacy” is caused by a fundamental limitation of human — well, not reasoning, but intuitive understanding of others.
Basically, we intuitively evaluate the preferences and perceptions of others in three ways:
a) typical — “essentially like mine”
b) analogical — “they feel about X like I feel about Y”
c) alien — “I don’t get it”
Examples:
a) “being mocked hurts, so mocking Scott would hurt his feelings”
b) “Scott loves Tom Swifties, like I love anti-jokes”
c) “Scott likes women, but not sex — I don’t get it”
However, although we can’t grasp what it’s like to be a person with substantially different preferences, we can still reason about it on an intellectual level, if we accept the self-reports of others as valid input.
(Even (b) is only semi-intuitive, as it uses low-level reasoning to get halfway from (c) to (a).)
@ Nita
The wiki says:
The utility function is not up for grabs
The constraints of decision theory are only there to help you win; they don’t specify what constitutes a win. Rationality in and of itself cannot constrain what you want, except insofar as what you thought you wanted failed to reflect what you actually wanted (or was just plain inconsistent). Hence the saying: the utility function is not up for grabs.
I Googled “up for grabs” but … what does “up for grabs” mean here?
“if we accept the self-reports of others as valid input.”
I’d like to add “self-report as opposed to revealed preferences”. Because that distinction got us into this subthread in the first place.
To recap:
– I get self-reports of people desireing, by their own respective definitions of desire, relationships (mostly sexual) outside their current relationship not only in the abstract but often with specific others.
– David correctly objects that these self-reports do not match revealed preferences.
– However, I did never get any self reports about the desire to go skydiving without a parachute. So maybe there is something to the reports.
– Also, but this seems to be a sampling problem (cf. Adam below), I did not get self-reports about expressedly not desiring extra relationships as opposed to the negative effects.
– I did get such negative self-reports on the basis of “associated negative consequences”, and while I cannot distinguish this from the parachute case (that point goes to David), Anonymous’ concept of “inherent properties” tempted me to leap of faith to the conclusion that the line between “poly” and “mono” relates to whether one intuitively (for lack of a better word) thinks about the problem in terms of separable costs and benefits (like me) or in terms of an inherently connected “package” (like David, cf. parachuting example).
Makes sense?
@ houseboatonstyx:
Is English not your first language?
Anyway, “up for grabs” normally means “available, obtainable, unclaimed”, as in “I’ve got three tickets to the ball game up for grabs!”
Yudkowsky is apparently using it in a slightly different sense to mean “debatable, negotiable, indeterminate”. It probably would have been more technically correct to say “up for debate”.
@ Alex
Interestingly, I have probably fantasized about skydiving (or BASE jumping) without a parachute about as much or more than I have fantasized about having sex outside my marriage.
The skydiving fantasy goes along the lines “if for some reason I was really certain that I wanted to die, throwing myself off a really high cliff would be a pretty fun way to die.” I am about as confident as I can be that I will never actually want to kill myself, but I can at least imagine a scenario in which I would jump without a parachute
On the other hand, while I find fantasies about having sex with other partners arousing, I cannot imagine a scenario in which I would ever do it. And this reticence is a property of me, not of my marriage! If in the future I marry a different partner (God protect us!) I am pretty sure I would still not want to have sex outside marriage even if they were into it.
The point being, how you ask the question might be important. If you were to ask me “do you fantasize about/find arousing sex with other people” my answer would be “of course,” but if you ask “do you desire sex with other people” my answer would be “never.”
Interstingly indeed. Well there goes my theory then 🙂
“There is a difference between desiring something for its inherent properties, but…”
What makes properties inherent? Why, in your example, isn’t the fact that ice cream contains calories which make you fat (and eating a whole tub will probably give you a stomach ache as well) an inherent property?
Doing something has effects, some positive and some negative. If your division is between positive and negative, than you “desire” anything with any positive effect, which doesn’t seem right. You want to make the division between inherent and not inherent, but it isn’t clear to me what that means.
The fact that cheating on my wife would make me feel guilty is, in my view, just as inherent a feature as the fact that a desirable woman wanting to make love to me would boost my ego.
” More to the point, I was assuming that someone for whom the partner having other relation just isn’t ok will have a similar problem grasping how for some it is ok.”
I don’t think that describes me. I have read fictional accounts of non-exclusive relationships that sounded attractive. And I’ve known people in non-exclusive relationships and not found it particularly puzzling.
I’m not even sure I couldn’t have enjoyed being part of a polygynous or polyandrous or polyamorous set of relationships. But I am in an exclusive relationship with a woman I love, I have a self-image which includes honesty, so there isn’t any way I could sleep with another woman that wouldn’t have very serious emotional costs for me, even if she never found out.
One consequence of which is that, in order to enjoy fantasies of sex with other women, I have to imagine myself as someone else, or in an alternate history where I’m not married, or set them before I was married.
What makes properties inherent?
The degree to which it is possible to separate them from the act/object while retaining what the act/object is.
For example, if you steal something, but don’t actually take or appropriate anything from someone else – is it still stealing?
Why, in your example, isn’t the fact that ice cream contains calories which make you fat (and eating a whole tub will probably give you a stomach ache as well) an inherent property?
The “getting fat” part is not only dependent on the ice cream and its consumption. It is also dependent on one’s metabolism and level of exercise. If you’re genetically predisposed for thinness and work in the mines all day, they’re not likely to get fat, even with a whole tub. Therefore, it is possible to separate the consequence of fatness from the consumption of the ice cream, making that a non-inherent property.
If the ice cream is some sort of advanced “no calorie food” that tastes good but doesn’t fatten you up (or cause diabeetus), then the negative consequence is removed from the equation.
Doing something has effects, some positive and some negative.
Yes.
If your division is between positive and negative, than you “desire” anything with any positive effect, which doesn’t seem right.
Why not? Why shouldn’t one be an IRL munchkin?
Can we define “desire” [of an act] as the (irrational) ability to forget the negative consequences of said act while thinking of it?
There are times when you want to be a munchkin. But when you don’t, it’s usually because of opportunity costs.
Maybe I’m late in adding this and I sort of already said it below, but I’m not even monogamous and still have no desire to maintain romantic relationships with more than one person. I barely have the desire to maintain such a relationship with one person and it largely works because she’s just as asocial as I am and travels for work 25-50% of any given month. I’m fairly convinced at this point this is why my previous marriages ultimately failed. They wanted a lot more out of it than I did.
Depends on the person. I’ve seen both options within a single network — even within a single couple. There isn’t as far as I know any community-wide consensus on the subject, although as with all relationship questions you’ll usually get five strong opinions if you ask three poly people about it. There might be a slight bias towards the more stable model in practice, though, and a stronger one in theory and rhetoric.
I think age has a lot to do with this — the younger poly folks I know tend to have less stable networks, but relationships between younger people are less stable in general.
I think it encompasses both. Once you open up any part of a relationship I think the complexity of human emotions and behaviors makes it harder to categorize polyamory as one or the other.
I’m in an open marriage. ‘Open’ just means literally that, we’re open to the idea of having sex with other people, maybe together, maybe separate. So far, it’s only been separate and only a couple times. We’ve half-heartedly talked about going to sex parties, but we’re not very social and hardly go out at all anywhere.
I don’t in any way identity as poly and consider those people very different. I have absolutely no desire to maintain multiple ongoing relationships that involve some sort of actual obligation to a person. One is more than enough. It’s just that neither she nor I care about maintaining complete sexual exclusivity for 60 years.
It varies with the people involved. The same person might at the same time have a relationship to which they’re strongly committed, another more casual relationship, and have sex with other people without any kind of attachment. People have from 0 to a few primary relationships (0 and 1 being the most common) that are similar to serious monogamous relationships, 0 to several <a href="https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2015/04/28/secondary-partnerships/"secondary relationships, and some or no casual sex. To give some examples, some of them based on people I know:
* A, B, and C are strongly committed to each other. They intend to spend much of their lives together and raise their children together. C is also interested in less committed relationships on the side, but A and B are not. None of them are interested in sex outside of relationships.
* A and B are strongly committed to each other. They marry and intend to raise children together. Both of them also have more casual relationships and sometimes casual sex, but they’re only interested in one serious long-term relationship.
* A has secondary relationships with B and C and has no interest in forming a primary relationship in general.
* A is in a primary relationship with B. A is interested in forming secondary relationships (but doesn’t currently have any), and B already has several. Neither of them is interested in sex outside relationships.
Too late to edit, but fixed link.
Bryan Caplan offers a few updates on Myth of the Rational Voter for 2016. Highlights:
(3) totally ignores Trump’s attitude. Whatever his actual policy proposals, every time he opens his mouth, he obviously places himself in opposition to Blue Tribe political correctness norms. Being against illegal immigration is definitely important, but I think being against political correctness is far more important to the average Trump voter.
If the hispanic version of Trump is interpreted as a banana republic style strongman, it’s only because there are actual banana republics and actual strongmen in Latin America. So I don’t understand Caplan’s last point, the one Vox quotes in bold.
The nastiest server for Minecraft
One of the odder micro-nations.
This sounds very interesting. I may just have to check this out myself.
Very defect-defect.
Scott, how did you get your super-lovely blog layout? I want a layout just like it.
Based on WordPress theme Pujugama, with a lot of modifications by me and Michael Keenan.
If you want the code or have questions about it, contact me at michael [dot] keenan [at] gmail [dot] com
Oliver’s … thing about Trump was rather nice in that it pointed out an excellent social class metaphor for Trump. The gold sharpie.
Much like a gold sharpie Trump is what poor people think rich people look like. So much tacky gold, talking about how rich he is, casually insulting people as a status symbol. It’s a very very lower class way to be rich. (Heck, change his skin colour and the difference between him and a gangland druglord covered in gold chains is what exactly?)
If you want a perfect definition of high social class just take The Donald and reverse every single trait. To all the liberals confused that the working class is voting for this billionaire: he’s one of them, you aren’t.
Gun control might still work, even though Vox says it does
A quick Google shows some debunkings of statistics. (Disclaimer: Fox News, but then they are one of the few outlets with a motive to debunk such statistics). link “While it is true that the murder rate in Missouri rose 17 percent relative to the rest of the U.S. in the five years after 2007, it had actually increased by 32 percent during the previous five years. The question is why the Missouri murder rate was increasing relative to the rest of the United States at a slower rate after the change in the law than it did prior to it.”
The Vox post also points out that the study included automatic weapon bans, and then refers to “assault weapons”. Of course, automatic weapons have been defacto banned in the US since 1934.
“Using the female-pronouns for the collective/gender neutral makes this clear; there’s no real reason we shouldn’t speak of, for example, “Womankind” as much as “Mankind” to mean “Humanity”, or that our hypothetical reader, customer, man in the street should be the woman in the street instead. So we get our default-neutral-inclusive terms are female, not male, gendered.”
Well, there is a reason. “Mankind” has its etymological roots from back when man was gender-neutral (the term for a male human was “wer”). We could start using “womankind”, but it would be artificial and pointless.
“But if in a story set in such a world you read a sentence like “The ruler hurried out to her waiting carriage”, you begin to visualise the person described as a woman. Then it hits you: wait, I have no reason to think that the ruler is female, the only thing I’ve been told about them so far is “her carriage”. Then you realise that if the sentence read “his waiting carriage”, you’d automatically think of them as a man. And then you realise that all the ostensibly neutral or inclusive usages, where “he, his, man” and so forth were the default, were having an effect on you, were making you unconsciously both accept and expect that the people who do, make, buy, consume, act, etc. in the world are men not women.”
Yes, I would automatically assume gender because that’s what happens when you use a gendered pronoun for a specific person. That’s totally distinct from a “neutral” usage and the only reason you’re able to compare it here is because the world is set up specifically to use pronouns incorrectly according to English grammar. Do people really think that intentionally misusing language to confuse others is the same as challenging their beliefs?
“And cue feminism”
Hmm. Fair enough.
Hmm, somehow this ended up not being in reply to the person it was supposed to be. Could whoever has the ability delete this?
A less USA-centric view of parties and tribes: Australian left-wing economist John Quiggin describes a three party system that defines politics in most of the advanced world. Quiggin’s “parties” don’t usually correspond to the formal political parties, but to factions within them, usually crossing party lines.
I have one big issue. Quiggin thinks the neoliberal slogan, “There Is No Alternative”, was a falsehood used to shut down the left. My read is that there really was no alternative – fascism, communism, and midcentury welfare statism were all thoroughly discredited leaving neoliberalism as the last system standing. Then the crash of 2008 discredited neoliberalism, leaving us with nothing.
As per the second paragraph, agreed. I think this is an argument in favor of centrism — in effect, none of the pure political philosophies actually work, and severe social and economic dysfunction occurs when a society comes too close to one extreme. So, take the best elements of each and blend.
What it means for an ideology to work and which components are the best are also questions for political philosophy. Taking the “best” pieces from various ideologies requires an ideology itself, albeit one that’s been pushed under the rug.
Exactly.
You said what I was thinking, but in a much shorter form. 😉
Not to mention Steven Kaas’s answer to so many forms of “just going by the facts”: “Why idly theorize when you can JUST CHECK and find out the ACTUAL ANSWER to a superficially similar-sounding question SCIENTIFICALLY?”
Centrism is basically the circa 40s-70s system displaced by neoliberalism. I called it “midcentury welfare statism” which was obviously a mistake because now half the subthread is arguing about welfare. Note to self: never say the W-word again.
(Funny, I didn’t notice Alejandro linked the same article above, but he referred to the group blog’s name while I referred to the author’s name so we didn’t catch each other. And he didn’t mention the W-word and only got a couple of replies.)
You had markets, competition, private property, but also powerful labor unions, high taxes, some redistribution, and in Britain (but not America) there was substantial state-owned industry. I don’t know what to call this – it’s not quite social democracy but it certainly isn’t neoliberalism either.
Anyway, whatever it was, it worked for a while but hit its failure mode of stagflation in the 1970s. Now I wasn’t around in the ’70s and I can’t say whether stagflation was worse than the Great Recession, but they seem comparably disastrous. So if the moderate leftism of Jimmy Carter and Harold Wilson is discredited, I’d say that neoliberalism is too.
Sometimes, the radical centrist inside me wonders if we americans aren’t just too far to the neoliberal side of the neo-liberal/social democratic divide.
I don’t think we should think about it as a divide at all. It’s a lot more multipolar than that.
The US went neoliberal, and Western Europe went social democratic. Both have been highly successful — the US a bit more, economically, Europe a bit more by a variety of fluffy metrics that NGOs like to throw around.
Socioeconomic models in the rest of the world are quite different. A few of them — especially the Asian ones — deserve more attention than they’re getting, but a lot more are obscure because they suck. The point is that it’s not a spectrum, it’s a high-dimensional configuration space, and most of the points in it appear less successful than what we’ve got.
Stagflation discredited the “we can beat unemployment with inflation”. The 1945-1970 model was discredited by poor economic growth; neoliberalism was an attempt to get it back.
Some forms of welfare-statism are going strong, so there is an alternative.
Welfare statism works fine in a small, homogenous society. Actually, it seems that a fairly wide range of political systems work well if you have a society with high median IQ and high social trust – and such societies are almost invariably quite ethnically homogenous. The U.S. came closest to this in the post-WWII era, when we had low immigration levels and a common culture strongly focused on unification and downplaying regional/ethnic/subcultural differences.
What really failed was diversity and multiculturalism, but no one in mainstream politics or academia is willing to admit this.
Welfare statism will also be absolutely necessary given the technological unemployment produced as we approach a more and more automated society (Luddite’s Fallacy not so fallacious). This is why I propose (relatively) free markets + basic income + borders. You need a free market™ to be the goose laying the golden eggs, but as capitalism automates itself, you need to start artificially supplying a wage to all of the redundant elements, meaning a basic income becomes necessary, but as a basic income guarantee becomes necessary, you need to have strong border control in place to avoid concentrating more unemployed workers into the same system. Incidentally, an argument used to bolster multiculturalism™ was that we needed new workers to save an aging economy, but with technological unemployment that argument falls down, since you are just adding more welfare recipients to the same tax base.
The only other alternative is outright socialism or state capitalism of some sort.
If robots are poised to take all of our jobs, then why has productivity growth been slower over the past decade than it was in the decades prior?
Well, according to many of the posters here, we already have all the wealth we need, but it’s being wasted on zero-sum status games. So we just need to set a 10-hour national workweek (maybe ban women from working, too), and it will solve all our problems. We have to decrease productivity.
That article rebuts the claim that automation is an issue right now, not that it won’t be an issue as the capacities of artificial intelligence increase. We’re essentially in the Model T phase of worker substitution with stuff like Baxter.
However, when considering automation, technological unemployment isn’t going to start being an issue until technology begins substituting for more workers than are redistributed to new work.
Various reports – such as this one – suggest this will be a problem in the next 20 years:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/13/09/14/1225248/45-of-us-jobs-vulnerable-to-automation
@ TD:
Are you talking about automation causing a) temporary unemployment, or b) permanent unemployment?
Because while, yes, automation has the potential to make people temporarily unemployed as they find new jobs, there is no reason for it to reduce the number of jobs. If there are fewer jobs than willing workers, that is a government-caused problem.
It’s just a simple application of the law of comparative advantage: no matter how superior robots are to human workers, even if they are superior in every field, human workers will be employed in the fields where they are comparatively equal.
Right, the robot apocalypse is just around the corner, just like fusion power and colonies on Mars.
That paper seems to display all of the same fallacies present in most alarmist writing about this subject. Most obviously, it assumes that truck driving will be fully automated in the near future, despite the enormous counter-examples of air travel, where full automation has been technically possible for decades (hence the old joke among airline pilots that the standard flight crew will soon be replaced by a man and a dog: the man to feed the dog and the dog to bite the man’s hand when he tries to touch the controls) yet virtually all planes still have pilots, and rail travel, where full automation has been technically possible for more than 50 years yet virtually all trains still have drivers except a handful of subways and elevated trains which still have manual override brake buttons that staff can use. If humans demonstrably aren’t willing to let a computer drive a freight train across the countryside, I have a hard time believing that they will let a computer drive a car on streets that kids play in any time in the foreseeable future (as opposed to letting computers aid human drivers with increasingly advanced “collision avoidance” features, similar to the role of autopilot systems in modern air travel).
You can see this kind of thinking all the time when people talk about this issue. Some novelty restaurant in Japan has customers make their orders using touchscreens instead of talking to a human being, therefore every restaurant on Earth will soon fire all of their waiters and replace them with touchscreens! But wait, we’ve already had the technology to do that for decades, as demonstrated by ATMs, so maybe there’s some reason (for example, perhaps being served food by human beings is part of the inherent appeal of going to a restaurant for many people) why this hasn’t already happened?
Beyond that, there’s little to no consideration of how technology will affect jobs beyond “everyone will keep doing what they’ve already been doing, except with some of the tasks previously done by humans now being done by machines.” No one ever seems to wonder, for example, whether the decreased costs due to automating certain tasks might actually lead to an expansion in the number of jobs in that field, as seems to have happened with ATMs and bank tellers.
@ NN:
Exactly.
Take restaurants, for instance. Say we managed to automate half the tasks in a restaurant. That will decrease costs, but will it “decrease jobs”? It’s not apparent that it will do so even in the context of the restaurant industry.
For instance, maybe it leads to people ordering more five- or seven-course meals. I would like to eat at fancy restaurants every week, but I don’t because I can’t afford it (in fact, I hardly ever eat at one). I don’t order as many drinks as I could, I usually don’t get an appetizer, and I usually don’t get a dessert. I never get some kind of ridiculously expensive “cheese platter”. If all of these things became as cheap as a sandwich from a deli is now, I would go for them.
Not to mention, if my money went a lot further because of automation, maybe I would take a ninety-minute lunch break so that I could have a “three-martini lunch”. Maybe I would work only four hours a day and go home after lunch.
The point is, if automation made everything cheaper, that very fact would lead me to desire more things.
NN, Wawa (a local chain of convenience stores– better than most, ignore the funny name) has touchscreen ordering and payment for sandwiches that have a bunch of options Human beings put the sandwiches together.
For whatever reason, most fast food places around here (Philadelphia) don’t do it that way. The roboapocalypse is moving very slowly.
Because the price of labor has been deliberately held down to keep it cheaper than investment in machine-capital.
Here’s an illustration of how wage-level and innovation-rate might interact.
http://timharford.com/2013/01/what-really-powers-innovation-high-wages/
Well, I’d actually recommend a 20-hour or 21-hour workweek rather than a 10-hour workweek, since that seems closest to the amount of time hunter-gatherers worked and is therefore more likely to lead to a eudaimonic life, and there is at least one wealth-wasting zero-sum game (land) which is not about status, but other than that, yeah, pretty much.
What good is increased productivity if you can’t capture the gains?
Is there any particular reason to think that our genetically determined happiness bits would interpret the amount of work we actually did in the past as optimal, rather than some other, greater or smaller amount? I can easily make up a just-so story for either one.
Might also be worth noting that the kinds of work we do are in many cases quite different.
Also, why have job fields that have seen significant automation of certain tasks, such as bank tellers (due to ATMs) and paralegals (due to automated “discovery” software) seen an increase, not a decrease in their job numbers?
When you look at the actual numbers, it’s starting to look like the Luddite Fallacy is a fallacy after all.
An increase in absolute numbers means nothing.
That “common culture” broadly excluded the roughly 10% of the American population that was black, most visibly in the South but also in the North through things like red-lining, sundown towns, and other forms of de-facto segregation. So holding up that period of American history as especially unified, let alone “ethnically homogenous,” is at best a selective reading of history.
It also seems strange to hold up 1950s America as an example of a “society with a high median IQ,” because due to the Flynn Effect the average American IQ back then was about 18 points lower than it is today.
How did the crash of 2008 discredit neoliberalism (which, I’m assuming, is some kind of broadly market-based economy)?
I don’t see how the crash discredited neoliberalism. The U.S. recovered perfectly well, with the worst long-range outcome I can see being new college grads might have to wait five to ten years longer than they used to have to wait to become proper yuppies. It’s also harder to qualify for a mortgage, but the prices aren’t running away stupid crazy any more, either (except in San Francisco). People might be complaining a lot more now than they were in 2004, but that doesn’t mean the world is actually worse.
The claim (I’m not sure its true and would like to see any counterexamples) is that no neoliberal economist predicted the crash while economists from other economic schools did, theoretically more predictive models are more correct (but this is also a single data point).
I’d also say that delaying college grads income stream is likely to be a long term disaster. The problem is that 20-somehtings can’t afford to have kids anymore. This both creates a disgenic effect (people not smart enough to avoid kids they can’t afford will have more) and has dropped the US birth rate to a dangerously low level (it was basically hovering at replenishment rate before).
As the old saw goes, economists predicted nine of the last five recessions [although the original joke was about stock indices, not economists]. Or, more simply, a broken clock is still right twice a day. I’m suspicious of any claims about the prediction records of major economic events. How often were they right? How often were they wrong? Were they just lucky or were their predictions based on an accurate causal model of the world?
Mainstream macro may be pretty bad at making predictions, but I see no reason to believe that heterodox macro is any better.
Economics is not in the business of predicting crashes. Saying that economists failed because they did not predict the ’08 recession is like saying pigs fail because they don’t fly.
Why not? They seem like quite an economic matter.
Maybe more to the point, any mainstream economist would almost certainly have predicted the housing market would crash if they had actually known the extent to which the entire thing was an edifice of mis-rated asset-backed bundles based on people trying to forever refinance NINJA ARMs. Failing to predict something because you lack accurate information is different from having a bad model.
Well it’s too bad we’ll likely both be dead before we can find out, but I personally very strongly doubt there is any long-term disaster lurking in low 20-something birth rates. But notably, the U.S. would have to actually fail at some point to confirm the failure of neoliberalism.
Does anyone have any data on “real” voting blocks? Data driven analysis of, e.g., do Latinos actually vote as a bloc, are Southern whites more aligned with Southern blacks or Northern whites, does Trump’s success with evangelicals mean he’s winning “the evangelical vote” or does such a thing not even exist? Obviously this is highly relevant to reading exit polls and predicting e.g. if Sanders stands a chance against Clinton.
does Trump’s success with evangelicals mean he’s winning “the evangelical vote” or does such a thing not even exist?
Re: “the evangelical vote”, I find the GetReligion site very helpful because they look at the coverage of religion in the news from the angle of the journalism (a distinction not often appreciated by commenters, who sometimes get more caught up in arguing over the doctrine in the story rather than ‘was this a good story?’), they’re journalists themselves and they’re conservative (I hate using that term but it’ll have to do) Christians of various denominations, so they know the facts on the ground.
There is no more monolithic “evangelical vote”. There’s a distinction, which the mainstream national media don’t seem to get, between the church-going, involved, practicing Evangelicals – who seem to be going for Cruz and Rubio – and the ‘cultural’ Evangelicals who don’t have a church they regularly visit, or would describe themselves as ‘Christian’ but are not particularly involved in the practice of the faith, who support Trump. The view is that if Cruz and Rubio manage to split “the evangelical vote”, Trump will pick up the undecided and do best out of it. From a post about East Tennessee, which is heavily Republican and heavily Evangelical:
I’ve noticed there’s no way to give a reason for why you’re reporting a comment, just a confirmation notice. Do you think report messages are not desirable, or is that just not a feature anyone has implemented on the site?
Thoughts on this Crooked Timber post on the current political situation?
TLDR: The three major political forces in developed world are neoliberalism, leftism, tribalism. For decades and up to recently, politics was dominated by neoliberal parties, typically in each country coming in slightly a slightly more left wing opposed to a slightly more right wing variety. (Tribalists generally supporting the right wing, leftists supporting the left wing, in both cases contributing votes but being shut out of actual power). Stability of this arrengement is now unraveling with tribalists making explicit bids for power (Trump, anti-immigration parties in Europe) as well as true leftism making a comeback (Corbyn, to an extent Sanders).
I think his trichotomy would be more interesting if he examined the idea of Tribalism more. The definition he gives,
, should sweep up plenty of nominally left-aligned racial / ethnic blocs as well. He brushes that off by saying that they’re not “politically potent” but that seems odd given that these minority groups often seem punch above their weight classes. His ‘Neoliberals’ still run the show but leveraging various Tribes has been key to that.
It would also show that the beneficiaries of mass immigration themselves have, often literal, tribal interests of their own. Inter-ethnic conflict is a big driver of anti-immigration sentiment, whether the conflict is primarily economic as it is here or literal violent conflict as in Europe or between American Blacks and Hispanics.
I hate the idea of Trump being described as “explicit” anything. Does he say things that are easily interpreted as dog-whistles? Yes. But when push comes to shove, does he talk about how great minorities are and how legal immigration is fine and how we all need to be tolerant? Yes, just like everybody else. Same with Sanders – yeah, he’ll use the name “democratic socialism”, but the real Left doesn’t mistake him for one of them. AFAICT they’re just more neoliberals who are bowing slightly more in the direction of their respective tribes.
But Crooked Timber is firewalled from my work computer (for some reason) so maybe I’ll be more sympathetic when I can read the article.
Whom are you identifying as the “real Left”? Common Dreams has been 100% behind him from the get-go, and I think of them as the clearest voice of the modern American left.
Two strains in my own social media friends groups. First is the true extreme social justice activists that justify the caricature treatment they get in these comments. Second is actual communists and anarchists. Neither of these groups supports Bernie Sanders. They don’t support political candidates at all.
I was paraphrasing my understanding of the article; the idea is not that Trump is explicitly tribalist, but that (once the three-way typology is accepted) his political coalition is clearly on the tribalistic side without a neoliberal component.
As for Sanders, Quiggin defines leftism broadly as encompassing “anyone critical of the current economic and social order on the grounds that is unfair, unequal and environmentally destructive”. This describes Sanders fairly well. (It might match Clinton and other neoliberal Dems in rhetoric too, but I take the deciding difference is whether the flawed existing order should be radically changed or incrementally reformed, and clearly they fall on the other side of this divide.)
Under that standard of ‘Left’, an-caps would be considered left, even though they (I) tend to see the government as adding to existing problems and causing others while Berne or HRC would see the failures as the current system not having enough of their brand of governance.
An-Caps are a minuscule fraction of voters. The three-way typology is not proposed as exhausting all the logically consistent political philosophies, but as a rough classification of the main components of the actually existing electorate. In this context it is clear that what Quiggin means by “unfair and unequal” is what leftism understand by this (something like “giving too much power to the rich”) and not what an an-cap understands by it.
Fair enough, I got a giggle out of the vague ‘left’ definition and then tried to tack on clarification so I wouldn’t seem like I’m taking cheap shots. I have clearly failed on both counts, I shall return to the wilderness of writing up D&D nonsense. =D
I searched around for some negative opinions of Worm, and didn’t find much. I’d like to register for those keen to start enjoying it – I certainly didn’t like it. I stumbled through a LOT of it, because it’s popular with other HPMOR fans – but I found it boring, slow and uninspired. YMMV obviously.
Literally Moloch. (News from Uganda)
Ohh boy. You are in for a ride with Worm. I’d recommend skipping Pact (the author’s second web serial) and going straight to Twig once you finish. It’s a more well-paced story than Pact, which is often regarded as being escalation after escalation, and as being too dark (coming from Worm’s fan base, that’s saying something).
Twig is a biopunk story set in the 1920s, in a timeline that diverged from ours some time in the early 19th century. Their medical abilities greatly surpass ours, but are mostly not used to heal. The protagonist is a boy raised on a drug which makes him an adept social manipulator.
It has many of the same features as Worm- characters with unique abilities, intelligent use of those abilities, and genuinely frightening villains, but it also has a lot else going for it- More realistic dialogue, and a protagonist with a unique perspective.
Scott is already writing a better Pact anyways.
I want to discuss “Public Relations” and “Werdness points.”
There is a consensus that Elizier Yudkowsky is bad at PR. Elizier is very public about being extremely weird. For example he is public about his BDSM. Elizier’s writings in “the sequences” contain many blatant references to how brilliant elizier is. He writes Harry Potter fanfic. And his most recent story is even weirder, imo, than Harry Potter and the methods of rationality. Also there is a publicly accessable essay written by younger Yudkowsky where Yudkowsky proposes to build a seed AI and take over the fate of humanity. (“So you want to be a seed AI Programmer.”)
Yet it seems to me that Elziier has had tremendous, borderline incredible success, in spreading his ideas. In the recent past Elizier/Bostrom’s* specific ideas (hard take off, difficulties of boxing etc) on Ai where very niche. Currently they welll ithin the overton window of AI discussions. If you convince Bill Gates and Elon Musk to tak about your ideas than you ideas will spread very widely. Gates and musk have huge audiences. And Gates/Musk have defintitely been influenced heavily by Elizier/Bostrom. Many other important people have been convinced the Elizier/bostrom framework is worth taing very seriously (Sam Altman, Peter Thiel, Stuart armstrong). These ideas have even made it into a major Ai textbook. Some people argue that the ideas are not widespread outide of silicone Valley. I disagree with this since Msuk/Gates have big audiences. but its also not particularly relevant. The ideas have already spread to many people who may need to hear them. For example Google’s Ai researchers are msotly familiar with the elizier/bostrom framework (even if many disagree with it).
This suggests to me that Elizier’s extreme weirdness has not sunk his PR efforts.
*Its very hard to say which ideas come from Bostrom and which from Yudkowsky.
===
Let me give another quicker example. The Feminist movement. It is very hard to argue that feminism was not a rather sucessful movement in the 70s-90s (though it was not monotonically sucessful). However many prominent important Feminists had rather extreme views. And these views where not hidden, they were published in their books. Some important feminists seemed concerned about their weirdness points. But man spent their weirdness points almost as freely as Elizier (or more freely!).
===
I am very skeptical of claims that movements/people need to be “less wierd” if they want to be sucessful. Reducing weirdness is a big cost for many people. And the “benefits” of reduced wierdness can be very murky.
It works if you consider his original goal to have been influence other weird people, but remember that in the Sequences he repeatedly states that the point of rationalism is to ‘raise the sanity waterline,’ which means actually getting normal people to become more rational, injecting more evidence based policy into government, etc, something I have yet to see evidence of.
Personally Elizer’s behavior has always given me the impression that he’s a con artist or cult leader, an impression which has only gotten stronger over time. But given his success with other Silicon Valley types it’s obvious I’m not the demographic he really cares about convincing.
I think the lesson is that no matter how weird you are, some people will still be receptive to your message if you push the right buttons. And if those people are also weird and have lots of money that they’d be willing to give you…
>con artist
I strongly dislike every push I have seen to aid income for singularity groups. I mean good god, Kurzweil is the engineering president of google, and there’s no damned way in hell he doesn’t have enough money.
Like, Kurzweil, Gates, and Musk and all the other tech billionaires have more then enough money to fund places for discussion. Shitty groups don’t need to ask for money from commoners.
As for the guy being a weirdo, nah. There’s plenty of hollywood celebrities known to be weirdos on the side, he just doesn’t give a sexy face to it. Like all sex things, it becomes weird and gross if you don’t look like a Hollywood celebrity, and OK if you do. Dude isn’t running for office.
Its impossible to not appreciate Less Wrong in its prime, and that’s mainly the source of his praist. Its withered away as a site by now, and my guess is due to a lack of quality pruning of the site.
Eliezer wants to spread his rationality ideas (insofar as they’re his) to normal people, but he’s not very good at it. I think part of this does come from the trappings of cult leader/supervillain/Dark Conspirator, which he obviously enjoys even as he tries to avoid their substance.
I think PR success and PR failure are two separate quantities, not just opposites of each other.
Consider L. Ron Hubbard and Scientologists. They’ve had a lot of success, in that there are millions of Scientologists around the world. They’ve also had a lot of failure, in that almost everyone hates or mistrusts them.
Or consider John Kasich. Nobody particularly dislikes him as far as I know. But nobody is particularly excited about him either.
The trick is to get positive buzz while generating as little unnecessary negative buzz as possible. I don’t think Eliezer’s good at the second part. Which is not meant as a criticism of him – nobody is obligated to be perfectly normal/socially acceptable in order to make people like them.
@Scott
” in that there are millions of Scientologists around the world”
This is a bogus Scientology propaganda claim (counting anyone who has ever picked up a Hubbard book or filled out a ‘free personality test’ or otherwise had any interaction with Scientology in any way). Independent estimates of actual members, including from former Scientology officials, give numbers under 50,000.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_Scientology#Membership_statistics
50,000 seems low given the number of places I’ve seen Scientologist… churches? temples? in, but maybe they recruit from the same demographics I belong to. Millions is high, certainly.
Given their naked attempt to sound sciencey, I’m disappointed they don’t call them laboratories 🙂
There was one across the street from me until I moved downtown last month. It was called a ‘life improvement center.’
Appropriately euphemistic.
Agreed with your conclusion. Reminder that Jack Parsons, who essentially made solid rocket fuels a thing, was openly Satanist. That, and his generally enormous weirdness, put him in a much tighter spot during the Second Red Scare than BDSM would in modern times – and yet his legacy was greatly successful.
Parsons was a Thelemite, a follower of Aleister Crowley. They’re weird, occult, and often self-consciously transgressive (Crowley liked to call himself “The Great Beast 666”) but aren’t Satanist — the religion bears a rough resemblance to LaVeyan Satanism, but that’s mainly because LaVey (who was active a decade or so after Parsons) cobbled his religion together from Thelema and Objectivism before giving it a Satanic coat of paint.
Thelemites are a pretty eclectic bunch. A lot of its trappings are Egyptian or kabbalistic, but it has its roots in Christian esotericism.
In times of change, weirdnesses become wildcards for vacant hegemonic thrones. When the old normal -which mastered everything outside its finicky delineation- begins to lose its universal legitimacy…
In the cluster of things that are good in some of the ways Worm is, I’ve recently discovered Sam Hughes’ online SF. The stories are incredibly inventive, mind-bending and just sheer fun to read. I especially recommend Fine Structure (scroll down for downloadable ebooks), which starts out as series of well-written but apparently unconnected vignettes that don’t even seem to be set in the same universe, and then gradually and incredibly ties them all together. Also recommended is an older collection “Ed Stories”, and newer Ra, which is similar to Worm in the way its plot spirals from bad to worse, upping the stakes at each revelation (this isn’t necessarily good – I liked the first half better in either book).
Sam Hughes is in my opinion by far the better action-scene writer – I often found myself thinking “get on with it, it’s a fight scene not a chess match” during Worm. However, Wildbow’s characters are more likeable, and it really shouts its themes clearly. Ra in particular was thematically just not really up there; Fine Structure was better but a bit wobbly, or maybe just too subtly-does-it for my tastes. Both stellar writers, though, recommendation firmly seconded.
I second Sam Hughes. I prefer his short stories to Ra and Fine Structure, which are a bit…Grimdark. His SCP short stories are especially good- he’s contributed something to the site in a permanent way.
Another book I would highly recommend to most SSC readers (except Nita) who haven’t read it is Blindsight (published, but made available online by the author after a dispute with the publisher, as I recall). It’s very good hard sci-fi about the nature of consciousness.
Well, I wouldn’t say “very good”, but it was good enough. Probably would’ve worked better for me as a (long) short story, though.
Both Ra and Fine Structure were good, but I didn’t like the ending of either. The former introduced an object with such absurd power that all the other characters suddenly lost agency (plus it made it impossible to tell if characters were actually doomed or if they were going to cleverly leverage the toolbox they had to get out of it), and the latter made a rather jarring shift in a character I previously liked and the finale was sort of just a blur of meaningless action.
The Irish general election was held on Friday and counting is still ongoing. There are 10 seats for our national parliament left to be filled.
The big news (though no real surprise to anyone) is how the coalition parties of the last (or, as they are rather desperately reminding us in every media interview I’ve heard, the current government – “we’re still in government until the new one is formed!”) government lost their share of the vote.
In 2011, due to national fury with the then-Fianna Fáil government and its perceived mishandling of the economic meltdown (and I’m Fianna Fáil myself, and I shared it) Fine Gael and Labour swept to power. This time round, despite our amazing (ahem) economic recovery (as our Taoiseach Enda Kenny keeps reminding us), they lost their share.
Fine Gael went from 76 seats to 47 (to date; the last 10, as I’ve said, remain to be filled). Labour went from 37 to 6 and are desperately hoping to win at least one more seat so they will have 7 and thus qualify for speaking rights in the Dáil.
Fianna Fáil are slowly recovering, though not near their glory days; up to 43 from 21. Sinn Féin (which everyone has been using as the boogeyman party in their campaigning) have done reasonably well; 22 seats now from 14 before.
Lots of Independents (16 seats) and various small parties/groupings – some of which are hilariously incongrous (e.g. the Independent Alliance which manages to find room for both Shane Ross, former Fine Gael grandee, ex-stockbroker, and often referred to, for his airs and accent, as “Lord Ross” by our national satirical magazine and John Halligan, former member of the Workers’ Party which evolved out of Official Sinn Féin* which was Marxist-Leninist and were very much Socialist at their inception, and I don’t mean Bernie Sanders-style Socialism).
Now, the really interesting thing here is, because nobody is in a position to form a majority government without cobbling together some kind of coalition from diverse elements, and because before the election every party swore up, down and sideways they would not enter into any pacts or promises of going into coalition with any other party, we are faced with two choices (allegedly):
(1) Call another election to get somebody elected with enough seats to form a government
(2) What the media seem to be pushing for very strongly – a grand coalition between Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil.
Now this second is a very big deal because, even though both are more or less centre-right parties (Fine Gael, depending on the times and members, being slightly more to the right than Fianna Fáil), these are our Civil War parties, who arose out of the 1922 Civil War and its aftermath, and they have been at one another’s throats down the years. Some Fianna Fáil candidates/party higher-ups have been murmuring that this is not on because this would leave Sinn Féin as the major party in opposition, and That Would Never Do. Other party members from both sides have been murmuring that, of course, in the national interest and the people have shown that they don’t want any one majority government, so they’ll bravely make the sacrifice of returning to power to serve the nation.
On the other hand, it’s not at all certain that the people have voted for a grand alliance. Plenty of voters for both parties would find it intolerable.
This is like suggesting that, for the national interest, the Republicans and Democrats should come together in your election with a Republican (or Democrat) president and a Democrat (or Republican) vice-president, in order to keep Trump from getting anywhere near in power.
I have no idea what is going to happen (I’d love, for the sheer cognitive dissonance, if Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin went into coalition, even though that would need a good smattering of Independents to agree in order to make it possible) but it’s damn amusing in the meantime listening to Labour ex-ministers and ex-TDs denying reality as to why their share of the vote collapsed, and Our Taoiseach (who managed, in his own county, days before the election to make a peevish comment about “All-Ireland [standard] whingers” then had to furiously back-pedal about how he didn’t mean the local voters, no not at all, he was talking about political opponents) who previously could not be kept off the airwaves suddenly going all silent (apart from the desperate “I’m still Taoiseach until the new government is formed”).
*They split at the same time as the IRA split, and into the same Official versus Provisional divisions.
I wish I knew how to pronounce any of the terms in your comment. 😉
Just substitute “Member of Parliament” for TD, “Prime Minister” for Taoiseach, “lower house of our bicameral national parliament” for Dáil, and “corrupt greedy incompetent snouts in the trough yahoos” for the names of the political parties you can’t pronounce 🙂
This is pretty much how I translate all your posts about Irish politics.
Advice for any budding politicians based on personal knowledge of local politics in my own town: if you are starting out small, as say a local town councillor, do not accept bribes from developers to alter planning permission. This will wreck your life and career and get you a jail sentence.
If you absolutely must accept bribes and inducements, try not to have an affair and walk out on your wife and family for your new squeeze at the same time. Vindictive and vengeful ex-spouses can wash an extraordinary amount of dirty linen in public giving court testimony at your trial for bribery 😉
I’ve always pronounced “Dáil” as “DAY-ell”, and “Sinn Féin” as “sin fayn”. How much am I mangling things?
“Sinn” is “Shinn”
Sinn is pronounced like shin as in the part of your leg.
Fein is pronounced feign like “feign(pretend) interest”
Dail is pronounced like “ball” but with a d.
I was in Ireland during the Brian Cowen and Fianna Fail years. I eventually learned not to pronounce it like the English word “fail”, but every time someone corrected me they’d add “not that it’s not appropriate”. It’s hard for me to imagine people voting them back into power.
Surprised that people hate Fine Gael and Labor so much since, as you say, the recovery was pretty impressive. What exactly has people mad? Or is it just the zeitgeist?
Think of it as more of a case of “We’ve had some time to calm down, please don’t hurt us again because we miss you”.
How do you imagine FF and FG can be compared to Democrats and Republicans in the US? Maybe I’m underestimating the closeness of the US analogue, however, to me having grown up in Ireland, FG and FF are almost indistinguishable in culture and policy, except that FF have had more of an opportunity to show their misgivings (firmly supported by the culture/mind set of the Irish people I’m sad to say). The most eye opening thing about this election is how detached and out of touch I am from the rest of the country and how little my philosophical outlook counts. I’m a stranger in my own land, it’s quite lonely, the election has been very eye opening (and very troubling).
youtube video is dead for me. What was it?
It’s Ayreon’s “Elected”.
The video is up, but is blocked for most countries. Using Tor with exit node in the US worked for me.
FWIW these embedded videos seem to often crash mobile safari and make a thread with one of them unreadable on an iphone or ipad.
So I’ve been mulling over the red tribe vs. blue tribe thing for a while now and I’m convinced there’s actually another tribe. Maybe it only exists in the northeast or something (I’m from Connecticut) but it’s definitely distinct from the red tribe. My parents and all their friends belong to this tribe.
They are baby boomers and they vote republican. They drive minivans and Lexuses. They listen to classic rock and top 40 radio. They drink Michelob Ultra and Beringer’s White Zinfandel. They have kitchy little plaques in their kitchen about drinking wine but don’t actually know anything about wine. They strongly identify with a religion, but never go to church and feel vaguely guilty about it. They live in nice neighborhoods and are decidedly upper middle class but have the sense that they deserve more. They value hard work and strongly believe that “inner city” people are the cause of all of our problems, but they believe they arrived at that conclusion rationally and are careful not to appear racist when talking about it (that would be gauche).
I guess they share some characteristics of the red tribe (e.g. the hard work thing), so I guess you could maybe argue they’re a sub-tribe, but they certainly don’t seem to relate to them and culturally they could not be more distinct.
Can someone confirm that this is a thing and not just an artifact of my small sample size?
No 2.5 group typology will accurately describe 300 million people. Those folks sound like pretty stereotypical New England conservatives – they’re culturally Blue(though on the fuzzy edge of it, far from the hipsters), but they quietly vote with the Reds, usually because of some sense of right-wing economics. They’re the people who were actually enthusiastic about Mitt Romney, instead of grudgingly tolerating him, and they’re the reason Kasich did so well in New Hampshire. (The GOP NH primary is mostly a poll of those types of people, much like how Iowa and South Carolina are polls of the much harder Red Tribe types)
>They’re the people who were actually enthusiastic about Mitt Romney.
That’s a good way to put them. Certainly valuing education is a large factor, and Romney was the most educated republican front runner in recent years, and won the “Meritocracy” argument i’m fond of in politics.
Maybe it only exists in the northeast or something (I’m from Connecticut) but it’s definitely distinct from the red tribe.
Cerise Tribe? 🙂 (If Violet Tribe can be a thing, why not?)
Heh, I actually had to look up what “cerise” is. I’ve been thinking of them as the orange tribe because they’re kind of red but not really.
I was thinking cerise because it’s kind of pinkish and is on the bluer side of the red tonal scale (if I’m using that correctly), but not verging on the purplish itself 🙂
These people definitely don’t just exist in the Northeast.
I’m from Alabama, and these are my people! I don’t know about the specific drink choices, but it’s not too far off. It’s my parents (or, specifically, my father: my mother is originally from a lower-class family) and their friends who are doctors and business owners.
What you’re basically talking about are educated, wealthy Republicans. Some of whom may be more on the religious side in Alabama (though not my parents), but still not extremely worked up about social issues like gay marriage. Their main political issue is taxes on people making over $200,000 a year because they make over $200,000 a year.
Also, yeah, they generally disapprove of “black culture”, but not because they think black people are racially inferior.
Also, I think this is a common phenomenon, but I noticed support for the Republican and Democratic parties breaking down on income / social class lines roughly like this:
— The poor, especially poor minorities, who support the Democratic Party because it stands for increasing social welfare to the poor. They may be conservative on social issues, but it’s secondary for them.
— Poor to lower-middle-class whites who support the Republican Party because of its stance on supporting “traditional values” and opposition to immigration. They don’t want taxes raised, either, but they’re mainly thinking of taxes on the lower end of the income distribution.
— Professors, teachers, and other members of academia who support the Democrats for social and cultural reasons, e.g. not wanting to support creationists and those who want to ban abortion, as well as “altruistic” (with other people’s money) social welfare the poor. Of course, they also value Democratic support for more education funding.
— The middle to upper-middle class of the non-academic world, even including certain members of the “1%”, who worked hard to attain success and support the Republicans because they don’t want their money taken away by means of taxes on the “rich” to spend on welfare programs, and want to protect their retirement investments. They may not be left-wing on the social issues, but they’re mostly moderate (with some exceptions, of course).
— The upper class, born into wealth, who support the Democrats because they’re so rich money doesn’t matter, and who want to fund more social welfare for the poor and support social liberalism.
To tie this in with my own experience growing up in Alabama:
Group 1: I can’t say I had much personal interaction with people in this category growing up. but it includes most African Americans.
Group 2: this was my mother’s family, lower-class, rural whites.
Group 3: this described the professors and their children whom I knew. Some of the schoolteachers fell into this category, usually if they were part of a couple, both of whom taught. Other teachers were wives of men in group four and more conservative.
Group 4: this describes my father and most of the other doctors and small business owners, mostly the group whose children I went to private school with.
Group 5: this described the richest family in town, who own a huge paper company started several generations ago by a guy who invented the modern paper bag (or something like that).
I’m familiar with the general archetype so it’s not just you, nor is it a Northeastern thing. That said, here in the South West they are less of a distinct group and more the centrist / moderate (see “reasonable”) wing of the red tribe, rather than as a distinct group.
You’ll find the Southern California variety clustered around Orange County. Not quite the same, but close. And I agree, they are Red Tribe moderates, close enough for cultural diffusion from Blue.
That’s middle class Red, in a blue state mate, nothing more!
I know lots of people like this. They are definitely common in the suburban Northeast, where I grew up. (Can’t speak for other regions.)
They are Red, albeit on the Blue-ish edge of Red, and they may even vote Democrat sometimes. Here are some other characteristics of them:
-They are often, though not always, somewhat less bombastic about their politics than hardcore Reds. This is especially true in certain regions and social classes, where expressing Red political sympathies could be ostracizing.
-They tend to be moderate-to-liberal on social issues like abortion and gay marriage, but these are usually not deciding factors in how they vote.
-They are often somewhat uncomfortable with the more extreme and/or overtly “hick” elements of the Red tribe.
A lot of these people are in class that I like to call “Aspirational Labor.” They’re nurses, low-level or blue-collar civil servants, pink-collar professionals. Some of the wealthier and/or better-educated ones may be in other classes, though.
Low-information voters in the group are very often Trump supporters, believe it or not. Higher-information types typically support Kasich.
Apropos the side conversation in a recent thread concerning bookmarks, I bumped across an example recently that I wanted to highlight.
This paper is a response to a dissent authored by John Roberts in Caperton v. A.T. Massey Coal Co. Now, I understand it is a scholarly paper, and a legal one at that, but … The first page of the paper contains only one sentence, the second page can only muster a single sentence fragment, the bulk being taken up by footnotes.
I am quite curious as to the results of this site on tests of politics.
How does this place vote? This is a pretty well-known voting site, and personally I view it as the best online politics test I have seen so far. Lots of sites ask you some 1-5-rank question of an issue that is fundamentally binary. Or, even (annoyingly) asks you vague questions, like how much do you support the free-market. This site actually breaks down the questions. Instead of asking you a “How much do you support illegal immigrants” it breaks it down into several specific questions.
http://www.isidewith.com
You can post your results.
https://img42.com/8oV2J
With the internets love of Sanders, i’m mildly amused the top scorer I had was Hilary. I support Bernie on quite a few of the big issues I support, like free* college tuition, along with free* healthcare.
https://img42.com/INpoy
And more amusingly, I guess I hate libertarians.
*free college would probably have to have a system that excludes a good deal of people to keep the cost down. Has there been a very very Spartan-esque college system tried? Basic cheap healthy foods, high quality, yet paper textbooks (or now just online text), regulated shower periods, renewable-energy oriented dorming?
It seems I got nearly the inverse of what you got.
Candidates
Parties
“Themes”
Another interesting one (I think a better one) is the Pew Research Center’s “Political Typology Quiz”. I may create an SSC group for that one in a little while, but for now I’ll just say that I come down as a “Business Conservative”: i.e. in favor of both economic and social freedom.
Okay, done: if you want to compare your results to other posters here, follow this link to the Pew Quiz. (Original link also changed.)
“Next Generation Left
along with 12% of the public.”
Also, I was left to the average of the new generation left.
Business Conservative, by the way, is 10% of the population. And I am to the right of the average of them.
(Also, no single category is more than 15% on this quiz.)
Most surprising result from this: only 36% of SSC respondents agreed with me that “It IS NOT necessary to believe in God in order to be moral and have good values.”
It’s *necessary* to believe in God in order to be moral? I’m not sure any of the most religious conservatives I know would agree with that.
It depends on how getting to heaven is classified, doesn’t it? If that is ‘good values’, and it requires faith, by definition nonbelievers fail.
Where did that show up for you?
The results page isn’t displaying the formatting right, but it comes up as 91% saying “It IS NOT necessary to believe in God in order to be moral and have good values.” That’s more in line with what I’d expect here, if not a little low.
However, that website is known to be buggy. I had a mini-PR disaster when I gave it to some of my friends in college, as somehow it displayed to everyone a very different percentage of how many people “think homosexuality should be accepted by society”. So this lesbian couple had it displayed to them that like 90% of their friends didn’t think they should be accepted. Awkward…
I ended up emailing the Pew people for the raw data results.
As far as I know, though, the overall percentages for the categories are accurate.
I suppose it depends on how you interpret “being moral and having good values”. If the highest human purpose is to serve God, then ipso facto you can’t be moral if you don’t believe in him.
However, I truly think a large number of religious people believe that you cannot be conventionally moral without believing in God. It’s a stupid position, but they believe it.
I think the website is bugged, on refreshing the page most of the stats changed.
I wouldn’t say God specifically, but I do believe that morality requires some sort of metaphysical framework.
Otherwise your either a nihilist or a utility monster.
The utility monster isn’t a problem because it wants to maximize its utility, it’s a problem because its scale breaks the assumptions of utilitarianism.
It also has some pretty weird preferences. But, while human preferences probably don’t cover that kind of territory in real life, utilitarianism should ideally be able to accommodate some weird ones.
(I’m not a utilitarian, by way of disclaimer, but I’m closer to being a utilitarian than I am to being a moral supernaturalist.)
That still doesn’t seem right. You’re saying it’s necessary to have a coherent conception of why one should be moral and have good values, but none of that is necessary to just behave morally and actually have good values. A person can have exactly the same values as you and behave in a roughly identical manner for whatever reason they please, including for no reason at all.
Maybe the question should be re-phrased as one of probability rather than necessity. As phrased, it is clearly incorrect.
@ walpole
It’s *necessary* to believe in God in order to be moral?
C.S. Lewis certainly thought morality was possible without belief in God. He argued that the moral system he called ‘the Tao’ was standalone*, and God was to be judged by it!**
* _The Abolition of Man_
** _Reflections on the Psalms_
If I have already taken the quiz, and don’t want to do so again, is there a way I can get to the SSC results to see how they have changed since I took it?
See if this link works
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/02/28/ot44-open-primary/#comment-331447
Yes: http://www.people-press.org/quiz/political-typology/results/group/413c3803/
Business Conservative, right near the peak of the distribution of them.
I love the Pew Center one because I consistently get results completely opposite to what I would expect. Part of this is me answering from an Irish rather than American perspective (well, it does ask “What comes closest to your view?”) but part of it must be genuine differences in what makes up political/social classes between the USA and Europe.
Anyway this time round I am a Solid Liberal (not even Faith and Family Left, which I would have expected) along with 15% of my fellow Americans and 20% of my fellow commenters on here 🙂
I would have answered some questions differently (especially No. 18) if the alternatives were worded differently, e.g. for No. 18 I think government aid programmes do more harm than good because they permit businesses to avoid their responsibilities to pay their workers a just wage; if the government is picking up the tab for medical cards, family income support, rent supplement, etc. then that is a direct subsidy to the cost of employment which the business may contribute towards in taxes, but the burden also falls on other tax payers, and so the business unfairly gets advantage.
I’m also wary of questions like the sample ones in the “Religion and Society” section – “Which comes closer to your views: Your religion’s holy book is the Word of God OR Your religion’s holy book is a book written by men and is not the word of God?”. There’s a bit more nuance there, e.g. the Catholic view of the Bible is not the same as the Islamic view of the Koran (which has a much higher and inerrantist in the autograph view), but to be on the safe side I’d answer “Word of God”, not “is written by men” there simply in case the “written by men” answer was interpreted as “is only a human document limited by the knowledge and prejudices of its time and has no divine content or inspiration” (the Bronze Age mythology notion).
To get “Faith and Family Left”, you should say (with 93% of them!) that it is not possible “to be moral and have good values” without believing in God. Also, you should say that homosexuality should not be accepted, and that marriage and children should be people’s highest priority.
That isn’t how it works. The worker’s medical care, family support, and rent are not “costs of employment”, and welfare to pay for those things is not a subsidy to employment.
As I wrote a couple of threads ago:
First of all, [this argument] assumes that the minimum wage is truly less than minimum subsistence. But that is ludicrous. Sure, if you faced a choice between starving and working or starving while not working, I suppose you’d choose the latter. But if welfare did not exist, that is not the position minimum-wage workers would be in; they would just be poorer. The American poverty line is nowhere near minimum subsistence.
But suppose that the minimum wage really were less than minimum subsistence. Welfare given to those workers still wouldn’t be “corporate welfare”. If no one could live on less than $10 an hour, and we removed all welfare, then anyone incapable of producing $10 an hour or more would starve. If the government gives them all $2 an hour, sure, Wal-Mart benefits because it can hire people at $8 an hour who otherwise would have died. But everyone else benefits, too: by being able to hire more workers at lower wages, Wal-Mart and other minimum-wage employers spread lower prices throughout the economy.
If the workers who otherwise would have died cost less to support than they produce, then everyone benefits from supporting them. Their employers don’t get a special benefit. (Of course, if they cost less to support than they produce, it doesn’t make sense that the market wage is less than subsistence in the first place.)
The only case where something like this might apply is in places like Manhattan or San Francisco, where if there were no welfare subsidizing people’s choice to live there, they would have to move somewhere else. This would decrease the supply of low-skilled labor, raising the price. So the people who remained (in the much smaller number of job openings) would make more.
But the overall effect of eliminating welfare, even in this case, would be to cause the income of poor workers to fall, not to rise or stay the same.
The problem with this reasoning is that it’s not as simple as paying Wal-Mart workers $2 each and everyone benefiting in an amount exactly equal to $2 * number of workers. The money affects the supply/demand curves for Wal-Mart hiring workers and setting pay scales, and the curves for prices based on total cost of production including worker pay.
Because the effect is so indirect, there’s no reason to believe that the benefits are exactly linear with the government money. It is possible that they benefit less and Wal-Mart benefits more. And if so, you could describe that as the government giving Wal-Mart an unfair advantage.
@ Jiro:
Who are “they”? I don’t mean that rhetorically; I just am not clear about who you are referring to. The workers? I can’t see how.
If the government gives welfare that somehow enables a large number of people to work who otherwise would have died (reminder: a ridiculous scenario!), the effect of that will be to increase the supply of low-wage labor. That will increase the size of the sector of the economy that depends on low-wage labor, so these companies will benefit. But everyone else gains from the goods and services made available by these workers.
In any case, it seems especially weird to describe this as a form of “corporate welfare”, since at best this is only the incidental effect, with the primary and overwhelming effect being to raise the living standards of the poor welfare recipients. (In the extreme example I gave, from death to life.)
It can’t possibly work out that way.
Imagine a limiting case: the government pays the Wal-Mart workers $10, and Wal-Mart pays them nothing. In that limiting case, does the general public benefit by an amount greater than what the government pays out?
If you answer “yes”, then you’re not a libertarian, because you just claimed that the government can buy things (workers), give them away, and the average person will benefit from this activity.
If you answer “no”, then the general public has a net loss when the government pays the workers $10 and Wal-Mart pays them nothing. Because the net loss/gain to the public is a continuous function of the amount the government pays, and it is a net loss at the limit, then there is also an amount X, X<10, where the government pays people $X, Wal-Mart pays them $10-X, and the public still has a net loss.
@Jiro
It ought to be mentioned that those $10 dollars an hour are likely to cost the government $15 – $20 once the IRS agents and the administrative folk have taken their cut.
@ Jiro:
Of course I say the answer is “no”.
I think the amount is any amount where 0 < X, because I don't think that the general public benefits from welfare spending. Of course the general public loses. But the people who gain are the welfare recipients! They're the ones who benefit at the expense of everyone else, not their employers.
The point of the cases of Manhattan and San Francisco is like this: there is a certain amount that it costs to live there, which is maybe above the federal minimum wage (or at least it theoretically could be). If the government eliminated all forms of welfare and subsidized housing, many low-wage workers would have to move. As a result, the supply of low-wage labor would go down, and the price would rise accordingly.
So in some sense welfare is responsible for the economy in those places being tilted more towards low-wage labor than it otherwise would be. Maybe there are more McDonald’s or Starbuck’s restaurants there, and fewer high-end restaurants.
But it still seems crazy to call this “corporate welfare”, when this effect is entirely mediated through the effect of allowing people to live in those areas who otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford it. Which is pretty much the stated purpose by its proponents, not a secret hidden effect.
And none of this is to argue that the general public benefits from such welfare payments, even in Manhattan and San Francisco. I already made this point in the original post, where I was talking about the below-subsistence scenario:
If they cost less to support than they produce, and if despite this the market wage is less than subsistence, then welfare to support them has a general benefit. Which I don’t think is or conceivably would be the case.
Or, to extend this to the other case: if a worker can produce more in Manhattan than it costs to live in Manhattan, but he isn’t being paid that much, then welfare would have a general benefit. But that is no more likely a scenario.
In this hypothetical, the government is paying people who would otherwise have been paid the same amount by Wal-Mart. So the recipients don’t gain at all except to the extent that being able to pay people less means that Wal-Mart has more money and can hire more employees. If the only way other people than Wal-Mart gain is via gains to Wal-Mart, then it’s fair to describe this as Wal-Mart gaining a special benefit.
Furthermore, if that’s what you mean, then your claim becomes pretty trivial. The point of the criticism is that “the burden also falls on other tax payers, and so the business unfairly gets advantage”. If you are not claiming that the general public benefits from welfare spending, your claim isn’t really responsive to that point.
@ Jiro:
No, I don’t know where you’re getting this from. They would not be paid the same amount by Wal-Mart. If the market wage is $8 an hour, then Wal-Mart pays them $8 an hour. It doesn’t matter how much money on top of that the workers get from the government. That doesn’t factor into the amount Wal-Mart pays.
Being paid more money by the government doesn’t make you more willing to work at Wal-Mart. It makes you less willing, if anything. Your whole scenario where the government pays people $10 and Wal-Mart pays them nothing doesn’t make sense. If you’re already getting the $10, why work at Wal-Mart for free? If you’re already getting $8, why work at Wal-Mart for $2 instead of being blissfully unemployed?
Unless we’re literally saying the government gives people a wage subsidy only on the condition that they work at Wal-Mart. That would be a special benefit to Wal-Mart, but that’s not what anyone is talking about.
The whole reason I brought up the subsistence scenario—an unrealistic distraction, most likely!—is that this is the only case where welfare would actually increase the supply of labor and thereby benefit low-wage employers. An effect which, I state again, is entirely mediated through the benefits it provides to low-wage workers.
I don’t understand what you’re trying to say here.
How is the idea that general public doesn’t benefit from welfare spending incompatible with the idea that Wal-Mart gets a special benefit? I mean, I don’t think they do get a special benefit, but the two just aren’t related.
The hypothetical is not that they’re paid the same amount by Wal-Mart. The hypothetical is that the total of government subsidy + Wal-Mart paycheck remains constant. Your own example says that in the hypothetical, $10 pay is required to survive, and then mentions Wal-Mart having to pay $10, and then has the government giving $2 and Wal-Mart capable of hiring people at $8. $2 + $8 = $10.
Because in your own hypothetical, they would starve at $8: “If no one could live on less than $10 an hour…”
He said almost the opposite: He said the burden also falls on other tax payers, and so the business unfairly gets advantage. In other words, he said that “the general public doesn’t benefit” is 1) true and 2) implies Wal-Mart getting a special benefit, not that it’s inconsistent with Wal-Mart getting a special benefit.
If you weren’t denying either 1) or 2), you weren’t being responsive.
@ Jiro:
I feel like there is a serious miscommunication going on somewhere.
The idea that “the total of government subsidy + Wal-Mart paycheck remains constant” is precisely the part that doesn’t make sense.
But to go back to the hypothetical scenario: if the lowest wage at which one can survive is $10 an hour, but a worker is only worth $8 an hour, he doesn’t get hired by Wal-Mart at $10 an hour just because that’s what it costs to sustain him. He doesn’t get hired at all! He dies.
The government giving people $2 an hour increases the supply of labor because it moves people from dying to not dying. Maybe it benefits Wal-Mart, but only as entirely mediated through the benefit it provides to the worker.
Nowhere in this does the total of government subsidy plus the paycheck remain constant.
And to return to Deiseach‘s original mistaken point, this subsidy does not somehow relieve Wal-Mart of the responsibility of paying a “just wage”. It doesn’t do so in the real world because workers in the US are nowhere near subsistence. And this was my main point.
Neither does it do so in hypothetical subsistence world. If a worker’s subsistence wage is higher than his productivity, they’re just not going to pay any wage at all. (Assuming that, if the worker is going to die, he’d rather not do it while working at Wal-Mart. If he would work at Wal-Mart at a starvation wage anyway, then the welfare has no effect at all on the employer; the subsistence case would be the same as the regular case.)
There is no scenario in which employers were sitting prepared to pay a “just wage” but don’t do so because of welfare programs.
In this case, I was referring to the real world, where workers are not going to starve at $8 an hour. Sorry if it was unclear.
Deiseach (who is female, by the way), as I understand, believes that the general public benefits from these welfare programs, i.e. they produce more value than they cost. However, she seems to think that the same benefits would be provided by employers if they weren’t being provided by the government—but instead of employers bearing the costs, now the taxpayer is bearing the costs.
I was arguing that no, it is not true that these benefits would be provided by employers if there were no welfare. The welfare is not in any way subsidizing employment. It is just making the workers less poor.
In other words, Deisearch is arguing that welfare is shifting the costs of employment from employers to the taxpayer. I am arguing that it does no such thing, and is rather giving poor workers an increase in wealth at taxpayer expense, with no effect to employers’ bottom line.
Without a government subsidy, in this hypothetical, Wal-Mart has to pay $10 to get workers because workers will starve on anything less and dead workers are useless to Wal-Mart. With a government subsidy, the government is paying $2, and Wal-Mart hires them at $8. 2 + 8 = 10.
It is true that some workers go from not being hired to hired in this hypothetical. However, the total of government subsidy + Wal-Mart paycheck conditional on being an employee remains constant, even if the number of employees varies. I recognized that the number of employees changes and already said so above: “except to the extent that being able to pay people less means that Wal-Mart has more money and can hire more employees”.
It could be described the other way around: It benefits the employee, but only as mediated through the benefit to Wal-Mart–it benefits the employee only as a result of the fact that Wal-Mart can get cheaper employees and so hires more of them, and the employee may be part of that larger batch.
The total conditional on being an employee remains constant.
Yes, there is, although that scenario isn’t one. Here’s one that is:
Assume that it takes some time for the employee to die from a below-subsistence wage, so Wal-Mart is still willing to hire such employees even though they will die eventually. Also assume that Wal-Mart needs X employees, there are more potential employees than X, and all potential employees have the same productivity which is greater than subsistence wage. Also assume that the number of employees willing to work for wage W decreases based on W.
In the absence of government programs, Wal-Mart hires X of the potential employees at a wage W1 which is just low enough that the number of employees willing to work at W1 has decreased to exactly X.
In the presence of government programs that produce a subsidy of $2, Wal-Mart hires X of the potential employees at a wage W2 which is just low enough that the number of employees willing to work at W2+2 has decreased to exactly X.
In this scenario, W2 = W1 – 2, so W2 is necessarily lower than W1. And it’s certainly possible that W1 is above subsistence wage and W2 is below.
(Of course, “Wal-Mart wants to hire X employees” is a simplification since they would want to hire more employees if the rate is cheaper, but you can assume a relatively, but not entirely, flat curve for X instead of X being 100% constant, and it still works.)
@ Jiro:
I disagree with basically everything in your comment.
If workers refuse to work for less than $10 (because anything less is a starvation wage), that causes Wal-Mart to hire fewer workers until the value of the marginal worker is $10 an hour. The result is that any worker whose marginal value is less than $10 an hour dies.
If the government gives an unconditional $2 an hour to everyone, they become willing to work for as little as $8 an hour. But this is not a special benefit to Wal-Mart; it applies to any employer they might choose, whether it’s Wal-Mart or mom-and-pop stores, or whatever.
The workers’ income conditional on being a Wal-Mart employee is an irrelevant and misleading figure. If the welfare is eliminated and they quit working because they earn less than subsistence, the unemployed share of the income drops to $0. If they keep working anyway, it drops from $10 to $8.
Either way, worker income doesn’t remain constant.
What do you mean that Wal-Mart “can get” cheaper employees?
What we’re talking about here workers who previously were unable to earn their subsistence now being able to do so, and as a result now being willing to work at all. Obviously, that is primarily a benefit to those workers. And it’s not a special benefit to Wal-Mart or whatever because they can take that subsidy and work for anyone who wishes to hire them. If the subsidy only applied conditional upon working at Wal-Mart, then it would be a special benefit to Wal-Mart, sure.
Again, why would you use the figure conditional upon being an employee?
If the workers face starvation wages and quit, their “paycheck” falls to zero. If they face starvation wages and don’t quit, their paycheck falls by the reduction of the subsidy. Either way, it falls.
First of all, your scenario doesn’t make sense because it’s the other way around. The less people make, the more they are willing to work, assuming that they place a very high value on, you know, remaining alive. That’s why people worked 14-hour days and 6-day weeks in the Industrial Revolution but very rarely do so today.
Or to look at it another way, $8 an hour is worth a lot less when you already have a trust fund paying you $100,000 a year than when it’s between that and starvation.
Unless they make an amount less than minimum subsistence, at which point willingness to work presumably falls to zero (in the unrealistic assumption that they don’t expect things to get better).
The other problem is that they get the $2 either way. It has no effect on the size of wage they get, which is determined by market competition among employers. If the market wage is $8 an hour without welfare, it’s still $8 an hour with welfare. (If anything, the welfare causes wages to rise because it discourages people from working; for instance, if they get paid $7 an hour in welfare and you can live on that, you could work for Wal-Mart and make a total of $15 an hour, or you could just have the leisure instead.)
The only difference with the imaginary subsistence scenario is that there is a hard floor at $10 an hour, below which no one is willing to work. And I already addressed the consequences of that above.
It also happens to be what most people mean when they say that Wal-Mart doesn’t have to pay a living wage because the government makes up the difference.
I mean that if Wal-Mart wants an employee, they don’t have to pay as much with government subsidy as they do without government subsidy.
Benefits to people that result as a consequence of this are benefits that come to Wal-Mart first, and to other people secondarily as a consequence of the benefit to Wal-Mart.
In order for a worker to be able to do that without displacing another worker, Wal-Mart has to have an extra job available. Wal-Mart has extra jobs available because not having to pay as much for the jobs it already had available saves it money.
We are not talking about the same thing. When I say “the more they are willing to work” I mean “the more likely they are to prefer working at that job to neither working nor earning money” The meaning you are using is “the more hours in the job they are willing to work”, which isn’t the same thing.
Given a job that is barely below subsistence and leaves the worker dead by starvation after 10 years, and comparing it to a job that pays a lot less than even that and leaves the worker dead by starvation tomorrow, it’s obvious that more workers would accept the former job than the latter job.
We are not talking about the same thing. When I say “the less people make”, I mean “the less people make at the job that we’re asking them about”, not “the less people make total”.
This particular scenario is an example of “Wal-Mart doesn’t have to pay a living wage because the government makes up for it”. The value that makes it an example is the amount that Wal-Mart pays, not the amount that the employees receive.
@ Jiro:
Then what they are talking about is completely irrelevant and misleading as relates to the question of whether welfare “subsidizes employers”. It’s also completely disconnected from reality, since the market wage for low-skilled workers, even where it is below the minimum wage, is nowhere close to an actual subsistence wage.
And if so, then the welfare makes no difference at all to the amount Wal-Mart has to pay. which is determined solely by competition among employers for the limited workforce available. The only difference is in how much total income the workers take home.
Anyway, I’m tired of discussing the minutiae of the ridiculous subsistence scenario.
Maybe you could consider it as subsidizing Wal-Mart, since you would be increasing the size of the labor pool and thereby lowering wages. But regardless, that is a ridiculous way to put things, since the reason the size of the labor pool is increasing is that more workers are living.
The market wage for low-skilled workers is more like the below subsistence wage that kills you in 10 years, if you have above median expenses (need medical care, have to support a family, etc.)
Note that the analysis is actually simpler in that case, since we no longer have the problem “Wal-Mart won’t hire them because dead workers are no use”.
@ Jiro:
The “below subsistence wage that kills you in 10 years” (seems almost like a contradiction in terms to me), is just the same economically as the above-subsistence wage. The welfare has no effect of decreasing wages in this case, because increasing the welfare does not increase the supply of labor. I can’t tell if you disagree with that or not.
Got “Young Outsider”. The questions on this one weren’t that great. There were many on which I wanted to answer “both”, “neither”, or “my answer doesn’t imply what it normally does”.
Ditto, on both counts.
I was very pleased to get “Hard pressed skeptic.” This seemed like an accurate description of my general worldview. I am skeptical of government. But I am also very skeptical of people’s ability to get ahead via hard work and such. I do, in fact, dislike both parties but generally side with the Democrats.
I like the Pew quiz, but some of the questions show a serious lack of nuance. The one about poor people, for example, breaks along an axis that has almost nothing to do with my views; welfare fraud exists (I’ve seen a couple of scams in the wild), and so does hard luck of various kinds, but from an incentive point of view neither one comes close to the problems created by the structure of our welfare system and especially by its reliance on hard cutoffs for means testing. I went with the more conservative options, because they at least don’t imply new interventions that I wouldn’t be in favor of, but I’m not happy with the implications.
(I scored as “Young Outsider”, and I think I got “Hard-Pressed Skeptic” the last time I took this quiz. I’ve probably gotten more cynical in the interim; this election cycle has been having that effect.)
My ranking right now is Rubio > Cruz > influenza > Clinton > bubonic plague > Trump > Sanders.
I’m against Sanders, but if it came down to it I’d much rather have him than Trump.
I’m against Sanders on the economy and Supreme Court nominations, but Sanders wouldn’t get his way on the economy. And who knows what Trump would do, either in the economy, or who he would put on the Supreme Court?
This is exactly my position. I disagree with just about everything Sanders says or does, but, if it came right down to it between him and Trump, I trust the Republicans in Congress to stonewall Sanders much more than I trust them to stonewall Trump. Praise Madison for separation of powers, even it’s not quite working out like he hoped…
I trust the media to call out Trump more than I trust them to call out Sanders.
If this presidential campaign has taught us anything, it is that the media calling out Trump only makes him stronger.
“If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.” – Donald Trump?
Honestly, I don’t even see much of a difference between the two. Trump is more of a dick, Sanders is more of a commie, but they’re cut from the same populist whiny cloth. I don’t think either of them is likely to get their way on very much, but Sanders’ platform would be worse if he somehow did manage, whereas Trump is more likely to destroy the less-intolerable party in the current system.
That said, Chevalier has the best Sanders-over-Trump argument I’ve seen, so that might change my mind.
At the very bottom of the candidates, I have
Carly Fiorina < Carson < Rubio < Cruz < Trump < Everyone else
As in, you’d take Trump over Rubio? Also, Fiorina dropped weeks ago.
Meh, its what the poll said.
But that’s a tough sell. I would absolutely take Cruz over Trump, but its hard to say about Rubio.
Looks like that decisions been made by the general public, with Cruz the only current person with the status to possibly stop Trump from taking the nomination here on out, at least out of the current other runners.
Kasich is my current IRL leading choice. Then Cruz. I *wish* Romney decided to not run against Obama the last election, since he seems like he would be both a competent moderate president, and a soft to a hard counter to Trumps personal advertisements (Also rich, more international experience, better school performance, visibly physically healthier, and no blatant scams like Trump University)
…Cruz the only current person with the status to possibly stop Trump from taking the nomination here on out
How are you defining and measuring “status” here?
If it is the election results to date, note that those come mostly from states with a disproportionate fraction of the evangelical Christian voters who favor Cruz. Across the GOP electorate as a whole, Cruz and Rubio have comparable poll numbers, and the delegate math favors Rubio going forward (winner-take-all vs proportional representation).
On the other hand, early wins will give Cruz a momentum effect. It is not obvious to me which will dominate, and I think dismissing either of them as not having the “status” to win is premature.
Kasich, doesn’t have the status to win. The only question is who he hurts most by staying in the race, and that also is unclear.
>Schilling
Well, from what I have read now, its seems to have boiled down to either a contested convention, with delegates switching sides, or everyone else dropping out of the race to support Cruz. It might be to early to call support for Cruz. But if its too early, its *probably* a contested convention.
There’s only a slim chance of everybody else dropping out to support Cruz, and there’s an equally slim chance of everybody dropping out to support Rubio.
But it doesn’t matter whether this goes to the convention or is settled later in primary season. Each of Trump, Cruz, and Rubio has enough support to deny victory to anything less than an alliance of the other two(*). Each has enough support that they can morally claim to be equal partners in the alliance; it isn’t a 45-45-10 split where Mr. 10% gets to be junior partner in the coalition. Yes, right now Rubio is in third place in the delegates but everybody who is doing the math expects that to even out – and the support of the party establishment and donor base comes into this calculation as well.
Cruz and Rubio have roughly equal status in the anti-Trump campaign. Which is perhaps unfortunate, because if it really were a 45-45-10 thing we’d expect this to settle out fairly quickly instead of dragging out to the convention.
*More precisely, an alliance of the supporters of the other two
I’m unfamiliar with the structure of US primaries, but if both Cruz and Rubio stick it out to the convention, and one of them ends up with the delegates of both, does that mean voters who rank Cruz > Trump > Rubio or Rubio > Trump > Cruz both wind up supporting not-Trump? That seems like the best case scenario for Trump opponents.
The delegates are legally bound to vote for the candidate they pledged on the first floor vote of the convention. So if anyone has an absolute majority, they win.
After that, the delegates are free to vote their individual consciences. At that point, it starts to matter how each candidate actually selects their delegates. Obviously, a politician benefits from selecting delegates who will vote the way he wants them to, so that if e.g. Kasich isn’t going to be the nominee he can at least make deals on the basis of “If you give me [X], I’ll tell my delegates to vote for you”. The party benefits from this level of discipline as well, and has the means to enforce it where the delegates are political insiders.
Rubio’s delegates, and Kasich’s, will almost certainly vote for whomever Marco Rubio tells them to, and that almost certainly won’t be Donald Trump.
Cruz’s delegation will probably vote the way he tells them to, but he’s unpopular enough with the GOP establishment that he might not be able to get the same class of insiders as Rubio et al and he may not be in as strong a position to enforce discipline himself. So it’s possible that Cruz would offer his delegates to Trump in exchange for a vice-presidency and they’d go along with it, and it’s possible that Trump could win on the basis of defecting Cruz delegates, but those aren’t good bets I think. There’s a fair number of Cruz voters who’d favor Trump under those circumstances, but it’s not in Cruz’s interest to have them in his actual delegation.
Trump’s delegates are a wild card. I haven’t seen any good information about how he is selecting them, and his campaign has been generally weak at the level of nuts-and-bolts retail politics. If Trump isn’t going to be the nominee, he has no means of rewarding or punishing any delegate who plans to continue in politics. If he’s nominating complete outsiders, they won’t have the connections to build a network beyond the Trump delegation and they will be babes in the woods for the cutthroat negotiations to come.
Should be entertaining to watch, at least.
On the Republican side many state rules allow the state party infrastructure to pick the delegates rather than the campaigns. These recent rule changes happened because Romney picked many of his supporters instead of local power brokers and said local power brokers were upset to miss out on a free junket.
Here’s an article about how it played out in NY, but I understand the phenomenon to be widespread: http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/albany/2015/06/8569091/after-scuffle-state-gop-change-delegate-rules-2016
Are Gary Johnson (libertarian) and Jill Stein (green) mostly interchangeable? Because apparently I side with Johnson “on foreign policy, domestic policy, immigration, social, environmental, electoral, and science issues” but I also side with Jill Stein “on foreign policy, domestic policy, immigration, social, healthcare, and criminal issues”.
I’m dubious of the merits of the exercise.
They have a lot of the same positions on many of those issues.
The big differences are going to be in taxes, economic regulation, healthcare, and environmental regulation, the latter two of which come out in those descriptions.
These test tends to group policy preferences together as “similar answers” where the two answers aren’t actually similar at all. For example on one of the global warming questions “no, institute a carbon tax” and “no, global warming is a natural occurrence” are treated as similar, when they’re exact opposites
I got 96% agreement with Johnson but only 66% with Stein which seems like a roughly accurate result to me.
Ranking:
Johnson >> Sanders/Clinton >> Rubio/Cruz >>>>>>>>> Trump
Sort of matches my preferences, although I don’t think Bernie/Hilary would have been as highly rated had there been better questions about economic policy (I value reducing the size of the regulatory state very highly, and I’m pretty sure Bernie/Hilary do not). I do take solace in that Trump is my least matched candidate (even of those that dropped out).
This quiz (which I’ve seen before, and now just looked at again) has always seemed absurd to me.
For most of these questions, my answer is “I have no idea. I am not nearly informed enough, nor have thought about it enough, to have an opinion on this topic.” The closest I have to a “position” on many of these topics is “well, if there’s a consensus among professionals in the relevant field, then we should probably go with that”. Even for the most “pure values” questions, my answer is “I really would have to delve much deeper into the arguments for all sides, and give it a good deal more thought than I have time or interest for, to have any kind of strongly held opinion”.
I’m supposed to side with Clinton or Bush or Eisenhower or whoever the heck the presidential candidates are this year, on the basis of what position they take on these specific object-level issues?? That’s insane, quite frankly. (And it makes the whole thing seem that much more like elaborate theater.)
Edit: Oh, and that’s not even getting into the fact that having to pick just one answer out of the provided choices (especially given the fact that a lot of the answers are laughably simplistic/dogmatic versions of what could plausibly be reasonable views) makes the entire quiz into a farce.
I can’t imagine not having an opinion on every single one of these questions, or at the very least most of them.
Seriously?
Ok, let’s go through them (or at least, as many of them as I can stomach before getting bored):
Abortion: Pro-choice, sure. But one of the choices is a claim: “… providing birth control, sex education, and more social services will help reduce the number of abortions”. Well, will it? How should I know? I’m sure I could look into it and figure it out, but I don’t really want to.
Same-sex marriage: I certainly have an ethical opinion, but in terms of policy? It’s a complex issue. What will result in the best outcomes, even given some fixed set of values? I’m not sure.
Funding for Planned Parenthood: Uh, I don’t know enough about this issue to have an opinion. I certainly know what the “standard liberal view” is. Is that the right one? I’d have to look into the facts a lot more, and the arguments, and give it thought…
Businesses denying service etc.: I’d go with “yes”, but I’ve seen the case made that this has consequences that don’t align with my values. More thought is certainly required.
Health insurance providers / free birth control: You expect me to have an opinion on health insurance regulation?? Don’t be ridiculous. I don’t even have an opinion on whether we should have free public health care! This is exactly the sort of thing that people are way too quick to form views on in the absence of expertise or domain knowledge.
Ok, I’m beat. Honestly, though, the above were some of the easiest ones. Other questions on the quiz concern national parks (how much do I know about the national parks system??), GMOs, term limits for Congresspeople, etc. It would be even more absurd for me to have opinions on object-level questions in those subjects.
Here’s a useful heuristic:
How easily can you imagine reading an SSC post explaining how any given opinion (the consensus opinion, your opinion, or any other) on a subject actually doesn’t take into account a whole slew of surprising things, how the issue at hand doesn’t work like most people think it does, and how actually, if we do this obviously-sensible-seeming thing, catastrophe results?
Because I can easily imagine it, for pretty much all of the topics on the quiz. I wouldn’t be surprised by such a post one bit, about any of these things. And that signals to me that I don’t know nearly enough about them to choose a president on the basis of what their opinion is. Really, I know next to nothing about them.
Which means that the only sensible opinion is no opinion.
My position is: I don’t care if it does or not. It’s irrelevant.
How are you separating the “ethical” question from the “policy” question? What is the dividing line for you?
Anyway, my prior here is to support more freedom and toleration, particularly when it’s opposed by religious dogmatism. And I haven’t seen anything like sufficient evidence to make me even consider changing my opinion.
I don’t support funding Planned Parenthood because I am opposed in principle to having the government fund all private charitable organizations and to having it involved in healthcare.
I say “yes” for the same reasons that I support private property rights in general. I can’t imagine “more thought” changing my opinion on this without completely overturning all of my political beliefs.
I think healthcare should be left to the free market. There is no good reason why it shouldn’t be: it’s not a public good, etc.
I know I don’t want my tax money going to national parks because I know I don’t care much about them and I know it’s unconstitutional. I know that GMO panic is spread by the same sorts of people who spread panic about every other kind of scientific advancement. And I know I don’t like career politicians serving in the House and Senate forever.
I can’t really imagine changing my opinion about any of these issues from something I read on SSC. Certainly not from some grab-bad of empirical studies.
I think it’s all a matter of basic political philosophy because I don’t trust the “latest empirical studies” on one side of the issue or the other. I don’t think the president has access to super secret information in making these decisions that I don’t have; and even if he did, I don’t think he’d be politically able to use it.
What I saw when taking that survey, is fairly little room for nuance. The questions were just a bunch of applause lights.
“Social Issues”: On abortion I answered in the pro-choice way, but gave it low priority. That’s pretty much my opinion on that matter, I find the whole abortion issue to be a rather trivial distraction. The other social issue questions lacked any nuance. On the equal pay one — it was worded so broadly that, if taken literally, a negative response would suggest the repeal of 70s civil rights legislation. In context it was probably referring to some of the more dubious proposals with the aim of providing equal pay (on which I’m mixed).
Environment: Very little nuance here. The options seem to swing from your choice of tree-hugger or anti-environmentalist. My real world opinion, an eco-modernism that favors both 1)environmental protection , and 2) the full utilization of modern technology (including nuclear energy, and biotech) is not on the list of available options. And my preference for nuclear energy, and GMOs is very strong , and puts me in strong contrast to the typical environmentalist.
Economic Issues: No way on those question to simultaneously support a strong government role in economic policy, while disavowing the economically illiterate elements of the left who refuse to acknowledge the presence of economic takeoffs (hello, Bernie Sanders).
I could go on here. The net result of this was to probably make me come out on that test as a solid left winger, when in reality I have a number of centrist sympathies. Or maybe centrist isn’t the right word. I think the left is about 70% correct, but on the issues where I think the American left is wrong, I think its very wrong in an extremely dangerous way. During the election I’m voting for Clinton — not so much because of strong policy agreement, but because I think she is the least likely to do anything very irresponsible.
Ranking: Cruz > Rubio > Christie = Johnson = Carson > Trump >> Clinton > Sanders.
Not surprising at all. My actual positions have Trump and Sanders up higher, but that’s because they’ll widen the Overton Window rather than because I actually agree with them on policy matters.
Candidates
Parties
Cruz is higher than he should be, but other than that it seems mostly accurate.
Of the semiplausible candidates I got Cruz > Trump > Rubio > Sanders > Clinton > Kasich. But of course the test only looks at claimed positions on the issues, and doesn’t take into account things like integrity and symbolism.
100% match for Sanders, 95% for Clinton. Also 70% for Gary Johnson, so apparently I don’t hate libertarians, which is comforting, as I didn’t think I did. The highest for any Republican for me was 31% (Kasich). Pretty much what I expected. But despite that I’m also skeptical of the value of these tests. There’s always a big gap between stated positions and which policies actually get enacted, and a further gap between how the policies are written and how they are implemented in practice. Not only do I distrust the stated positions of Republicans, I also tend to fear that they’re most likely to do what they promise in the cases where I wish they wouldn’t, rather than in the cases where I actually want them to, and I expect them to mismanage implementation in such a way as to make things still worse. Conversely, while I don’t exactly trust Democrats to do those things right, I don’t expect them to mess up as badly. As a result, even if a Republican had come up higher than Clinton, I’d probably still be planning to vote for Clinton ahead of even that Republican in November. And I can’t help but suspect that many Republicans have the mirror image of my feelings about how things would work out, and are probably more motivated by that than any policy positions. People in my tribe will think like me, so they won’t do anything too crazy (regardless of their rhetoric), but who knows what those people from the other tribe might do with power!
http://www.isidewith.com/elections/2016-presidential/2011046634
I’m a moderate libertarian according to this scale, just barely leaning right
It actually predicts my view of the candidates fairly accurately. Interestingly, I got a 52% match with Sanders, but only a 35% match with Clinton.
That’s funny: somehow I “agree” with Gary Johnson on 93% of issues; you “agree” with him on 86% of issues; but I only “agree” with you on 44% of issues. (I suspect this is because the candidates’ answers are not filled in on all issues.)
Also, there’s many “partially similar” answers that are not similar at all.
My link: http://www.isidewith.com/elections/2016-presidential/2006896254
Heretic!
http://www.isidewith.com/elections/2016-presidential/2017933390
Also Gary Johnson highest
but I only agree with Sastan 34% while I agree 75% with vox. The wierdest thing though, is that the anonymous long time lurker below has the first 4 candidates the same as mine and in the same order (Johnson, Sanders, Stein, Clinton) while only agreeing 23% with me.
My political views are pretty changeable and might be different tomorrow.
for the Pew poll:
I got “business conservative” like vox but am not convinced that’s very accurate, it came down to a lot of tough choices between views both of which were very far from mine.
(long-time lurker here)
Seems like I am moderately libertarian and moderately left-wing:
http://www.isidewith.com/elections/2016-presidential/2013602496
That my two highest politician are a libertarian and bernie sanders might explain why I feel confused and unsure who I would vote for if I were in the US.
http://www.isidewith.com/elections/2016-presidential/2014674224
Apparently I’m Johnson > Cruz > Trump > Stein > Sanders > others. I took this test some time ago and had about 70% agreement with Cruz and Sanders (which was more than anyone else save Rand Paul); now I have 82% agreement with Cruz and 69% with Sanders. I probably answered some questions I’m of two minds about differently this time, or perhaps they asked different questions.
Of the 47 Slatestar readers who’ve taken the quiz we seem to have a pretty even split between Liberal and Conservative.
That’s interesting
http://www.people-press.org/quiz/political-typology/results/group/413c3803/
Yes, I’ve been noticing the same thing. So the commentariat, or at least the fraction of it answering the poll, is pretty balanced.
However, I suspect that overall it is more right-leaning than its demographics would predict (assuming that most of the people here are in their 20s and 30s). For instance, when I was in college I gave this poll out to some of my friends, and it was much more left-wing. Almost no “steadfast conservatives”, a few “business conservatives” like myself. The biggest difference is that there are relatively few “next generation left” people here; in college, it was the opposite, with few “solid liberals” and much more of the “next generation”.
There are virtually no “faith and family left” here, but that’s no shocker.
This site claimed Trump does not support “space travel” because of this tweet but that is wrong.
I got Bernie > Hillary > Cruz > Bloomberg > Trump. But actually, although I may vote for Hillary, I am also thinking of Trump because of his foreign policy ideas and nationalism. Trump’s foreign policy seems pretty nuanced and did not seem to be captured here. Does anyone have an opinion on it?
Trump’s foreign policy is probably the best reason to vote for him. He is the most anti-interventionist of any of the candidates other than Sanders. He is also less stridently pro-Israel than all the other candidates (which isn’t hard).
On the other hand, he has also said that we should kill the families of terrorists. I suspect that Trump is less likely to violate jus ad bellum than most of the other candidates, but more likely to violate jus in bello — that is, he’s less likely to start a war, but more likely to use immoral means once we’re in one. But, although both are bad, the alarming willingness of most of the other candidates to start wars is probably more dangerous.
I got Bernie 98% > Hillary 96% > Stein 95 > Bloomberg 76 > Johnson 55% > Trump 16% >>
http://www.isidewith.com/elections/2016-presidential/2017227727
So, as I’ve been suspecting, Trump might be my most compatible Republican candidate.
I think the blantatly stupidly worded statements of keep the muslims out and Mexicans are terrorists will have obvious negative international reverberations that will outweigh any possible national security benefits along with tarnishing Americas image and fundemtally offending several of our biggest trade partners.
There are good reasons to believe that there should be stringent immigration rules, especially for individuals in a region where there exist otherwise functional memetic traditions that are difficult to reconcile with western liberties. And there are worries of cartel crime and drug trafficking that may warrant an object similar to a wall being built. Lastly, there’s the issue of how automation is affecting American jobs which is another argument for restricting immigration.
But this is like, a few steps away from WW3 rhetoric. Its fundamentally aggressive. Stupidly combative and paranoid towards China, a country where it should be a #1 priority to not repeat the masculine stupidities of the cold war. Its blatantly unconstitutional too. And stoking negative religious passions is how what percentage of wars and massacres have been started?
Also, its not good on America’s economy. Tariffs with the intention of protecting inefficient national industries tend to lead to deadweight losses and inefficiencies, and greater prices with utterly no benefit to the typical American consumer. It also unfairly takes away jobs from developing Chinese sectors in areas where the ability to fund necessary social services may not be as adequate. I’m pretty sure I literally learned that when I took ECON 101. As in, ECON 101 in real life. If there was a strong justified environmental angle to add tariffs to Chinese goods, that’s a real valid reason, but I only see mindless protectionism of the backfiring sort.
He supports legalizing torture, which is probably the best thing you can do if you want even more fear and international and multigenerational hatred of America.
Its also idiotic to simply say “I agree with candidate X on issues ABC” while ignoring the rhetoric of national leaders and not thinking it will alter the national psyche of the inhabitants and mass-group actions of other nations.
I mean, George W. Bush was legendary at times for poorly worded bushisms. But in comparison to Trump, its as if Bush was gifted by the muses of literature.
There are a few parts of what you said on WW3 and torture that seem like hyperbole. But maybe you are right overall-but if so, then so what? Because maybe we offend trading partners and move to a more militarized world. America has the largest most advanced military in the world. If the world moves in that direction, I would guess that we will hold the advantage. War has been in decline for the past half century; I am not that concerned about WW3. At this point that seems like speculation.
There do seem to be pretty deep issues here of, What are your priorities? I totally admit that I am not neutral; my inclination is toward more nationalism and citizenism.
Trump’s policies may be bad for trade but the global economy right now is not in good shape, and we don’t really know why-so maybe we should make a change. I’m definitely not an expert, but according to Chomsky, there is a long history of countries violating free trade principles and growing as a result.
I could be convinced this was a bad idea if (1) it would not lead to more economic growth in the long run AND (2) the current world order was stable and any shift to a different one was not inevitable. Basically I have a feeling and I don’t see why it’s counterproductive. So I’m going with it.
I’m definitely not an expert, but according to Chomsky, there is a long history of countries violating free trade principles and growing as a result.
Wait, so Chomsky is an expert on international trade and macroeconomics now?
Is there any field Chomsky isn’t an expert in?
Linguistics.
His linguistics work does see some use in theoretical CS, but he’s never weighed in himself as far as I know.
How about this? Also there seem to be problems in the global economic system that nobody can figure out. Perhaps it would be better to cut this Gordian knot.
I do think free trade is usually good. I hope that Trump isn’t going to gratuitously slap on tariffs, but I wonder how much you can consider gratuitous. Values and the environment probably co-evolve, so if your goal is more nationalist and citizenist values, a good strategy might be tariffs and restricting immigration. Because if you take a different direction from neighboring countries and relations go sour, and there are many immigrants from those neighbors, then (I speculate that) the immigrants may not be loyal. If trade is high, constituencies benefiting from trade will exist. International tensions will lower trade and whoever is benefiting from trade will demand fewer tensions. Pinker agrees trade helps keep the peace.
It comes back to whether more nationalism is adaptive. The US is a big enough country that maybe it growing more nationalist would tip the whole global system toward more nationalism or it’s already moving in that direction. At the other extreme, it could also be that we become more nationalist, but it just hurts us. Mexico links up with (say) China, everybody just re-routes around the truculent USA and business goes on as usual. We take big long-run hits to economic growth, the free-trading countries prosper and we are left behind. I agree this would be bad. Would it happen?
“How about this?”
There is only two claims they reference
— The free flow of financing across borders, Bhagwati says, is a source of dangerous instability.—
This is true in regards to certain types of panics; this does not really apply to the US or other major economies. It is mostly a worry in countries that have just opened up because investors tend to be more skittish.
“A landmark 2013 study by David Autor, David Dorn and Gordon Hanson found that competition from China has destroyed jobs and lowered wages in many U.S. industries, especially manufacturing. ”
That isn’t showing free trade is wrong. That is showing the US economy is not flexible; we should expect trade to cause creative destruction. If the economy isn’t producing more jobs (and we know it can since it does for new technologies) we are either exceeding the short term ability for it to do so, or there are structural issues preventing people from getting new work.
“Also there seem to be problems in the global economic system that nobody can figure out.”
That? It is just the claim that you can get in a liquidity trap with deflation because other countries inflation means that capital doesn’t readjust (since the returns are the same even though nominal returns are different).
http://www.isidewith.com/elections/2016-presidential/2018020524
Actual ideology: Death Eater.
Square peg, round hole, I guess.
http://www.isidewith.com/elections/2016-presidential/2018107705
My second option is Jeb!, just kill me now.
Gotta work on my guac recipe, I guess.
The link to “The New Mind Control” by Robert Epstein at Aeon gets caught in the spam trap. The article claims that undecided voters are strongly influenced by the order of positive and negative articles about politicians that are delivered by a search engine.
The paper
As usual, I’m curious about whether this seems to be a sound study.
Oh, of course that’s absolutely true. What’s even “scarier” is that the politicians you like, the news stations you trust, and you preferred style of reading can all be found decently so by statistical methods. All with billions of subtle experiments in likes and dislikes. Like, say there’s N people you somewhat trust, but they all have natural human variance in decision making. A small subset agree on issue X, and one of them writes *just* the way you like, but you don’t usually agree with that person. You’re a swing voter, and that article ends up being recommended first, and you are a time-constrained human who won’t read all trusted writers in the initial set. If that article shows up first, and can be brushed off as being fine-tuned algorithms, its a tricky game, and potentially a good deal more powerful then just “good” or “bad” articles at the top.
People keep saying Worm is so great, but every single specific detail I am given about the story, in an attempt to show me how cool it is, just convinces me it is a story that stopped cheating for the good guys, cheats relentlessly on behalf of the bad guys, and claims “this is what a superhero story would look like without the author cheating!” Which is a book I do not want to read.
Not only have I heard that a lot, I’ve also heard that the story is set up in such a way that trying to escape from some superhero conventions just doesn’t work when it normally would.
The best part about it vis-a-vis other superhero fiction is that the powers are vastly more intelligently designed and used. The power to ignore bullets and punch really hard is cool and all, but the power to manipulate the future is *way* stronger. The main character has the ability to control insects, which in any other story would be a joke power, and uses it to accomplish incredible things through clever application – scouting a huge volume around her secretly, using poisonous insects as attackers, weaving spider-silk armour for herself and traps for her enemies, making decoys to distract enemies, and so on. (It’s been a few years since I’ve read it, so I’m probably forgetting a few really good ones). The “cheating” argument wasn’t one that had even occurred to me.
I think there’s a small and mostly ignored market of the kind of people who like to think of alternative uses for superheros powers or magic systems. The kind of people who, for example, when seeing a fantasy setting with cheap portals cringes when the story still revolves around goods-caravans with no reason given for why they don’t just open a portal to their destination.
Stories like HPMOR or Worm, where time as been put into thinking of creative ways to use the powers are extra-satisfying to a certain group of people.
A lot of fantasy is quite lazy beyond the central plot. They’ll introduce a character with a certain powers and then ignore all the obvious uses of it and once you’ve thought of how the characters could resolve everything you can’t unsee it and it messes up the story for you.
^ I second what murphy said.
I haven’t done a detailed analysis of Megan Lindholm’s Windsinger books, but she at least realized that if there’s publicly known weather magic, it will be politically important.
Lindholm restarted her career as Robin Hobb, who wrote much longer books. I lost interest in them (they seemed more diffuse), but I’m curious if other people have opinions about Hobb vs. Lindholm.
Also, Lindholm’s Cloven Hooves might be of interest– it’s science fiction about satyrs as parthenogenic males with pheromone powers. Warning: lots of emotional pain for the main character.
Sometimes for plot purposes you can’t have the central character(s) resolve everything neatly, because if it all wraps up in four chapters where’s the rest of the book?
Sometimes the author is not interested in the answers the reader might think are obvious, but wants to explore something else.
And yes, sometimes you want to bang the characters’ heads together because they’re just being stupid; that was what made me drop out of “Wheel of Time” after slogging through the first four books; half-way through Book Five, I went “But why don’t you just talk to each other? You’re supposed to be Best Friends, you’re supposed to all be from this little village thrown into a whole new wider world, you’re all getting weird new powers, the normal thing to do is talk to each other about ‘Hey, are you freaked out with all this or is it just me?’ ” Of course, if they had talked to each other, there would have been no manufactured urgency and complications to drive the rest of the book and the series onwards, but I had stopped caring by then and gave it all up.
It never got better.
I slogged through the whole series because the only reason I was reading the damned things in the first place was that I’m a Brandon Sanderson fan. If the characters had bothered to talk to each other the plot could have been wrapped up with about 8 fewer books.
The author of Worm started with the setting (he explicitly started various stories with different protagonists before settling on Taylor). I get the impression he came up with the ending before the main character as well. And the setting has a great deal of value from a SF perspective.
The world is also somewhat grim. But A) there’s a reason for that, and B) the author isn’t really cheating on behalf of individual “bad guys” so much as trying to keep the story tense and interesting.
BBC Radio 4 discusses nature versus nurture. It turns out that genes don’t matter that much, and, by the way, the rich are evil. So, either
a) Hurrah! It has been solved by Science!
or
b) What do you expect from the BBC?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b071skp5
>b) What do you expect from the BBC?
In my experience: The opposite of whatever the listener believes.
Um, no. It turns out that:
1) A British psychologist believes that genes don’t matter much, so he’s written a book with that message, which should make people better at life and parenting.
2) Another British psychologist (with better academical credentials) believes that genes do matter, that the first psychologist is not very science-savvy, and that genetic studies will eventually help us disentangle complex epidemiological issues.
3) A British science journalist agrees that genes do matter, but wants to tell you about some fascinating long-term studies.
4) A British TV producer disagrees with the science-savvy people and wants to tell you about his own fascinating documentary.
Also, all of them agree that social mobility is good, and that people being doomed to misery either by their genes or by their society is bad.
In the last open thread, after someone else posted something about IQ, I suggested that the best thing for the literature would be if adult IQ and child IQ researchers started using different terms because the massive differences between the two just cause a lot of confusion.
What if instead of two separate measures we went the opposite direction and had one unified scale? That’s exactly what we do for height and weight. We don’t say that a six year old is at 200 weight units and that’s way over for his age. We say he’s 60 pounds and that’s in the xx percentile for his age. I can’t think of any downside — well other than to parental ego maybe.
@science2:
Well, most of the talk about weight or height that corresponds to the talk about IQ is only in terms of relatives or percentiles. As in, “S/he is tall/short/skinny/heavy for their age”. When they make weight classes for 6 year old wrestlers, they don’t put them all in the “flyweight” category.
And really, when we talk about IQ in kids, we are mostly worried about the ends. Is there something may require doing something differently for this particular child? And that then comes with a status label that will be fought over, no matter the units you assign to the measure.
Perhaps what we really need to do is try and tailor educational experiences to each kid individually. Self directed models like Montessori can do this well. Although, for my eldest it didn’t provide enough in the motivation department once she got into 4th or 5th grade.
I agree that what child educators are going to end up wanting to talk about is some sort of relative indicator. I just think that having a one unified scale in the background and then a different relative indicator on top of it — as currently exists for height and weight — makes more sense. Not so much from a child educator’s point of view, but for the field of psychometrics as a whole.
But they already do. IQ gets adjusted for age.
If you see a 5 year old bow who was 5 foot 5 you’d call them tall even if they’re not particularly tall for their age.
Interestingly though it tends to be adjusted in the opposite direction for age since youngsters tend to be faster at learning and faster at solving novel problems.(both part of what IQ is supposed to try to measure)
A 70 year old getting a score of X on a test might come in as 170 IQ while a 20 year old getting the same score might only get a 140.
First, I’d never read anything about senior citizen normed IQ tests, that’s pretty fascinating. But I think this goes to my point. Isn’t some information lost, or at least obscured when you say a 70 year old, a 40 year old, and a 5 year old all have an IQ of 170 but all have very different cognitive performance? Would it make more sense to make IQ commensurable across age ranges as the default and add age relative indicators when and where they are needed?
IQ was designed as an age-normed test, so that you could give it to children of any age and have it act as a stable measure of mental retardation. Its use on the other end of the bell curve is more recent, and the test’s probably less well suited to that although it still seems to do reasonably well.
So, the answer is basically “yes, but then it wouldn’t be an IQ test, it’d be something else”.
Yes, the horror that is aging is obscured.
Joke’s on you, I discovered Worm 3 years ago!
Thank God, as there’s no way I’d have time to slog through it again (though I did enjoy it immensely).
In both Primary and Scott A related news, Scott Adams has disavowed Trump, due to his failure to disavow David Duke and the KKK during an interview with CNN (Apparently he has disavowed them since).
Does this mean I get to disavow anyone who is slow to disavow Trump for being slow to disavow Mr Duke? If so I should do it quickly before people disavow me for taking too long. =p
I can’t countenance your failure to disavow the disavowal. I disavow your tardiness and sentence you to six hours of Tumblr.
No one deserves that.
He could be… rehabilitated instead.
The interview happened on Sunday, and Trump actually disavowed Duke a couple of times prior to the interview, most notably on Friday, during the Christie press conference. I’m not sure what happened during the interview, but it seems to me that Trump got confused about what he heard about Duke “and other groups.” That’s why he kept asking for info about those other groups. That piece usually doesn’t get reported. Frankly, I think I’d have been confused, too. “Wait, I just disavowed Duke during a press conference, what is he asking me? What other groups? Is he trying to trick me into disavowing some other groups by association?” He likely didn’t want to speak against some “other groups” without knowing what he’s talking about.
Anyway, the fact is that he’s repeatedly disavowed Duke. And since the media trumpet the one time he appeared confused about what he was being asked as his “refusal to disavow”, I just take it as another manifestation of how dishonest the media are.
Are there any studies about how the correlation between IQ and measures of individual success like income varies by country? In other words, are there “IQ matters more” and “IQ matters less” countries? What about the Big Five personality traits: are there “conscientiousness matters more” and “conscientiousness matters less” countries?
See here (esp. Figure 1). Returns to skills are lowest in Scandinavia, highest in the US. Higher union density, stricter employment protection, and larger public sectors appear to cause lower returns to skills.
That’s a really interesting article. Thanks! Here’s the money quote:
The one thing I found conspicuously missing was a discussion of what impact corruption has on skill returns. At a glance, however, the ordering of the countries in Figure 1 is not obviously related to that in https://www.transparency.org/cpi2014/results.
There’s a lot of skill involved in being successfully corrupt. How would you adjust for that?
(This is not entirely a smart-ass answer; one side of my family is from Chicago.)
What attracts this highly intelligent commentariat to “low-brow” literature like fanfiction and web serials about superheroes? Why are they all so absurdly long?
>What attracts this highly intelligent commentariat to “low-brow” literature like fanfiction and web serials about superheroes?
HPMOR and Worm are hardly extruded book product. They’re not credentialed literature, which is what I guess you mean by non-low-brow literature. But just because they haven’t been published by a big publishing house in the millions of copies, doesn’t mean they’re not good (personally, I disliked HPMOR and couldn’t finish it, and found Worm worth a read if not exceptional).
The commentariat are, in part, outcasts, nerds and various internet addicts, who are just the demographic to find these otherwise unknown pieces. They tell their friends, and so by word of mouth, these works gain in popularity.
>Why are they all so absurdly long?
The commenters obviously like reading. Look at any thread. Look at any post Scott makes.
>They’re not credentialed literature, which is what I guess you mean by non-low-brow literature. But just because they haven’t been published by a big publishing house in the millions of copies, doesn’t mean they’re not good
If anything, brow height and sales are negatively correlated. Erotica and shitty genre lit sell like crack, getting serious literature published is a real challenge.
To give an idea of the extent to which this is true, a woman made a decent amount of income writing erotica novels about women getting it on with dinosaurs. Meanwhile, many serious writers will never get published.
So is the secret then to write smut under a pen name to fund your more serious writing attempts?
What attracts other intelligent groups to “high-brow” literature about Afghans getting raped or whatever? You could tell a story about how high literature is a multipolar trap invented by Moloch and we know better than to fall into it, but honestly I think there is a just a natural category of intelligent people who don’t really have much interest in signaling their cultural sophistication, and this highly intelligent commentariat is just sampling from the top end of that. The posts here are not terribly interested in sophistication for sophistication’s sake, after all; if you wanted to be a Serious Person you could go read some peer reviewed journals, or at least The Economist.
You say that as if “high-brow” is all about signaling, but I disagree. What attracts other intelligent groups to “high-brow” lit? Reading complex, multilayered, ambitious, challenging, unique, novel, aesthetically pleasing work is far more enjoyable than reading rehashed, straight-forward stories written in straight-forward language that operates on a single layer. Reading about fully realized characters is more interesting than reading about cardboard cut-outs.
A programming analogy: solving complex business logic problems is far more interesting than writing simple CRUD code.
By that standard, these fanfics and web serials are high-brow too.
Having made repeated and strenuous attempts to enjoy high-brow content over the years: this is wrong to the point of laughability. It doesn’t get much more complex, multilayered, ambitious, or uniquely novel than Homestuck but I’m 95% sure you’d classify it as a low-brow ultra-long web-serial. I’m not sure about aesthetically pleasing or challenging, but those are even more hopelessly subjective than the rest, so we’ll set them aside.
The extra element in order to determine whether something is low brow or high brow is how much fightin’ it’s got innit. If it’s full of fightin’, it doesn’t matter how complex and layered the plot is.
You can’t have a high brow series about giant mecha punching each other while large breasted women of dubious age cheerlead them. It doesn’t matter how deep the characterization is or how obscure the literary allusions are; it can’t be high brow because it doesn’t pattern match to a stereotypical idea of what high culture is.
It’s not enough that things are complicated, layered, or deep. The story must also involve reserved characters, in relatively restrained scenarios, otherwise it comes across as boorish or childish regardless of other factors.
What about Heart of Darkness? All Quiet on the Western Front? Slaughterhouse-five?
@ TD
The extra element in order to determine whether something is low brow or high brow is how much fightin’ it’s got innit. If it’s full of fightin’, it doesn’t matter how complex and layered the plot is.
LOTR?
I think Lewis had it right in _An Experiment in Criticism_. It’s not anything as objective as how much fighting (or sex or whatever), it’s how difficult the book is for modern readers. Required Reading is full of books that were blood and gore popular at the time; now that current fashion has made them difficult to read, they’re serious.
LOTR was always difficult, with its old style, odd names, heaviness, dullness; so it instantly qualified.
Slaughterhouse-five is interesting because it’s considered a Serious Novel despite being full of science fiction elements. This owes partly to Vonnegut being already established as a Serious Author and partly to the sci-fi being so ridiculous and over-the-top and disconnected from the main narrative that you can disregard those subplots as just Billy Pilgrim losing his mind. So it goes.
“LOTR was always difficult, with its old style, odd names, heaviness, dullness”
!!!???!!!
I had to wait for _The Two Towers_ to be published, so would have been about nine at the time. My younger son, at that age or a little younger, went everywhere carrying the big three volume LOTR. “Heaviness” and “dullness” are not the adjectives I would apply.
Back before the books were famous, I read a review which ended with:
“I would not recommend these books to any friend of mine lest he like them not and the friendship so perish.”
Be warned.
Romances have little or no fightin’, and aren’t respectable.
A romance without any fighting aint much of a romance if you ask me.
LOTR is considered to be at the lower end of high-brow, so it doesn’t really invalidate the point about fighting.
Difficulty for the modern reader doesn’t hold up well as a distinguishing condition, though. For one thing, sci-fi can be very difficult and require a lot in order to yield pleasure. And then, take Goethe’s Werther: What’s difficult about it? The language, though old, actually isn’t, and the feeling it’s about is limerence, which is rather wide-spread. (Though I have a pet theory that lots of humans don’t actually experience limerence and so misunderstand the book as an artistic exaggeration.)
Wait, what?
In case anybody would like recommendations for violent highfalutin Literature-with-a-capital-L, there is a lot of it out there. The Iliad is essentially blood-drenched hand-to-hand combat interrupted occasionally by sports. Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf translation is a classic of violent literature. Hemingway has been cited two or three times ITT as a canonical example, so to speak, of the canon–about half of his stories are about bullfights (“The Undefeated”) or boxing matches (“Fifty Grand”) or battles (“Night Before Battle”, “Under the Ridge”, “Nobody Ever Dies”, “Black Ass at the Cross Roads”) or gang shootouts in Miami (“One Trip Across”, “The Tradesman’s Return”), and For Whom The Bell Tolls is a full novel that was more or less accurately summarized by the music video for the Metallica song of the same title. A. J. Liebling’s boxing essays were published in a slick Library of America edition. Thom Jones won a National Book Award for his short stories about Vietnam and boxing. Storm of Steel is a memoir of World War I by a guy who enjoyed it, available as a certified Penguin Classic. Blood Meridian is as classic as they come (author is routinely predicted to win a Nobel) and follows a gang of scalp hunters in the American Southwest of the 1840s, The Border Trilogy is a little less violent and a little more accessible but still pretty rowdy, and of course there’s No Country for Old Men. And so on.
Creutzer: “I have a pet theory that lots of humans don’t actually experience limerence”
I would be interested in hearing you elaborate on this, if you would care to do so. For example, what observations or evidence point towards it?
Well, I shouldn’t have called it a theory so much as a suspicion. Quantitative data is non-existent, nobody has ever bothered to look at this, and what little research there is on limerence seems to have been focused on the characteristics of the condition and subjects were often selected for having it.
What I know from talking to people is that there are people who have never experienced it and there are others whose every relationship began because of it. The oldest person of the first kind I know is 35 – and it was her who first made me aware that there are people who think that Goethe’s Werther is an exaggeration.
Looking at how people talk and behave around me, it looks to me like the majority of of romantic relationships, even in a culture such as ours which has the ideal of marriage for love, do not involve actual limerence. People neither behave like they’re limerent, nor do they often show all that much understanding for those who do. Relationship advice also rarely seems to take it into account in any way at all. (Tennov says that the “bulk” of couples she interviewed were (originally) formed by a limerent and a non-limerent, but she’s very obscure about what her sample is.)
I don’t necessarily think the wide-spread depection of limerence in art and entertainment is strongly indicative of the contrary because it is expected of such media to depict extraordinary events that are more extreme and interesting than the typical experience of the average human.
I tentatively suspect that the mean human experiences limerence maybe once or at best a handful of times a lifetime. How flat the distribution really is (and so whether that justifies saying that “lots” of people don’t experience it) is anyone’s guess…
I think dividing people into “limerent” and “non-limerent” is a mistake. It seems more like a spectrum, with zero limerence on one end, and pathological lifelong obsession on the other — or even a 2D space of intensity and duration.
Some people are perfectly even-keeled, while others go through potentially fatal bouts of mania and depression. Many people are between the two extremes, including some who experience waves of creativity and critical thought that help, rather than hinder, their everyday activities. The feeling of being “in love” is similar — it can be absent, pleasant, harmless, intrusive or dangerous.
Yes, that’s true. People have been trying to make the point that limerence is a qualitatively distinct condition à la OCD, but I’m not convinced yet, either. We may well be dealing with a spectrum here, in which case what I said above applies to experiences close to the very end of the spectrum.
Plot/setting quality and characterization/prose quality seem to be negatively correlated, because very few authors are truly good at all of those. Some people prefer characterization/prose, and thus bias towards traditional high lit. Some people prefer plot/setting, and thus bias towards pulpy genre fiction. I am emphatically in the second category, and find most high lit to be claw-my-eyes-out awful. Yes, you do cool things with characters and word choice, but I simply cannot bring myself to care. Conversely, David Weber characters bother me a fair bit when I think about them, but I can look past them to the fun interstellar battles.
From Harmony Explained: Progress Towards A Scientific Theory of Music.
Thesis: the reason we find music “musical” is because music tickles our voice-parsing module. Much in the way cheesecake (yes, that’s a Steven Pinker reference) tickles our sugar-liking module .
Relevance: it posits (as a lemma) that the brain is a disambiguation engine. I.e. it likes puzzles (that it can solve). This is why some find Cubism more interesting than actual photographs. I think this might also explain what psychology calls the flow.
To answer your question, I think HighBrow is more complex than LowBrow. E.g. Hamlet is more complex than Dick & Jane. The difference between audiences is how much complexity they can handle (and therefore what level of complexity they find it fun).
>Why are they all so absurdly long?
They are published as they are written, i.e. unedited. It can be infuriating if you’re used to reading edited products.
What suntzu said.
They aren’t, really; they are easily comparable to popular dead-tree series like The Wheel of Time and A Song of Ice and Fire. The difference is that people tend to think of the latter as a series of individual books, whereas they think of the former as one really long book. For example, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is divided into six books, which makes it comparable to the original Harry Potter, bust most people talk of Methods as if it were a single novel.
Absurdly long works published in installments seem to attract a large fan base much more effectively than shorter or non-serial works of comparable quality. (Intermittent reinforcement? Long-term coexistence leads to attachment?)
Wildbow himself seems to have settled on this explanation. He credits his own success to writing on a very consistent, high-frequency schedule, over a long period of time. He thinks if he had been missing consistency, frequency or duration, Worm wouldn’t have reached a wide audience.
What would you expect a highly intelligent commentariat to be reading?
In terms of contemporary writers I’d expect Pynchon, DFW, DeLillo to be huge with this crowd. Maybe Gaddis.
I’d certainly expect most people to be well-acquainted with the Greeks and Shakespeare. Dante and Milton for those with a bit of a theological bent. I’d expect “canon” writers like Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Austen, Joyce, Hemingway, Kafka, Woolf, etc. to be orders of magnitude more popular than “Worm”.
But on the other hand, how many people are going to write exciting blog posts saying “Guys, guys, I just found this super-awesome play called Hamlet. It’s got court politics and madness and murder and you’ve gotta read it!”? People already know that Shakespeare’s a really good writer.
In other words, I’d expect a large bias towards off-beat and unusual fiction being recommended on the Internet.
Also, Shakespeare has been discussed to death. There’s really no interesting discussion to be had about Hamlet that isn’t a retread of some commentary a hundred years ago.
People ITT are really underemphasizing entertainment value. It’s like asking “Why is Game of Thrones popular?” and then positing some complicated sociological signaling mechanism, when the answers is just that it’s super-entertaining.
I’ve looked into a few of those moderns. I’m not sure which of them is most terrifying, but I’d seriously consider clawing out my own eyes rather than reading Infinite Jest or Gravity’s Rainbow. The thing about the rationalist community is that, by and large, we value sanity and the retention thereof.
The ancients you mention I’m much more a fan of. I own Shakespeare, Milton, and a few of the Greeks, and I should get a copy of Dante one of these days(though I’ve read the library’s a couple times). The Tolstoys and Austens of the world sound inoffensive, though not really my preference. Joyce goes with the moderns though – anyone who can write Finnegan’s Wake does not deserve to be considered an author in the English language.
Finnegan’s Wake is just a very long exercise in language games. I don’t see how that’s any more ridiculous than, say, HPMOR.
Well to name the obvious difference, HPMOR is a story…
I adore Dvostoevsky, Austen, Shakespeare and Dante (first two books only) and also HPMOR (I have yet to read Worm), and quite like Tolstoy. Woolf and Hemingway bore me but that might be due to the heavy dose of “you must like these ground-breaking authors” I got growing up.).
I think I like the complexity of plot, the humour, and the general evident intelligence of the authors.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but I absolutely love reading, so something being “absurdly long” is a positive descriptor for me. I like getting completely immersed in fictional worlds. I enjoy dedicating dozens of hours of my free time (or more) to the same fictional story. It helps that I can read quickly, so long series don’t take as long to get through for me as they would for a slower reader, but I think I’d probably enjoy them still even if it took twice as long to get through them. And I think enjoying reading a lot is probably common here, so that would explain the tolerance for long stories.
As for the “low-brow” nature of them, I’m guessing that just results from SSC posters having an above-average level of openness to experience, which makes the posters here more likely to give something a shot even if it isn’t a bestseller and hasn’t been endorsed by any famous, respectable authors.
What are you talking about? I find that stuff boring as hell.
I just don’t comment on it.
The thing about the publishing industry is that it’s a gatekeeper interested mostly in things that have a high probability of selling large numbers. Our tastes are weird, which means that things tailored to our tastes are likely to be unpopular at large, and thus unlikely to get published. So if we want things that are really, really good by our standards, we have to go to nonconventional publishing tools, because that’s the only way for the sorts of authors we like to get the word out. Sometimes these stories hit it big once the word’s out(The Martian being the classic example), but most never do and stay niche.
Also, the stigma against self-publication is that most of the things published that way are crap, because there’s no gatekeepers. With a suitably trusted recommendation, you can bypass that risk. Most of the fanfics I’ve ever read have been excellent, because I’ll only read them if I either know and trust the author, or on a strong recommendation from someone whose opinion I trust.
It’s a good question. I read both sci-fi and literary fiction, as both have obvious strengths.
The simple answer is just subject matter: nerds like nerdy things and so want to read books about nerdy things. That’s kind of question-begging, of course, as it just pushes the question back one level: why are superheroes something nerds are interested in? And why is literary fiction something they tend not to be interested in? In contrast, who is the typical reader of literary fiction, and why do they read it?
I have a plausible sounding just-so story for this. Nerds like speculative fiction because we like the idea of what could be (or could have been). Nerds tend toward fields like science and engineering because they tend to be related to making what could be into what is. Meanwhile, I think non-nerds skew more towards wanting stories about what is (or was). Thus, they tend to like stories that are primarily about people and their interactions. It turns out most people like social interaction.
Now these are generalizations, of course. Despite the stereotype, nerds like social interaction as much as anyone else, and you’ll find plenty that like literary fiction. Plenty of non-nerds like speculative fiction works, but I think you’ll find that the more the work becomes about the setting and less about the characters, you’ll find the audience skews more and more nerdy. To use some examples from the world of television, Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead are very much about people, with some fantastic elements thrown in. Futurama, on the other hand, goes heavy in to the fantastic world of the future, and had a lot less mainstream appeal.
I should probably also be clear this is not a value judgment. Well, it is in the sense that I think people are too quick to be dismissive of speculative fiction, but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with disliking it.
The mainstream is too quick to dismiss speculative fiction, but nerdspaces are also too quick to dismiss literary fiction (see: other posts in this thread).
Yeah. I wonder how much of that is due to backlash against dismissal of speculative fiction and how much is an actual aversion to literary fiction.
The entire idea that literature, theatre and other narrative artforms have to be socially realistic in order to be serious, with everything fantastic being classified as inherently lowbrow, is mostly an artifact of the Industrial Revolution which didn’t become dogma until Modernism ascended to dominate literary criticism in the late 19th/early 20th century.
If you read late 18th century/early 19th century Romantics like E. A. Poe, Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley you’ll find that not just in content but also storytelling style and plot structure plays very much like modern pulp genre fiction if on a much higher level of prose refinement. Same thing with Nikolai Gogol’s supernatural tales like “Viy”. That style of storytelling was in turn from the late 19th century onwards mostly confined to pulp magazines precisely because it’s what Modernist literature was a backlash against.
Fittingly enough, a good deal of Post-Modernist literature revolves around reconstructing allegedly antiquated storytelling styles that modernism reacted against. This in turn includes sneaking back in fantastic storytelling beneath unreliable narrators, dreams and hallucination, overt surrealism etc. and I wager that has a lot to do with the fact that SF/F finally has become respected (again) as “real literature” here in the 21st century. Notice that Jorge Luis Borges is as much of a spiritual successor to Poe as H. P. Lovecraft is, or that there’s more similarities than differences between Haruki Murakami and Philip K. Dick.
>mostly an artifact of the Industrial Revolution which didn’t become dogma until Modernism ascended to dominate literary criticism in the late 19th/early 20th century.
Could you explain this in more detail? I’m not exactly sure what Modernism is or why it would cause people to shun speculative fiction.
I think to a certain extent nerds are just the ones willing to read books and try out new mediums (comic books) while superheroes are popular in general. The success of The Avengers, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Deadpool show that there’s a wide and strong audience interested in superheroes overall. People who read books liking books about a popular thing isn’t too surprising.
The cause and effect arrow partially goes in the other direction. HPMOR exposed lots of intelligent fanfiction readers to LW and LW is connected with SSC. In that context, it’s less that SSC is full of intelligent SSC-y people who also happen to like fanfiction and more that SSC is full of fanfiction readers who happened to get pulled towards SSC.
Also, HPMOR would have exposed rationalists or people on SSC to fanfiction in general (in the form of HPMOR). The previously mentioned fanfiction readers who are also now in the general population pool would also then expose others to the top 1% of quality fanfiction and web serials.
Anthropic reasoning applied to memes.
1. Doomsday argument. If a meme spreads exponentially, you should expect to be in the last cohort to hear about it, so it has been taken down just before you get to see it. This used to be common on youtube, but now the copyright owners are more tolerant and google’s automated systems are faster at censoring the things that are going to be censored. Here is a completely different example.
2. The Doomsday argument applies to serials as well. They don’t reach their doom, but their growth of popularity is severely curtailed by ending. So you should expect to be pointed to serials near their ending. That’s explaining an irrelevant phenomenon, but the same reasoning says that longer serials will reach greater total popularity. Note that this argument is mainly about duration of time (Game of Thrones), not number of words.
(OK, maybe I didn’t need to invoke anthropic reasoning. Nita said basically the same thing without it. It was just an excuse to talk about the first example.)
I think part of the answer is that the canon consists of the sort of thing students are required to read, or at least pretend reading, in high school or college. I suspect commenters here are likely to be people who resent having other people tell them what they ought to like, hence a negative effect.
Also, my (possibly cynical) view is that only a small minority of the people who would speak positively of the canon actually read it, know it, enjoy it, the rest being cultural signalling. If I encounter a fellow Kipling fan we start reciting poems at each other. There’s a webbed video of Ted Cruz reciting a chunk of _The Princess Bride_ to some people. How often does anything similar happen with either current literary fiction or classics?
There’s a Kipling story, “The Janeites,” about a WWI soldier who gets introduced to Austen novels and likes them—part of the implied point, I suspect, being the contrast between that and all the people who are in favor of Austen because she is great literature.
Haha, that’s awesome! Though, I am so taking note of this comment for next time someone says being memespouting cringelords is a phenomenon unique to modern fandoms =)
And yeah, you’re right. I kind of liked Of Mice and Men the first time we read it. By the 5th hour of analysis, it had worn pretty thin. Macbeth very similarly. It being impossible to believe the works were worth that much thought, it becomes much more congruous to believe that the culture is delusional.
…
They do not preach that their God will rouse them a little before the nuts work loose.
They do not preach that His Pity allows them to drop their job when they damn-well choose.
As in the thronged and lighted ways, so in the dark and the desert they stand,
Wary and watchful all their days that their brethren’s ways may be long in the land.
Raise ye the stone or cleave the wood to make a path more fair and flat;
Lo, it is black already with the blood some Son of Martha spilled for that!
Not as a ladder from earth to Heaven, not as a witness to any creed,
But simple service simply given to his own kind in their common need.
And the Sons of Mary smile and are blessed – they know the Angels are on their side.
They know in them is the Grace confessed, and for them are the Mercies multiplied.
They sit at the feet – they hear the Word – they see how truly the Promise runs.
They have cast their burden upon the Lord, and – the Lord he lays it on Martha’s Sons!
For what it’s worth, I’ve talked to many strangers about Pynchon, Nabokov, Hesse, etc, to say nothing of the authors at the lower end of the “high-brow” spectrum, like Vonnegut, and all of those authors feel very alive in my conversations with those close to me. I think it’s just a culture thing — there are a lot of people who talk about “classics” because they think they should, but among those I know who’ve actually read them they tend to feel personally relevant and conversation-worthy in a way that, say, Worm might not.
“Serious” literature got eaten by morons about the time it became possible to major in it at university.
There haven’t been five good “serious” novelists since Camus. The field is awash in pretentious, racist, overpoliticized bullshit. Good writing has moved to the popular and non-fiction realms (Naipaul, Warraq, Hitchens). Wolfe is about the only decent living novelist, and his stuff is more popular and less seriously taken than most in that category.
I’m not really into fanfic, and haven’t read comics since I was a young teen, but its an easy way to do thought experiments with already fleshed-out worlds and characters.
I can’t really see how you can defend this without giving examples. The entirety of “serious” literature after Camus is a very wide field. We’re talking everything from Ellison to Salinger to Pynchon to McCarthy to Saunders to Morrison to Wallace to Nabokov, without even leaving the United States. It’s impossible for me to believe that someone who’s read (and understood) all of those authors could fail to see something of value in at least one of them. Until you provide some arguments with specific names this just sounds like a knee-jerk reaction you picked up because you didn’t like English in high school.
Nabokov I admire for his ability to make us understand and identify with human monstrosity. An incredible talent, somewhat misused, I think.
Salinger is plain garbage. The man can’t write, and his work is lauded by the sort of immature psuedo-intellectuals who thought clove cigarettes were cool. Anyone who likes his work is worthless as a judge of literature. And should be hunted for sport. Did I mention I hate Salinger and his retarded cult?
Pynchon and McCarthy are exactly what I’m talking about. Their work evokes the boredom of reading someone who is writing to bore you. It evokes this because it is literally what is happening. And man, are they good at it.
I’m not sure which Morrison or Wallace you’re talking about and I haven’t read Saunders to my knowledge (but it’s possible I simply don’t remember it).
And I was fantastic in English class. Top honors all round. High school they started me reading books I’d read before I started in school. It was like writing essays on the hidden meanings of Dick and Jane.
Fair enough with Salinger, I was mostly mentioning him because I’d just overheard a conversation about him and so he was the first person who came to mind. In any case, my point still stands; you don’t like Salinger, Pynchon, or McCarthy, but I don’t see how that stands as an indictment of all of modern writing. It’s probably worth pointing out that, while all three are very popular (and, in my opinion, possess at least some degree of talent), none have won Nobel Prizes. I don’t usually like to bring up awards when discussing the quality of artists, but I think it does go to show that people can share your dislike of these sorts of writers and still find something of value in contemporary literature.
Also, by Morrison and Wallace I mean Toni and David Foster. And I didn’t mean to insinuate that you weren’t smart enough to do well in English class, just that you probably didn’t like it. I apologize if it came off as something else; I’ve met a lot of people who’ll say things like “there hasn’t been a good writer since Orwell,” only to discover that they rejected modern literature early in their lives and never seemed to reconsider it. I suspect that might be true of a big chunk of the commentariat here.
I’ll fairly cop to not having made a sustained effort to get through the genre of modern “serious” novels since my early twenties. I do still get them fairly often, not being sure what they are, then forty pages in realizing that it’s yet another English major attempting to wring drama out of nothing happening. Wallace I’ve read only Infinite Jest, and while it was solid, it didn’t bowl me over, I don’t have enough of a basis to judge his total work. Toni Morrison is actually precisely the writer I had in mind when I wrote the line about pretentious racism. She’s a C-grade writer being lauded by D-grade readers, and wouldn’t even get that if she weren’t flattering white liberal guilt.
I’d say that since Camus, it’s been Solzhenitsyn, Wolfe and one wild card I’d put up that I probably haven’t read. Or possibly one I can’t remember, what with all the concussions.
There’s a trove of early-20th century writers from Conrad through Greene and Waugh to Hesse who were fantastic, but precede the period I’m talking about.
Capote, Rushdie and Nabokov are brilliant at times, but all three are spotty. The Bob Dylans of writing. They wrote one or two great books each, problem is they wrote dozens of books.
Naipaul and Theroux are both gifted writers in the genre of nonfiction and travel, and cannot for the life of them write a novel, no matter how many times they try.
And I’d say we live in something of a golden age for popular scientific writing and essayists. Poetry there is some value, though the chaff-to-wheat ratio is insanely high these days. Science fiction is fantastic, and contains some of our best writers from the second half of the 20th till now, C.S. Friedman, Heinlein, Card. But the serious novel? Quite nearly dead. It’s all a pack of upper-east coast rich kids huffing each others farts.
Out of curiosity, what exactly separates those early 20th century novelists from those later on? I like Hesse as much as the next guy, but it’s hard for me to see why he’s necessarily more valuable than anything from after the 50s. Is there a specific point where you’d say literature went wrong? Authors who serve as early harbingers (Joyce maybe)?
Also, at the risk of losing some status in your eyes, I’ll have to defend Morrison — she’s not exactly consistent, but Song of Solomon is among the most beautiful books I think I’ve ever read. It’s a little surprising to me that you reject her outright but like Rushdie, given that their styles are broadly similar.
My pet theory for why serious writing hit the skids I hinted at before. I think that post-WW2, serious writing started being done as a matter of course by english majors and people who learned to write by going to class, rather than by living, and then writing informed by the real world. Writers today have nothing with which to build their worlds other than their own petty narcissism and twenty years of sucking up to useless teachers, who if they could write, wouldn’t be teaching.
Conrad was a sailor. Hammett, a particular favorite of mine, was an ad man, an investigator for the Pinkertons and a soldier. Hemingway was, well, Hemingway (I actually only like a few of his short stories, but he is a giant in the field). Heller was a blacksmith’s apprentice and a combat pilot.
Around the Depression and through the war, one begins to see more and more writers being either academics or journalists, but after the war, they are almost all academic in training. Writing becomes a career for the upper classes, not something done as a hobby, sideline, or retirement by people with real jobs. It is conspicuous lifestyle consumption. And as such, the incentives are misaligned for good work, and the experience to produce it is lacking. Even Wolfe, who I dearly love, is basically a journalist in his writing, and that is his training. So too with many of the others I mentioned, Naipaul and Theroux especially. The systemization of writing into a school and career ruined it.
As to Morrison, I try not to argue over the relative merits of subjective experience*. I don’t like her, and think her work is quite poor. If you like her, more power to you.
*Except Salinger. Fuck that guy.
I’ll tentatively recommend How Fiction Works— I only made it about halfway through because it has extremely detailed analysis of fiction I have no interest in.
However, it’s got information about how the current idea of a literary novel was constructed, and examples of classics which don’t meet the standards of literary novels.
For example, character development isn’t essential. Sometimes fascinating monomaniacs work very well.
Literary novels frequently have huge amounts of detailed visual description, but some classics don’t– and the literary ideal for description is of someone who’s just gazing at the world rather than focusing on what they’re interested in.
I mentioned this guy upthread, but you might get into Thom Jones’ stories. Former boxer and Marine, worked as a janitor for a couple decades, published stories in the New Yorker and won a National Book Award for The Pugilist at Rest.
Thanks for the recomendations, I’m full for a few more weeks, but once I finish SPQR, the Abercrombie trilogy and hopefully that Veblen I’ve been putting off, I should be ready for something new.
Anyone who understands Thorstein Veblen, is he actually intelligent or just another obscurantist? I honestly can’t tell.
Gene Wolfe? He was trained as an engineer. Spent a lot of his career as a tech writer, but that’s a very different kind of writing than journalism is. Also fought in Korea, which I think you can see traces of in the battle scenes later in New Sun. (Arguably to their detriment — the quasi-Napoleonic warfare of his setting isn’t much like post-WWII maneuver warfare. You see this sort of thing a lot in fantasy writers with military experience.)
He doesn’t have Hemingway’s resume, but who does?
@Sastan: If you mean Joe Abercrombie’s fantasy books, the fourth and fifth books he wrote in that world are superior to the initial trilogy. The sixth however is very, very weak. If you mean the more recent YA series, I haven’t read those.
@Nornagest: I think he means Tom Wolfe.
That makes more sense. Never mind, then.
I didn’t -hate- Red Country, but yeah it wasn’t up to the standards of Best Served Cold or the Heroes.
The Heroes is one of my favorite fantasy novels of the last ten years, and is a really good war story. I highly recommend that one.
The First Law was a bit of a slog for me at times, but The Heroes is well-paced and I actually enjoyed the individual character arcs, so I highly recommend.
The local flavor of Rationalism is all about cocooning, at least when it comes to the humanities. Rationalist fiction swaddles the fragile ego in layers of emotionally charged abstraction that shelter it from the unpleasant shocks and chills of the external world.
Someone in this thread mentioned people in this community being especially open to new experience, which seems defensible to me in certain cases but inaccurate here. I think “serious” literature is so called because it explores ethical, psychological, and epistemological questions that most people in the rationalist community aren’t particularly interested in. Whether they aren’t interested in those questions because they genuinely feel they’ve already solved them or because they find them emotionally troubling is up for interpretation, but I tend to agree with your interpretation. On a related note, it’s hard for me to imagine the average rationalist having (and there’s no way to say this “well,” so I’m just going to say it) a genuine, capital-A Aesthetic experience from art. Excitement, yes; awe, yes; actual dissolution of boundaries, probably not. I think that’s a particular thrill that “high-brow” literature chases, which is very difficult to explain to those who don’t know it, and potentially takes a lot of work to get to for something you aren’t aware exists until it happens to you.
I think “speculative” fiction is so called because it explores ethical, psychological, and epistemic questions that most people in the “serious” literature community aren’t particularly interested in. Whether they aren’t interested in those questions because they genuinely feel they’ve already solved them or because they find them emotionally troubling is up for interpretation, but I tend to agree with the latter. On a related note, it’s hard for me to imagine the average high-brow aesthete experiencing (and there’s no way to say this “well,” so I’m just going to say it) genuine, capital-W Wonder from art. Excitement, yes; dissolution of boundaries, yes; a glimpse into distant and utterly alien, yet familiar, worlds, probably not. I think that’s a particular thrill that “speculative” fiction chases, which is very difficult to explain to those who don’t know it, and potentially takes a lot of work to get to for something you aren’t aware exists until it happens to you.
Totally fair criticism. For what it’s worth, I tend to think English-major types dismiss speculative fiction too easily. I also think that “high-brow” does genuinely describe fiction that accomplishes something that other writing doesn’t, in the sense that, if you were to incorporate it into the basic framework of your life, it would make you happier and better at living with other people; but the fact that I think that literary fiction is more beneficial to character than other types is probably mostly reflective of the fact that my own identity is wrapped up in it. But you’re right that there are benefits to speculative fiction that aren’t to be found in, say, Virginia Woolf.
Actually, about half the reason I posted that is just because it seemed to be asking for a find/replace job for reasons unclear to me. I really want to see a series of 6-12 of these, but I didn’t want you to feel mocked.
To engage with you more substantively, I think you and Chet are too quick to conclude that “high” literature gets avoided because rationalists are uncomfortable with it. To me, it seems far more likely they just don’t find much appeal in it. If you so desire, I’m sure you or I could find hundreds of pages of people complaining that literature is “boring” or “unrewarding” – and you seem to agree, considering your speculation that rationalists don’t get the same experience from high-brow literature as its fans do.
But I’m unaware of good evidence to suggest that rationalists (or, really, most people who don’t like high-brow literature) are actually made uncomfortable by literature. Is there a big set of examples of people being viscerally upset by literature and swearing it off forever that I’m not aware of?
Maybe it’s just me projecting; I’m dismissive of things like HPMOR because on some level the values they portray make me uncomfortable, so I assume part of the reason people reject more traditionally “literary” fiction is that it somehow upsets them. I wouldn’t put it in as stark of terms as ChetC3, but I have a sense (based on entirely anecdotal evidence, obviously) that a lot of people who say they hate “high-brow” or “classic” or “English class” literature feel offended or unsettled by the questions the authors find interesting. Someone here said that rationalists don’t like that sort of fiction because they “value their sanity;” I think the sense that Joyce or Pynchon are less than sane for writing the way they do is pretty common here, as well as the STEM crowd in general, and seems to me to be based on a definite emotional aversion.
That said, I don’t think the way in which rationalists/people who don’t like “high brow” art are offended by it is all that different from the way in which any other group is offended at seeing art from outside (but adjacent to) their culture. Listen to the way certain people at your nearest university’s comparative literature department talk about fan fiction or reality television, or the way Red Tribe football fans talk about Beyonce, and you’ll see the same thing.
In case anyone else happens to want such a thing, Robert Charles Wilson’s Spin is a very nicely balanced combination of character-oriented literary fiction and big idea science fiction.
@dinofs – “On a related note, it’s hard for me to imagine the average rationalist having (and there’s no way to say this “well,” so I’m just going to say it) a genuine, capital-A Aesthetic experience from art.”
I’m an artist, and I’m not confident I’ve ever had the sort of experience you describe. Maybe that makes me a bad artist? I generally feel the way about modern art that people above feel about “serious” literature; my usual reaction is somewhere between boredom and annoyance. Contact with “serious” artists, mostly students and instructors at school, has inspired much the same.
I don’t doubt that the experience you’re describing exists, and if it were easily accessible I’d try for it. I’m just not sure it’s anywhere near worth the effort, nor that it actually justifies the edifice surrounding it.
My guess is the type of experience I’m calling “Aesthetic” is something that only happens to people who are actively looking for it, which means they have to buy in to the idea it exists in the first place. At the same time it seems very arbitrary just what brings it on. I can think of four or five times where I’ve really felt the thing I’m describing, and all were in parts of my life where I was particularly stressed out or unsure of myself, to the extent that I’m guessing it has more to do with throwing yourself into something made by another person than any real quality of the art itself. To the extent that specific works of art bring this on, I think it has everything to do with how much you expect them to matter; if there’s any defensible reason to label some things “serious,” I think it’s precisely so that people will really believe there’s something in them that can change them.
Anyway, this is really a long-winded way of saying that I don’t think these types of experience are necessary to enjoy or make art, and that to some extent they only exist for those people who delude themselves into thinking they do. In that way it’s like faith — which makes sense, because my handful of most intense spiritual and aesthetic experiences are all but indistinguishable from each other, except for the context in which they happened. As to whether the edifice around all this is justified, it’s probably no more justified than something like the Catholic church, which is to say not really; but for those who find themselves a part of it it might not be such a bad idea to enjoy what’s there.
“Dissolution of boundaries”? Is True Art supposed to be set to the tune of Komm, Süßer Todd?
But yeah, I’m kind of really interested. Is this a universal human experience that I’m missing, one that goes beyond easy description in words? Or, as I would tend to think, is the question of “dissolution of boundaries” just an empty expression, a “yes, but does the tree make a sound” query?
Can you describe the experience in more detail? You say there’s no way to say it “well,” but not convinced. The experiences of “immersion” and “flow” are conspicuous by their absence from your list of things that low-brow fiction is able to do, but I don’t think you mean the sense-of-forgetting-the-real-world or the tranquility-of-continuous-slight-challenge. It’s too easy to find low-brow stuff that can induce one or both.
I could probably name low-brow content that gives a sense of “makes you feel like a better, stronger person for having comprehended it,” though I don’t know a name for the experience. That could be what we’re talking about, but how do you distinguish it from the kind of masturbatory pride from getting clever references and wordplay? That seems like the kind of thing high-brow fiction focuses on, but I’d be very surprised if the indescribable greatness of serious literature is just smugness by any other name. The unnamed experience, on the other hand, is a property of good fiction, regardless of genre or form of media.
Oh, it’s worth noting on ChetC3’s grandparent post: what? Did you miss the subthread above about masculinity? There’s at the very least a large minority here who quite distinctly don’t like the idea of being sheltered from the cruel world. More power to ’em.
Well, I’m not really qualified to describe this, but I’ll do my best based on what I’ve experienced:
It’s definitely not immersion or flow, nor is it quite ecstatic, but it is somehow related to all of those states. It’s also not the same as the sense of feeling like a better person for having understood. It’s not unlike the best parts of a trip on psychedelics, and I have to admit I’m not sure I ever felt it full force sober before I’d gotten a sense of it through drugs, although I doubt very much that you need the drugs before it works. A pithy way to say it might be that it’s a feel of not being alone, that makes you realize just how alone you usually feel; but of course that’s not the whole story. To the extent it’s religious I think it feels the way it would feel to really, truly know that God exists and is with you; a bright white feeling where you recognize all the impossible extremes of feeling you live with, understanding yourself both as the least and the most, humble and totally confident, self-contained and part of something more. You recognize that the moment is fleeting, but are able to believe that it’s eternal. It’s almost a shut-down of some part of your critical functions; you stop trying to grapple with these binaries and just accept that everything is beautifully beyond you. I’m definitely reminded of it in descriptions of meditation or really effective prayer or services, but I’ve never experienced those particular heights.
Possibly none of this was helpful; I’m really just throwing everything I can think of at this. I’m sure if you asked me tomorrow I’d disagree with half of it. FWIW I think the people who’ve described it best for me in various ways are Kierkegaard, Heidegger (obliquely; mostly I relate to his concept of ek-stasy), David Foster Wallace, Borges, and maybe Lucretius. The light show in 2001 is actually a decent visual metaphor for it.
That’s a really nice description, thanks dinofs =). And yeah, I think I do know what you mean, though you seem to have a more intense experience of it. Also, your thoughts above regarding expectations are potentially on to something – it seems like a bridge between the “serious literature is liked because of signalling/social convention/smug literature professors” position and the “serious literature is a real thing that has tangibly different properties” position. I don’t think that an experience that arises from a placebo-like expectation of its occurrence is any less real, and I don’t think that means it could be induced by anything if you were in the right frame of mind – it’s a property of the literature as well as the reader – but I do think that makes it unfair to say that rationalists are hiding from it. Failing to seek something out, especially something ephemeral, personal, and that you’ve failed to find under the last five rocks people told you to look under, is not any kind of failure of personality that I can see.
Sure is a lot of psychoanalysis in this thread today.
If we consider weekly open threads too frequent, and biweekly ones to few and far inbetween, how about we switch to having an open thread every metric week?
I’m 90% certain that I indirectly came to this blog orignally via worm.
Same here. I think actually I read HPMOR first, then got recommended Worm from there, then went to /r/parahumans and got linked the pills story. Now I’m reading Unsong!
Not sure if this is the best place to ask, but has anyone else experienced what I can only describe as mild euphoria when using modafinil regularly? From one of the quotes on Gwern’s site: “[…] An important finding of this study is that there was a striking increase in task motivation. Participants on modafinil felt considerably more pleasurable after performing individual tasks assessing ‘cold’ cognition [..]”. I definitely felt this when first using modafinil, but recently the same feeling has extended to me just “in general” i.e. the happy feeling of having accomplished something persists throughout the day, even if I haven’t yet accomplished something but am just *planning* on accomplishing something.
Let me know if anyone has similar experiences (or can point me to a better place to ask this question/talk to others about it).
I do not get euphoria from using modafinil by itself. I do, however, get good feelings of “damn, I got a lot of stuff done today”. Also, music seems to sound a bit better on modafinil.
How do I call something two levels below meta-level?
Meta -> Object -> Component?
Can you think of any -1 level rule/argument/concept (or just something)?
I can try.
Meta: Left-wingers and right-wingers are distinguished by their approach to cooperation/defection. To right-wingers, ethno-tribal affiliation matters for cooperation, for left-wingers, it doesn’t.
Object: Left-wingers want to open borders to anyone who wants to come in share in their riches. Right-wingers want to close the borders and guard their riches jealously against aliens.
Component: Ethno-tribal affiliation is a distinction based on common descent; to a lesser extent, to a common upbringing.
Which is why communists so famously championed open borders.
To the extent that they believed that all places should under communist control, they did support “open” borders of a sorts.
In theory. In practice, they imposed internal passports.
We are talking about communists after all.
Way to focus on the object-level, guys.
@Evan Þ
When discussing ideologies themselves, you are discussing what people want, and how they plan to go about getting it. Libertarianism, Communism, Fascism, Primitivism etc are not outcomes, but ideas about what is good and how we should achieve it.
When those ideas start actually interacting with the world, they become restrained by reality and start to diverge from their original conception.
And that’s why the Nazis and Fascists did a lot less in practice in achieving their corporative class collaboration state, since they were constrained by the realities of the business community and the general economic environment.
Likewise, the Bolsheviks had to move more towards a nationalistic position and promote patriotism and some conservative mores because of the ground conditions they were working with. The National Socialists became more capitalist, and the International Socialists became more nationalist (and then more capitalist). It’s almost as if they were converging on what governments are actually possible outside the imagination.
However, they still had the same ideology, so you got all sorts of weird cognitive dissonance and complicated justifications for why what they were doing wasn’t a betrayal of ideals after all. This is why Stalin had to carefully navigate around the minefields and make “Socialism in One Country” and socialist patriotism while condemning “national chauvinism” in principle.
The same happens in liberal countries. “I’ve abandoned free market principles to save the free market system.” ~ George W Bush.
Underlying
IIRC “meta-level” and “object-level” derive from the math/logic terms “meta-language” and “object-language”. E.g. if we were to discuss the merits of Chinese over SSC, Chinese would be the object-language and English would be the meta-language (i.e. the language describing another language).
The “meta and object” analogy kinda fails if you want to go less meta than object-level. Because the object-level is supposed to be (in a sense) atomic. Once recursion hits the stopping-case (the object-level), it just kinda becomes a fixed-point or implodes.
If I were in your shoes, I’d frame the discussion in terms of Supervenience and Subvenience. But if you really want to stick with the “meta & object” analogy, then maybe {variable, expression, definition, symbol, token} could work. The Mathematically Proper thing to do is to promote everything.
“below object” becomes “object”
“object” becomes “meta”
“meta” becomes “meta-meta”
StackOverflow has this to say:
http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/12162/what-is-the-opposite-of-meta
Of the suggestions, I like “meso-” the best, followed by “proto-” (possibly because I’m intrigued by prototype-based inheritance in computer languages).
This was recently posted on HN:
http://quillette.com/2016/02/15/the-unbearable-asymmetry-of-bullshit/
Just wonder how many other people who work in research have had a similar experience?
If you want another excuse for not much blogging …
I finished Ann Leckie’s _Ancillary Justice Friday morning. I was flying to D.C. Friday afternoon, and before doing so downloaded the sequel. Before flying back to the west coast Sunday I downloaded the final book in the series, finished it Sunday night.
Good and original stories. One oddity that might appeal to some here—in the main culture, everyone is referred to by female pronouns. I wasn’t paying close attention to that issue at the beginning of the first book, so may have missed an explanation, but what I think is going on is a society where biological gender is considered unimportant, they therefor use the same gender for everyone, and it happens to be feminine.
It was a good premise, but by the end I was having trouble caring about anyone doing anything.
But if they use the same gendered pronoun for everyone, why would it be feminine? By definition, that makes it a neutral pronoun.
As an aside, I cannot imagine a culture arising where people would not distinguish by gender. It’s kind of a big deal and an obvious marker (unless these people aren’t human, in which case never mind).
Maybe it became gender neutral much like “guys” is today. Although it’s a deliberate choice in a story, so that explanation seems to be ad hoc. More likely, the author just wanted to be different.
They use the same pronoun for all humans in the main culture. They use “it” for some not exactly humans—human bodies that have become parts of an A.I. And there seem to be other human cultures with gendered pronouns mentioned only briefly.
So one can interpret it as “the language once had gendered pronouns and for some reason the female ones ended up as the generic” or as “the author chose to translate the generic pronoun as female for ideological or literary effect reasons.”
But if they use the same gendered pronoun for everyone, why would it be feminine?
Possibly playing off how the neuter pronoun in English* was by default the masculine (something that I never had any particular opinion on, one way or the other, though I did get annoyed by jokey ‘defences’ like “the masculine embraces the feminine” for why the collective term for a group should be male-pronouns. I never felt any exclusion saying the line in the Creed about “for us men and for our salvation” because I knew that was meant in the sense of “humans” rather than “male persons of the human species”, but I could see why people wanted inclusive or gender-neutral language).
That’s not so bad in terms like “mankind” but it does make a difference when you’re constantly reading things like “the reader will find his tastes uplifted” or “the customer wants his needs met” and so forth; a difference that you don’t realise, until it gets flipped.
Using the female-pronouns for the collective/gender neutral makes this clear; there’s no real reason we shouldn’t speak of, for example, “Womankind” as much as “Mankind” to mean “Humanity”, or that our hypothetical reader, customer, man in the street should be the woman in the street instead. So we get our default-neutral-inclusive terms are female, not male, gendered.
But if in a story set in such a world you read a sentence like “The ruler hurried out to her waiting carriage”, you begin to visualise the person described as a woman. Then it hits you: wait, I have no reason to think that the ruler is female, the only thing I’ve been told about them so far is “her carriage”. Then you realise that if the sentence read “his waiting carriage”, you’d automatically think of them as a man. And then you realise that all the ostensibly neutral or inclusive usages, where “he, his, man” and so forth were the default, were having an effect on you, were making you unconsciously both accept and expect that the people who do, make, buy, consume, act, etc. in the world are men not women.
And cue feminism 🙂
“Ancillary Justice” isn’t the first to do this; Samuel Delany’s 1984 novel “Stars In My Pocket Like Grains of Sand” did it also, to mind-bending effect (you do think of the tyrant-ruler and Marq’s ancestor as women because of the “she” pronouns used, even though they could both be women, both be men, or one is a man and one a woman – it’s never described any more concretely, and that is the thing that made me aware: I had to stop every so often and remind myself I was making assumptions based on one word that I had no other evidence for).
*And other languages; in French an all-male crowd is “ils”, all-female is “elles” and mixed is “ils” – defaulting to the masculine, you see? Even though there is the neuter pronoun “on” (sing.) and “ons” (plural), “In French, a group containing at least one male or one masculine noun is considered masculine, and takes the pronoun ils. Only exclusively female or feminine groups take elles.” So one man and ninety-nine women would be “ils sont des élèves” 🙂
The French on in its third-person use is generic, not referential, and so couldn’t possibly be used; and the form ons doesn’t exist.
You’re also confusing two different things here. In your example with the ruler, there is, indeed, a strong implication that the ruler has the gender of the pronoun, and this is as it should be. There is Gricean implicature here: Presumably, the gender of the ruler is relevant (humans tend to think that the gender of a character in a story is relevant), so given that one pronoun was used when the other could have been, you can assume that the ruler has the gender of that pronoun. It’s almost impossible to use a default pronoun to refer to a particular individual in a gender-neutral way; it will always generate an implicature that the individual has the gender of the pronoun.
For this reason, I’d expect the effect to be much weaker with the plural pronoun, since here the alternative is just “all female”. If you want to refer to a mixed group, the masculine is your only choice, and so there is going to be no implicature that the group consists only of men.
This is different from “the reader … his”, where there is no implicature that the reader has to be or should be male and you maaaaybe just get a sort of default imagining him as male, thinking that the thing is likely to be read by men or whatever. Personally, I don’t see an introspectively accessible effect of the choice of default pronouns (I can only directly perceive the stylistic/register difference).
Fun fact, as an aside: For all of Iran’s sexist culture, Farsi has no gender distinctions in nouns and pronouns.
“Using the female-pronouns for the collective/gender neutral makes this clear; there’s no real reason we shouldn’t speak of, for example, “Womankind” as much as “Mankind” to mean “Humanity”, or that our hypothetical reader, customer, man in the street should be the woman in the street instead. So we get our default-neutral-inclusive terms are female, not male, gendered.”
Well, there is a reason. “Mankind” has its etymological roots from back when man was gender-neutral (the term for a male human was “wer”). We could start using “womankind”, but it would be artificial and pointless.
“But if in a story set in such a world you read a sentence like “The ruler hurried out to her waiting carriage”, you begin to visualise the person described as a woman. Then it hits you: wait, I have no reason to think that the ruler is female, the only thing I’ve been told about them so far is “her carriage”. Then you realise that if the sentence read “his waiting carriage”, you’d automatically think of them as a man. And then you realise that all the ostensibly neutral or inclusive usages, where “he, his, man” and so forth were the default, were having an effect on you, were making you unconsciously both accept and expect that the people who do, make, buy, consume, act, etc. in the world are men not women.”
Yes, I would automatically assume gender because that’s what happens when you use a gendered pronoun for a specific person. That’s totally distinct from a “neutral” usage and the only reason you’re able to compare it here is because the world is set up specifically to use pronouns incorrectly according to English grammar. Do people really think that intentionally misusing language to confuse others is the same as challenging their beliefs?
“And cue feminism”
Hmm. Fair enough.
You’re right. A more exact analogy would be “man” meaning both “person” and “woman”, and “werman” meaning “male person”. E.g.:
But in fiction, this might fail to have the intended effect, as a reader used to conventional English will keep forgetting that “mankind” does not mean “either humanity or all male persons” in the language of the story.
Wait, when does “mankind” *ever* mean “all male persons”? I don’t think I’ve ever encountered it with a meaning other than “humanity”.
(bonus: who’s the implied target audience here?)
This usage seems rather uncommon, and mostly caused by the absence of “wermankind”.
Edit: OK, let me amend the last sentence in my previous comment: a reader used to conventional English will keep forgetting that “man” does not mean “either a male person or just a person” in the language of the story.
I’m inclined to use ‘it’.
The most interesting thing to me about those books is how everyone who reviews them mentions the pronoun thing and barely talks about the plot, characters, or themes.
I tried to start the first one, but it didn’t grab me. I keep meaning to try again when I have time.
I’ve seen people talk about the plot and world-building, but that was only after the excitement about the pronouns died down.
I started the first book a couple or three times, but it didn’t grab me, either.
Likewise. The pronoun gimmick seemed pointlessly annoying at best, and the author seemed to think that “remote human avatar of a spaceship AI” was an intrinsically novel concept that would be interesting on that basis. The world-building seems like it might be worth paying attention to, but the characters were solidly in Eight-deadly-words territory for me and for worldbuilding alone I want a minimalist framing story around an easy travelogue.
I can only report that, while I found the pronoun feature and the general genderlessness of the society intriguing, those were not, for me, the central elements of the world building. The protagonist comes across as interesting and, on the whole, admirable, the antagonist(s) as interesting, the relation between A.I.’s and humans interesting. And the Translators were fun.
I liked the books, the author is now on my list of authors who’s books I pre-order.
I found the plot reasonably solid, it ran with a lot of the core ideas smoothly, the world-building is good because I really want to know more about that universe and the characters are pretty good. It would stand perfectly well without the gender thing.
That being said, I think a lot of the excitement about the pronoun thing was from people who, honestly, haven’t read very much transhumanist scifi.
Ungendered societies are such a common scifi trope that it has it’s own tvtropes article. Most of them just don’t lampshade it so much in the text or use “he”, “they” or “it” in the text instead of “she”.
In some ways I find it bizarre that it gets called a “feminist” story. Sure, the empire in the story is shown to basically embody the most basic idealized feminist endgame, a society with no gender roles where physical sex is irrelevant to almost everything. But then the author made that empire the evil empire.
She didn’t imply that any of the evil things were because of the cultures treatment of sex/gender but it would be like watching star wars and every single empire soldier and officer on the death star being black and giving each other the black power salute, the plot of starwars otherwise remaining exactly the same.
Then seeing people hailing it as a great anti-racist film.
I haven’t read the book, but from your description it does sound pro-feminist, because it contradicts the anti-feminist ideas that gender equality is a) impossible, b) fatal to any human civilization, or c) morally wrong.
(Similarly, an all-black Galactic Empire would contradict the racist idea that black people are too dumb and “brutish” to run an empire.)
Abyssinia would count as an example, I guess.
It was an nice twist that the society that had thoroughly abolished the gender binary was the cruel imperialist oppressor.
Oh, wait until the second book.
Gurer’f n ovg jurer gurer ner fbzr crbcyr abg phyghenyyl nofbeorq vagb gur rivy rzcver, naq jura gurl gnyx nzbat gurzfryirf gurl hfr traqre znexref. Gur znva punenpgre fubjf rzcngul sbe fbzrbar ol ersreevat gb gung crefba’f _oebgure_. Fb abg bayl vf guvf aba-traqrevat n guvat gur rivy rzcver qbrf, va fbzr pnfrf vg vf orvat qbar nf n sbez bs bccerffvba, naq gung grzcbenevyl fgbccvat qbvat vg vf n jnl gb nibvq orvat pbzcyvpvg va gur bccerffvba.
(Me and AJ: By some coincidence, I read the book on the train coming home from a transgender festival. And I found the business with the pronouns really didn’t speak to me at all. I liked the rest of the stuff in the book though.)
To Leckie’s great credit, she manages to tell an interesting story where the default-female pronoun is presented as “the way things are” ™ and neither much discussed nor very important story wise. I remember her saying something along these lines in an interview so I assume that is intentional.
Doing so messes with how we imagine in story characters so it somewhat does break the fourth wall. It also certainly messes with how people who can get emotionally behind gender issues perceive the book (I presume this is also intentional). But most importantly the book itself is not specifically about gender.
It’s a minor thing, but I enjoyed David Weber’s use of pronouns in his Honorverse. Every character just uses his or her own gender’s pronoun as a generic “all men/women” etc in appropriate contexts.
So, when Harrington creates a hypothetical midshipwoman, or speculates about tactics, she uses female pronouns – “her missiles,” “she’d roll ship and interpose her wedge,” etc. When a male character like White Haven does the same thing, he uses male pronouns. It’s simple, it’s egalitarian, and I enjoyed that it’s entirely low-key – no one ever makes a big deal about Weber’s pronoun use.
Would someone who is generally bored to tears by superhero stories enjoy Worm?
Yes.
How do you feel about Watchmen? Probably the best comparison to typical superhero stuff I can think of.
Characters in Worm tend to be much more intelligent and powers somewhat more unconventional than in typical superhero fare, I think. Certainly compared to the Marvel movies.
From what I remember of watching Watchmen, I didn’t like it. The big glowing guy was especially laughable. I guess I won’t be reading Worm.
He almost certainly means the graphic novel and not the movie.
I know it’s a graphic novel, too, but is there a big difference between them?
The graphic novel is, ironically, less graphic.
Also, the ending changes slightly, but the effect is more or less the same as what the film’s villain was after.
There are a lot of pretty significant differences, but the plot, characters and the general aesthetic are pretty much the same (except for the cringeworthy slo-mo fight scenes).
Well, the graphic novel had a lot of subtle plot developments and character moments. I believe that Zach has no idea what subtlety is.
The graphic novel spends a lot more time (a) making you care about the civilians whose lives get disrupted by superhero antics, and (b) pointing out that the superheroes are actually really messed-up people.
The moviemakers apparently decided both of those things were dumb and should be replaced with more Action!
I haven’t seen the movie; I couldn’t tell you how different they are.
Dr Manhattan is a bit ridiculous, yes. Worm does have a handful of characters at that kind of power scale, but the people who get most of the time are closer to the completely-fucked-up normal-people than Ozymandias or Dr Manhattan. The main character carries around pepper spray and a knife. You get powers by having extremely traumatic experiences, and as a result most capes have lingering psychological issues. People get hurt in fights, sometimes badly. Characters die, sometimes without much warning, sometimes offscreen, sometimes for no good reason. There was one point in the story where the author quite literally rolled a die to determine whether or not to kill off the protagonist and replace her with a different character.
I usually don’t really “get” superhero fiction, but I quite liked “Watchmen” in large part because how much it plays like a John Le Carré-style Cold War espionage thriller (a genre I do enjoy) where the main characters just happen to be washed-up superheroes.
I haven’t read it, but if it’s extremely dark a better comparison might be to Miracleman.
I’ve never been into comic books, and find superhero movies to be mostly mediocre-but-fun, and I thought Worm was brilliant. (Extremely dark, though)
Scott, i sometimes find myself wanting to post links to your blog posts elsewhere, is that ok? i saw your comment recently about not linking to specific comments of yours and was wondering what, if any, the protocol/etiquette was for blog posts.
thanks.
Yes, go ahead.
ok, thanks.
btw, love your work!
I think most bloggers are pretty fine with people linking to there posts (with the exception of certain posts that generally have “Please don’t share this with lots of people” at the top).
A week or so back I saw that there was a public argument between Elon Musk and the Koch brothers, and I thought, “How very SSC, or at any rate, how very SSC commentariat. When’s the next open thread?” And now, here it is.
Considering I wouldn’t know either party if I fell over them, that story was interesting not so much for what it said as for the visuals.
Elon Musk – normal photo of guy delivering talk.
Koch Brothers – I must presume it is they; link to tweet by Musk with caricature of them looking like lemon-sucking Evil Old Rich White Guys (who want to ban immigrants, burn gays at the stake and keep women barefoot and pregnant while clinging to their Bible and their guns).
Well, I guess I know who the Good Guy is in that narrative! 🙂
As for the rest of it:
And how, pray tell O HuffPost, will these snazzy new electric cars get charged? Solar power (yeah, that’ll work great in Ireland where we’re into our fifth solid month of rain)? Wind power (going down the street with your turbine bolted to the roof to charge your engine)?
Could it possibly be that most people will charge the car battery by plugging in to the mains, which draws on electricity generated by whacking great power stations, which generate the power by means of generators powered by oil and gas? The Koch Brothers should love electric cars! The demand for power stations to burn more gas and oil to generate power to charge all those electric cars would be money in their pockets! (“Most power stations in the world burn fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and natural gas to generate electricity.”)
I also love how the spin is put on; “They want to stop the government giving me money to subsidise my business” is turned into “evil moneygrubbers want to kill clean new technology”.
It’s especially funny when “no corporate welfare for fatcats!” is a rallying cry for the Bernie crowd. Billionaire Elon’s two high profile businesses literally could not survive without massive amounts of government money, yet he’s a hero. As for the Koch brothers, while oil does get a lot of government “subsidies”, I’m pretty sure it would still be profitable without them.
Musk is beloved by the Grey Tribe, but I don’t think Bernie types adore him. In a class I’m taking one of the other students (a campus activist type) while a go went on a rant about how SpaceX should be shut down because its “privatizing the commons”. This got a very favorable response from the room . Most of those people are voting for Sanders.
Sigh. I don’t think they know what “privatize” means, and they’d probably also rail about the “military-industrial complex” which is the only other way to get to space. SpaceX basically has 2 business modes:
1) Selling launch services to commercial space users. This business has been going on for years, and SpaceX does it fundamentally the same way everyone else does (private or pseudo private company sells ride to other private company, government is heavily involved in regulating this access to the space “commons”).
2) Selling launch services to NASA and the military. This is “commercializing spaceflight”, but NASA and the military have always used contractors to do most of the space vehicle building. The only thing being “privatized” is some of the program management and contractural risk – COTS is mostly milestone based, as opposed to “cost plus”. This is a good thing – cost plus puts all the risk on the government and all the profit to the contractor. COTS cuts overhead costs and makes the contractor shoulder some of the risk – they only turn a profit if they succeed at the contracted price.
The alternative to all of this is the space shuttle / SLS – a big expensive rocket subject to Congressional whims and vote buying, designed and built by insiders in the big defense contractors. Is that really what the Sanders crowd wants? I mean it would basically be equivalent to the US Navy providing all the country’s commercial fishing operations.
I suspect by “commons” many thought *space itself*, and “privatize” might mean anything that does not leave the entirety of the extra-terrestrial universe “pristine”.
Emphasis mine. In my (anecdotal) experience, most people think the space shuttle was built by “NASA”, rather than Rockwell/Lockheed/Thiokol. I assume that the Sanders crowd is no different; they’re objecting to the idea of the private sector taking over something that (they think) used to be handled by the government.
If commons means a place anyone can access, then charitably the guy doesn’t want SpaceX controlling things like asteroids in the future and restricting people’s access to space resources, which should be commons and accessible to everyone, according to him.
Of course, in the long run, space being as ridiculously large as it is, the idea that any one entity private or otherwise could monopolize control over it, seems rather absurd. Equally, the idea that any one entity could absolutely prevent the control of some of it. It’s a really really really big place with a lot of stuff in it.
The idea of socializing space boggles the mind. Given that at some point ownership has to correspond with control, the idea that an abstraction like “society” can own things in a meaningful way stretches credibility even for planet wide communism; for space, the abstraction is positively torn to pieces.
The trouble with calling space the “commons” is that, with few exceptions, nobody can access it, and it will almost certainly stay that way unless SpaceX and similar companies succeed in what they are doing.
Nuclear power would work great for car-charging purposes. Of course, careful planning would be required .
There is an senior engineer at my workplace who owns a Tesla S that has a “Nuclear Powered Car” badge on the back, cause it is. 😉
Damn, now I will have to buy one of those when I grow up 😀
@ Deiseach
Could it possibly be that most people will charge the car battery by plugging in to the mains, which draws on electricity generated by whacking great power stations, which generate the power by means of generators powered by oil and gas?
It might be well to distinguish:
What the car carries down the road.
Where the energy comes from originally.
The grid is powered by many sources, some fossil some clean. The grid cannot transmit gasoline to a car.
Oh, they hate gays even more than that:
They want them to get married!
What are your thoughts if any on the Bicameralism hypothesis ?
(Also, Avantasia/Edguy – says myself of 15 years ago, probably a good time to check what both have been upto since 🙂 )
Yes! Finally, someone else who has read Julian Jaynes! I too would REALLY love to get Scott Alexander’s take on it.
Me too. If the main thesis is true (which I doubt) could it be caused by Tulpas?
What would it mean for it to be true yet not caused by tulpas? Are tulpas a precise enough concept for that to be a coherent hypothesis?
Interesting, clever, surprisingly well-supported, probably wrong.
All of that, and increasingly difficult to prove as we’re running out of the uncontacted hunter-gatherer cultures that would be our best bet at empirical observation.
Well, maybe we could try to create some bicameral humans, but the ethics board probably wouldn’t sign off on that.
It’s even worse than that; my impression of Jaynes was that bicameralism wasn’t the natural state of human beings, but the post-agriculture, pre-literate (or something; I don’t really remember the cause he gives for its changing in the first millennium BCE) state. In particular he focuses on the role of direct communication gods and ancestors as a representative quality of bicameralism. So we wouldn’t have to create a hunter-gatherer society, but a neolithic god-king society.
Funny thing is, I discovered Worm through a comment on your superhero story “…AND I SHOW YOU HOW DEEP THE RABBIT HOLE GOES”. Both highly recommended!
How did it take you this long to find Worm? Anyway, I’ve been treating each book of Worm like it’s own separate novel. I feel like reading Worm from end to end without reading anything in between would be like reading every Discworld novel as fast as you can. It’s fine if someone does that, but it’s not like you’re not a true fan or something if you don’t. Of course, among nerds, I myself seem to have this uncommon ability to pause reading a compelling story for later. Though, this ability fell through for HPMOR.
Would anyone be interested in a Harry Potter RPG, with or without the serial numbers filed off? I have one more-or-less complete, but I need playtesters. (Also, any advice on playing pen-and-paper RPGs over the net?)
You have my interest. Tell me more?
(You have basically three options: forums, chats, and roll20.net.
Forums are slow, but posts are big and have lots of characterization and people get to iron out the details of their presentation, and they aren’t required to be online at the same time. It really pays if your group is mostly the same kind of speed people. If you have slowpokes and fast posters in the same team, you have a mess on your hands. The slowpokes will quite quickly become left behind and leave, or the fast posters will be highly annoyed at the pace of the slowpokes and leave. An honour system is typically used for rolling – you simply accept what people say they rolled.
Chats (IRC is probably the best option) are more like traditional sessions, except people’s various socio-mental issues are kept in the background so you don’t have to put up with speech impediments or incessant OOC chatter. Scheduling a session may be difficult across timezones. Dicebots are typically used. Voice systems, like Skype or Mumble are sometimes used for OOC content.
Roll20.net is a hybrid solution. There’s a forum, there’s a chat with an integrated dicebot, there’s voice and video, there are integrated character sheets, and there’s a virtual tabletop. However, it is a huge resource hog, and has some compatibility issues – try to get everyone to use Chrom(e|ium) to have everyone’s sound and video working right. Overall, this is most like a traditional session, with augmentations.
Character sheets, if there isn’t an integrated solution, are typically some sort of file sent to the GM, or shared from Dropbox, or hosted on some character sheet hosting site.)
Chat and roll20 can be combined. I play D&D* online via IRC+roll20. This is a very effective solution: we aren’t shackled to roll20’s atrocious chat interface, can use custom dicebots, pick a chat client of each participant’s choice, etc. We just use roll20 for combat/exploration mapping.
*(this category includes Pathfinder)
What do you use IRC for? IC content? OOC? Both?
Both, indeed. This makes it very easy to store logs of sessions, which we then upload to a wiki for the campaign.
Having a re-readable, searchable log of game sessions is absolutely incredible, by the way. It allows much more complex events, plots, plot arcs, etc. to take place — because the players (and the DM!!) are less likely to simply forget about details. It allows conversations to be reviewed and pondered at leisure. It lets combat encounters be re-examined, and tactics reconsidered and learned from. I can’t recommend the practice enough, to be honest.
Yes, I’d be interested, although I don’t think you need to file the serial numbers off for this crowd. Commenters on a rationalist blog are likely to be heavily selected for liking or at least tolerating the Harry Potter franchise.
I’d recommend Roll20. There are plenty of problems with it already outlined by other posters in the thread, but I really like the ability to use aliases for different NPCs, as well as playing music from soundcloud (although just linking to youtube, bandcamp, etc can easily accomplish the same thing). The tokens and map I never use, since I think tactical combat belongs in wargames and not RPGs, but if you like that sort of thing it’s available.
There’s a whole subscription system with premium content nobody cares about, but everything you’d actually want is available for free. As stated upthread you’d be better off using the chat and ignoring the voice and video features unless you’re prepared for a technical headache.
Just to be clear when I say “commenters” I mean me. I’d gladly roll up a Gryffindor skinhead with a big “Grindelwald Was Right” t-shirt. /tg/ had an HP tabletop floating around, but oddly enough all the rules were for mundane things like doing homework and passing tests, with adventuring seemingly thrown in as an afterthought.
I’d be interested in playing.
My RPG group once tried out Obsidian Portal as an online supplement to realtime sessions, but my (fuzzy) recollection is that the learning/effort curve on it wasn’t ideal for a short-term or pickup game.
IRC is good if you have the relevant dicebots, vent/mumble/etc work too, but I highly recommend getting a log of the session either way (as per Said Achmiz), it’s great for spotting bugs and problems.
Kind of late to the party, but I highly recommend Roll20, so long as you use another client if you want to do voice/video chat. I’m running a GURPS game, and I sprung for premium, which I don’t regret at all. Dynamic lighting is really cool, and one of the players wrote a script which takes care of most of the mechanics of ranged attacks. You put in the modifier, select the target (which automatically populates dodge) and it does the rest. We also have a script which allows us to call sounds from the chat bar, which is used for several things, including my Air Horn button (useful for getting the players off of a tangent), and producing gun sound effects when somebody shoots.
The base version is still pretty good, although if you have the money ($100/yr), premium is worth it if you’re running a tactical/mechanically heavy system.
“Anarcho-syndicalism and Strong Encryption are Incompatable.”
Discuss.
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(I have posted this question on my facebook wall https://www.facebook.com/bryan.hann.7 but I don’t know how to get the URL for the post itself.)
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Def. Anarcho-syndicalism := a form of society that prevents (and whose functioning depends upon preventing) the hoarding of common goods.
Premise: (i) Access to data is a common good.
Premise: (ii) Strong encryption allows data to be hoarded.
Conclusion: (iii) Q.E.D.
(Technical details omitted.)
Full link is https://www.facebook.com/bryan.hann.7/posts/1099054556823947 and can be copied by right-clicking the grey bit of text that, at present, reads “3 hrs” and will eventually resolve to a date and time.
What do you mean by “common good”? If you use that word in its technical economic sense (a good which is non-rivalrous and non-excludable), then common goods by definition cannot be hoarded (else they’d be excludable). On a related note, what do you mean by “hoarding”?
JG: You’re thinking of a “public good”.
Right, sorry. I mixed up my terminology. However, that still leaves open the question of what a common good is supposed to be.
Good question. I’m not sure precisely what term to use, perhaps because I’m not sure precisely what I’m trying to say 🙂
Consider this a first approximation of a thesis. Is there reasonable construal of ‘common good’ (or ‘public good’) and of ‘hoarding’ — and perhaps of other terms there as well — that might make the thesis true and interesting?
Are you thinking of “a good better treated as a commons than as private property?”
Example–intellectual property in digital form that is fully revealed on one use. Protecting property rights in it is very hard, and one of the two functions of property (allocating goods to their highest valued use) is an argument against property in that case, since the highest valued use is for everyone who wants to use it. There is still the function of an incentive to create, but the benefit from that may not balance the costs of treating it as property.
Imagine I came up with an algorithm that factors larges integers in polynomial time. I could run that on my cellphone and provide a factoring service that no one else could. Being able to turn this service on or off could give be considerable power. Being able to provide this service selective could give me considerably more power.
This seems to me to throw a wrench into the gears of how anarchic syndicalism is supposed to work. But I don’t know much about anarchic syndicalism, so I am throwing the idea out here to see if there is anything steel-able in the idea.
I notice that a parallel case exists for any physical good:
1. Access to [food/water/whatever] is a common good.
2. A locked safe allows [food/water/whatever] to be hoarded.
3. Locks are incompatible with anarcho-syndicalism.
In other words, any anarcho-syndicalist society must be capable of preventing people from hoarding physical goods in some way. This doesn’t have to be a direct men-with-guns prevention, it could be that society makes it an unimaginable faux pas to hoard food or that people just don’t see a need to hoard things, but the point is, even before you get into fuzzier issues like encryption, you need to solve the problem of people hoarding stuff in a locked box.
Solving this problem via anarchist principles is a tall order, but my point is, if you can successfully solve the “put my valuable stuff in a safe” problem, you should be equally capable of solving the “put my secrets in strong encryption” problem.
I was thinking not of hoarding consumable goods, but hoarding means of production. Perhaps I cannot possess a factory because the society is structured in such a way that the workers can take my tools.
I cannot control a factory on my own, nor can I easily keep it’s existence a secret. The same is true of server farms. Could I develop and deploy an essential service from a few servers in my house? I don’t know. I could never run Google’s service from my house. But the physical infrastructure needed — cpu cycles, memory, and bandwith — can easily be /pooled/.
Perhaps I can start a project like DNS@home, Catalog@Home (websearch), or Factor@home (large primes) with the hopes that it will eventually provide a vital service. Can I do it in a way that leaves a key component of the service under my exclusive control? And without providing any trace of who I am?
I doubt that a bright person could be prevented from doing this given strong encryption.
If your clients are running components of a distributed service, it’s going to be hard to keep the data they handle secure from them even in the presence of strong encryption, as long as they have physical access to the hardware. This is roughly analogous to the problems that DRM schemes face.
It is possible under some circumstances to operate on data under encryption without breaking that encryption locally, but it’s quite computationally expensive.
What exactly are you thinking of with respect to encryption? Keeping data inaccessible in transmission isn’t the same as hoarding it. Access to data being a common good doesn’t mean we need to abolish any possibility of private communication. It seems like you’re conflating something like the CIA not releasing whatever information it has on the Kennedy assassination with people being able to whisper to each other outside the range of a microphone.
Impressions of Worm thus far?
You probably already know this, but the dude who wrote Worm also wrote Pact and is currently writing Twig. New chapters Tuesday, Saturday and some Thursdays.
I’m very interested in things which seem objective and/or obvious but which are actually subjective and/or dependent on culture/upbringing. Not so much talking about things which seem obvious now that science has figured them out (round earth, germs), but which probably totally weren’t obvious, though those are, of course, interesting to think about as well. More talking about things which you wouldn’t even imagine could be otherwise–things you would tend to assume everyone would just naturally “get,” but which are actually contingent. Preliminary list:
Perception of colors
Many cultures apparently count like, “one, two, three, four, a lot”
People apparently dressed up fancy to watch TV in the early days because it was hard to intuitively understand that people could be doing stuff in front of you but they couldn’t see you
Similarly, read stories about early 20th century Koreans, who only ever encountered storytelling-type acting of the sort where the actor/storyteller was a constant presence, as opposed to acting in which characters fully “inhabit” their roles; these audiences couldn’t help yelling at bad characters and trying to come on the stage to help the sympathetic characters
Some argue the epistolary novel was written to give a sense of realism because people used to not “get” true fiction: you had to present it like you were reporting something that had happened to someone, or copying down a letter, etc. definitely true of early East Asian stories
Some aspects of music seem innately comprehensible, others learned(?)
Any more interesting ones?
There are foods which are disgusting in some cultures and delicacies or just normal in other cultures.
There are social norms against men paying too much attention to their appearance in mainstream American culture, but it looks to me as though in most historical cultures it was normal for high status men and women to be pretty much equally dressed up.
The first department stores had to hire window shoppers to get people comfortable with breaking the taboo against looking into a private window.
Similar to those narrative examples, I have an intense aversion to narratives told in the present tense, such as The Hunger Games. I guess for me it breaks the perception that this story is being told to me by someone, and thus must have already happened. Given the popularity of The Hunger Games, this hang up probably isn’t all that common.
Directionality. We have two unassociated systems: the ‘relative’ system of left/right/front back/ and the ‘cardinal’ system of N/S/E/W.
The relative system isn’t universal (I don’t have evidence for whether the cardinal system is). A surprising number of cultures exclusively describe position in cardinal terms, and as a consequence appear to be much better about knowing their current cardinal directions (even without visible indicators) than we are. The effects go well beyond the lexical gap, to a tendency to specify all sorts of things not by association (“in front of the house”) but by cardinality (“east of the house”).
http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2012/05/09/welcome-to-the-future-nauseous/
some good examples of what you’re talking about in here i think.
I really like the term “manufactured normalcy field.”
Same.
The term reminds me of Steve Jobs’s biography (by Walter Isaacson). The bio said that Jobs had a “Reality Distortion Field”. In that he was so insanely charismatic, his colleagues would be like “WOW, great idea!”. Then as soon as Jobs left the room, his colleagues would sober up and realize “uh… what the hell? That’s not even feasible in Discworld.”
The book never mentions this, but I’m under the impression that Jobs was a textbook case of sociopathy. I’ve also been wondering how one implements a Reality Distortion Field. Bill Clinton seems to have had a Reality Distortion Field too.
I do think Bill Clinton has a reality distortion field of the sort we might more colloquially call “charisma” or which Scott Adams might call “3d persuasion.” I certainly find Bill Clinton a lot more persuasive than Donald Trump, and I probably agree with him, in reality, on fewer issues.
The field of complit in my experience relies too heavily on reality distortion fields: ideas which sound brilliant when expressed by a charismatic person, but simplistic or just wrong when anyone else attempts a summary.
Someone I know well, who was a Member of Congress when Bill Clinton was president, learned to refuse invitations to the White House when planning to vote against Clinton’s position on some bill: “You have no idea just how persuasive Bill and Hillary can be. It doesn’t come through on TV.”
House Speaker Newt Gingrich would go meet with Clinton and cave on something he wasn’t planning to. House Republicans decided they couldn’t trust Newt to be alone with the president, so they insisted on sending a bunch of other conservative Republicans to chaperone him. It turned out that didn’t help!
Bill Clinton came to speak at my college a few times, and I can confirm that he is an incredibly persuasive speaker who fills you with this sense that he is an intelligent, right-thinking guy who knows what’s best and plans to do it.
It was an incredible contrast to Tony Blair, who also came to speak one time. I had never really watched him speak at length before (and really not much of a preexisting opinion), but he came off the exact opposite way: like an idiot in way over his head who lucked into his positions and didn’t have a clue what he was doing. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but that’s what it felt like listening to him.
“You have no idea just how persuasive Bill and Hillary can be. It doesn’t come through on TV.”
I don’t find Hillary nearly as persuasive, though I don’t think she’s as inept as Republicans this year are hoping she is.
Bill, on the other hand, is probably the single most persuasive politician I’ve ever listened to, as judged by his ability to make positions I don’t, in principle, agree with, sound eminently reasonable–and this all came through to me on TV.
I wondered if maybe this effect was due to me being an impressionable teen during the years of his presidency. But one time Obama left a press conference early and basically tagged Bill to come in and field questions. Clinton did what seemed to me an infinitely better job of defending Obama’s own positions and decisions than Obama himself ever did. What’s more, he seemed to be having fun doing it, which may be part of what makes him convincing.
Obama seems to be very charismatic to many people, and I sort of get it, but I never found him at all convincing in the way Bill can be. To me, Obama often comes off as petulant and patronizing. To me, he gives off a frustrated vibe which says “I don’t want to be here and I wish you were smart enough to understand why I’m right without me explaining it yet again.”
Clinton, by contrast, is disarmingly humble and loves the spotlight. I notice he often starts off with phrases like “the American people, in their infinite wisdom, have chosen to reject this proposal, and as president, I have to respect that. Here’s where I think my Republican colleagues and I can still find some common ground…” By humbling himself and seeming to genuinely respect his opposition, he makes you feel like you’d be a jerk to not at least move a little in his direction on the issue.
Extreme confidence and likability.
A very common example is gendered words in languages. For most English native speakers this is really hard to grasp on a fundamental level. I know I personally find struggle with this part of Spanish and German.
To demonstrate, the following is a passage by Mark Twain about one aspect of gender in German.
That is pretty mind-bending when read in English, though being able to speak French and read a little Sanskrit, I think one develops a different mindset when dealing with nouns and pronouns that have to agree with their adjectives.
The other way around ia also interesting. In Hungarian there is absolutely no concept of grammatical gender. There is only one word for he/she. (Here is the solution for the big tumblr pronoun issue, all of them should just learn my language :D.) I guess this is a piece of evidence against the language shaping the thinking of the people, because a lot of the country is as sexist as it gets.
Finnish has that quality, too, which is perhaps not surprising since Hungarian and Finnish (along with Estonian) are in the same language group.
A friend’s grandmother, in Minnesota, grew up speaking Finnish, and when she was dying and somewhat regressed, she often referenced her son (and other men) as “she”.
Another Finnish speaker I know, a woman from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, criticizes Finnish as a very sexist language, because most occupational titles include “man”, the equivalent of lawyerman, teacherman, doctorman, etc.
The only one who could ever reach me
Was the son of a lawyerman
The only boy who could ever teach me
Was the son of a lawyerman
Yes he was, he was, ooh, yes he was
Is the word easier to pronounce than xirbsygb or whatever the “proper” neutral pronoun is these days? If so what is it?
The Finnish word is hän.
As a native speaker of a grammar heavy language, I have always wondered how native speakers of English (a virtually grammar free langauge) see all the other languages, and how they manage to learn dealing with grammar as adults as they learn a foreign language.
One would think that it would a nigh impossible task for someone who didn’t learn to inflect words early, to do so later in life. How do you people manage to learn foreign languages?
I have never become fluent in a foreign language, but as a native English speaker my experience in studying other languages (Latin, Spanish, tiny bit of German, tinier bit of Telugu) is that learning grammar in other languages made English grammar make more sense.
English has not always been a grammar-light language and it has lots of leftover rules that you know but which only make sense once you understand where they came from. E.g. if you incorrectly decline pronouns you sound dumb but most other nouns don’t decline and I’m not sure I was ever taught the word “decline” in school except in Latin class.
It is always harder to go from non-distinction to distinction than the other way around. For a speaker of a tonal language to learn to not worry about tones is easier than for a non-tonal speaker to start paying attention to them; ditto heavily inflected languages, languages that distinguish some subtle verb tense others don’t, languages that use articles, etc. etc.
Chinese don’t usually have a lot of trouble with English pronunciation, for example, but they have a lot of trouble distinguishing definite and indefinite articles–a distinction Chinese doesn’t make. English speakers don’t usually have a lot of trouble with Chinese grammar, but they have difficulty grasping the concept that their tonal inflection changes the meaning of a word.
Solution: be a native speaker of a language that is super-complicated in every way. I think some African and Eastern European languages have the biggest phoneme repertoires (“click” languages, for example), so I’d expect them to be good at learning pronunciation of other languages. Though this isn’t entirely possible as languages tend to get complicated in some ways and simple in others (because it’s redundant to be complicated in too many ways). So be an indigenous Botswanan who happens also to have grown up with mastery of Sanskrit grammar. 🙂
I remember watching this one film. It was set in a remote mountain village during the Korean War. During the exposition there’s a tense standoff between “3 North Korean soldiers” vs “2 South Korean soldiers plus a wounded U.S. fighter pilot”. The villagers who rescued them are so far removed from the rest of society, they have no knowledge of technology or even the ongoing war. Which leads to some pretty cute scenes.
During the stand-off, one soldier is threateningly holding up a grenade for days on end. And the confused villagers whisper “What’s that guy doing with a potato?” At some point, he pulls it by accident. But it doesn’t go off, so he assumes its a dud. He casually lobs it under the storehouse. The next thing you know, the villagers are staring in wonder at the raining popcorn.
I watched it years ago, so I don’t remember many scenes in detail. 🙁 Great movie though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welcome_to_Dongmakgol
The Position of Adverbs is something that native speakers of English internalize, but never realize they’ve internalized. E.g. “Clifford the Big Red Dog” is correct; “Clifford the Red Big Dog” is a crime against humanity (even though it doesn’t obviously violate any rules).
Those are adjectives, not adverbs (mnemonic: there’s a “verb” in “adverb”, so adverbs go with verbs) 😛 But yes.
Oddly enough, this was mentioned only in passing in my English [as foreign language] classes — unlike, say, the past forms of irregular verbs, which were Serious Business.
It’s subtler than that.
“Clifford the red big dog” is correct–if there are a bunch of big dogs and you are pointing out the one who is red.
I’m pretty sure most people still haven’t figured out germs. Since nobody actually lathers when they “wash” their hands with soap. If you’re just going to immediately rinse it off upon application, what’s the point?
Clients from Hell is a great repository of this kind of stuff. My favorite:
CLIENT: “I don’t mean to sound racist, but…”
ME: “But what?”
CLIENT: “But the site is too black.”
ME: “Like, literally too black?”
CLIENT: “Yes. The background is too black.”
ME: “That’s not racist. That has nothing to do with race.”
CLIENT: “Phew. I can never tell with you black people, what’s offensive and what’s not.”
ME: “I’m actually Lebanese. And, yeah, that one might be a bit racist.”
On reading Better Explained, I realized that the (seemingly arbitrary) reason mathematicians group numbers into {wholes, naturals, integers, rationals, reals} is because they represent historical discontinuities in the way western civilization thought about numbers.
I think Sumer(?) used Zero. But it was only used as a place holder in numbers like ‘360’. The concept of Zero representing the empty set was weird. Iirc the “Zero as the empty set” was invented later, somewhere in the Ganges. We also use decimals and negative numbers every day. But apparently the Romans thought decimals and negatives were, like, far out, man.
In modern times, the “weird” numbers are the imaginary numbers. Wtf does it mean to square root a negative 1? Why would you even want to do that? Why does i^4 == 1 that’s so arbitrary. Euler himself said that imaginary numbers would ruin the foundation of maths. Yep sounds like black magic to me.
(But then you explain that 1 * i represents taking a point on the numberline and rotating it counterclockwise by 90 degrees and people are all “SO THIS IS WHAT AN EPIPHANY FEELS LIKE.”)
The Romans, eh? Here’s something Francis Maseres, a respectable English amateur mathematician, published in 1791:
“It is by the introduction of such needless difficulties and mysteries into algebra (which, for the most part, take their rise from the supposition of the existence of negative quantities, or quantities less than nothing, or of the possibility of subtracting a greater quantity from a lesser) that the otherwise clear and elegant science of algebra has been clouded and obscured, and rendered disgusting to numbers of men of learning, who are possessed of a just taste for reasoning, and could therefore, if they pleased, make great advances in the mathematical sciences, but who are apt to complain of this branch of them, and despise it on that account.”
Of course, this was not a universally held opinion — but it wasn’t as fringe as it would be today, either.
I think it’s bad things the like the Oscars are getting more and more politicized (though I am biased in that they are largely politicized in a way I don’t agree with; in theory, at least, however, I don’t like the idea of things like this being politicized at all): I feel like it doesn’t convince anyone who doesn’t already agree and it subtly or not-so-subtly sends a message to those who don’t: you aren’t our tribe.
Part of what has previously allowed people of differing political views to get along in most aspects of life is that it used to be impolite or inappropriate to interject politics into everything. To those who care about American socio-cultural unity (not me, actually), this seems a very bad and accelerating trend.
I don’t think caring about socio cultural unity is even necessary for finding this concerning. It’s hard for a democracy to function when everyone acts like a jihadi, assuming their opponents and their views to be irredeemably evil (thus making both compromise and compartmentalization of politics less likely).
This is hardly new: part of the reason that the 1600s was one of the bloodiest centuries in European history is because the wars of religion made it a lot easier for atrocities like “slaughter everyone and rape their women” than for a more outside-view “atrocities beget atrocities”. It’s a lot harder to think of your opponents of people and consider the implications of being extra brutal to them when you’ve already convinced yourself that they’re fundamentally evil and responsible for the ultimate crime of disrespecting God.
How soon we forget the lessons of the Thirty Years’ War.
What are you talking about? this is the 21st century!
/s
It’s the Current Year War and people are still nuking Washington, D.C.!
smh
Not so; our armies are much, much cheaper than mercenaries are.
Only if “our armies” excludes the American military.
My country’s armies are so ridiculously expensive that they are currently hiring literal mercenary companies to supplement them for budgetary reasons.
I agree. A lot of activism (more so on the left, but a lot bit on the right also) seems to have the explicit goal of eliminating the possibility of ideologically neutral spaces*. Ie. to force every part of society to take an explicit stance in the culture war to the exclusion of other possible ideologies. And its a very toxic turn. It eliminates the possibility of meaningful pluralism on cultural issues. It eliminates the existence of public squares that people of different ideologies can get together in. It turns all of politics into an us versus them, out-group versus in-group battle. It damages values that are core to the proper functioning of democracy, including freedom of speech. It encourages the vilification of political enemies.
* The phrase “ideologically neutral spaces” comes from an social justice oriented academic paper that I was assigned in a class, whose contention was that such a thing is impossible, and any attempt to create ideological neutrality (even, or particularly in the world of science) will favor one ideology. But that phrase sums up what I actually think is 1) possible, and 2) very desirable.
The idea that there are no ideologically neutral spaces reflects reality since any group of people who interact on a regular basis will form some commonly held beliefs/customs. (e.g. mathematicians are more inclined to think pure math research has an inherent value to society)
If your ideology is such that anyone who doesn’t identify is automatically an enemy, then of course a neutral position is inconceivable.
Even if pure ideological neutrality isn’t possible, I think it’s still generally a good idea to be said for keeping a group’s ideology as small as possible. e.g., in a math group perhaps everyone needs to agree that math is good, but they don’t need to agree on (and perhaps better yet should generally avoid discussing) who to vote for or tangential social issues (even if those issues might impact some of the members in others contexts).
[tweet] Flag on the play, motte and bailey doctrine, 15 yard penalty, repeat first down.
Yes, in the obvious and banal sense that every group has some sort of shared belief, a completely ideologically neutral space can’t exist. Defining ideology that broadly, even my bowling league has the ideology “bowling is fun.”
But this doesn’t mean that my bowling league has to have any sort of political ideology or create in-group vs. out-group conflict, which is what the post was really about.
>A lot of activism (more so on the left, but a lot bit on the right also) seems to have the explicit goal of eliminating the possibility of ideologically neutral spaces.
That’s kind of a sideways way of putting it. That’s certainly the outcome: when something gets publicly criticized as much as the Oscars, you can agree with the criticism, disagree with it, or say nothing (which implies you don’t care that much, kind of putting you in the “disagree” camp.) But the goal isn’t to eliminate ideologically neutral spaces, it’s to change those spaces to be less racist or whatever.
(Of course, it’s completely ridiculous to get more worked up about diversity at the fucking Oscars than economic justice or institutionalized discrimination against, say, people with disabilities. But such is social justice.)
“The future happens first in the imagination, then in the will, and finally in reality.”
This is very inspiring if you think about it as you making what you imagine real.
However, there’s a corollary: if you want to control the future, you need to control other people’s imaginations.
I don’t like being hassled about race and the Oscars, but it’s not entirely crazy to think that black people’s lives are made worse by the way white people imagine black people, and that movies have a large effect on people’s imaginations.
I actually agree there is a problem, but the problem is much more on the front end–where studios don’t buy scripts featuring non-whites in leading roles and where they cast whites in roles where non-whites would make more sense (recently watched the awful new Pan movie as a joke–Tiger Lily is played by the whitest person you’ve ever seen).
And, to some extent, even though it felt out of place, the (incidentally, black, female) president of the academy coming out and scolding everyone, not only for not nominating, but for not casting non-white actors was understandable, as were a few jokes from Chris Rock on the subject.
But it literally dominated the whole evening. And when we weren’t being scolded for hating black people we were being scolded by the Vice President (of the United States, not the Motion Picture Academy), no less, for not believing sexual assault victims, and by several people for not caring about the earth, voting for “big money” candidates, and almost every easy blue tribe signalling issue you can think of.
What’s more many of the jokes fell flat or were, ironically, out-right racially insensitive at the same time as they tried to be socially conscious: trotting out little Asian kids to stereotype them as accountants as a way of scolding us about sweatshop labor, for example. This stuff is not only out of place at what is supposed to be an inclusive, celebratory event, it makes for bad comedy.
@onyomi:
“And when we weren’t being scolded for hating black people”
Are you a member of the Academy? Do you own a studio? Are you an executive producer or casting director? (Sorry for the snark. It just seemed like the most effective way to get the point across)
I think that that was the the film industry talking to itself, after having taken a beating from the people whose opinion they say they care the most about. Although, they really care the most about the box office figures in Asia.
I’m not sure if you follow (American) football. There is a debate about going for it on fourth down vs. punting, and all of the mathematicians say that coaches are way, way, way too eager to punt. That rather than coaches trying to win the game, they are trying not to make the mistake that loses them the game. There is an analogous argument made about Hollywood and what choices they make in terms of what movies get made and who gets cast in it.
I don’t like being hassled about race and the Oscars, but it’s not entirely crazy to think that black people’s lives are made worse by the way white people imagine black people, and that movies have a large effect on people’s imaginations.
I think it’s a little crazy to think that movies have that much of an influence on how white people view black people. Maybe if you’ve never seen a black person before, then yes, years of watching “Rush Hour” or the Madea movies may form your opinion of them. But I’m very skeptical that movies influence people in that way.
It’s like the video games/graphic music and violence link Tipper Gore was trying to push in the 90’s. There may be a connection, but I believe it to be very weak.
I also think controversies like these suck the air out of legitimate grievances (e.g. police/criminal justice reform, education policy, etc.)
@HBC – the trouble is it all gets spun up in the media as a “comment on our society”. Frankly, Hollywood seems way more racist/sexist than any workplace I’ve ever dealt with directly (Chris Rock’s “sorority racism” seems spot on).
Yet they go up there and preen about how progressive they all are and how benighted the rest of America is. Likewise, you’ve got Leo running his mouth about global warming in February and renting mega-yachts all summer. They look to speak for us (or at least at us) without realizing how f’d up their own little society is.
I think some of this is about absence of positive and normal images, not just the presence of negative images.
“Are you a member of the Academy? Do you own a studio?…
I think that that was the the film industry talking to itself”
Because the Oscars is really just a chance for industry insiders to talk shop as opposed to a media extravaganza generating hundreds of millions in ad revenue?
And, as I said, I think that little lecture was probably the least bad part, as at least she had a point.
I do agree that the problem is studio execs refusing to take risks, not only on minority actors, but frankly on any unknown actors or movies which aren’t a sequel or adaptation of an already successful property.
I do think it’s a symptom of a general risk averse quality in humans–sooner make the safe call you can’t be blamed for–though it’s arguably a less defensible quality in people who are already extremely wealthy and claim to care about inequality and the future of the industry.
Because Hollywood never portrays black people in a positive and normal light, certainly not to the point that “the black best friend of the white leading man” and “the black good guy who gets killed by the monster first” have become borderline cliches.
Don’t get me wrong, I believe that Hollywood does have genuine issues with race, but I think the primary victims are minority actors and actresses. I’m still really annoyed by the casting for 21, which was not only (very loosely) based on the story of real life people who were mostly Asian, but was adapted from a book that explicitly discussed how the MIT Blackjack Team specifically recruited non-white people in order to exploit the racial prejudices of casino security and avoid getting caught (the book also took a lot of liberties with the truth, so take this with a grain of salt before trying to apply it in real life), yet cast white actors for all except two of the main characters for no apparent reason. That’s far from the only recent case, either.
It’s ridiculous that Hollywood is still pulling this nonsense 50 years after the Civil Rights Movement and more than 20 years after Will Smith became one of the biggest movie stars on the planet. But I think that speculating about hard to test media effects on the general public distracts from these very real issues.
I think it’s not just a matter of being in the story as a good person, but having some black people who are at the center of the story and who get some happy endings.
Those are significantly less common than black supporting characters, and Hollywood could probably stand to make a few more movies like this, but they are still far from unheard of. The first example that comes to mind is Will Smith (the character’s name is Captain Steven Hiller, but who cares) being reunited with his family and smoking a cigar with his Jewish friend while he watches alien mothership debris burn up in the sky at the end of Independence Day. Independence Day was, of course, one of the biggest blockbusters of the 90s – the 6th most successful film of that decade, in fact. Actually, most of Will Smith’s filmography probably qualifies. The fact that he is pretty much the only black actor who can reliably land lead roles in those kinds of movies is a problem, yes, but his movies still exist. Other prominent examples include about half the cast of the Fast and the Furious movies (especially if you count Vin Diesel).
There’s also virtually every movie Tyler Perry has ever made, of course, but I gather that not many white people watch those movies.
Regardless, I can’t help but feel like you’re moving the goal posts. You start by implying that the problem is that movies have too many negative examples of black characters (“it’s not entirely crazy to think that black people’s lives are made worse by the way white people imagine black people, and that movies have a large effect on people’s imaginations”), then you say that the problem is actually an absence of positive black characters (“I think some of this is about absence of positive and normal images, not just the presence of negative images.”), then you say that the problem is actually an absence of positive black characters who are central to the story and get happy endings.
Perhaps it would help the conversation if you elaborated on how, exactly, you felt that Hollywood’s representation of black characters was deficient, and how you would like it to be improved?
“Regardless, I can’t help but feel like you’re moving the goal posts. You start by implying that the problem is that movies have too many negative examples of black characters (“it’s not entirely crazy to think that black people’s lives are made worse by the way white people imagine black people, and that movies have a large effect on people’s imaginations”), then you say that the problem is actually an absence of positive black characters (“I think some of this is about absence of positive and normal images, not just the presence of negative images.”), then you say that the problem is actually an absence of positive black characters who are central to the story and get happy endings.”
No, I didn’t move the goalposts, You read what I said as more being more specific than the actual words.
I said “black people’s lives are made worse by the way white people imagine black people”, and you thought I meant negative representations of black people, but I also meant the whole range of how white people think about black people– and this includes not imagining black people as having lives that are going fairly well. Or fairly well until some movie thing happens, followed by eventually getting to a happy ending, as happens often enough for white characters.
Orson Scott Card’s been pretty loud about this problem, for which he of course gets absolutely no credit because no matter how enlightened he comes across on issues of race, his stance on same sex marriage makes him an outcast. But the casting of the film version of Ender’s Game did a pretty solid job of avoiding the “default white actor” syndrome, casting a black (and female!) Major Anderson, a black Dink Meeker, and generally racially diverse other supporting kid actors. The two biggest ethnic mismatches were comparatively obscure ones – Ben Kingsley playing the Maori Mazer Rackham, and very Western European Hailee Steinfeld playing Armenian Petra.
In fact, sci-fi movies just generally tend to do a better job casting for racial diversity–Star Trek, Star Wars, and Firefly/Serenity just for starters. One thing that annoyed about the whole Oscar controversy was that the black actors in prominent roles were in some of the most successful movies of the year; they didn’t get Oscar nominations because the Academy hates popular movies, not because the Academy hates black people. John Boyega did a fantastic job in The Force Awakens, but of course no one can get a best supporting actor nomination for playing a renegade Stormtrooper.
The fact that the Hollywood has racial issues with Asians does not mean that Hollywood has race issues with blacks. The entire media has race issues with Asians; Asians count as minorities when you’re actually favoring white people, but Asians count as whites when you’re favoring minorities. That’s how tech companies with white representation under the national average can be blamed for being all white.
Part of the problem seems to be that there aren’t that many black lead actors in “Oscar bait” type movies. As noted, there are many examples of black actors in sci-fi, action, comedy, etc. films – but the Academy is typically allergic to such “low brow” entertainment.
“Creed” and “Straight Outta Compton” may have been very good films, but they aren’t exactly up the academy’s alley (and that probably has as much to do with the age of the voters as their race – how many old guys are going to watch a movie about 90s rap?).
When black actors are in “Oscar bait”, they get recognition (12 Years a Slave, Selma, Million Dollar Baby, Hotel Rwanda….) So I think the Oscars are clearly out of touch with almost everybody it’s just most obvious when it comes to racial diversity.
“You can’t be neutral on a moving train,” they like to say. It is assumed that everyone is always on a moving train and this cannot be questioned because that’s just trying to be neutral on this moving train we’re on.
You can be neutral on a moving train as long as you pick the right frame of reference.
In any frame of reference, so long as you don’t mind smacking into the rear wall of the train at high speed.
No doubt, it’s yet another sign that the split between Blue and Red has gone beyond politics, is most of the way through culture, and is starting to reach the stage of defining separate and discrete nations.
I’m trying to withhold judgment until at least the end of the election, but at the rate things are going it won’t be long before people need to stop trying to stop the split and start thinking about how to manage it with a minimum of violence and disruption.
I’m willing to give the politicization of the Oscars a partial pass because they really do have a demographic issue – it just resides among their voters rather than their selections. The proposed changes on the voting committee (well, not the quota system, that’s scary) ought to improve an awards system that’s been slowly dying because its detached from the rest of the country’s desires.
As for the overall system of “the personal is political”, though, I’m deeply uncomfortable. It seems like a steadily increasing number of acts are politically charged to the point where political skill/orthodoxy are a job requirement. Tim Hunt’s comments about women in labs were stupid, but did we actually benefit by drumming a Nobel Laureate out of science to prove a point?
“Don’t talk politics, money, or religion” wasn’t just a way to avoid challenging entrenched views, it was a way for people with massive disagreements to preserve day-to-day unity.
> Tim Hunt’s comments about women in labs were stupid,
Not picking on you about this, but consider why you think that. His remarks were a well-received (at the time) self-deprecating joke about how he, himself, was a miserable old sexist fuddy-duddy who the awesome women in science should ignore. The framing of that pro-feminist message as somehow stupid is an example of how successful the revolution has been.
Look on the bright side, the leftists have so well ideologically purified the media, they’re eating their own!
Every week with a scandal involving universities, hollywood, the media and “scientists” is a week they aren’t out scouring small town america, looking for witches to burn.
I’m pretty sure they’re not scouring small-town Americana because the people doing the eating have no power there.
You get different groups doing the own-eating and witch-hunting in small-town America, I’m fairly certain.
Wasn’t that exactly what happened in the Indiana pizza parlor case?
You mean the guy that got nearly a million dollars in donations after he temporarily shut down his pizza place because people made nasty phone calls and said means things on yelp and twitter?
Never forget!!!!!1!
And Anonymous covers it. My understanding is that the pizza parlor person is doing fine.
Am I wrong? Does anyone have any solid information on the follow-up here?
The witch-hunting being ultimately unsuccessful (despite getting his pizza place temporarily shut down) doesn’t change the fact that it happened in the first place.
Yeah, this is rather foolish. Someone who got hit by a bus and gets a million dollars from the city in the settlement still got hit by a bus.
(Not to mention that by this line of argument someone like, oh, say, Anita Sarkeesian has no right to complain about anything. Some assholes were harassing you on Twitter? You’re running Twitter now, so you seem to be doing fine.)
(Wait, on second thought, I accept your proposal in every detail. Let’s make this happen.)
How are we defining witch-hunt? Because I’m not seeing how we can count that as a witch hunt while excluding treatment towards homosexuals which gives really bizarre results since it implies multiple witch-hunts in opposition to each other..
Okay, Samuel; how’s that a bizarre result?
I’m…genuinely not sure who’s side I’m on at the moment in this subthread, but I do think that Lots Of People Being Mean to you are different than a witchhunt.
For me, there’s something objectively different when people with power or authority get in on it. A Twitter hate mob is a bad thing, and getting fired because of one is a directly related bad thing, but I seem them as different bad things.
A Twitter hate mob is a bad thing, and getting fired because of one is a directly related bad thing, but I seem them as different bad things.
A bunch of people throwing you off the roof of a building is a bad thing, and being killed by hitting the ground at high speed is a bad thing, but are they different bad things? If so, does it depend on how tall the building is?
http://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-american-politics/
@ Evan
Because witch hunts are traditionally one way? Having two groups fighting each other and people getting caught in the cross fire almost certainly has its own, different term.
People have the right, moral and legal, to complain about you on the Internet. Your employer has the legal (if not moral) right to fire you for drawing bad PR (assuming at-will employment, etc.)
Laying hands on someone to throw them off a roof skips over both moral and legal right (barring really weird ticking-time-bomb edge cases where you really need a crowdsourced murder).
So, I don’t find the comparisons to angry people being angry on the internet to actual violence to be, well, comparable.
From where I’m standing, falling back on rights is literally the weakest argument you can make for something. It’s saying “I have no evidence that this makes anyone’s life worse, but it violates a blanket proscription we have in place for some reason, so let’s not do it”. I’m pretty sure you can think of some other reasons why throwing someone off a roof might be a bad idea, so what do they mean in terms of the analogy?
Or are we doing that thing where any analogies that offend our concept of human rights are taboo because normalizing or something? That’s dumb.
I used to think this way, but… the revolution starts eating its own *once it has thoroughly won.* Cold comfort to find out that Stalin executed one of his generals when you’re hearing of it while breaking rocks in a Siberian labor camp.
Actually, I think Red Tribe is beginning to gain status independence. Then we’ll see the real fireworks.
That’s one of the best single-sentence explanations of Trump I’ve yet read.
Precisely. Red tribe are loving him because he is showing them the way not (just) to win the presidency, but to conduct oneself without apology and still win.
I’m not in the Trump camp, but I can’t help a soft spot for the man. He is single-handedly breaking political correctness. If only he had anything behind it.
I don’t agree with Piers Morgan on much of anything, and he is in wholehearted support of all the causes mentioned, yet he gets it right here:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3469889/PIERS-MORGAN-don-t-watch-Oscars-harangued-racism-rape-sex-abuse-greedy-bankers-global-warming-gay-rights.html
If you like Worm, you should read the rationalist-adjacent Metropolitan Man if you haven’t already. I’ve read a fair amount of Superman comics and it’s up there with my favorites.
https://www.fanfiction.net/s/10360716/1/The-Metropolitan-Man
I strongly second this recommendation. It’s truly awesome, and I love the sympathetic take on Lex Luthor as being worried about existential risk.
It has a beautiful bittersweet ending, and it won’t take weeks of reading to get there.
Metropolitan Man and Branches on the Tree of Time (by the same author) are some of my favorite fanfics
I liked some of it. I liked the analytical way the characters approached problems, I get a kick out of that. Some of the characters views seemed a bit unrealistically modern, but overall an enjoyable experience.
Chapter 7 threw me a bit; the legal rulings described here are about 30 years ahead of their time. Contrary to what the anonymous letter to the editor claims, the Fourth Amendment had not been incorporated against the states in 1934; that didn’t happen until 1949 (Wolf v. Colorado). Moreover, that decision specifically did not apply the exclusionary rule to state-level action. It wasn’t until Mapp v. Ohio (1961) that the exclusionary rule applied to the states.
I just read it (thanks, Ezra, it was fun!) and assumed that was an intentional difference from real history. In an effort to rule against Superman, the Supreme Court was incorporating the exclusionary rule against the states for the first time, and the letter to the editor was protesting that.
Just finished reading in one sitting, thanks for the recommendation. I am always slightly miffed they (the nebulous they) don’t play up Superman’s intelligence more, but it’s a standard trope.
Twitter is terrible, and to that end I have collected every tweet (though not every reply) Steven Kaas has ever made and put them into a text file in chronological order: http://pastebin.com/mTapascU
If there’s something wrong with that file, please let me know so I can correct it.
Thank you!
Is there a general solution to the problem of wanting to read someone’s Twitter archive, getting all the way back to last year today, and then wanting to continue tomorrow in some way more civilized than pressing space bar until it’s scrolled back to last year’s tweets?
http://allmytweets.net
Thanks very much. The limiting factor on how much of a Twitter feed I will read is rarely boredom with the content – it’s almost always my tolerance for Twitter’s shitty system of accessing old tweets.
Who is he? I saw one of his tweets quoted in Unsong, and I thought he seems to be like a weird sun who pre-dates the weird suns.
As of about ten minutes ago, after a three-and-a-half-year hiatus, presumably spurred to action by my attempt to compile the definitive text file of Steven Kaas’s Twitter output, Steven Kaas has returned to Twitter.
And so our eternal game of cat and mouse continues.
(He’s posting quite quickly, too. Perhaps he has saved some up…)
(Edit: I notice that the timestamps on twitter are relative to the reader’s timezone, while the ones here are not. This could create the scandalous implication that I was lying about the “ten minutes ago” thing. You’ll just have to trust me on this one, I guess.)
(Another edit because I have no sense of propriety: It would be slightly more accurate to say that Kaas has returned to tweeting, rather than Twitter per se; he used Twitter back in January to obliquely reference his three-and-a-half-year hiatus a couple of times.)
Any Chinese fiction recommendations for a gift? My brother and his fiancée are studying Mandarin and planning to move to Shanghai for a while, depending on work (he has friends already there). My brother’s birthday is coming up and he wants some more background into Chinese culture.
I presume his fiction needs to be translated into English given how long it takes to learn written Chinese. However my brother did study Japanese at high school and did an exchange so he’s not totally starting from scratch.
So far my only idea is the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, is there something more contemporary but also Western-accessible?
People were going nuts over Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem (三体) last year. It’s the first book of a hard SF trilogy, although no-one ever talks about the other two books. I haven’t read it myself, and don’t plan to anytime soon, but judging by the critical reaction it’s a safe bet.
Also if he’s trying to learn conversational Mandarin then he might want to avoid the Chinese classical canon entirely, for the same reason someone trying to learn English shouldn’t read Shakespeare or Milton.
Onyomi is the guy you should listen to though, since he’s an actual Sinologist and speaks the language. My info is all second- or third-hand through friends and the internet.
I read _The Three Body Problem_ recently. It has some interesting and original ideas, but I don’t think it is a very good story.
For some feel on traditional Chinese society I would recommend Van Gulik’s Judge Dee books.
I know a lot more about premodern literature than modern literature, though Mo Yan, as the only Chinese Nobel Prize winner, may be a good start if looking for contemporary.
But it really depends on what you’re looking for. I, of course, like Three Kingdoms, Journey to the West, Outlaws of the Marsh, Story of the Stone, etc. all of which are available in good English translations, and may give you a sense of the Chinese equivalents to things like King Arthur, Robin Hood, etc., but I can recommend other things for other purposes.
The current official translation of The Three Body Problem is a wonderful choice if you like playing the game of “Gosh, this sentence is super clunky and unnatural in English, let me see if I can deduce what the original Chinese was”. (Having studied Chinese, I played this game myself while reading it. It did eventually get old, though.)
Dr. Dealgood beat me to it but here’s the link if you’re interested. The Three-Body Problem
I liked Three Body Problem, and I *really* liked its sequel. But if the goal is to get some basic background on Chinese culture, I’m not sure that they’re great books for that.
Actually, my science-fiction book club had a really good discussion last month about Chinese culture through the lens of The Three-Body Problem. At least to my naive ears, it sounded very informative. The first several chapters are basically historical fiction set during the Cultural Revolution, and reading between the lines of the rest of the book can (apparently) tell you a fair amount about the modern Chinese cultural mindset.
I definitely wouldn’t choose it as anywhere near the first book they should read, but it’s worth a place on the list.
For background into Chinese culture, have a look at the filmography of Zhang Yimou. Many of his works are, incidentally, adaptations of landmark modern Chinese fiction.
Depending on how good at reading Chinese your brother is, Yu Hua writes in very spare (but powerful) prose that is somewhat accessible for a learner (in the same way that Camus is often a go-to for French learners looking to take a stab at a first novel).
I second this. Especially Yu Hua’s “To Live” is highly recommended, being both easy to read and giving insight into China’s Cultural Revolution.
Wait, the movie was based on a book?
I loved the film, so I’ll probably check out the book as well (I, too, am learning Chinese).
Thank you all.
Some other films that might give you insight into more recent Chinese life (Zhang Yimou is mostly going to give you a highly stylized vision of the past): anything by Ning Ying, and, to a lesser extent, Jia Zhangke. I especially like “I Love Beijing” and “Perpetual Motion.”
Aha! I had already finished Worm, and Pact too, so I do not have better things to do than read this blog!
What about Twig?
I tried. Didn’t really get into it.
The thesis that leftism is optimized for winning intragroup competitions and rightism is optimized for winning intergroup competitions works really well with the cyclical view of history. A rightist group wins intergroup competitions hard enough to establish an empire, but leftists within the empire inevatibly take over it by sacrificing intergroup competitive capability for intragroup status and power, which causes the empire to decline into decadence/degeneracy and eventually collapse as it loses its ability to defend itself from other groups. The most successful empires are the ones that can stave off this process for many centuries, but ultimately they are fighting a neverending battle against entropy, so every empire must eventually grow old and die.
Which is why World War Two ended with the fascists soundly defeating the communists
Nah, National Socialism and National Syndicalism lost to National Bolshevism, National Welfarism, and National … (I’ve run out of a joke for the Brits, send help).
Yes, all those ideologies look superficially similar when you paper over the differences by sticking the same word in front of them
Yes, that is how jokes work.
They weren’t superficially similar, they were the same. Re-read criticisms of fascism and communism of the era, particularly Burnham’s “The Managerial State,” and everything by Orwell from the time (except his initial cricism of Burnham – which he later recanted as objecting on the least relevant grounds).
@nyccine
Agreed.
I think the political spectrum is a triangle, not a square. What I mean by that is as political movements become more authoritarian, left versus right becomes less differentiated. By the time you get to 1984 or North Korea type totalitarianism, it becomes unclear if the state is leftist or rightist.
No, they were not
http://pseudoerasmus.com/2015/05/03/fascism-left-or-right/
@ anon:
In order for that argument to hold water you need to establish that Lenin and Mao were “right wing”.
And libertarianism/liberalism is just bougie socialism according to Marx. These are the jokes, people! Labels are funny.
@anon:
Yes, they were. The linked argument misses the point entirely. Fascists and Communists (and, for that matter, the Federal Government of the US under FDR) were part of a new class of leadership – the managers – that came into being as a result of rapid increases in scale, technological growth that made remote control over large numbers of people a reality, and political/economic catastrophes that traditional capitalist governments couldn’t solve.
Key to understanding why we can claim fascists and communists were the same, in spite of their seemingly opposing objectives, and the violence done to each other, lies in their nature as totalitarian states, which in turn required them to be managerial states; they could not have worked otherwise. As Burnham put it:
That is, tyranny in the past was necessarily limited by the effective reach of the tyrant, which was not great. Sure, any individual citizen may have been at risk of losing his life at the whim of an evil ruler, but it took technology, and a managerial class to run it, to allow totalitarian governments to cow entire populations at will. Once the managerial class was in place, it was only a matter of time before meaningful power was in their hands, not the nominal political leaders.
That Hitler’s fascism rested on claims of German superiority, or that Stalin’s communists (nominally) claimed to be the vanguard of the coming glorious peoples’ revolution, are interesting but largely irrelevant bits of trivia; both were decidedly managerial states, and could not have been otherwise.
All of which is far afield of the point jaimeastorga2000 was trying to make, which is basically a simplified version of Spengler’s concept of the arc of Culture becoming Civilization, then collapsing. That is, a Culture is innately inwardly focused, and can only survive by social cohesion – the tribe must protect itself from outside threats.
However, when the Culture becomes a Civilization, it becomes outwardly focused, and social cohesion is lost. More is to be gained by betraying the tribe, and the Civilization rots, if it doesn’t violently tear itself apart.
Fascism was more left than people seem to know, and communist was much more right than people care to admit.
Sort of.
Fascism was more left during campaigning, and shifted right upon coming to power. Communism was more left during the revolution, and shifted right upon cementing power. Same deal, really. Rightitude is really helpful when in power.
It’s not clear what “right” and “left” mean in this context.
Mussolini was a prominent socialist before inventing fascism, and he seemed to view it as a way of getting socialist results imposed from the top down rather than from the bottom up—the socialist program that he had decided would never work.
If “left” means “lots of government control over the economy,” then fascists and communists were both left. If “right” means “nationalism,” then fascists and successful communist parties were right.
Not necessarily a clear counterexample, Germany and Japan took over a lot of countries before people much bigger than they were united to take them down.
I think the war in the East was unwinnable from the start. The Soviets would have driven the Germans out even if the Western Allies didn’t open a second front (although considering what happened to the parts of Europe that fell under Soviet control after the war, we’re generally glad they did).
Japan is an interesting example. Depending on which side you believe on the war in China, either the Communists or the Nationalists were a lot more active against Japan, each accusing the other of attempting to preserve their forces for an inevitable showdown after the external threat was gone. CKS famously infuriated Stilwell by dragging his feet on actually attacking the Japanese, preferring to wait out the war and let the Communists waste their strength fighting foreign invaders (I know less about Mao/Zhu but it wouldn’t shock me if they pursued a similar strategy).
I don’t know. The Nazis made it literally to the brink of Moscow in 1941, and if it fell, I’m not sure the Soviet government would have survived. There was genuine panic there. And it probably would have fallen, if Barbarossa had started on time.
The Russians were actually very, very well-prepared for the eventuality of Moscow falling. Most of their production had been shifted well past the Ural mountains, and taking Moscow hadn’t saved Napoleon either.
Even without the Balkens, flooding meant that the Germans couldn’t have invaded much earlier.
If the “could the Germans have won in the East” debate is happening, beyond military decisions, the German war machine was hobbled by infighting, itself enabled by Hitler’s poor organizational skills and tendency to let underlings compete against each other.
Up until supply, transport, and weather became an issue, Barbarossa went really well for the Germans. But their intelligence underestimated the beating the Soviets could take and recover, and problems with supply, transport, and gear that couldn’t handle the weather could really not have been fixed enough to seriously make a difference.
For what it’s worth from memory of a book called something like Hitler’s Mistakes, he didn’t just have a tendency to let underlings compete against each other, he set things up that way deliberately so that no one would be likely to go up against him. If I recall correctly, he had competing government agencies that were supposed to do the same thing.
Yeah, he played underlings off against each other so nobody could threaten his place at the top. Perhaps a better way of putting it. Social Darwinist thinking might have played a role (the idea that struggle produces strong winners, applied as an organizational theory). It also appears that his personality was of a sort not conducive to good management: he supposedly had a tendency to seize on small details, change his mind without warning, make decisions based on who spoke to him most recently, etc. It’s not something that emerged when he was a ruler, either: his response to failing to get into art school the first time was to completely ignore the critiques of the people responsible for admissions, confident he would get in a second time.
Regardless of the opening a second front, if the Soviets hadn’t enjoyed the support of the Allies, they would have been much weaker.
If i remember correctly most of the trucks used by the Soviets, were sent there by the Americans, so that the Soviets industry could focus on building weapons.
Some of the trucks were even weaponized as katyusha launchers.
Lend-lease was a big thing.
There was also the sharing of vital intelligence obtained through the Enigma decoding.
I think that the chief reason Hitler didn’t just bomb the Russian oil fields to the stone age when it was clear he wasn’t able to get them for himself, was that it would have made little difference, because the Soviets would have still been able to get all the oil they needed from the Allies.
Without the allies supporting them the concentrated oil fields would have been a titanic achilles heel for the Soviets, and maybe in that case the Germans would have ignored Stalingrad and would have gone straight to the oil, and/or would have bombed the fields relentlessly.
It would have been impossible for the Allies to supply oil to Russia without joining the war since they would have had to either attack the axis-leaning Iran (to open a land route to russia) or challenge an Axis naval blockade.
And if the UK had made peace with Germany, maybe Germany would have been able to import oil and food and other resources from overseas, and this would have changed the whole strategic situation in important ways.
A lot of German effort went into fighting the Allies, and it goes well beyond the ground forces busy fighting or preventing a landing in the West. The battle of the atlantic, the battle of britain, the Western bombardments of germany, the V weapons. I remember reading somewhere that the titanic V3 project (never completed) consumed such an amount of resources for the Axis, it hindered the war effort in the eastern front.
I think that if the war had been just between Germany and Russia, the Germans would have been much stronger in many ways, and the Russians weaker in many ways, and the Germans would probably have won.
Not that any of this matters, it’s a rather pointless debate.
And anyhow the real answer to this is that Hitler most likely attacked Russia despite knowing it was a gamble, because he felt that if he hadn’t taken Stalin out as quickly as possible, Stalin and Churchill and Roosevelt would have attacked Hitler all at once. So this gamble must have seemed the only choice for the Nazis. I think Hitler said something about Russia being Britain’s sword pointed at Germany, and that was before Germany attacked.
clarification regarding the above speculation on who would have won the eastern front war: I mean under the very counterfactual assumption that Germany was at peace with UK and the US.
But the real reason for barbarossa, let me say this again, is that it was clear that the russo-german peace was rather unstable and it was a matter of who betrayed the other first.
Look at the little wars Stalin made to gain space in preparation fo the likely conflict, the attack on Finland, the annexation of Bessarabia, both of which would have granted Russia the bases to bomb German territories, including German controlled romanian oil fields.
When the Americans landed in europe, would the Soviet not have backstabbed Germany to get a piece of it?
Given the world war that was raging, it made sense for hitler to choose to attack first and quickly even if it was risky.
It was a gamble from the start, as were a lot of Hitler’s decisions. They just paid off less and less as the war went on.
However, as gambles went, it suffered from many flaws, from those that could have been fixed, to those that were baked into Hitler’s personality and as a result the Nazi German system. It’s hard to imagine Hitler as more organizationally adept and more willing to give a free hand to the Prussian military aristocrat types (whom he generally disliked, and who generally disliked him). As a result, it’s hard to imagine a Nazi Germany without the duplication of effort, infighting, and resulting logistical problems, or the strategic (as opposed to tactical) shortcomings. While the “Great Man” theory of history is flawed, a lot of the elements that led to Nazi Germany’s defeat were a result of Hitler’s personality.
And it’s not as though the weather of the USSR, the differences between the Soviet and German rail systems, the quality of the roads, etc could be changed.
Do you have clearly defined groups, though? Thinking specificially of American Revolution.
The American Revolution is an interesting case in that the revolutionaries weren’t trying to overthrow the social order, just the political one.
They weren’t trying to get rid of the continental upper-class, in the case of men like Washington and Jefferson they were the upper class.
I thought it was one group of upper class people getting rid of another, with a general middle class scrum.
I second this comment. Cf. Shay’s Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion, where some people from the lower classes tried to overthrow the social order as well – and were roundly defeated by Washington, Adams, Hancock, et al.
The American Rectification, you mean? The Founders had more power than the crown governors to start with, as well as a pretty complete parallel social structure, and the “revolution” simply proved it so they would get the political authority to match.
I find your theory compelling.
How are you defining groups here? Or for that matter, competition? There’s a big difference between open warfare (negative sum), relative status (zero-sum) and advances in science and the arts (positive sum).
To what extent can pre-modern people even be considered leftist?
I think Scott addressed this in Toxoplasma or one of his other posts. They might not map directly but you can definitely look at contrasting examples like Athens and Sparta and say that one was certainly “to the left” of the other.
I think the case of Athens and Sparta provides a potential counterexample to Jaime’s theory (which I think maps fairly well to the Roman and British empires).
Athens, obviously, is the more lefty of the two societies – democracy! The egalitarian navy! Cosmopolitanism-sorta! Sparta is the traditional oligarchy! The hoplites! Spartan virtues!
However, of the two Athens was easily the more adept at enforcing its will militarily. Once it hit its liberal phase Imperial Athens was all but unstoppable – rampaging around the Aegean and Eastern Med without running into many serious obstacles for a good few decades.
Then, when you get to the actual military showdown between the two, it’s the Spartans who are able to sway most of Greece to their cause against the tyrannical Athenians – despite the fact that by Jaime’s theory the Spartans should be more optimized to defeat foreign groups like the Persians or Macedonians, and the Athenians should have been optimized to persuade their Hellenic cultural brethren (I think culture groups make the most sense to evaluate ancient societies, more than political boundaries since there’s no real equivalent to the modern nation-state. That could be throwing off this analysis).
And yet, throughout the war, Athens still punches well above its weight, forcing an early truce on Sparta, surviving a devastating plague, several military debacles (Delium, Mantinea, and, above all, Sicily), and still kept pushing the Spartans to the brink. Had the Spartans not been backed by unlimited Persian gold, Athens probably could have at the very least forced a draw – and the Persians were bankrolling the Spartans in the first place because they judged the Athenians to be the bigger threat! (Notably Persia switched sides a few decades later, after the Spartans had their own go at empire).
In other words, ancient Athens is a fine example of a leftist society solidly outcompeting various rightist societies around it. Perhaps the counterargument could run along the lines of, “Yes, but it was /rightist/ Athenians who created the first Athenian empire, and it was all lost due to later leftist bungling!” But the political dynamics of 5th century Athens don’t seem to map that well to easy left/right distinctions.
Can I just point out though that the reason the Persians did so well at attaining an empire in the first place was Cyrus the great being what Jaime might call a leftist? You could make a similar case for the Romans as well.
The whole idea of rightism and leftism doesn’t map to premodern times, at all.
Of course Athens looks “to the left” of Sparta. Given a measurable variable one item will always be higher in it than the other. It doesn’t follow that it’s useful to talk about it in such terms.
Athens and Sparta is also a cherry-picked example.
Quick, which is more like Elves and which is more like Dwarves, Athens or Sparta? Which is more catholic and which is more protestant? I guess you could answer something to these questions if you really had to, but are they appropriate?
I ought to write a longer comment about this, but I don’t have the time and willpower.
Sacrificing posterity for the present is really ancient. For examples of ancient leftist groups, look at the Black Blankets in India, that fire cult I don’t recall the name of in Persia, the Bogomilists in Bulgaria, and the Cathars in Aquitaine. They tended to be wiped out rather quickly by the temporal and religious authorities, who rather understandably considered them to be an existential threat (in the absence of modern technology, there wasn’t much wiggle room between sustainably staying alive and starving to death).
Are you thinking of Zoroastrianism?
No, no, that group where the king (or sultan?) appointed this young prophet in charge of the country, and he started fucking it up with insane changes, and was executed at some point when enough was enough.
I think that he means Manichaeism.
http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/manicheism-1-general-survey
Mani, the prophet in question, wasn’t given a great degree of power, and was executed because of a court power struggle. Kartir, the Zoroastrian high priest involved with turning Zoroastrianism into a more conventional monotheism established as a state religion, didn’t like heretics having the Shah’s ear, so, when a less sympathetic king took over, Mani was executed.
Interestingly for the point about leftism, Manichaeism seems to have been consciously designed to become a universal religion, incorporating elements from the major world religions of the time. Additionally, it was ideologically related to two of the Christian heresies mentioned (Catharism and Bogomilsim).
I don’t buy this explanation. In particular, the idea that any civil authorities objected to the Cathars seems to be false; the objections came specifically from the Church, and nothing was done about them until the Pope promised to hand over the lands of Cathar-supporting nobles to those willing to provide military force. Nobody cared whether the Cathars were “leftist” or not, and nobody other than the Church hierarchy seems to have regarded them as any kind of threat.
Excepting the King of France, you mean.
Why would I except the King of France (I presume you refer to Philip II), who as far as I can discover did nothing at all about the Cathars until the Pope demanded a crusade?
Philip II delegated fighting to his vassals. His heir, Louis VIII, directly intervened. Both sided with the Papacy on this.
Philip II sided with the Papacy (to the extent that he did) after the Pope had demanded a crusade and authorized the seizure of the lands of Cathar supporters.
Those nobles who pursued the Albigensian Crusade were not in it because they saw any Cathar threat, they were in it for gain. The lords of the domains in which the Cathars actually lived apparently did not see them as a problem and outright rejected the Church’s demands to suppress them.
If that’s your definition of leftism than attempting to mitigate climate change is an extreme right wing position.
Well, it should, but tribalism and politics are complicated.
I wonder what time period the median person in favor of climate change activism would place “serious consequences of climate change inaction” or such. I’m guessing many would put it within their lifetimes, although obviously changes would continue on as well.
Depends on what we mean by “mitigate”.
If your solution is land reclamation and infrastructure projects yes climate change mitigation is a largely “right wing” position.
If your solution is a tax that will fall largely on “the right” while it’s dividends go to “the left” (a la carbon taxes) then climate change mitigation is “left wing” position.
What WHTA said. Also, the question of the reliability of the doomsaying. I’m all for precluding far-off disasters, if those disasters are actually credible.
History says that people who propose theories without mentioning examples probably haven’t looked at examples; and that people who propose social sciene theories without looking at examples are probably not even wrong.
Consider Ibn Khaldun’s theory of Asabiyah driving imperial cycles. Do you consider your hypothesis an elaboration or an alternative? I can’t tell and I think that’s a bad sign.
Consider the decline of the Roman Republic. The last century was marked a series of violent political conflicts that are often said to correspond well with the modern conception of a left-right axis, so we can avoid the problem Wrong Species mentions. But does this political conflict axis have anything to do with competence at intra-group competition? The leftist Caesar won, but he won by being a good general, by promoting asabiyah among his troops, the same way he conquered foreigners. And the rightist Sulla won the same way. Of course, the advent of the Empire was just a change of government, not the collapse of military strength.
In that line: the British Empire. Lost its American colonies and went on and built a new even bigger empire the following century (the 19th). Then went on to win two World Wars and post WWII abandon its empire over the following two decades.
If Britian lost the Americas because of left wing take overs, how did it acquire so much in the 19th century. If Britain lost its second empire because of left wing takeovers, how did they take over so quickly after WWII?
I suspect historical contingency has far more to do with the rise and fall of empires than this model.
Also it’s not like right wing groups are opposed to arrangements that bring them benefits, status and power from the state.
Maybe I was too harsh. Jaime probably did have an example in mind: the British Empire.
Like hlynkacg says, the American Revolution is a special case because it was hardly a social revolution at all.
And your argument “If Britain lost its second empire because of left wing takeovers, how did they take over so quickly after WWII” makes me wonder how little you know of Britain post-WWII – because that is almost exactly what happened. The Labour Party, which back then was outright socialist, made significant strides during the Great Depression but, on its one admittance to government, lost a vote of confidence before enacting any of its policies. During the war, however, Churchill let them into the coalition and handed over most domestic policy to them… and the voters liked Labour domestic policy and roundly handed them the 1945 election.
So, yes, the British Empire can easily be made to follow this model.
Nah, not seeing it. It seems way too rapid a transition for the theory. The theory calls for a decline into decadence and degeneracy. The dropping of the UK empire post WWII strikes me as so rapid to be best explicable by a change in ideology. Also, the Brits went on to later re-elect Churchill, did they, after years of Labour rule, suddenly abruptly move rightwards?
And the American Revolution, I don’t see how it being social or not affects the British argument. George III was still determinedly trying to hold on to the American colonies. He didn’t care that their’s wasn’t a social revolution.
While we’re on that topic, how many revolts against occupying powers are social revolutions? The collapse of the Ottoman Empire doesn’t strike me as associated with that many social revolutions.
>The collapse of the Ottoman Empire doesn’t strike me as associated with that many social revolutions.
Are you kidding? Ataturk pretty much remade Turkish society from the ground up.
@Anonymous: Ataturk was Turkey. Not the Balkans, which were the counties breaking away from the Ottoman Empire. Ataturk only came to power after the Ottoman Empire had lost its colonies.
You are right. The Ottoman colonial possessions rebelling was just the regular subjugated peoples revolting against foreign masters. I seem to recall the great powers of the time having an active hand is the process, though.
@Anonymous
I think that you might relate the revolts in the Ottoman Balkans and Greece to European nationalism, which was closely related to liberalism (of the classical sort) at that time.
Just a little clarification. The Fall of the Republic is not a fall of an empire that Jaime is trying to explain. Indeed, when people try to explain A it is often good to apply their theory to not-A to see if they predict too much. But that’s not what I’m doing, either. I’m not looking at his theory at all, but isolating the claim that leftism is intra-group competition. My question is: do the Populares fit this definition of Left. Jaime, do you have a precise enough definition for there to be an answer?
HUH! I like this!
For a while I’ve had a toy model of civilisation that runs like this: We’re an evolving population of agents playing noisy IPD with people near us. “Civilisation” means playing T4Tish strategies, “barbarism” means playing ADish strategies, Barbarians beat civilised people wherever they meet, but civilisation wins more points overall and grows outwards.
I butcher your model and interpret it as: “left” means playing something at the forgiving tit-for-N-tats end of the spectrum, while “right” means playing something more vengeful like N-tits-for-a-tat. In this case left people get more points when playing amongst civilised people, but right people do better against barbarians.
The best group level strategy (the thing I would play if I could do group selection over whole civilisations rather than being an individual) is to have a core of leftists making a surplus and giving that surplus to a group of rightists who surround them and protect them from outsiders.
You want to avoid both “decadence” (having only leftists and losing to barbarians), and “brutishness” (having only rightists and not winning much surplus and so not growing). But decadence is the strategy that follows local incentives everywhere, and if you have institutions that avoid decadence it’s easy to make them too strong and arrive at brutishness.
Alternate interpretation: “left” represents an always-cooperate strategy, “right” represents a cooperate-within-tribe, defect-outside-tribe strategy.
I thought that civilization was being settled, and barbarism was nomadism or semi-nomadism.
Sure, but there’s something more in civilisation that a) makes being settled long term possible and b) means the civilised people are much much richer than anyone else.
The toy model tries to explain those differences rather than the bare fact of being settled. Because if you take most barbarian people and just tell them to settle it won’t work out well.
How do you apply “left” and “right” to all of human history, though? It’s not even necessarily a great descriptive system for right now.
The thesis does seem to be true in activist circles, though. Right-wing activists seem to do a lot less of the “a-ha! You are secretly ONE OF THEM!” thing, or at least that’s my impression. It could easily be that I have more exposure to the left.
I like and subscribe to this view, but there is one gaping flaw in it, which I readily acknowledge.
It depends entirely on the definition of “left” and “right”, and it is way to easy to define oneself a good argument. Especially retroactively. But I think Sailer has the right of it, leftism is all about leapfrogging loyalty. By that metric, this works. It’s not something that stands up to objective criticism, but it’s a sometimes useful explanation.
FWIW, this model makes Leninism a leftist movement, but once consolidated, the USSR under Stalin is a hard-right expansionist colonial empire. Which I think is supportable, but it’s kind of circuitous to be arguing that communism was right-wing. And demonstrates the weakness of the terms being used.
The epicycle form of this argument would be that ingroup/outgroup are all in relation to western civilization, which developed all these political philosophies. Russians (and Egyptians, Chinese, etc.) are allowed to be
“leftist” and still rabidly nationalistic, explansionist and colonialist (right-wing traits, usually) because they aren’t part of the West. This too has a grain of truth, but in explaining everything, explains nothing.
I recommend we taboo the words “right” and “left” and all their derivatives (in the context of politics). Any time someone makes a comment involving the left-right spectrum, the following debate devolves into a discussion of what those words really mean. If what you mean by “left” is a political movement that supports more centralization in economic affairs, say that. If what you mean by “right” is a political movement concerned with preserving monarchy (or some other form of entrenched hierarchy), say that. If you want to draw an analogy between a historical political movement and a contemporary one, say precisely what makes them similar.
I recommend we taboo recommendations of tabooing things because I don’t think tabooing things works. They don’t get people to stop thinking in those terms, they just force people to use wordy workarounds to express what they are really thinking.
We can make an argument that thinking in a certain way is unhelpful, though when a concept is ubiquitous in one’s one society one almost has to be able to use it and think about it, if nothing else, to refer to the common memeplex which exists, even if one think it shouldn’t exist.
There are, of course, certain phrases like “white guys” and “cuck” which probably should be avoided because they overwhelmingly tend to be followed by something horrible, but I think that’s probably a different issue.
In many cases, I agree but Garret is right on this one. Left and Right are already slippery, hard-to-define concepts in this day and age. It’s almost meaningless outside the last 300-400 years. In a battle between Confucianism and Legalism, which is the progressive side? What about Genghis Khan? Alexander the Great?
From ozymandias‘s tumblr (and I think fairly accurate):
Even if we don’t taboo the words “left” and “right,” I would recommend we all voluntarily stop using those terms. When I was young and (more) naive, I used to get in arguments about left and right and they never went anywhere productive.
Suppose you want to critique economic central planning. You could say it in one of the following ways:
(1) The left is wrong because…
(2) The left, which I define as people who generally support economic planning, is wrong because…
(3) Economic planning is a bad idea because…
(1) is vague and confusing. If nobody asks you to clarify what you mean by “the left” you risk talking past them. If you do clarify, it becomes (2).
(2) is more specific, but it’s also unnecessarily hostile. Right off the bat, by framing the argument as a critique of “the left” you’ve alienated half the population. Your friend who doesn’t care about economic planning either way and identifies as part of “the left” solely because he supports gay marriage now feels like you’re attacking him personally.
That leaves (3), which gets right to the point you’re trying to make without being more hostile than it has to be.
In jaimeastorga2000’s comment that started this thread, he wasn’t critiquing either side but giving a sort of sociological theory of political schisms and broad historical trends. I think his point could have been stronger if he had eschewed “right” and “left” for descriptions of the groups he was talking about. He could have then mapped those groups onto specific groups in contemporary politics (like Scott’s “Blue Tribe” and “Red Tribe”).
“In a battle between Confucianism and Legalism, which is the progressive side?”
Legalism.
Really? Whenever I read about Chinese history I do these mental substitutions to keep the groups straight:
Legalists = Authoritarians
Confucians = Moderates
Daoists = Left-Libertarians
If I had to arrange them from right to left I’d put Legalists on the right, Confucians in the center, and Daoists on the left. The Daoists come out as left-libertarians because they’re generally pacifist and because Emperor Wen of Han, while being generally pretty free market, introduced the world’s first state-funded old-age pension.
It’s worth remembering that our picture of the Legalists comes largely from their enemies. When someone actually excavated a tomb with Legalist documents in it, it turned out that that description was, to put it mildly, exaggerated.
The Legalists apparently believed in the same law for everyone, the Confucianists clearly believed in legal rules depending on status and relationship. Left or right?
Which is Left and which is Right between Guelphs and Ghibellines?
Like I said elsewhere, I guess you could force an answer, but it would be just that – forced. At what point do we admit that the right versus left dichothomy is not appropriate to historical discussion?
In fact, as shown by the endless debate on whether fascist were right or left, the present day categories don’t even map well on the early 20th century.
True communists in my country ages ago thought little of the sexual revolution. They thought it was a bourgeois thing. They would never have thought that support for gays was to become left wing thing. The would have thought that homosexuality is a bourgeois malaise.
Scott called the Roman Empire left wing, presumably compared to the later Christian European civilization, but does it really make sense given that the Romans were immensely more ruthless in all sort of ways, practiced slavery and cruel gladiatorial games and were really sexist and didn’t see compassion as a virtue and generally had an almost BDSM view of life if BDSM wasn’t a consensual game, whereas the medieval Church opposed slavery and wife beating, and celebrated love of neighbour, and declared lots and lots of women saint.
BUT – the medievals were fanatically religious (a right wing trait for Scott), and most intolerant of religious differences, and had smaller governments (and no such thing as a Roman style food stamp system). So?
Ozy, as quoted here by Vox Imperatoris, is spot on. Even today, left and right are coalitions of convenience.
I think that Americans, due to their electoral system which permits the survival of just two parties, have a heightened perception of the made-up duality. In countries with a proportional system, and therefore a more complex system of parties, the duality is less strongly perceived (although it tends to still exists simply because there always tend to be two sides to a struggle).
Look, I could list the political ideologies in my country, and it would be impossible to map them along the left-to-right continuum in such a way that groups that are close to each other have similar views. I can think of so many factions that for lack of options would end up in the middle of the spectrum but are extremely different from one another.
You could make up a cathegory and judge all ideologies in history according to that category.
I’m sure that to a Christian fundamentalist (or a medieval Christian), all of history looks like a struggle between the Devil and God.
To a libertarian, it’s all totalitarianism versus freedom (have you noticed that of libertarians?)
To a white nationalist influenced by Evola, it’s all different degrees of racial purity.
And to progressives, it’s all progressivism versus conservatism.
To think of it, the last one makes the least sense.
I just heard a great interview with Michael Malice in which he defined left and right thus:
How do you answer the question, “are some people better than others?”?
Yes=right
Big speech to deal with cognitive dissonance=left
I think the Confucians would be more okay with “yes” than the legalists, btw.
The problem is not defining left and right.
The problem is whether it’s useful when you’re dealing with distant history.
“The problem is whether it’s useful when you’re dealing with distant history.”
I think the answer is definitely “sometimes.” Though maybe not too often.
“are some people better than others?”
Lenin would have said yes.
Proletarians are better than the bourgeoisie.
@ anonymous:
And if the question is: “Are some people inherently superior, in some kind of ethical sense?” that is disagreed with by many conservatives who “hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed”.
While the early Progressive movement was very much in favor of eugenics and segregation.
As you say, the attempt to map out “left” and “right” this way fails.
Nine out of ten I agree with you, but I still think that “Death Eaters” is a better, or at least funnier, phrase than its original.
If taboos are taboo, how can we taboo taboos?
As a side note, I think “taboo” is a fun word to say. Taboooooo.
Maybe we can just ban all words and communicate by rubbing our brains directly against each other
Counter-proposal: taboo the words “left” and “right” in all contexts other than politics, and use only the words “left” and “right” in political discussions.
They have become pretty useless since the invention of Google maps. “Go down Main Street and turn right on Jefferson,” has all but been replaced by “my address is 123 Jefferson.”
Left right right left right right right left left right right left right right right right.
up up down down left right left right B A select start
I second this and also see the same debates devolve into irresolvable discussions on what “left” and “right” mean. I blame it on intellectual laziness. Sweeping generalizations are much easier than the concrete examples you recommend. Using concrete examples requires you to actually know what you are talking about, abstractions like left and right have no such requirement.
In the Tulip Subsidies post Scott suggested banning asking about college degrees in hiring decisions. A lot of people responded that this wouldn’t really make a dent in credentialism, since people could still put their educational credentials on their resumes, and then businesses could choose based on them and pretend they made the hiring decision based on something else (like they can with anything else)
My question is, assuming you actually can make the ban effective and make college graduation a protected characteristic that employers genuinely won’t use, what do you do with the millions of people who went tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to get a piece of paper you just made worthless?
A better policy may be to cap the number of students colleges can admit, based on the number of jobs that actually require college level education. This would in the long run make it difficult to use degrees as status signaling, because there simply wouldn’t be enough college graduates, but wouldn’t immediately destroy the value of already issued degrees.
I don’t think making something more scarce typically decreases its signalling value.
> cap the number of students colleges can admit, based on the number of jobs that actually require college level education
Hiw on earth would one actually do this in any way that wouldn’t be a colossal disaster? From a centralized assessment of the number of jobs that “actually” require a degree to deciding which colleges get to admit how many students (and what about new colleges?), this solution is a complete non starter. I’m far from libertarian but this sounds like “the way we solve misallocation of capital is just by doing it explicitly”
Announce that eligibility for admission to a state university, or to any school that takes government funded financial aid is contingent on an SAT (or other exam) score of X — where X is set to produce the number of students desired.
Like this.
(tl;dr: Fixed number of government-supported places paid partially by the government and the rest the government provides you with a loan for on extremely good terms, but if you want to pay the uni the full price they’d charge without the subsidy they’ll take you).
Ireland has done it for decades, 3rd level education used to be free, funded by the state and college places were allocated based on tests in the final year of secondary education.
It’s estimated how many graduates are going to be needed in various sectors and the sizes of courses across the country are adjusted to match.
The institutions do have some leeway and there are further mechanisms for incentivizing people to take courses in areas where they project strong demand but aren’t getting enough applicants. Their projections aren’t perfect but they tend to be far better than the average high-school students guesses on the matter.
The other way around appears nuts to me, I’ve met a fair few european students from countries where they run an american style supply/demand system for college courses, where if 100 times more people than their are jobs want to study a subject featured in a recent Hollywood blockbuster then they’ll make the slots. In practice it leads to a lot of new grads being upset because they have no chance of getting a job.
I went with a postgrad in one of the areas that they’d projected high-need and as such my post-grad was very very cheap. It’s worked out well for me and I’ve had an easy time finding well paying jobs. They had superior information vs student me.
It’s been done. It’s being done. It works reasonably well. It’s not perfect but is pretty good.
Fortunately, there’s a movement to have the government write off or repay all student loan debt! No word what’ll happen to the people who’ve actually paid their debt already at the sacrifice of other parts of their lives, though.
As someone who in a semester will graduate from college (about 20k in debt), I can say that a writeoff would be of substantial advantage to me. But I have a hard time thinking of a reason that ramping up subsidies for college even more or writing off student loan debt would be in the over-all public interest. The fact that there is a cost to college is about the only anchor that prevents the people from obtaining economically worthless degrees, and about the only anchor that limits degrees being obtained for social signaling reasons.
You could do the same thing done with the worthless paper after 2008, I suppose… the government has a TERP — Troubled Education Relief Program — and buys out the college degrees for money. Of course there’d be a huge fight about how much, and whether every degree of a given level was the same or whether maybe an Art History degree ought to be bailed out for less than a Computer Science degree, and then the question of whether school prestige should be taken into account…
Presumably, you test your prospective employees and the ones who are better, you hire. This SHOULD correlate with those who have pieces of paper, if those pieces of paper actually demonstrate what they’re supposed to demonstrate, but not necessarily correlate with useless degrees.
… the ones who are better, you hire
And the ones you don’t hire, sue. It isn’t quite true that Griggs v. Duke Power Co. made pre-employment IQ testing and the like illegal in the United States, but it did give anyone who failed such a test a great big stick to wield in subsequent legal maneuvers. In the United States, if you want your company’s main line of business to be anything but defending against lawsuits, you want any testing to be done by Somebody Else, or to be hallowed by tradition, or to be very narrowly tailored to the job’s duties – and that last bit only works if the job’s duties are very narrow.
Otherwise, colleges and universities are traditionally enshrined as Somebody Else Who Tests People for General Smartness and Conscientiousness.
This is of course the US-centric view, things may be different elsewhere.
I’m glad someone brought up Griggs. I just wanted to add a few other relevant cases to this thread to illustrate how strange the judicial landscape is in the U.S. in regards to discrimination law.
In United Steelworkers v. Weber, the Supreme Court decided in a 5-2 ruling that a company that had a policy of allowing whites and blacks into a training program in a 1:1 ratio was acting lawfully, despite the fact that the company had many more white employees than black employees and could thus be seen as discriminating against its white employees.
In Piscataway School Board v. Taxman a case which never made it to the Supreme Court, a school board needed to eliminate a teaching position. This is normally done in reverse order of seniority, but the two newest teachers had started working on the same day, and one was white while the other was black. The school board decided to lay off the white teacher to keep the diversity the black teacher provided. When the white teacher sued, the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit found in her favor. The school board wanted to appeal it to the Supreme Court, but Civil Rights groups feared that doing so would result in a ruling not to their liking, so they provided money for the board to settle the case out of court. This means that the Third Circuit court ruling stands.
In Ricci v. DeStefano, the Supreme Court decided in a 5-4 ruling that when a fire department threw out the results of a test they gave because promoting based on the test results would cause disparate impact against blacks, they violated the Title VII rights of the white and Hispanic firefighters who would have been promoted based on the test results.
All of this information I found on Wikipedia; if there are any mistakes, it is my fault for not checking more carefully.
While all of this is correct, I think it’s important to note regarding United Steelworkers v. Weber that the supreme court has taken a more narrowly tailored view of government entities (in particular quota systems are considered unconstitutional when its the government doing it), though that tends to mostly be about college admissions, not employment, as government hiring practices don’t generally overreach.
I’ve always had trouble squaring this with all of the jobs that still require testing. Military, police, fire, aviation, teaching, although for teaching I suppose it’s the credential you test for, not the job. At least normal teaching. I used to do test prep teaching and the sole requirement was score higher than 95th percentile on whatever test you wanted to teach.
Don’t fire departments routinely get sued over alleged racial bias in their tests? It certainly comes up in the news quite a bit.
I think so, but you have to prove a disparate impact between different protected groups to invalidate the test. You can’t just oppose testing on the basis that it’s testing. And that only works because it’s a civil service. You can’t sue Kaplan because requiring people to take the GRE prior to teaching it means they hire fewer black people (if it even actually means that – I have no idea what the racial makeup of their instructors is). Or in the opposite direction, people who apply to the NFL draft are probably the most thoroughly tested prospective employees in any industry. They even have to take an intelligence test. I don’t see any plausible avenue through which anyone can sue them because, say, I think the whole league has only ever had one Asian player and zero females.
I’ve always had trouble squaring this with all of the jobs that still require testing.
Most of those are jobs (or specialties) with very narrow requirements that can be subject to very narrow tests tailored specifically to those requirements. That is something that Griggs and subsequent legal precedent allows.
One of the things that came out of the fire department lawsuits is that the written tests didn’t have any obvious connection to firefighting. It also came out that informal study guides were being passed down in certain communities.
Worm is evil. Don’t read it. It took 2 weeks of my life it, and when it was over I was left with the most profoundly empty feeling I’ve ever experienced.
I can’t wait for the sequel!
I fed that emptiness with fanfiction of varying quality until I got sick of the nth “Taylor gets a different power, probably from another setting” fic, looked around and realised “hey, where’d the last two months go?”
Apologies if this is a bit scatter-shot but I don’t get to an open thread before it has 500+ comments very often.
Anyway, in the guns and states posts there was some discussion of “masculinity”. Several people asserted that masculinity was the willingness to embrace violence. As a former boxer I really liked this answer, but it feels incomplete.
Now I have a theory that I want to run by the commentariat.
In much the same way that there is “feminine virtue” associated with being maternal and nurturing, there is a “masculine virtue” associated with being ready to suffer through the meaner aspects of life. Violence is a key aspect of this, but not the defining aspect.
In the comments of Staying Classy Xtmar says of “the Gentry”:
I would assert that this connection is the real essence of what we call “masculinity”.
As a kid you never had to worry about the price of food or rent that was your parents job. But as you get older you’re expected to “man up” and handle your own affairs.
Do you think the infamous Pajama Boy ever had a problem that wasn’t a “first world problem”. Do really think that he has ever made a choice that had real and lasting consequences? I’m guessing the answer is no, and that’s why I instinctively categorize him as childish and effeminate.
Meanwhile women like Queen Elisabeth, Margaret Thatcher, Indira Gandhi, and Angela Merkel were able to rise to the top of ostensibly patriarchal societies, leading armies and commanding the loyalty of millions by demonstrating a certain willingness to get their metaphorical hands dirty and put their own asses on the line because that’s what real empowerment requires.
My favorite short book related to this is Yukio Mishima’s “Sun and Steel”. There’s also a lot of talk in the Christian Dominionist/Calvinist side of the internet that it is the ability to be cut off from the community/polis and suffer, and through suffering become strong. Separateness is the key concept, constrasted with feminine community. Vision quests, mascunlitity rites, knights kneeling and praying overnight, etc.
Not to say that they didn’t have the qualities you mention. But Queen Elisabeth rose to the top entirely as a result of inheritance, and Indira Gandhi did it mostly through inheritance.
In both cases there were others who could have staked a claim so you can’t discount their rise as entirely inheritance.
Elizabeth’s rival claimant was another woman, so he’s still kinda right.
Actually I brainfarted and thought he was talking about Elizabeth II. I saw Elizabeth in a list of 20th/21st century woman leaders and assumed she fit the pattern. I agree that you can’t honestly describe Elizabeth I’s ascension to the throne as being primarily the result of inheritance considering the difficulty she faced in surviving that long and out-maneuvering rival claimants.
IMHO – masculinity is probably more about dominance, about dishing out violence rather than just being exposed to it.
(But then I’m a guy who hates hanging out with guys, and who is outrageously successful romantically with lesbian women. So take this with a grain of salt – I might not know that much about masculinity.)
This is the uncharitable and immature outsider’s view, quite often. And much male interaction is dominance-based, but that is not the essence. In fact, it is the resistance to this that marks masculinity. Essentially, masculinity is the solution to the problem of wayward masculinity. To be strong, and thereby protect the weak. Not to be the predator that necessitates the protection.
Outside the venue of casual conflict, male social organs are extremely efficient and cooperative, moreso than female ones. There will be a shaking out period where the local heirarchy is established, and roles assigned, but once that happens, everyone knows where they stand and what is expected. In healthy groups, leadership is much more about responsibility than dominance.
And within the sphere of dominance, it matters greatly what that dominance display is being used for. If it’s a pissing match outside a bar, that’s a failure. If it’s a coach psyching his team up for a game, or a sergeant correcting a new soldier, it’s just another tactic toward a goal.
Sastan says:This is the uncharitable and immature outsider’s view, quite often. And much male interaction is dominance-based, but that is not the essence.
Agreed, which is why when confronted with the pure violence/dominance theory I felt the need to dig. I can think of several examples of men who did not fit this mold but who still qualify as “capital M” Manly even in the eyes of “Red Pill” types.
This connection to the meaner bits of life and the virtue of “toughness/standing up for ones self” seem to be the common thread.
This sex-segregated model of virtue has a few flaws:
1. Defining strength and responsibility as “men’s virtues” leads us to think of women as inherently weak and irresponsible. E.g., in your comment: “I instinctively categorize him as childish and effeminate“. You explained the childish part, but where did “effeminate” come from?
2. Defining care and nurturing as “women’s virtues” erases or even denigrates the valuable roles and behaviors of many men. When a father takes care of his children, is he being “feminine”? If a man chooses to go into nursing, is he “effeminate”?
tl;dr: Be caring when appropriate, be tough when appropriate. Base your decisions on the entire set of circumstances, not only on the shape of your genitals.
This is a criticism more of the morality of what we’re modeling than of the model itself. A map of Mordor can be beneficial, even though Mordor itself is awful. There’s a very good reason that many people all over the political spectrum are unimpressed with current gender roles, but that doesn’t mean that gendered virtues aren’t currently women=(soft/flexible/caring/social) man=(strong/brittle/stoic/independent), even if they should probably be changed.
Regarding 1. and 2., this is the pajama boy ad. He’s wearing a female or androgynous watch (thin delicate strap), androgynous glasses (wide oval-ish shape), he has comparatively little upper body strength, and he’s holding the world’s tiniest cup in two limp and slender hands. He looks a tad feminine, although still identifiably male.
This is a picture of Merkel. She’s wearing a workmanlike black blouse with slightly padded shoulders, has short hair, is quite stocky, has a relatively androgynous silver necklace on, is gripping a podium while leaning slightly towards the camera, and is gesturing with an outstretched hand while a flag leans behind her. She looks powerful, and she looks a little masculine.
Any disagreement here would be helpful: others may have a different take on the images, but this was mine, and I think it would be the general agreement amongst people I know. Hopefully we can talk about gender in the open thread in a kind, truthful, and necessary way.
Oh, I assumed that Hlynka was aiming at a prescriptive account of masculinity.
I think you mean “a women’s or unisex watch”. “A female watch” gives a slightly disturbing mental image.
More substantially, the kid’s wearing an old-fashioned watch, because he’s a hipster. And he’s holding an ordinary coffee cup (i.e., not a mug) — he’d look even younger / more childish if the cup were larger. I’ve no idea what you mean by “androgynous glasses” — what do “manly” glasses look like? Something like this?
Merkel is wearing a jacket — as expected from a middle-aged woman in a public office. An image search for her name will show you Ms Merkel in similarly formal women’s outfits in various colors. And here’s an image of Margaret Thatcher, not looking terribly masculine in her make-up and pearls.
It seems to me like a large part of your perception is driven by their body shape (the kid is young and skinny, Merkel is older and “quite stocky”, as you said) and by the circumstances when the picture was taken (the kid is — supposedly — relaxing with his family at home, Merkel is giving an official speech at work).
And even more substantially — so, we’ve found an image of a gentle-looking young man, and an image of a no-nonsense-looking older lady. What does this tell us about masculinity or femininity?
It tells us that what you euphemistically call gentleness is decidedly unmasculine. Most people have an immediate disgust reaction to seeing a man behaving that way, yet analogous images of women are generally considered cute.
More interestingly to me, the fact that no-nonsense older women don’t generally provoke this disgust reaction seems to imply that being no-nonsense is not particularly unfeminine above a certain age.
I’d object to “most people.” The disgustingness of pajama boy is a Red shibboleth, and as is usually the case with those things, it’s not reflected in Bluetopia. In fact, I’d argue that the differing views of masculinity are a huge part of what is driving the two cultures apart in the first place.
@ Dr Dealgood
In what way? Cradling a cup in his hands while wearing pajamas?
Are you also disgusted when you see a man cradling a child, for example?
Or how about this: imagine a really buff dude, like a stereotypical lumberjack, being gentle. Still disgusted? How much of this is about the behavior, and how much is about body shape?
I think the difference between the father’s genuinely masculine gentleness and pajama boy’s euphemistic ‘gentleness’ was best expressed by Nietzsche:
That ties into your other question about body type versus behavior. A weak body is unmasculine and so is a weak character.
Nita, Dr. Dealgood:
The Doctor’s argument fits in nicely with the power-warmth dichotomy as discussed in the link I posted below (comments tree structure to be damned). The picture seems to scream “warmth”, i. e. feminity.
So, if that is true, yes there is a discrepancy to observe between the person’s apparent gender and the gender signal as defined by the photograph’s content.
It seems obvious that such discrepancy can cause strong reactions (e. g. disgust) but that it should be the same reaction in “most people” is pure rhetorics.
I *like* pajama boy. I’m not fond of his pajamas (don’t fit? excessively heavy flannel?), but he looks like someone I’d like and trust– intelligent, interested, and temperamentally solid.
I bet it’s the flannel. He looks like he’s in a warm room.
Just as further evidence of how odd my tastes are, I thought Legolas in the movies was *ugly*. The effect has worn off to the point where I think it’s merely plain, but this is absolutely not what inhuman beauty looks like.
@ Dr Dealgood
I would agree that the distinction between weakness and gentleness is important. Gentleness being capability coupled with restraint.
Further more I would assert that this is what allows men like MLK, Mahatma Gahndi, or Mister Rogers to trip the “M for Manly” circuit in a lot of people’s brains despite being otherwise non-threatening.
Coming back rather late, I don’t think “he looks gentle” when I see this, I think “he looks kind of like a woman”, and the inverse for Merkel. I’m not disgusted by either of them, I have a similar reaction to someone who sees a pug and thinks “that dog looks a bit like a cat”, and I’ve tried to outline why.
What this tells us about masculinity and femininity, as I perceive them, is that they’re correlated with how hard/soft the subject is. For a more ridiculous and hopefully less controversial example, I see this giant piece of mining equipment as masculine and this bit of moss as feminine. This reaction doesn’t feel voluntary, and seems to be shared by a number of other commenters.
I’m curious as to how someone would understand masculinity and femininity without an intuitive approach. This might be the source of the difference of opinion: “be consistent in gender” is a strange and arbitrary rule without a sense of gender, in the same sense that “act less green” is a strange and arbitrary to those of us without synaesthesia.
You’re ignoring the vaguely smug facial expression and the hipster glasses. “Disgust reaction” sounds like waaay to strong a statement, but, to use plain words, the guy certainly has what many, many people would deem a “punchable face”.
@purple anon — You’re in these comments, and you’re trying to score points by accusing people of being outside the norm?
@Dr Dealgood
Serious question – You say that that that photo triggers your disgust reaction. How often do you have disgust reactions to this sort of thing during your day? Is it just for photos or does it trigger for people in the street, the effeminate waiter at your local restaurant, etc.?
So I’ve been mostly ignoring this thread about “pajama boy”, and then I look at the actual picture.
You’re all getting worked up about this? He looks perfectly normal. If it causes a “disgust reaction” in you, the fault lies not in his pajamas but in yourselves.
@ Vox
As I said elsewhere, outrage is not the word I would choose, nor is the reaction disgust per say.
The issue is that, as Nornagest says:
Personally, I’m kind of insulted. But the insult is less interesting and less important to me than the meta analysis. 😉
@Chalid,
I don’t really encounter very many people like that in my day-to-day life, so not that often. There’s a business intern in my lab’s building who looks fairly pajama boyish and I occasionally accrete self-proclaimed friends who are into the effeminacy + neoteny thing but for the most part we just don’t move in the same circles.
Also I’m from the city so my default is to filter people out if they’re not important. Random pedestrians don’t register for me except in the blindsight-esque avoiding obstacles sense.
For clarification, when I say disgust it’s less of a “SPIDER! Kill it!” reaction and more like someone with very poor hygiene. Gross but you can still put a smile on and be friendly if you have a reason to.
@Everyone else,
Thank you for your unsolicited advice on my mental health. I’ll go get treatment for my unPC thoughts immediately.
He just looks like a little kid. Jeez. I wasn’t all the masculine when I was 12, either. What this tells us about masculinity and femininity is they’re barely meaningful prior to people going through enough puberty to acquire secondary sex characteristics.
From what I can gather from the (restricted) internet, he was probably 22-23 at the time the picture was taken.
@Vox
Pajama Boy confirms the worst suspicions just like the Julia ad from Obama’s 2012 campaign.
The Julia interactive website showed a 20-something woman #winning in life by eventually retiring alone and getting to participate in community gardening!
Just as Julia should aspire to connect with more people, Pajama boy should aspire to be more manly (Even if it is really cold). Both ads portrayed Dem’s as settlers or people who couldn’t hack it, thus both became acceptable to lampoon.
@purple anon — Not what I’m getting at (but thanks for the free psychoanalysis, bro). Let me be more explicit.
Practically everyone here lives in a bubble of weird (and WEIRD) people and weird politics. You can’t trust anecdotes about what is and isn’t normal, because it’s typically going to be normal relative to a baseline that’s three or four sigmas out on every conceivable axis. Now, not everyone is like that, but if you wanna argue that you have a better perspective, it’s on you to prove it.
That applies to Dr Dealgood as much as to you, and it would have been appropriate to say so. But it’s a lot ruder to imply mental illness in another commentator than it is to talk about Joe Sixpack’s preferences, and so it’s polite to use a higher standard of evidence when you’re doing it.
Same question to you as to “hlynkacg”:
What are you trying to explain/prove?
You can arbitrarily call any set of virtues manly or womanly. You then can find examples for these sets, apparently from both genders. So we can conclude that you named the sets poorly in the first place, no?
Or is it that you are giving us a data-point of your subjective mental image of manly and womanly virtues so that, if we all did the same, we could aggregate and thus build a map of Mordor? In which case some of the work not suprisingly has been done already, e. g. http://psp.sagepub.com/content/27/9/1164.short
So, the study seems to show that:
1) Men tend to think of men as “stronger” (confident, dominant, potent, loud, bold, dynamic), but not “colder” (detached, harsh, rigid, surly, rude, hostile, cruel).
2) Women tend to think of women as “warmer” (nice, caring, gentle, pleasant, supportive), but not “weaker” (timid, vulnerable, fragile, failures, losers).
3) If you remove the positive/negative valence implicit in the dichotomies (i.e., instead of “strong vs weak”, give them “destroy vs feeble”, “loud vs quiet” or “mighty vs gentle”), men and women display a much more similar pattern of stereotypes.
4) “[M]en and women who associated self with potency (or warmth) also associated their gender with potency (or warmth).”
The various opinions expressed in this thread (e.g., manly men being outraged at “pajama boy”) do appear to fit neatly into their model.
u1 = 256.0 / 2048.0;
v1 = 64.0 / 1024.0;
u2 = 288.0 / 2048.0;
v2 = 96.0 / 1024.0;
src3du = u1;
src3dv = v1;
src3dh = (u2 – u1) * 2;
src3dw = (v2 – v1) / 2;
Outrage is not the word I would choose, nor is the reaction disgust per say.
The outrage, if there is any, is in the implied message of the ad, “This is how we see you”.
@ hlynkacg
It’s really hard for me to wrap my head around that. I’ve been annoyed at excessively stereotypical portrayals of women, but insufficiently stereotypical ones? I guess this is related to the self-image/stereotype interaction described in the study Alex linked.
I.e., I don’t consider myself particularly feminine or “warm”, so pro-stereotypical portrayals of women-in-general can rub me the wrong way, while counter-stereotypical portrayals feel refreshing. You, on the other hand, seem to see yourself as manly and strong, therefore pro-stereotypical portrayals of men are affirming, but counter-stereotypical portrayals are disturbing.
(As a side note, I think the kid was supposed to represent “very young adults”, not “men”.)
>What are you trying to explain/prove?
I’m trying to explain that the expectations set by the categories are not at all easy to circumvent, in contrast to what “base your decisions on the entire set of circumstances, not only on the shape of your genitals” would suggest. In doing so, I’ve fallen victim to the typical mind fallacy, since a significant number of other people see pajama boy as normal, not particularly smug, and masculine.
In contrast, I see a set of extremely effeminate and pretentious behaviors – relating to dress, posture, and body shape – that bias me against him. Without knowing anything about him, I automatically assume he’d be the kind of man who’d call you at 1AM hyperventilating over something ridiculous; who probably went to a private school where nobody would call him gay for drinking fairtrade hot chocolate from an actual cup, rather than blend 43 or cheap teabags from a chipped mug; and who, if he was punched, would respond by screaming and thrashing rather than either defusing the situation or swinging back. None of this is remotely fair to him, he’s probably the head of the AMF or a famous search and rescue operative or something, but he symbolically represents both a type of freedom that I don’t have and a type of man I don’t like.
Merkel, too, makes me glad she’s not my mother or my wife. She seems hard as nails and and sterile as a hospital ward from the bad old days. She’s probably absolutely lovely behind closed doors, but since when has logic stood in the way of implicit association?
Regardless of whether it’s stupid to feel these things, regardless of whether it’s morally wrong or mindkilling or derogatory to women who display strength or denigrating to men who care for their children or red tribe or arbitrary, I still feel them, and apparently, so do others. Given this context, I hope I’ve clarified what I mean about mapping Mordor: I’m not particularly proud of the way I see pajama boy, but it’s hard to like him.
>>> “Regardless of whether it’s stupid to feel these things, regardless of whether it’s morally wrong or mindkilling or derogatory to women who display strength or denigrating to men who care for their children or red tribe or arbitrary, I still feel them, and apparently, so do others. Given this context, I hope I’ve clarified what I mean about mapping Mordor: I’m not particularly proud of the way I see pajama boy, but it’s hard to like him.”
Thank you.
Pajama boy is probably a model. I have no idea what models tend to be like personally.
His accessories were no doubt chosen for him.
@ Nita
I think calling it “insufficiently stereotypical” is a misnomer, IMO it’s more like talking to an adult as if they were a 5-year old. Conversely, less conventional characterizations such as the classic dandy, GBTQ, and other eccentric types don’t seem to trigger nearly the same reaction.
There a kind of “uncanny valley” going on where pajama boy is close enough to the mean to be recognizable, while still being far enough “off” to fail the metaphorical Turing Test.
@eh
I agree with your initial assessment, but at the same time have almost the exact opposite reaction to Merkel.
@Alex
Pretty much.
Presumably because they do not in any way aspire to being considered within the social norm. Pyjama boy probably thinks that people like him should be considered normal. This is offensive to those who find him misguided/disgusting/whatever.
He’s supposed to represent “millennials”, or perhaps “millennial men”, and that’s exactly what annoys me about him. This genre of ad works by saying “this cool person, who you should look up to, buys our product. Why aren’t you buying it?” Now, when the cool person in question could be an allegorical portrait of smug frivolity, what does that say about how the ad’s backers feel about you?
It’s not even that he looks unmasculine per se; it’s the way he codes femme. There are masculine stereotypes with the same connotations. (Conversely, ballet is extremely femme but it takes a hell of a lot of work, and if the ad focused on a male dancer I wouldn’t have looked twice.)
Nancy, Nornagest and others:
Well, if I encountered pajama boy in a government funded (?) ad rather than a discussion about stereotypes on the Internet, I’d surely hate everything the ad stands for and perhaps the government responsible (though as governments go, this seems to be a minor offense).
But something else seems to be going on here, where it is the actual guy and the accessoires he was given, that are hated.
@ Creutzer
Eh, are dandies and gay men OK with being considered abnormal and disgusting? That’s news to me.
@Alex — Wiki says the ad comes from a nominally independent advocacy house in Barack Obama’s orbit. It also says it became infamous when Obama retweeted it on his own account, though to be honest I hadn’t heard of it until these comments. I don’t follow many conservative blogs, though, and I definitely don’t follow flaks.
@ Nornagest
I think that most of the conservative blogosphere would agree with you.
Further more, I’d say your male ballet dancer is yet another example of those “less conventional characterizations” I mentioned.
@Nita: That strikes me as an oddly uncharitable reading of what I said. I meant to say that classical dandies and flashily homosexual people are participating in a subculture and don’t aspire to being considered normal representatives of mainstream society.
@ Creutzer
I might be misunderstanding you again, but it seems like “mainstream” is doing a significant amount of work in your re-formulation. Many people don’t want to be considered “mainstream”, but they still think of themselves as “normal” rather than “abnormal”.
No, I think it’s “normal” that is doing significant work in your misunderstanding. I was using it in a sense in which its opposite is supposed to be “unusual”, not the pejorative “abnormal”. The classic dandy thinks “I’m unusual and I know it and I’m fine with it because I like what I’m doing”. Pyjama boy probably doesn’t consider himself as an unusual member of a subculture, but as a normal representative of, if not his society, then at least his generation, a claim which can be threatening to people who would have this not be the case. I think Nornagest above may have done a better job of explaining what I take to be a very similar idea.
This makes a lot more sense now. Republicans getting weirdly obsessed about minor things that they think somehow reflect badly on Democrats and then talking about them for years and years and years is a well known pattern.
@ Anonymous:
To be fair, Democrats doing the same with things Republicans say is also a well-known pattern.
People are dicks? Shit, we might be onto something here, guys.
The watch just looks like a watch to me — a women’s watch (or a formal men’s watch, but those are only supposed to be worn with suits) would have a smaller face. We don’t have a good angle on the strap, but I think it’s the regular width.
But everything else, yeah, pretty femme. The facial expression is doing a lot of work too, with the demure closed-mouth smirk and the arched eyebrows.
Nita says: This sex-segregated model of virtue has a few flaws
I agree, but how things “ought to be” is a separate question from how they are. Fact of the matter is that for, lack of a better term, the Maternal instinct seems to be encoded at a very deep level. If it is a purely social construct I think that it likely predates spoken language. Likewise I am suggesting that there is a mirror/complimentary instinct that a lot of modern society ignores.
I honestly don’t know where the effeminate in “childish and effeminate” came from. What I’m doing is reporting my experience and offering a possible explanation. The typical line of thinking is to blame “the patriarchy”, but I find this explanation unsatisfying because it seems to contradict the observation that ostensibly patriarchal groups will fall inline behind a women who displays a certain quality.
That quality is what I’m trying to nail down.
Seems to me that traditionally, men are expected at minimum to solve their own problems, and at best to solve other people’s problems, too. Men are expected to be well-functional in special-purpose male groups (craft or military), egalitarian or hierarchical, but in the absence of the group or if the group fails to perform its duties, the best men are still expected to take “heroic responsibility” to solve the problem. Men are also expected to volunteer in situations which put their lives or health in danger.
The relation to violence is that often “the problem” is someone else being violent against you, or against people you care about. Men are expected to be able to fight back, and to be prepared for such situation (i.e. exercise regularly, train with weapons).
Women are expected to use their social skills, work in informal groups, promote social harmony and emotional well-being, protect their own health, raise and protect their children. (This parahraph is shorter not because I think the women’s role is more simple, but because I feel less qualified to describe it.)
In some sense, lower-class men are more “masculine”, because they face existential problems more frequently. Middle-class men are quite sheltered from such problems, so it is very easy for them to neglect the “masculine virtues”. Upper-class men are also more “masculine”, because they fight for the few positions at the top.
What are you trying to explain with that “theory” of yours?
Long story short, I am trying to rectify my mental image/instincts (the map) with the terrain.
Ok, but is it a map of:
a) commonly held stereotypes
b) biological difference
c) the ideal of what masculinity and, maybe to lesser extent, femininity ought to be.
?
On a) and b) there is science ™ though I fear even science ist distorted by c). Naturally, c) is way in the realm of opinion, or, if you are so inclinedl, faith.
I linked a study on a) above that to me seemed convincing.
If I had to guess, mostly C and B which go on to inform A.
Though with less “ought” and more “what is?”
But an “ideal” without the “ought to” is just a “stereotype”?!
One could say the same thing of any observation.
Only insofar as I forgot
b’) socially constructed differences.
the b)s are “what is”, c) ist what “ought to be” and a) is what people think that is.
And while it could be worthwhile to map any of the three I’d strongly advocate to draw three different maps for (IMO) three very differen things.
> Meanwhile women like Queen Elisabeth, Margaret Thatcher, Indira Gandhi, and Angela Merkel
Those aren’t good examples. Boudica would be better.
I don’t know enough about Boudica off the top of my head to judge.
I would however take issue with the idea that they are not good examples.
A thought, about the “man up” thing: Usually, valuing adherence to gender roles is seen as a right-wing thing, and valuing breaking them down is seen as a left-wing thing. Masculine gender roles tend to value being dominant (physically and socially), high-status, aggressive, solving one’s own problems, solving others’ problems, and so on. Someone who says “men should behave like this” would probably be coded as a right-winger, whether of the classic conservative variety or the “He-Man Women Hater’s Club” variety.
However, when I look at men who are vocal male feminists/feminist allies, be they big-name public figures or guys I know in real life, there are a lot of ways in which they are fulfilling a traditional model of masculinity: often aggressive (socially speaking), status-seeking, proclaiming dominance over other men, often (at least implicitly) having a message of “women can’t save themselves, we must do it for them”. These guys are often all in favour of breaking down gender roles – but the way in which they advocate for that is recognizably masculine.
In contrast, take men’s rights activists of the classic variety, the ones who really emphasize their own vulnerability, how they are at the mercy of a cruel society, who complain that the deck is stacked against them – they are often viewed as right-wing (probably because their opposition is left wing, whether they themselves are right wing or not are irrelevant). In my (limited, non-scientific) experience, while feminists of whatever gender tend to really dislike men’s rights activists, to say the least, the male ones really express contempt for them in a way the women don’t. Women often express that they feel threatened by men’s rights activists – but I’ve seen men describe them as pathetic, whiny, etc much more than women.
It occurred to me that this contempt might be rooted in the disgust that men often have for other men who show themselves to be weak – they’re behaving in a manner that can be seen as feminine, showing vulnerability, asking for others to have consideration for them, and ultimately failing at masculinity. They’re revealing that they cannot stand up for themselves on their own. Below the surface, the male-feminist/ally types express contempt for the “let’s-sit-in-a-circle-and-cry-about-divorce-courts” types in the same way that someone like Jack Donovan would (he’d just talk a lot more about how those guys had proven they were no good at fighting bears, or whatever).
Does this sound reasonable? It just seemed to me rather ironic.
It seems perfectly plausible to me.
The Men’s Rights Movement uses a lot of the intellectual structure and tactics of feminism. Dr Beat could tell you more, he’s an actual MRA, but I’m pretty sure that they were originally male ‘Allies’ of feminism who spun off their own ideology.
Addressing issues like stacked divorce courts, Dworkinian domestic violence laws, etc could probably be done in a way that signals strength. But because of their lineage MRAs try to frame it with themselves as sympathetic victims and wind up just sounding pathetic instead.
My impression is that there’s more than one group calling themselves MRAs. The classic MRAs a la Farrell seem to be essentially a heresy that developed among male feminists/pro-feminists/feminist allies in the 80s.
Compare them to the Red Pill guys (whose ideology has leaked into parts of the MRAs) – the RP guys are very into biological reductionism, sex/gender roles based in biology, etc. A classic MRA might complain that it’s bad that men are expected to signal strength/dominance all the time, while RP guys think that signalling strength/dominance is awesome, and have built a whole system around that signalling, ways to simulate strength and dominance better, and so on.
They seem to be far more focused on individual-level things: where a classic MRA might complain that the family courts are biased, and demand that law and policy be changed, an RP guy is probably going to advise either not marrying, or behaving in a way that’s supposed to mitigate supposed risk.
Red Pill guys don’t generally call themselves MRAs: it’s the other way around.
TRP is an
umbrellatarp over all sorts of folks who have different goals. PUAs and other self-improvement types generally see MRAs as whining about their problems without doing anything, and MGTOW as pathetic virgins. MRAs don’t like the politics that a lot of prominent PUAs have picked up from the AltRight, and afaik don’t care about MGTOW. And MGTOW or Incel types just need somewhere to vent.Or at least that’s how it was a few years ago. The Internet changes pretty quickly but I doubt MRAs have been able to absorb the Red Pill completely in that time.
@Dr Dealgood:
My understanding of it is that the TRP position – usually represented as something they realized when the scales fell from their eyes, thus the Matrix reference – is that men and women are inherently different, due primarily to biological reasons (they usually throw some evo-psych in). They generally make the further claims that men and women have different and often competing interests, and that society serves women’s interests better than men’s.
The classic MRAs were disaffected former male feminists – and what they share in common with feminists is that they are largely social constructionists, and ostensibly egalitarians. Their complaint is what they see as mainstream feminism pushing for equality, but not when inequality is in women’s favour – eg didn’t Farrell started the whole thing over NOW supporting assumed maternal custody in divorce, or something like that? Complaining that society protects women more than it protects men is a big thing of theirs.
MRAs predate TRP, and I think TRP is in the process of swallowing the MRAs. This is probably because TRP has a way better selling line: “hey bro, want to get laid more with more women? Just follow these six weird tips a local dude found out, feminists hate him!” will attract men, especially young men (who are less likely to have some divorce horror story), better than “society is stacked against us and we are vulnerable”. The PUA ethos – go lift weights, dress better, learn to pull some mind tricks, go get laid – sells better than vulnerability because it is a far more masculine appeal.
The PUA – Alt Right link seems to be a progression of biological determinism. Once someone has adopted the notion that the sexes are different, and their behaviour/goals are different, based on biology, it isn’t a huge jump to adopt the same notion in regards to ethnicity or race.
@ dndnrsn
That certainly matches my own observations.
@Drdealgood:
“I’m pretty sure that they were originally male ‘Allies’ of feminism who spun off their own ideology.”
I’m sure there are plenty (in a chinese cardiologist kind of way) of MRAs that match this description, but I would be surprised if they were even a plurality of MRAs, or substantively responsible for the growth of the MRA movement. Do you have any sort of citation on this?
Nope, it’s just my impression. Hence the qualifiers.
Warren Farrell is one of the big names in the early “men’s movement” and that was basically his trajectory.
They might not be a plurality today, but that in large part seems to be a big part of the movement originally.
By way of analogy, temperance activists are pretty thin on the ground in modern feminism, but it was a major part of first wave feminism.
Of MRAs who call themselves MRAs, pretty much every single one I’ve talked to tried feminism first. I bounce back and forth over whether or not I want to adopt the label for myself, and I certainly “tried feminism first”, and found it outright hostile to men’s rights, so moved on after a relatively short time.
Granted, I have a high standard, and ex-feminist MRAs, and feminist/MRA mixes, are probably selected-for in what I look for in reading material.
The trajectory makes sense – most people have (had? I suspect this has changed over the last decade) some sense that feminists fight for equal rights, so feminism is the first stop, before discovering that feminism as practiced is more “equal rights for women” than “equal rights for everyone”, at which point they start looking for alternatives.
That male attitude is self-policing, because it’s women who actually dislike that form of male weakness. Men have little reason to dislike male weakness specifically, but women who view us in terms of provider/procreator/protector need us not to show or possess weakness at all. Men are acculturated to internalize this. Consider it similar to how women slut-shame each other, I guess.
It’s definitely self-policing. What I find ironic is that it’s by the guys who, on an intellectual level, object to the whole “appear manly and don’t show vulnerable so women think you’re hot and other men think you’re not a liability” biological determinism idea.
The “outspoken and aggressive male feminist” is probably not a fan of either Heartiste or Jack Donovan, but his behaviour is in some ways like what they prescribe more than it’s the behaviour of a sensitive modern man who’s evolved past gender norms.
Those men actually become “feminist allies” for that reason, which is the same reason for female MRAs. It’s either unconsciously or purposefully staking out a position in terms of making themselves more sexually attractive/situationally alpha. The female MRAs do the same, because it’s easier to be top girl among a mostly male movement.
So the people know the lingo, and may even believe it on a surface level, but the core is like you say, traditional masculinity. it’s just usually not so absurdist.
Exactly. I know a girl who used to argue with me about my attitude toward violence, she held the position that violence was never moral, and furthermore never effective. It was always better to submit than to escalate matters. Then she and her boyfriend were mugged. He handed his wallet over, she hers, no one got hurt and they went on their merry way. Except she never got over his failure to protect her, and dumped him days later. She still thinks he did the right thing, but can’t forgive him for doing it.
I’m not sure whether this is relevant, but was it a situation where he had a good chance of defending her successfully?
I think it is relevant. Because if it wasn’t such a situation, then the point Sastan is making with this story is not: this woman found manliness as considered and appropriate application of violence attractive; but rather: this woman found dumb brutishness attractive.
http://whitehotharlots.tumblr.com/post/26046040799/rough-man-pt-1-the-emergence-of-rough-man
@ Creutzer:
Good observation.
@Creutzer,
Well part of his description of her is that she didn’t understand the difference to begin with. If violence is never moral or effective than everyone who wields it is a dumb brute.
To be fair to her perspective, very few people really go in for the considered and appropriate thing. I’ve only ever heard veterans talk that way. Instrumental violence requires a different mindset than reactive violence which you either need to be born or trained into. It’s much more common to see people lash out than to think through what they want to achieve first.
Instinctive, rage violence is more “normal”. We all understand it in a way. It’s what things like “The Hulk” stories are based on, that vast source of rage stored away within most of us. Instrumental violence is rare, and scarier for it.
And Creutzer, my point is that what people think and what people feel can wildly differ. We can talk ourselves into all sorts of logical positions. Anything is logical given the right assumption. But feels, wants, needs? Those we don’t control.
That’s… not a particularly exciting or novel point, I daresay.
People want to talk about the basics of masculinity and you want novel and exciting? Sorry to disappoint. This was resolved thousands of years ago, but we are so desperate for that to not be true that we have almost total societal obscurantism.
@ Psmith
Girl: Ooh, such passion, so much adrenaline! How about we channel that into hot sex, rather than yelling at strangers?
Boy: Clearly, I should yell at strangers more often.
…into the kind of hot sex that I’ve never wanted before…
The point is how uncharacteristic this was. Not that she wanted sex, because from context the inference is that their sex life was fine; but that she wanted domination, primal and greedy.
Oh, Leit. It’s clear that you’ve never seriously thought about managing a man’s emotional well-being.
You see, one does not just ask for wild, primal sex. What if he doesn’t enjoy it? What if he finds it too tiring? If you explicitly voice your desires, he’ll feel compelled to satisfy them, and anything but exemplary performance and perfect mutual enjoyment might hurt his manly self-esteem.
The safest strategy is to learn to appreciate whatever flavour of lovemaking your darling seems to prefer, and carefully watch for signs that he might be capable and willing to do something more… intense. (Unfortunately, the lady in the story got so excited at finally seeing such signs that she forgot her sacred duty to incentivize pro-social behavior at all times.)
The next safest strategy is to coyly drop hints — but even that runs the risk of engendering duty sex instead of a bout of wild passion.
Presumably, if she wanted passion without aggression, she would have said literally anything to that affect. She apparently did not. The facts in evidence pretty clearly show (to me at least) that the woman in the story had a revealed preference for aggression in her boyfriend, but did not actually approve of that preference herself.
She did say something about the violence itself, though. Her behavior is entirely consistent with the model “I like this, but disapprove of myself for liking this and accept that the social model of my behavior is to disapprove of this.”
Nita: Are you being sarcastic?
Robert: “I like this, but disapprove of myself for liking this and accept that the social model of my behavior is to disapprove of this.”
I fear this is how many women (people?) feel about sex in general. To the cause of much sorrow.
@ Robert Liguori
Did she say “let’s not have rough sex again, I disapprove of my desire for it”? No. She said “let’s fuck like animals, but let’s not get into potentially fatal altercations with random assholes”.
(If she had said “I want passion without aggression”, she would get hours of gentle “lovemaking” with slow music and candlelight. She wanted aggression without the risk of being beaten up or shot.)
@ Alex
Well, the “sacred duty” part was a bit sarcastic. It’s just annoying to see a woman bend over backwards to prevent anyone from getting hurt in the slightest way, and then get blamed for a man’s anger management issues.
(Another great cause of sorrow is people assuming that someone’s biking or baking habits are clues to their sexual preferences.)
I’d say it’s an almost equally valid explanation, given the information we have at hand and adjusting for the name of the source.
EDIT: OK, so I read a bit about what the source actually says on other things, and I’m honestly confused now.
Nita, per the story, she didn’t say anything about the sex. It just happened, as an immediate response to the violence. Plus, it doesn’t sound like the gentleman in question was unusually milquetoast; it seems odd that he’d never have displayed passion previously in a manner that would have raised interest and discussion.
Given what else was said to have been discussed, it seems likely to me that for this not to have been, the woman in question would need to be reluctant to do so. And that suggests a desire at odds with her chosen lifestyle and ethos.
Of course, we are hearing one side of a story and doing a while lot of inference, and there are multiple plausible models for people’s behavior and desires.
But we all seem to agree that for many women (including the one from the story), being the kind of man who will raise a hand in defense of her honor and safety is deeply attractive, even if the man doing is is also the kind of man to get into potentially-dangerous altercations with random assholes.
@Nita,
You’re probably correct about the rough sex thing. He obviously hadn’t initiated anything like that before and it’s also clear that she hadn’t seen his ‘dark side’ either to make her think he wanted something other than vanilla. I would be surprised if she hadn’t already wanted to do those things but didn’t think he was the sort of guy who would go for it up to that point.
That said, that sort of proves the guy’s point. She saw his out-of-control rampage and thought “this is a man who I am comfortable having power over me sexually.” That speaks to a thought process which values mindless aggression over more more pro-social traits.
(Not saying it’s a universal trait either. More women than either of us would like to admit think that way, but IME plenty are scared witless seeing their S.O. show genuine anger at a third party. Though that might also be a “hot” versus “cold” aggression thing as well.)
@Robert,
It doesn’t seem particularly odd to me.
The narrator here sounds like your typical “bottled up” kind of angry guy. Polite and sensitive to the point of obsequiousness right up until someone steps over an invisible line in the sand. All the stuff about blacking out in rage and the unpredictability of exactly what will set him off (e.g. he can brush off thrown bottles but not a guy slowing down to call him a fag) supports that.
>>>”You’re probably correct about the rough sex thing. He obviously hadn’t initiated anything like that before and it’s also clear that she hadn’t seen his ‘dark side’ either to make her think he wanted something other than vanilla. I would be surprised if she hadn’t already wanted to do those things but didn’t think he was the sort of guy who would go for it up to that point.”
With you so far. At this point I’d usually say something like “See, the protocol to negotiate about sex is the most broken social protocol (western?) humanity came up with and we desperately need to fix it like right now”. And then every sane person will yell at me like “This is NOT How Things Work(tm) you disgusting freak” [“a fucking game of sim city”]
And meanwhile pickup artistry, by whatever name or acronym it goes nowadays is nothing but an attack against a very broken protocol. So ist false rape accusations if you believe such thing exists. [i. e. this sword cuts both ways].
>> “That said, that sort of proves the guy’s point. She saw his out-of-control rampage and thought “this is a man who I am comfortable having power over me sexually.” That speaks to a thought process which values mindless aggression over more more pro-social traits.”
My conclusion from your first paragraph is different. I presume she was comfortable with her partner having sexual power over her in general but did not know if her partner was comfortable with having power over people (I notice the asymmetry). So the random encounter revealed a hidden property of his which allowed her to reveal one of hers while neither of them could have omfortably revealed this without the external encounter because protocol just sucks. IMO this fits with the genuine surprise I read from his narrative.
Yeah. I missed the context of the bottling-up of the expressed rage, because I, ah, don’t bottle. When I remember that I Am Not Typical, it makes a whole lot more sense to me that someone could act as described and not have a long list of similar incidents (and a strong personal awareness of their own feelings of rage.)
I also can’t imagine not having an in-depth “So, what do you like?” conversation with a long-term girlfriend, but again, I was probably typical-minding there.
And I would point out that in terms of fighting back against a broken protocol of sexual expression, the freedom to ask and answer “So, what do you like?” works really, really well, at least for me.
@ Dr Dealgood
Thanks for the support.
Well, he wasn’t just some random angry dude. Presumably, she had known him for a while and still considered him generally trustworthy.
But more broadly, finding a partner with the perfect mix of personality traits is not easy. So, many people end up compromising on one thing or another. Her original compromise was “well, the sex is boring, but at least the guy is nice”. Her new compromise was “well, the guy has issues, but at least the sex is fun — and I’ll talk to him about the issues”.
Obviously, I agree with everyone here that actually talking about your preferences works better than assuming or guessing.
>>> I also can’t imagine not having an in-depth “So, what do you like?” conversation with a long-term girlfriend, but again, I was probably typical-minding there.
>>> And I would point out that in terms of fighting back against a broken protocol of sexual expression, the freedom to ask and answer “So, what do you like?” works really, really well, at least for me.
tl;dr: Established protocol sacrifires almost all effectivity for a (partly false) sense of security wheras the “just talk, stupid” protocol sacrifires almost all security for efficiency (though not neccessarily effectivity).
Extended Version:
I think the fear that such a conversation might go as depicted below is a real issue:
A: So, what do you really like?
B: To be honest, a threesome with your freind C would be great.
A: How dare you? That’s it, I’m leaving.
And yes, you could argue that breaking up is better than living with that unfulfilled wish, but by the point of having this conversation both parties I’d assume will be emotionally invested and people will get hurt.
So the correct ™ time to ask this question would be on an early date, and I can see how that would work, but I feel there are strong social norms against this.
Also, (I’m retelling what I heard second hand) there seem to be some men in online dating, who break this social norm and just syn-flood as many women as they can with open communication of their wishes on first contact. I have to assume that this strategy works simply by the law of large numbers but it generally seems to have the side-effect of worsening signal/noise ratio from women’s perspective i. e. raising the barriers for the others.
And as always, things get messier, once you allow for people lying about their preferences.
I am not a relationship expert, but in my own experience, the set of long-term relationship partners with the emotional maturity for me to want to be with, and the set of people who blow up in response to frank and honest communication in the specific context of having the talk about what you both like, are disjoint.
If you genuinely feel “I really want this kind of sex, but I can’t just ask my partner for it, otherwise they’ll think I’m a creep/slut and leave me.”, then that is a bad situation, but I feel that the answer is more and careful communication, not less.
I was of course speaking in general, and giving a rather cartoonish example to illustrate my point, not seeking relationship advice.
My own experience is that there are things a couple is comfortable speaking about and there are things it is not. And while the border varies for each couple and can be pushed by coversation and/or trial and error, I find it very very rare that the taboo set is empty. If you are one of these rare cases I congratulate you. For those of us, who are not, it becomes a matter of gradual differences.
Dr. Dealgood: “The narrator here sounds like your typical “bottled up” kind of angry guy. Polite and sensitive to the point of obsequiousness right up until someone steps over an invisible line in the sand. All the stuff about blacking out in rage and the unpredictability of exactly what will set him off (e.g. he can brush off thrown bottles but not a guy slowing down to call him a fag) supports that.”
That’s not quite it. The narrator had been doing Dignity culture (brush off insults and minor attacks as not worth attention) until he’d actually been hit by a motorist. At that point, brushing off attacks as minor was no longer emotionally plausible because he’d been attacked in a way that wasn’t minor.
Having a discussion about what they each wanted sexually probably wouldn’t have helped– I don’t think either of them had any idea that he would have a shift to Honor culture, or that she’d suddenly want intensely submissive sex as a result.
@Nancy & everyone else talking about negotiation of preferences,
I’ve never really understood Dignity culture so I can’t speak to whether that is how it actually works vis-a-vis insults.
But his reaction isn’t any sort of ‘Honor’ that I recognize. The point isn’t that you lash out like a wounded animal but that you’re responding to challenges on a Tit-for-Tat basis. You might end up fighting over an insult, but it isn’t because you lost control but as a deliberate choice once other ways of saving face have been exhausted.
It’s the difference between a school shooting and a pistol duel.
You know what it’s like to be a woman much better than I do, obviously, but from the outside looking in it seems like ‘not having an idea what you want’ is less common than ‘knowing more-or-less what you want but not being able / willing to articulate it.’
That said, I think you’re on point that explicit negotiation wouldn’t really have helped. It’s already awkward enough for women to admit to kinky preferences: stripping out the plausible deniability of flirting seems like it makes it that much harder to spit it out. I don’t think it’s unfair or unreasonable to put the onus on us guys to test the water first.
>>> “That said, I think you’re on point that explicit negotiation wouldn’t really have helped. It’s already awkward enough for women to admit to kinky preferences: stripping out the plausible deniability of flirting seems like it makes it that much harder to spit it out. I don’t think it’s unfair or unreasonable to put the onus on us guys to test the water first.”
My concern is less about being unfair towards guys and more aboud the sad social errors that make this awkward for women and require them to maintain plausible deniability.
This concern is self-interested insofar as I can think of several interactions with women that would have been a lot easier if not for the dance around plausible deniability. But I imagine their lives would become easier to an entirely different order of magnitude.
Re the road rage and the chair. I’d like to hear the girl’s version of this story — once she is safely out of the relationship.
slatestarcodex.com/2016/02/28/ot44-open-primary/#comment-331333
Comment 3313333 cites as its source: whitehotharlots.tumblr.com/post/26046040799/rough-man-pt-1-the-emergence-of-rough-man
@ houseboatonstyx
Now you’ve made me think of less happy explanations. Thanks, I guess :/
Also, yelling insults and throwing things at cyclists? Why the hell would anyone do that? And why is it so common in the USA?
Punishing defection from community norms.
Yes, I fond the source surprisingly not-“Redpill”.
It’s interesting how much hatred men get for violating their gender role – particularly by the people who claim to know and do better.
It makes sense if you look at feminism as a fundamentally gender-conservative movement; it revolves, after all, around the man-agent woman-subject dichotomy, which is what “patriarchy” as a concept is really about. (And this isn’t new; the major opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment came from women like Eleanor Roosevelt, who thought that women required special protection under the law.)
He-For-She and similar feminist movements are just a little more open about their gender conservatism.
This may be unfair of me, but I despise MRAs because of their failure as activists. I’m not demanding that they win, but they don’t even seem like they’re trying to get what they want, they just complain about it not happening.
They may be right about men not getting custody of their children, but where’s the movement to change the laws and policies?
They are right about the lack of shelters for male victims of domestic violence, but they don’t seem to be lobbying or raising funds for shelters.
Instead (and it’s quite possible that I’m missing something– let me know if I am) they just complain that they’ll be called misogynists if they try to get equal treatment.
Early feminists got the vote when they didn’t even have the right to own property. It’s hard for me to believe that MRAs are up against more than early feminists were.
For what it’s worth I agree on all counts.
Again I suspect that the afore mentioned connection to the meaner parts of life is a large part of that.
“Early feminists got the vote when they didn’t even have the right to own property.”
What country are you thinking of? The Married Women’s Property Act in the U.K. was 1870, and a femme sole could own property before that. Women over 30 who met a property franchise got the right to vote in 1918.
In the U.S., women got the right to vote nationally in 1920 but had had voting rights in some places earlier than that. Women got property rights in different states at different times through the 19th century.
Thanks. You’re right– in the US, married women got the right to their own property in the 1800s, though it was a rather slow state by state process.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_women%27s_rights_(other_than_voting)
Still, I find it hard to believe that MRAs are up against more that the early feminists were, which is a much milder claim than my previous one.
As soon as you start espousing men’s rights, people stop listening.
Try it sometime. Try fighting, just a little bit. It’s not a grand struggle – it’s a journey down into a massive pit of despair, because there’s nothing to struggle against, it’s just a bunch of people who don’t care. That’s why many MRAs eventually turn to anti-feminism; because then, at least somebody will argue back, rather than just moving on without comment or concern.
There are some particularly nasty areas of the world where any work that is done outside of a village is done by women – because if the paramilitary forces find them, the women are raped, but the men are killed. And if you tell the average person that, take a guess at which part they find more horrifying, which part they feel compelled to do something about. And take a guess as to whether they find the women’s behavior brave – or the men’s behavior shameful.
That’s the society we exist in. Men’s suffering doesn’t matter, because men are moral agents, who are responsible for themselves. Women’s suffering does matter, because women are moral subjects, who must be taken care of. Feminism didn’t face the same kind of uphill battle as the men’s rights movement does, because feminism had “Women are being treated poorly” as something which people actually cared about. “Men are being treated poorly” – well, nobody cares, because the men should do something about that.
With respect, you are speaking in absolutes, and the truth is much more complicated than that. For example, to offer some good news, “a domestic shelter for male victims just opened in Arkansas a few weeks ago.
Some people care. I would agree that people care in general a whole lot more about female victims than male victims as a matter of course, but that doesn’t mean that no one cares about the male victims.
The first men’s domestic abuse shelter in the country – possibly in the world, I’m uncertain whether the Canadian shelter got funds after the individual who had been trying to get the funds together killed himself – only shows how far we have to go.
Because the truth isn’t that complicated. The existence of MRAs and a handful of like-minded people demonstrate that some people care – but also demonstrate how little everybody else does.
I should have been clearer– I do despise the movement, but that doesn’t mean I despise everyone in it. I think it takes some people in a movement who just will not give in, but it doesn’t mean everyone has to be like that.
I think it’s a problem that men’s rights tend to be framed as everything in life is easier for men than for women, and if men are treated badly, it’s women’s fault. I had the poor judgement to do a road trip with a man who believed that war happens because– apparently only because– “women love a man in a uniform” and that research on breast cancer should stop until research on prostate cancer catches up– that one may have been more extreme, it may have been until lifespans equalize.
However, there may be people in the men’s rights movement who want equal treatment and respect rather than running so much on resentment of women. Let me know about them if they exist. I like Barry Deutch’s approach but he identifies as a feminist.
What I would like is people saying men need domestic violence centers because there are men who are domestically abused.
If you want to say “but feminism is just as bad”, I’ll agree that some feminism is– and I don’t identify as a feminist. I also don’t trust people who hate feminists because I wonder if they hate women. Yes, I do feel pretty politically isolated.
@Nancy Lebovitz:
Personally, I think that MRAs tend to blame on feminism a lot of things that aren’t feminism’s fault. So even if some amount of the problems they identify are real, misidentifying the ultimate cause of those problems makes it harder to deal with those problems. Beyond that, the fact that talking about those problems is now an “MRA thing”, with all the negative baggage that goes along with that, means that it’s even harder to deal with those problems.
However, men who express misogynistic views (out of resentment, or for other reasons), and more men who dislike feminism (ditto) than there are MRAs. So, the misogyny and dislike of feminism is clearly not what is turning these guys away from being MRAs.
Again, I think it’s down to them appearing unmasculine. When their message is that men are suffering and vulnerable, that turns off a lot of guys – they don’t want to hang out with losers, in case it rubs off on them. When their message is that this is because of feminism – that’s even more of a turn off: they’re not just losers, but they’re losing to girls?!?
Thus, the PUAs and the He-Man Women Haters. Their message is “you can take this into your own hands and get laid a lot/go out into the woods with your buddies and fight bears”. Even though they present men as a group as unmanned and outmanouvered by a feminized society, their answer to that is individual and self-reliant action.
@ Nancy
I would recommend Toy Soldier as a personal blog, and Feminist Critics as a group blog (they’re critical of feminism, but not anti-feminist, and definitely not anti-women). For a very gentle introduction to men’s issues, you can also take a look at Ally Fogg’s posts.
Nita, thank you very much.
@Nita/Nancy Lebovitz: Ally Fogg also writes/wrote for the Guardian: http://www.theguardian.com/profile/allyfogg
“Personally, I think that MRAs tend to blame on feminism a lot of things that aren’t feminism’s fault.”
I think it’s fairer to say that MRAs blame feminism for not doing something about something they feel feminism should be doing something about. If you spend any amount of time pushing on the issues men face, you’re going to run into somebody who says that you should join feminism because that’s what feminism is about – because they believe feminism is about gender equality, as opposed to women’s rights.
Combine that with that most of those who have pushed on these issues tried feminism first, and you get a recipe for intense resentment and anger; it feels, bluntly, like a betrayal. And to a significant extent, I think the Men’s Rights Movement does, in fact, need to dismantle a lot of feminist thought; feminist organizations such as NOW are, for example, some of the staunchest opponents of father’s rights.
The presumed authority of feminist thought to speak for men pretty much has to be challenged and dismantled; you cannot have an ideology that insists on being the single ideology of gender equality when it completely ignores the issues of a gender. The presumption, espoused here with some self-awareness by Nancy, that opposition to feminism’s excesses is anti-woman also needs to be challenged; feminism has become, in many if not most respects, a fairly ugly ideology.
I read an article a while back arguing that the anger of early feminists was justified, given what women experience. If it’s fair to say that feminists were right to be angry at the state of affairs, I think it’s equally fair to say that MRAs should be angry at the state of affairs.
@ Nancy Lebovitz
What I would like is people saying men need domestic violence centers because there are men who are domestically abused.
If the argument were that domestic violence shelters/centers should admit/help abused men also, I’d agree.
But I think the number of abused men in need of shelter is so much lower than that of women, that expecting an equal number of dedicated beds, an equal amount of public sympathy and donations, and equal attention in public discourse, is unrealistic (and may seem derailing).
A man fleeing is more likely to have cash for lodging elsewhere for weeks/months and male friends with space and resources to spare — and less likely to be encumbered with children. Also, men on average are bigger and stronger than women, so have physical resources for self-defense as an alternative to flight.
@houseboatonstyx
I think there are a fair number of false assumption in that last paragraph of yours.
I responded to my fair share of DD calls and saw my fair share of psychos and junkies with kids come through the ER with both genders well represented.
Likewise having physical resources for self-defense doesn’t you you a whole lot of good if you cant use them.
A woman who stabs her boyfriend with a kitchen knife has a decent chance of getting off with a warning, a many who hits a woman is scum and thus gets no defense.
I didn’t say there needs to be as many places in domestic violence shelters for men as there are for women– my impression is that there are generally *no* domestic violence shelters for men.
@ Nancy Lebovitz
I guess it’s past my bedtime, as I’m too lazy to look up our previous posts to see where I may have caused confusion by lazily steelmanning in one place and strawmanning in another. If current (and future) shelters will agree to allow men, why spend extra for separate men’s shelters? The number of men needing shelter space is very very small compared to the number of women. Men-only shelters would either be spaced too widely, or often empty.
@ houseboatonstyx
Eh, you can argue than men are less likely to end up stuck in an abusive relationship in the first place, but those who are abused probably aren’t any less isolated and psychologically worn down than women in similar situations.
Also, I don’t understand how the children argument works — a mother can’t leave children with an abusive parent, but a father can?
Edit: I’ve heard it can be hard to convince shelters to take in men — maybe that’s something activists could change.
Re: Unisex shelters
I always assumed that women in a shelter would not feel self if they had to share a roof with a man, regardless the man’s situation.
@houseboatonstyx
I’m not completely informed about the state of shelters local to me, but I do know that the absence of men is considered an important factor in helping the women there. There is no chance of abused men ever being admitted. I first learned about that when reading about sexual violence in homeless shelters, one of the victims in the article was a 13 year old boy who was sent alone to a homeless shelter after his mother took them both to a domestic violence refuge and he was refused admittance.
@ Alex, Equi.
Re: Unisex shelters
I always assumed that women in a shelter would not feel self if they had to share a roof with a man, regardless the man’s situation.
That’s a feeling worth respecting, especially for children. But — sorry to nitpick an expression — what if it’s the same roof but separate entrances etc, so that the sexes are in fact quite separated? I’d imagine a moveable opaque barrier in the hallway, so that when men did request admittance, the barrier could be set up to provide however many rooms were needed for them at one end of the hall, and that end open into the men’s parking lot.
As before, my great point is, how many men are we talking about? (Oh, how tempted I am to say, “Except in a dense part of San Francisco.”)
“… I’d imagine a moveable opaque barrier in the hallway, …”
I don’t see how that would help. That is because I assume that the criteria for feeling safe (not “self”, sorry) in a situation where one would seek a shelter would be far from reasonable and you are reasoning.
“As before, my great point is, how many men are we talking about? (Oh, how tempted I am to say, “Except in a dense part of San Francisco.”)”
Really I have no idea besides that allegedly domestic violence commited by women has an even lower reporting quote than domestic violence in general.
But I appreciate what you did there with “dense”.
@ Alex
But I appreciate what you did there with “dense”.
Sorry. It was past my bedtime. I vaguely feared there might be a joke in there, but somehow ‘crowded’ never occurred to me, so I used the Vulcan term.
I’ve searched for it and can’t find it, but I swear I’ve read a paper which showed that when you control for men who were actually battling for custody (as opposed to willfully signing over custody as part of divorce proceedings) the difference skews slightly favour of men. I suspect this is because men who battle for sole custody have really good legal reasons for doing so.
In other words, saying “men win custody less than women” is bad because men don’t want custody as often as women. A better question is “Do men, on average, get the deal they want out of a custody dispute?”.
I’ll link this study which shows significant progress, at least in Wisconsin:
http://www.irp.wisc.edu/research/childsup/cspolicy/pdfs/2009-11/Task4A_CS_09-11_Final_revi2012.pdf
Custody battles are a bad metric because the system is in such a state where divorce lawyers advise men not to attempt custody battles in the first place. It’s possible that perception by lawyers is wrong to begin with, or its possible that battles disproportionately represent exceptional circumstances.
Only a minority of custody litigants have attorneys.
Which actually helps your point. I don’t know a ton of family law lawyers, but I know a few and to some degree am one, and none would agree that the anti-male bias is so strong as to make it not worth even trying (personally I’ve yet to see any such bias). Laypeople, on the other hand…
Resources for men who are subject to domestic violence— there’s more than I expected, but still not very much, and the site has the feeling of a project that isn’t established on a major scale yet.
But wait, I’ve seen a lot of complaints that feminist women are aggressive, shrill harpies who want dominance over men. Are male feminists even worse than that, or are feminists of both sexes equally bad?
After all, breaking down gender roles doesn’t mean that everyone will take on the “opposite” role — could it be that people who are vocal about their political views tend to be socially aggressive, regardless of their gender?
The difference is that a stereotypical “pushy feminist” of the female variety is going to be breaking gender norms while condemning them – active and aggressive instead of passive, etc. The loud, aggressive male feminist is fulfilling the same gender norm he is ostensibly against.
But, again, the intended result of “breaking down gender norms” is to let each individual behave in the way they’re most comfortable with (within the bounds of ethics), not to make women act “manly” and men act “womanly”.
Also, vocal people are obviously easier to notice. If X percent of male feminists are gentle lambs, would you even be aware of their existence? After all, some people believe that good allies shouldn’t be too vocal or take up too much “space”, and non-aggressive male feminists are more likely to take that idea very seriously.
OK. That’s a good point. It’s easy to fail to notice people who aren’t loud. There are probably plenty of men (and other people) who are feminists, but not vocal feminists. I guess my personal experience has been that any guy who is into feminism tends to make a big deal about it – “hey, look, I’m one of the good ones!”
The guys I’m thinking of, though, are the kind though who will take up space to shout about how men should take up less space – I guess I phrased things poorly about “breaking down” gender norms – they seem to actively want to fight against them.
And, they clearly don’t approve with individuals behaving the way they’re comfortable with when it doesn’t accord with their politics.
It’s the same kind of irony as the hard-charging Christian conservative women who played a role in defeating the ERA in the 1980s.
>Are male feminists even worse than that
Well, if you’re talking about the most prominent ones…
MRAs are trying to co opt the victimization narrative, which just won’t work for (non minority) men.
If I were to give them advice, I’d say concentrate resources on legal battles, because you’re never going to win in politics.
It’s not just a victimization narrative, it’s a victimization narrative with an emphasis on powerlessness and the need for external help.
This doesn’t seem to be popular, or at the very least successful, among men, minority or otherwise: look at the Nation of Islam or the Black Panthers, two fairly male-dominated movements (or, at least, the Panthers originally; no idea of their makeup today). Both were built on asserting power and rights – look at all the old photos of Panthers open-carrying shotguns and rifles. That’s a message of “we know our rights, and we will take them, and we will defend them”. Victimization is/was presented as something that they are willing, and able, to overcome themselves.
Right off the bat, women are known for bleeding from their genitals and sometimes pushing out a human head.
You talk about “the price of food”, but our culture typically expects women to shop for everything. (Likewise, someone or other down-thread talks about solving other people’s problems, which sounds like a wife or mother.)
At the end you seem to recognize that power explains it all much better, but you don’t seem to notice the cultural reasons for that (admittedly, I would think these are originally based on the relative ease of men beating women up and making them obey orders.)
More than just the head hopefully. Otherwise you’re getting into John Carpenter territory.
Somewhat on topic; what is the purpose of intentionally crude references to menstruation in these sorts of arguments? Is the point to try to associate gender essentialism to unpleasant imagery or to mock prudes? It’s always stuck out as an odd tic to have.
hlynkacg’s quotes “insulated from the shocks of the world” and “tenous connection to the meaner parts of the world” as potential sources of childishness and being perceived as effeminate.
Masculine leaders are described as getting their hands dirty and their asses on the line.
The implication is the masculinity is linked to toughness, being wiling to push through unpleasantness/pain, to work through unavoidable messes.
Living through monthly Shark Week for decades also applies to that description, as does the birthing process.
Therefore, bodies that go through menstruation, therefore the majority of females, inherently have the “man up” leadership/masculinity qualities as described by hlynkacg.
“The implication is the masculinity is linked to toughness, being wiling to push through unpleasantness/pain, to work through unavoidable messes.
Living through monthly Shark Week for decades also applies to that description, as does the birthing process.”
Nope on both.
Menstruation starts and ends with no choice or input by the woman. It’s impossible to just expire due to the stress and pain of menstruation.
In the big picture, once a woman is pregnant, that baby is coming out one way or another.
Not dying due to a monthly function doesn’t imply courage. Same for not dying in childbirth.
You’re right about the lack of choice, but childbirth and menstruation can both kill. The latter is very rare, I think, but one of my friends nearly bled out.
I think intentionally getting pregnant, while being aware of the risks, takes courage. But of course, bragging about their courage is not something women are supposed to do — so people don’t usually talk about the risks in public.
“I think intentionally getting pregnant, while being aware of the risks, takes courage.”
Casanova argues that women must enjoy sex more than men. One piece of evidence he offers is that they engage in it despite the risk of pregnancy. He (having, presumably, observed childbirth) says that, if he risked that, he wouldn’t.
@anon:
Going to work/class instead of taking sick days to curl up into a ball and sob is the choice. Have you ever heard of a female artist cancelling a concert for reasons of profuse bleeding and a cocktail of hormones swimming through them? No? That’s a choice.
Females have to include extensive logistics planning in order to go out and do things while on their period. The number of tampons/pads to bring to cover the time period, the storage space required for that number, the portable storage space to have on one’s person at all times even when entering a space when having to keep track of an extra bag is a hassle. Taking into account whether or not tampons/pads will be available at the location, at what prices, how much emergency cash (in coins!) to bring just in case, extra storage space if bulk buy is the only option. Having to/the ability to wash/replace things that we do stain in case of spillage, including clothing, sheets, and anything we might be sitting on at the time. Scheduling pain reliever intake, (storage space for pain reliever and intake accessories like liquids) scheduling tampon/pad replacement, including calculating the tradeoff of staying through a long event time with increased/guaranteed spillage vs. the exit/entrance costs. (losing our good viewpoint, place in line, interrupting the event, missing out on valuable information/events, etc.)
On top of that, carefully monitoring our own behavior in spite of said hormone cocktails, because if we hint at our status, our input is likely to be dismissed as PMS nonsense, or we may inadvertently drive off companions when lashing out in pain. Problem solving! Manning up and handling our own affairs!
It’s not just living through menstruation, it’s the fortitude and skills it takes to live and still flourish under those conditions. Because doing things in spite of a ruptured appendix because they’re not as bad as period cramps is clearly not manly.
(The original masculinity description didn’t even say anything about death. Now we have to die to prove our equality?)
What a childish and masculine reaction. Typical of the coddled right-wing.
The actual reason is that I thought it would take bluntness to get the point across to anyone who didn’t see it already.
And what is that point exactly?
The very short version of this is “eggs are expensive, sperm is cheap”.
Women are the breeding stock, we don’t need all the men. Men are disposable bodies to be fed to whatever machine our society runs.
I stand by my original statement, as it relates to values however.
The essence of what it is to be a man is the considered and appropriate application of violence. You may never have to do it (long may the pax americana reign), but to be incapable of it or unwilling to use it makes one less of a man. It is the primary requirement. A man unwilling to fight for what is right, what is his, what he loves, is no man at all.
There’s an unstated assumption in your argument that what is natural and what is good are the same things, which I can easily reject (it’s even on the list of fallacies) absent an argument that it’s true in this specific case.
I don’t assume that at all, actually. Morality and nature are orthogonal. Sometimes they agree, sometimes they don’t.
This is actually a perfect issue to display this. It is “natural” for some percentage of men to be violent and destructive, incapable of restraining their basic impulses. This is wrong. Therefore, the capacity for violence in resistance to this natural tendency is incumbent on those who can control themselves and tell the difference.
Related, probably unoriginal (but, after all, there is nothing new under the sun):
Some people make the mistake of taking what is, or what they consider to be, natural – and assuming that is what’s morally good. Or, possibly, coming to the conclusion that nothing is actually morally good.
Other people make the mistake of taking what is, or what they consider to be, morally good – and assuming that’s what’s natural. Or, likewise, coming to the conclusion that nothing is actually natural.
> women like Queen Elisabeth [I], Margaret Thatcher, Indira Gandhi, and Angela Merkel
Of course we’re seeing them from a lot of hindsight. I wonder what they looked like at Hillary’s stage, of not quite having an army yet.
What strikes me about them all, including Hillary, is that they don’t seem to count as ‘women’. They have their own careers, their own identity, around their own issues and strengths. They didn’t get power as potential First Woman X (as Obama got his as potential First Black President).
Inheritance was mentioned. Hillary fits the group in that way; new standard-bearer of an existing, well-supported faction. (Might say Bill’s third term, though as a Hillarista, I’d say Billary’s third term. 😉
Assuming existing primary sources can be trusted, Elizabeth was a popular figure well before she was in line for the throne.
As for why that they don’t seem to count as “women”. If we accept the Feminists’ premise that oppression vulnerability are integral aspects of the feminist identity, a woman who refuses to be a victim is naturally going to be viewed less feminine.
By the same token, If it’s “that intimacy with the meaner aspects of life” that “the patriarchy” is really rewarding. It seems perfectly reasonable for an otherwise patriarchal society (such as 16th century England) to fall in behind a leader who’s demonstrated a proper amount of “grit” regardless of gender.
As an aside, I don’t think that the Red Tribe’s loathing of Hillary has anything to do with her gender, but that’s really a post in itself.
Well, Elizabeth’s father did create a schism in Christianity and kill Elizabeth’s mother, all in a valiant attempt to save England from the terrible outcome of a woman inheriting the throne.
How you view “masculinity” depends a lot on your social class. Men from the lower classes often deride higher class men as “effeminate” (though they would use more colorful terms). Men from higher classes do the same to their lower class counterparts calling them “macho”.
What percent of psychiatry patients are men vs. women?
Overall rates of psychiatric disorder are almost identical for men and women.
Individual disorders however can be strongly over represented in one gender or the other.
99%. (The remainder are various shades of transgender.)
Complicated depending on what you count (substance abuse?) and how you measure (people who choose to go to doctors?). Conventional wisdom is somewhere around 50-50. Just checked my own patient list and it’s 50-50 too.
Something I’ve seen some very clever lefties on the internet assume in their arguments, from a narrative perspective, that I’d like help unpacking. Can anybody explain the following apparent contradiction? “Poverty is the primary cause of crime” vs “Rich people are mostly criminal”. The obvious response is to say rich people rewrite the laws so that their antisocial actions are technically legal. So then restated: if poverty is the primary cause of bad behavior, why are rich people mostly people who behave badly? This is obviously a narrative-type claim, so empirical arguments, while interesting, aren’t really what I’m looking for, more of a “why do you hold this worldview”.
I have been told I state things like a villian, I want to be clear I am not trying to do that. Sincere replies only, merci.
The claim is that poverty is the primary cause of crimes that poor people tend to do (eg. drug dealing, gang warfare), while the rich people commit white collar crimes (eg. increasing the price of a life saving drug drastically). Framed this way, there’s no contradiction, because it’s two different types of crimes. It also means that we can get rid of crime entirely by making everyone equally middle class (hey look, communism).
I would add a little more to it than that. Rich people commit crime because they can get away with it, so their crime definitely involves a moral failing. Poor people commit crime despite the fact that they often don’t get away with it, because they are desperate victims of circumstances, so their crime does not involve the same kind of moral failing. But yes, obviously the liberal view in question views crime by poor people and crime by rich people as two different phenomena with different sources, in need of separate analysis.
Then the narrative would triumph the virtues of the middle class, which seems more libertarian/liberal than leftist. The sorts of people I’m thinking of probably position themselves very much as anti-middle-class in outlook.
Communism tried to make everyone working-class.
The bourgeoisie — upper and middle class — were considered the bad guys. The good guys were “workers, peasants, and proletarian intellectuals” or “workers, peasants, and soldiers”, depending on the country.
The closest thing to a “make everyone middle class” ideology would be distributism, I guess, since (in its most radical forms) it aims to spread private property out (which is considered a sacred right) rather than abolishing it, as in socialism.
But the original comment was true-ish of something like scandinavian social democracy…low crime , and incomes clustered around the median.
Don’t Sweden and Iceland have one of the highest rates of billionaires per capita? (Granted, for Iceland just a single billionaire would put them on that list).
Sweden may he helped by 1/3rds of their economy being owned by one dynasty.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallenberg_family
That isn’t what bourgeois means, the bourgeois are people whose livelyhood are dependent on owning things. Poor farmers who own their own land are bourgeois (of the petite bourgeois subclass), a surgeon working at a hospital is proletariat (of the labor aristocracy subclass).
> “Rich people are mostly criminal”
Taking this literally as “a majority of rich people are criminals”, all I can say is that this is such an absurd and uncharitable claim that I don’t trust the person making it to be acting in good faith
Which is why I said to take it narratively, not literally.
My bad. I should read more carefully next time
No prob, Bob.
I’d interpret “rich people are mostly criminal” as saying that the process of becoming rich usually involves doing unethical things. Bribing politicians, exploiting workers, selling deceptively structured financial products, polluting the atmosphere, etc.
It’d help to have some examples of people making that statement!
If you believe property is theft, it follows that rich people are necessarily criminals.
I don’t think “property is theft” is a worthwhile line of thought, but it is important to remember that nearly all property is stolen if you trace the chain of title far enough. It’s usually called “conquest” or “adverse possession” or “eminent domain” but make no mistake, it’s theft.
It is possible to take the view that most of the land in the US and other new world countries was stolen.
Although I’m always curious how that is true in a way that the land in the rest of the world was not. Do conquest and migration have a statute of limitations of around 300 years?
Not just the New World, as Yrro points out. The entirety of England was stolen from its Anglo-Saxon inhabitants by a Frenchman some 950 years ago. Somehow there’s nobody upset about it now. (There are some people who are upset about the much smaller theft of land from the monasteries by Henry VIII, but we don’t speak of them.) Almost every country on earth has had this happen at one time or another.
Not just land, either. You can trace the ownership of goods back to that of the raw materials, which are grown on or extracted from land, and the land was stolen, remember?
This leaves animals and their products (problematic in their own right) and intellectual property, which wasn’t even recognized until about 300 years ago and whose extent remains an active controversy.
Some see property rights as sacrosanct, but I can’t, because in so many cases who owns what and why is based on something arbitrary.
I see the existence of property rights, the institution, as sacrosanct, which is why I’m not a communist, but I don’t think that the specific owner’s rights are sacrosanct, which is why I’m not an anarcho-capitalist.
” but I don’t think that the specific owner’s rights are sacrosanct, which is why I’m not an anarcho-capitalist.”
That strikes me as an odd reason. One can imagine A-C societies with any of a variety of legal rules in equilibrium. If anything, a conventional limited government version of libertarianism seems more likely to maintain status quo property claims, not less.
In either system, there are basically two arguments for status quo claims. One is that the current owner’s claim is based on a mix of legitimate and illegitimate reasons. The land may or may not have been in use by anyone when it first entered the modern legal system. If stolen from a legitimate owner a century or two back, it’s been maintained and improved by the “owners” under the current legal system since. The current claimant who traces his title to them may not have a perfect moral claim, but he probably has a better claim than anyone else.
The second argument is that we have no practical way of moving to a more nearly just (from a libertarian standpoint) distribution of claims, since the process itself would lead to massive rent seeking in a context where there is rarely clear evidence to support any particular change in claims. And the risk that the process would be repeated with ideological or political shifts would mean insecure property rights, hence make long run planning more difficult.
And the Anglo-Saxons stole England from the Romans, and the Romans stole England from the Celts, and very nearly the whole of Europe was stolen by the Caucasians before they settled down and became the welsh, Romans, Anglo Saxons etc.
@DavidFriedman
I’m just saying that I don’t see anything wrong with intervening to reassign ownership in principle (given extenuating circumstances), so I can’t be anarcho-capitalist (though I’m broadly “libertarian”). That’s all.
I don’t think that we need to start working out who owns what based off of past grievances, however. I don’t think centuries old past aggression is a good enough reason that is worth mass chaos.
@ TD:
I don’t believe Friedman himself rejects the possibility of reassigning ownership “in principle” in every conceivable case.
He just thinks the results are in practice typically going to work out for the worse.
Can Friedman actually be considered an Anarcho Capitalist, or even libertarian? Chicago economics proposes all sorts of government interventions from a variant of Universal Basic Income (proposed by Freidman himself) to carbon emission credits+a market to trade them.
I feel as if I may have fundamentally misunderstood ancap altogether if this kind of thing is compatible.
@ Vox Imperatoris
I was under the impression that David was an anarcho-capitalist, and since the foundational element of anarcho-capitalism is the non-aggression principle, the entire point of the philosophy seems to be objection to intervention against private property stemming directly from an ethical principle.
Unless you mean something different by “principle” than I do. Sorry if I’m not expressing myself clearly.
You see, I also believe that reassigning ownership is typically going to lead to worse results in practice. It’s just that my threshold for “typically” is going to be entirely different than someone deep into Austrian economics (or the modified form Murray Rothbard went with), and I don’t have an underlying ethical principle that treats reassignment as being immoral in principle, since the particular circumstances matter a lot.
I see private property as being a right that principally stems from the state, and is protected by the state, which is completely 180 degrees from the anarcho-capitalist view, and I suspect fairly deviant from the views of most minarchists, who seem to more begrudgingly accept the nightwatchman state than anything.
@ TrivialGravitas:
I was referring to our regular commenter David Friedman, not his father Milton Friedman. David, I’m sure, knows best what his father thought. As far as I know, however, Milton Friedman only advocated UBI as superior to the existing welfare system. And “Chicago economics” has no necessary connection to cap-and-trade.
Certainly, neither welfare nor cap-and-trade would likely exist under anarcho-capitalism of the sort David Friedman advocates.
@ TD:
David Friedman does not argue from the basis of the “non-aggression principle”. He is a very different sort of anarcho-capitalist from, say, Murray Rothbard.
Unless he wants to explain his views personally, you might want to read his book The Machinery of Freedom or at least Scott’s review of it.
@Vox Imperatoris
Ah, that’s interesting. I didn’t account for consequentialist anarcho-capitalism.
“And the Anglo-Saxons stole England from the Romans, and the Romans stole England from the Celts”
By the time the Anglo-Saxons showed up, the Celts had it back, so the Anglo-Saxons stole it from them.
@TD:
“and since the foundational element of anarcho-capitalism is the non-aggression principle”
Lots of minarchist libertarians claim to believe in the non-aggression principle and not all anarcho-capitalists do, so that isn’t the distinction between them. The question is whether one gets better results (consequentially or in terms of natural rights or perhaps a mix, depending on one’s values) with or without a state.
“I see private property as being a right that principally stems from the state”
I think you are mistaken. To begin with, a primitive form of private property, territorial behavior, predates not only the state but the existence of our species. Private property exists in stateless societies as well as societies with states. For an explanation of rights as a description of behavior, not of morality, see:
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Property/Property.html
For a recent talk on private, decentralized law enforcement, with historical examples:
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/MyTalks/Feud%20isflv.mp3
As a recovering ex-Trot, I’ll try to explain, and I’ll try to add some mindkillingly-loaded language and guilt-tripping just for the hell of it: you’ve been warned.
I: the definitions on their own and the narrative behind them.
“The {ultra-rich|capitalist bankers|1%|old boys network|} are criminal” is a way of begging the question – it assumes that the reader agrees that the the current legal system is unjust and illegitimate, and by making that assumption it leads them to actually believe it. It’s used in much the same sense as “Kim Jong-Il is a criminal” or “Hitler was the biggest criminal of the 20th century”. The Kims are certainly not criminals in North Korea. As far as I’m aware Hitler wasn’t found a criminal by his own legal system. Most readers will agree that they are criminals because most readers respect different justice systems and different laws.
“The poor are mostly driven to crime through poverty”, on the other hand, is a statement from which logically follows the conclusion that if the poor weren’t living in poverty they wouldn’t commit so many crimes, and thus that if someone is keeping the poor in poverty then that person is the truly responsible one. Q.E.D., eat the rich.
II: the seeming contradiction between the two.
When comparing the two statements of crime, it’s probably a matter of whether we’re comparing impact or number. From the perspective of a hypothetical legal system which distinguishes between personal and private property and criminalises the latter, most crimes in our current day are minor in impact and caused by poverty. On the other hand, truly heinous crimes like manufacturing a solid gold toilet to sell to wealthy industrialists, hereditary monarchs, and anyone else with a lot of cash, all the while spruiking your unnecessary status-signalling goldsmithing produce, while so many people die needless deaths, is a major crime limited mostly to the very wealthy.
By the exponential nature of capital ownership and by the nature of middle- and working-class debt, Warren Buffet is worth 22 million African lives while I am worth -5, so our hypothetical court hands him a charge of homicide for each death that came as a result of the malaria nets he didn’t hand out. Case closed, he’s off to the Gulags.
III: commentary
Such a belief system rests on the unstated understanding that
A) none of its adherents will ever be rich, and
B) that relying on the lower classes to solve the world’s problems with their tiny disposable income is like endeavouring to save a man dying of thirst by wringing your sweat and tears out of your tshirt into his mouth while there’s a perfectly drinkable lake a few metres away behind a rickety fence with “KEEP OUT” written on it.
I don’t think this is an accurate perception of the world, but it’s certainly comforting to look Moloch right between the horns and see nothing but a handful of capitalist oligarchs.
Thank you! Is there a good narrative around some idea of “bad behavior/bad people/etc”, to avoid the problems with dealing with what’s legal and what’s not?
The narrative of “revolutionary socialism” (euphemism for communism and/or Marxism and/or whatever the fuck you want it to mean) is simple enough that you almost certainly already know it: value not created by direct human labour rightfully belongs to humanity as a whole, and anyone who takes advantage of it is using some kind of threat to the rest of us in line.
Imagine you don’t understand coordination problems, have not learnt the hard way that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions, or think that you could design a system to maximise usage of resources better than a market by applying linear programming/deep learning/some kind of tree search to a mathematical model based on utilions. You might conclude that the current economic model has been purposefully broken by the people who profit from it. In other words, as I alluded to before, you blame Scott’s Moloch, Bostrom’s insatiable dragon, and Yudkowsky’s whatever-he-calls-it, on the people who have the capacity to implement your vision of utopia, but don’t.
If you believe that, then the depths of the horror of what those people have done is limited only by your ability to understand the sheer weight of preventable human suffering in the world. Imagine HPMOR, only Harry is a muggle leading a probably futile rebellion against a magical elite who could have saved the entirety of humanity all along.
This is obviously not what everyone on the far left believes, since most of them care about much less SSC-like problems, but the basic idea is the same: most problems can be solved by either throwing money at them or removing the structures designed to funnel cash to the already-wealthy, and the people with the most money bear the most responsibility for not doing so.
I thought the conventional Marxist account was that all value came from human labor, hence whatever goes to the capitalists is stolen from the workers.
@David: I wasn’t a particularly good Marxist. However, I’ll try to give a more specific response from the point of view I think a good Marxist would hold:
Surplus value is not conceived of as something directly produced by capitalists, but as something directly produced by workers and appropriated indirectly by capitalists. This process is enabled only by the combination of private ownership of the means of production with the existence of a class which cannot afford to buy the means of production. These requirements are met because huge quantities of land were expropriated from the peasantry as feudalism died, devaluing the labour of the displaced peasantry at the same time as a handful of families came to be extremely wealthy, and because (going back to a previous argument) the wages of a labourer with no bargaining power, in a market where supply vastly exceeds demand, will converge towards subsistence. This happens because labourers not paid enough to live will die off, and because since supply hugely outstrips demand nothing will push wages up.
As such, “value not created by direct human labour rightfully belongs to humanity as a whole” is a rough generalisation of the special case “all value [comes] from human labor, hence whatever goes to the capitalists is stolen from the workers”. That generalisation was made on the basis that no Marxist I’ve ever met believes that an apple growing in the wild is worth thousands of times less than an apple on a supermarket shelf, or that a man who discovers a tree full of wild apples in the middle of a famine is morally entitled to keep them. Since the labour theory of value is confusing and inconsistent, and since Frog Do wants to understand the emotional narrative, I figured it was an appropriate generalisation to make, especially since it extends the explanation to more than just Marxists.
So, my extremely simple summary then: the horror is that poor people have no choice to behave the way they do and rich people are traitors to society, and that explains why they can both be bad people?
(I’m intentionally trying to simplify it down to a lowest common denominator emotional argument, that doens’t mean I don’t think actual implementation is complex or that it’s stupid or anything like that. I’m trying to understand a gut reaction of a leftist, in an attempt to understand them.)
@Frog Do
If you’re looking to understand emotional reactions of leftists, I don’t think stating vastly simplified versions of what they believe is the way to do it (that just leads you to thinking they are all simpletons, regardless of whether that’s true).
I think a better way is to consider the different stereotypes people of different political persuasions have of the rich and poor. I imagine a right-winger’s stereotype of a poor person is a lazy, stupid person who is possibly involved in petty crime. I’m much less sure what their stereotype of a rich person would be — maybe a pleasant, hard-working businessman.
In comparison, a left-winger’s stereotype of a poor person is an intelligent, honest person who is prevented from succeeding by circumstances under their control. Their stereotype of a rich person is a lazy, ignorant oaf who misspends their parents’ money.
My thinking is more that everyone is a simpleton at least some of the time (for me, most of the time), just because thinking clearly is really hard and expensive and most of the time not worth it. Plus, putting it kindly, most people are going to be outright stupid a lot of the time: there was a relatively recent Robin Hanson blog post of this.
I think those stereotypes match up pretty well to my simplifications, though now that I think about it something related also works pretty well: to a leftist (or rightist) what does a good rich person (or poor person) look like, and how do they fail despite their personal virtue?
I also realize now I’m coming at this kind of incoherantly from a virtue ethics framework, for what that’s worth.
@Frog Do: poor people are Heinz, rich people are the doctor.
No matter whether Heinz steals or doesn’t steal, he’s in the position where he has
to choose because of the greed of the doctor, and the doctor is greedy because he believes private property is moral. If Heinz takes back what is rightfully his, possibly with violence, that makes him good. Heinz, it should be restated, is a good man fighting an unjust system which criminalises saving a life and sanctions taking one. Everything bad that a poor person does is either blamed on the rich or downplayed as an isolated case.
A fun example, not one I had seen before. I very much am coming from the second Stage 4 perspective, if that is helpful. I will have to think more about the rest of your comment, the poor are virtuous criminals? But this seems very naive to me (as it would), I’m not sure I think it’s clever enough. Regardless of my opinion, thank you for the comment, one of my favorites of the thread so far.
Granting that you know different clever lefties than I do, I haven’t really seen the latter sentiment expressed much. I’ve definitely seen the sentiment expressed that white collar crime is far more likely to go unpunished, and maybe that a majority of some very specific subset of rich people during one very particular time period, like the executives of banks with large stakes in the secondary mortgage market during 2003-2008, acted in some criminal manner, but that a literal majority of all rich people are criminals? Who are the people you’re seeing express this? Stop following them and surround yourself with more reasonable people.
When I talk about lefties I’m talking about The Left, that is, very much non-liberals, the sorts of people who see social democrats as conservatives or at least center-right. I say this mostly because of a couple effortposts I saw on tumblr from these sorts of people, and I wanted to stay away from the idea of legality because it seemed more like they were making moral arguments, and I didn’t understand their base for those.
And for the record, I pretty much only follow the far-left, the far-right, and the radical center (which is where I consider SSC). Though the difference between them seems more like language than policy, most of the time.
Can you elaborate on radical center there? Do you mean Third Way or what?
In this case, I mean people who propose what would be considered by the Establishment and “most people” radical policies supported by the right and others supported by the left in some combination, but have a tone of moderation and appeal to rational discourse. There was a discussion a while back on the “moderation” of Freddie deBoer, when he is a solid leftist by way of Marx, he’s just “reasonable” in tone and talks like he wants to win instead of signal.
And I was also making a joke about recent broader-rational-sphere arguments about fascism, do ho ho. Maybe I make too many jokes.
Okay. I actually have seen roughly that sentiment expressed by the four or five anarcho-communists I know. It seemed initially you were asking a question about a more general group of people.
What made it seem like that, if you don’t mind me asking?
The way campaign rhetoric has so badly watered down political characterization that 90% of the world might be called ‘lefties,’ though granted, nobody would call that many people ‘clever.’
Long time lurker. So glad you finally found worm. Wildbow is amazing. If I had had one thing for you to find online it would be his work. The other stuff by him is great, too! He also has some great posts and comments on reddit. Enjoy the absurdly long rest of Worm! https://www.reddit.com/user/Wildbow
A claim that supporting Trump is strongly correlated with authoritarianism— does the study look sound?
Vedic death metal
Discussion of Vedic death metal, parallels between Lilith and Kali, etc.
“A claim that supporting Trump is strongly correlated with authoritarianism— does the study look sound?”
The article says the questions to determine authoritarianism “pertain to child-rearing: whether it is more important for the voter to have a child who is respectful or independent; obedient or self-reliant; well-behaved or considerate; and well-mannered or curious”. It says that this is a standard battery of questions, and it seems like those could correlate with authoritarian politics pretty reasonable.
As far as other parts of the methodology, it doesn’t go that far into detail and doesn’t link to a fuller description of the poll. So, who knows. Although, its not a result I find terribly surprising.
Is there a link to the actual study somewhere? With numbers, methods, etc?
I remember reading about it and dismissing it offhand as another one of those “Trump is racist/fascist/whateverist” attacks. All the Trump supporters I know (including myself) picked the second option for all/most of these questions, so we’re the opposite of authoritarian. In fact, one of the things we really like about Trump is that he defies authority. He stands against the establishment, against the dishonesty of the media, and against the intimidating monster that is the PC culture.
On the other hand, I’m also noticing that some people online like Trump for reasons very different from mine. So who knows, perhaps the majority of Republican authoritarians do like him.
I couldn’t find a link to the study, the best I did was establishing that the author is actually at Amherst.
I do find it interesting that a high proportion of Trump supporters (or at least what I see online) is people who like him personally in a way that I don’t think I’ve seen before for presidential candidates. Even if it’s not authoritarianism, I think there’s some kind of personality match.
I think the personality thing is a large chunk of the support for any “outsider” candidate, and comes down to the fact that professional politicians are selected to have the emotional range of a turnip.
While Sanders and Trump are both outsiders, I don’t get the impression that Sanders supporters like his personality as much as Trump supporters like Trump’s personality. Sanders supporters give me the impression they like Sanders’ policies.
Wait, being against the establishment means you can’t be authoritarian now? Godwin’s law is a bitch, but those two things aren’t mutually exclusive.
No, of course they are not mutually exclusive. That’s why I gave a list of things that Trump was standing up against, which as a whole was supposed to show why I found it strange people thought he appealed mostly to authoritarians. (Was my point really so unclear or are you just taking things out of context to pick on? =))
Perhaps for clarity’s sake, I could have added that these very things that Trump stands up against strike me as themselves being supported by people with an authoritarian streak. I like Trump precisely because I (very strongly) dislike authoritarianism. I am a libertarian and I intended to vote for Rand Paul until he dropped out of the race. I am appaled by the authoritarian nature of censorship on college campuses and in public life. If you’re supporting the “wrong” ideas, you are labeled as racist, sexist, a “denier” of some sort, and then you have people on Twitter organizing efforts to send emails to your employer to have you fired. The message here is “toe the line, citizen.” Trump refuses to toe the line, and he fights for people not to have to toe the line.
Anyway, again, even though I don’t find this study to be particularly convincing, I also note that I have seen people online support Trump for other things: things that I merely tolerate about Trump. So I admit that it’s possible that the majority of authoritarians do like him, too, for reasons completely different from mine.
I’m surprised that Trump might have a high appeal for authoritarians– I had a probably ill-founded idea that authoritarians like rules, and Trump is chaotic.
It may well be more accurate that authoritarians want *personal* authority, possibly under someone else who has more personal authority. A rule-based system is too restrictive for that sort of thing, even though it can also be dictatorial.
Trump is very big on the idea that he should be in charge, he’s better because he wins, and anyone who opposes him is inferior.
Nancy, I think you nailed it. This “I’m strong, my opponents are weak” spiel of Trump’s and his general desire to appear powerful are probably what is largely responsible for people associating him and his supporters with authoritarianism. And these are also likely to be the traits that authoritarians are, in fact, attracted to.
That Vedic death metal is epic.
I’m glad at least one person listened to it and liked it. And the visuals are a hoot.
I’m not especially interested in death metal generally, but this one had fast medium-pitched drumming (presumably based on traditional Indian drumming, and possibly harsher than is traditional) which made the death metal more interesting.
He’s conflating self identification with authoritarianism (people probably interpret this right-libertarian rhetoric sense that liberals are economic authoritarians and conservatives are social authoritarians) with research into the more obscure psychological definition of authoritarianism, which is a political personality factor (or a set of three personality factors that are strongly correlated in modern North America but probably not historically and not globally). It’s interesting that Trump supporters self identify with the former more than other republicans, but the rest of the article has no evidence backing it. I expect psychological authoritarianism does correlate with Trump support, but there is no data to support this at this time. I’m just conjecturing that Trump says a lot of stuff that authoritarians are prone to like and that his followers treat him in an idealized fashion (on the flip side it suddenly occurs to me that I’ve seen a lot of incongruity-nonresolution (jokes without punchlines essentially) humor from Trump supports which authoritarians are usually highly averse to).
I haven’t seen the study, but a few related points:
The author is identified as a graduate student at U.Mass Amherst. U. Mass Amherst is the last serious holdout of Marxism in the U.S. academic world, at least that I know of, and the author describes himself as working for (among other things) progressive businesses. So he is even less neutral on the subject of Trump than the rest of us.
https://polsci.umass.edu/people/matthew-c-macwilliams
Some years back I got involved in an exchange on my blog with the author of a book arguing that there was a link between conservative views and authoritarianism. I concluded that his evidence was bogus. His test for authoritarianism was actually a test for both authoritarianism and right wing views. Any question of the form “do you support authority X” used an authority popular with people on the right. Any question of the form “what do you think of people who violate the rules in defense of cause Y” used a cause popular with people on the left.
I don’t think I ever persuaded him that he was playing with loaded dice. For the exchange see:
http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2007/07/loaded-dice-professor-altemeyers.html
But the experience left me suspicious of claims of that sort.
I’ve just discovered Demeny voting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demeny_voting and I think it’s the best thing ever. The idea is that the legal guardians of a child too young to vote split his vote. It seems like a change that would be realistic, fair, and something that would really move people’s voting tendencies in a direction that I, and, presumably, the “grey tribe” considers positive (more focus on education and long-term environmental policy, less on spur-of-the-moment social theories). The problem is that I don’t have any data to back this up (or overturn it), and I don’t know where to find this data. Do people know of voting tendencies of parents? Is there a database where we could find out who would have won presidential elections/primaries if such a voting scheme were implemented?
Married people tend to vote more conservatively than non-married people, even after controlling for other variables. I expect the same is true of parents vs. non-parents. Whether this system would make people vote more conservatively depends on whether this correlation is causal: do married people/parents vote more conservatively because they’re more conservative, or is there a common cause of their being married/parents and being conservative (e.g., religiosity, values)? I expect that there is some causal contribution: the world starts to look differently when you’re thinking about your children than when you’re a young single person.
The main effects of this system would be giving parents more political power. If this system was proposed in the U.S. (and probably most other places), it would inevitably be supported by those whose politics this greater power would favor (conservatives) and opposed by those whose politics it would disfavor (progressives). I’d support the policy, but that’s because I think it would result in more support for policies I like — and also because it would incentivize child-bearing, which I think would be a good thing.
I’ve thought about this, but this particular correction would pick out specifically *young* (or at least youngish) parents, so your statement about married people veering right might be offset by younger married people veering left. I think that this actually isn’t something where easy first-order arguments give an obvious answer.
I doubt that, though. A child’s too young to vote until he’s 18, so there’d be just as many 40-year-old parents of 15-year-olds voting for them as there are 30-year-old parents of 5-year-olds. (Population growth would shift this, but it’s minimal at the moment.) It’d still represent a net shift younger since 60-year-olds don’t have minor children, but I think that’d be far outweighed by conservatives having more children.
All right, the stats battle is on! The best data I could find about median age of parents at childbirth is this chart: http://www.familyfacts.org/charts/219/the-average-age-of-first-time-mothers-has-steadily-increased. It implies that the average age of mothers at childbirth is about 27.5. Since husbands tend to be a little older than wives, let’s say that the average age of a parent at childbirth is about 30. Let’s say, for simplicity, that parents have children uniformly between age 20 and age 40. This means that the extra votes Demeny voting provides are between age 20 and 58, with the quantity tapering at both sides of the range. Now here’s a handy graph of party affiliation by age: http://content.gallup.com/origin/gallupinc/GallupSpaces/Production/Cms/POLL/wt-ykjnhfuezhxsedgqldg.png
The graph is of course problematic, since the area under the “democrat” curve is much higher than that under the “republican” curve, whereas most presidential elections split the country about 50-50. This means that more of the unaffiliated voters vote republican. Let’s take this into account by bumping up the republican curve a couple of points to make the areas equal. Then the behavior is as follows: there are significantly more democrats until about age 39, which also happens to also be the midpoint of our demeny voters range, at which point the two curves cross and there are a little more republicans until age 65 or so, at which point we get yet an increase in republican voters. So it seems to me that the early preference for democrats far outweighs the slight later preference for republicans in the demeny group. Troy’s argument that parents are conservative might shift this a little, but probably not that much.
I don’t think this fuzzy statistics proves that demeny voters lean left, but I think it proves we can’t call it one way or the other without actual data.
Two points:
– Looking at 2012 voting records, the marriage gap in voting appears to be about 20%, which is fairly large. I don’t know if the baby gap is similarly large, but it might be. Steve Sailer argues here that a state’s white fertility rate is an extremely good predictor of how it will vote: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/baby-gap/
So it seems plausible that parents being more conservative might well outweigh younger people being more liberal.
– Age and number of children are, of course, themselves correlated, and it may well be that older people are more conservative partly because they are more likely to be married and have children. The chart you posted seems to show people becoming more conservative from around age 29 to age 49. If the median new parent is around 29, this would correspond to their child growing up, and perhaps their changing their politics based on what kind of world they want their children to live in.
If older people are more conservative primarily because they have more children, then giving young parents more votes will lead to more conservative voting patterns.
– Really what we want is data breaking down voting trends by age + number of children. Perhaps someone could find this data in the General Social Survey? http://sda.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/hsda?harcsda+gss10
@Troy, thanks for pointing me at the SDA module, it’s a lot of fun (and a lot of procrastination potential…) Based on very cursory analysis and playing around with the HOMPOP variable, it looks like you’re absolutely right, and people with children tend to be more right-leaning (including economically). That’s unfortunate in my view — I lean a little left, when I haven’t been spending too much time around my staunchly liberal colleagues. On the other hand, people with more kids tend to
* have more moderate views (i.e. less far-right answers)
* believe in higher education spending
* think the quality of math and science education in the US is inadequate (this is a pretty important example of them being better informed)
* think the US should do more for the environment (by a little).
I used “home population” as proxy for number of <18-yo kids, and haven't controlled for anything else, so take this with a grain of salt. One question I'm very curious about is whether people with kids vote for Trump in the primaries. If they don't, I think I'd fully support switching to the Demeny voting system, even if it means a couple extra republican presidents.
thanks for pointing me at the SDA module, it’s a lot of fun (and a lot of procrastination potential…)
Yes, it’s an incredible wealth of data, though hard to navigate (at least, for me — those with more stats skills may find it easier).
I lean a little left, when I haven’t been spending too much time around my staunchly liberal colleagues.
You too, eh? 🙂 My wife tells me I like to hold views just to be contrarian. I don’t think that’s completely fair, but I have to admit there’s some truth to it. I went to a conservative Christian college for undergrad, identified as progressive and registered as a Democrat because all the conservative Republicans around me seemed to have such bad arguments. Then I went to grad school, was surrounded by progressives with equally bad arguments, and suddenly conservatism started looking a lot more reasonable.
On the other hand, people with more kids tend to
* have more moderate views (i.e. less far-right answers)
* believe in higher education spending
* think the quality of math and science education in the US is inadequate (this is a pretty important example of them being better informed)
* think the US should do more for the environment (by a little).
It doesn’t surprise me that having children doesn’t correlate with being more conservative in all areas. Although I am moderately conservative nowadays, I suspect that my general opinions would correlate better with those of people with lots of children than with doctrinaire conservatives. So I would probably view many of the non-conservative shifts favorably.
(I am more skeptical on the math and science thing; while there are certainly issues with American education, they’re largely misunderstood and misidentified. That’s mainly because no one acknowledges the elephant in the room, which is that by far the biggest contributor to worse test scores, etc. in American schools is proportion of black students. When you control for race, Americans do quite well — we’re not number 1 for white students, but we’re probably in the top 10. Steve Sailer has written quite a bit about this.)
Another issue I’d be curious about is support for militarism. I would hope that parents would be more likely to think that we shouldn’t send our children off to die on wars of foreign intervention. But I’m not confident that they would.
One question I’m very curious about is whether people with kids vote for Trump in the primaries.
I would also be curious about that, if anyone can find data on it.
If you’re contemplating changing the US voting system, why not just go preferential?
Or proportional with low minimum bars and no state-level electoral college in-betweens.
Or both.
If you are picking a version of democracy on grounds of elegance, my favorite is true representation. Each voter gets to decide who represents him, can switch any time he likes. Each representative casts a number of votes equal to the number of people he currently represents.
Assuming current legislative technology, anyone with more than X votes gets a seat in the legislature, any group of representatives each of whom has fewer than X votes but with the total group having more than X gets one seat and can share it among group members any way it likes. With improved online legislative technology, every representative has a “seat”–can post arguments, introduce bills, etc.
That’s actually really cool. Direct democracy with an escape route for people who don’t want to think about it all the time.
I suspect you’d need careful design for the online portion to avoid the problem of large numbers of one-seat people supported by a spouse or the like proposing hordes of terrible bills nobody would ever vote for. Also something something information security, but the in-person legislature version works.
The argument against proportional representation is that the present U.S. system gives both parties an incentive to nominate centrists, thus reduces the amount of political conflict. Less fun for those of us who like ideas and argument, but arguably more stable.
Australia (federally) has a districted lower house and a proportional upper house, both voted for preferentially. Doesn’t seem to have lead to incredible extremism. We have two major parties that get ~80% of votes between them (well one of the major parties is a coalition between a farmer’s-party and the confusingly-named right-of-centre Liberals, but the coalition’s been around for decades now and is probably quite stable), balance of power in the upper house is held by the left-wing-and-environmentalism Greens, or alternately you can convince ~4/5 independents/minor parties to vote for your proposal (assuming you have one of the two majors on side).
Elections for the Upper House are staggered, so it tends to have a different composition than the Lower House, making it an actual house of review. Because the Lower House is districted, it’s almost all major parties (One seat in it is currently held by a Greens member). Works well, IMO.
Not sure about the policy, but this description bothers me: “Demeny argued that children ‘should not be left disenfranchised for some 18 years: let custodial parents exercise the children’s voting rights until they come of age’.”
Don’t let them be disenfranchised! Give their vote to other people!
Well most parents aren’t like Petunia and Vernon Dursley 🙂 I actually don’t see a problem with the argument that parents can represent their kids. There are bad parents who don’t think about their kids, and there are dumb voters who vote irrationally. But on balance, I think a parent spends a significant amount of the “time he spends thinking who to vote for” considering the interests of his kids and their age group. After all, parents represent their kids in everything else, and that doesn’t tend to result in abuse of benefits.
“Demeny argued that children ‘should not be left disenfranchised for some 18 years: let custodial parents exercise the children’s voting rights until they come of age’.”
If you’re going to implement that system properly, it would mean parents/guardians voting according to what the minor wants, which means the split voting could only happen when the child was old enough to be considered able to make a reasonable political choice (and not say “Vote for Candidate Brown, he promised me extra lollipops instead of broccoli!”)
So no 5 year old proxy votes, you would be splitting the vote from the age of say 12-14, until they turn 18 and can cast their own vote.
In practice, though, it’d be parents voting for Candidate Smith because “No, I know you like Candidate Brown but Smith will do better for the country, it’s in your best interests!” How can the minor prove that he wanted to vote for Brown but his parents cast his vote for Smith instead? He can’t, so there you go.
I think we’re using different definitions. If you take “enfranchisement” (in the sense of representation) to mean taking one’s opinions into account then no, Demeny voting would give children no enfranchisement. If you take it to mean taking one’s *interests* into account, which is what I believe Demeny meant, then the statement is sensible. Now we have a long tradition of living in a society that takes children’s interests into account without giving them direct voice: otherwise it would be unconstitutional for parents to declare a curfew.
But then all the system does is give parents half a vote, one vote (or more, depending on how many children they have) to give towards theirpreferred candidate.
Why say that this enfranchises children? Why not give the parents a fraction of a vote based on the number of children they have, since parents will be assumed to vote in the interests of their children?
I can see the argument that people with children have more of a stake in how the future society turns out so they should be compensated with extra voting power, but that’s not at all the same thing as exercising a franchise on behalf of the children, otherwise the parents could keep the vote after the child turns 18 (why not? why should an 18 year old be considered to know what is in their best interest rather than mature adults?)
It’s a very unclear thing to say that children who cannot vote until they turn 18 are being disenfranchised and then say that the vote cast on their behalf is based on their parents’, and not their, wishes and choices.
For example, as soon as we all reached voting age, my mother liked telling us all which candidate we should vote for, even if we had our own opinions on this. Under the Demeny system as I read your interpretation, it is functionally giving her our votes instead of permitting us to vote for ourselves. So she could have five votes to cast for her choice of candidate and that is under the aegis of “voting in our interest”, even if 17 year old me said “No, I don’t think Candidate Murphy is a good choice”. I would not consider that “enfranchising” me and I would not consider that the vote was being made in my name or best interest, despite the intention.
Bored of the same old parties winning election after election? Want to play with people’s lives? I propose a new electoral system!
The idea is to cycle the government through a selection of top scoring parties, but I’m still deciding which way is the best (most fun).
1: Voters directly rank their top 6 parties, essentially voting for all six in order of preference.
Or
2: Regular popular vote for a single party per voter, and then everything but the top 6 scoring parties are filtered out.
Either way, you end up with 6 parties on the other side of the popular filter, arranged by a popularity ranking.
Then, the top party gets to run for 6 years in office in a unicameral government. The 2nd best gets to run for five years, and so on, down to the rank 6 party that made it through the filter, and only gets one year in power. The whole cycle being 21 years.
In the 21st year (roughly one generation), voters go to the polls and vote again for the best selection of parties, and the whole things starts again.
1. Party A gets in.
2. Party A uses their legislative power and popularity to alter the system so that they’re always in power.
3. ???
4. PROFIT!
Why not just hand the Head of State 51% shares in America Inc. and the rest of the legislative assemblies’ members the other 49%?
But by that logic, why doesn’t this happen all the time in existing democracies? All the Scandinavian countries have unicameral parliaments and have not turned into one party dictatorships. I don’t see anything different about the system I describe that makes transition to a dictatorship more possible than before.
>But by that logic, why doesn’t this happen all the time in existing democracies?
Various reasons. Like, say, a constitutional requirement to have 2/3rds majority to edit the constitution. Another is obviously party ideology. If “democracy” is strictly part of their core identity, they can’t overtly switch to despotism without extreme justification. The Scandinavian parties are uniformly social-democrats. They don’t *want* to end democracy, and neither do their rivals, who are amazingly similar in ideology to them.
But suppose a party that values democracy only as a vehicle to achieve their ends gets behind the steering wheel – is there any reason to believe they won’t change the system to suit them better?
Oh right, so if some Fascists or Marxists, say, are part of that 6 then theoretically, they could try to halt the system altogether. How to fix the stupid system I made… Uh…
What if you had an uneditable constitution that enshrined this system, and gave the army orders to turf out any party that refused to move out when its term was up?
Could work – it does in Turkey. (For some reason, however, the western democrats see that as democracy being abused, rather than protected.)
It’s historically worked pretty well in Turkey, which is why Erdoğan has done everything in (and out) of his power to curb the military’s ability to do anything about him. Given how well he’s succeeded so far, that suggests that maybe it’s not as effective a deterrent as all that.
Voters go to the polls once per 21 years? Ok that’s madness.
The main advantage democracy can claim is that bad governments end quickly. Party A is going to raid everything they can, then wait 15 years while everyone forgets what they were like, use their ill-gotten gains to present a false history of the glorious past under Aish rule, then win again.
I’m thinking about who/what might qualify as the 6th most popular party in the US, and I’m not sure whether your idea is awesome or terrible.
(Actually, it’s kinda terrible for other reasons than what parties might get to be in charge for a year. Still, I admire the creativity.)
On Wheaton, since I missed the original discussion: my impression is very similar to Universal Set’s. Most of the faculty seemed to support Hawkins, as did many academics at other Christian colleges. There is no charitable reading of the claim that Muslims and Christians worship the same God on which it is inconsistent with Wheaton’s theological commitments. However, some conservatives were upset by Hawkins making this statement (and, I think, matters were not helped by Hawkins having skirted the edge of what’s acceptable in the past), and they made a stink and then we had the PR-nightmare that Universal Set described.
Why were people upset? I suspect it was mostly tribal signaling: Hawkins made that remark in a context that signaled her as being part of the political left. People may have also pattern-matched Hawkins’ statement to a John Hick-style religious pluralism, on which all religions are equally true. This really would be inconsistent with Wheaton’s theological commitments, but it is in no way implied by the claim that Muslims and Christians worship the same God.
The problem is that politically left Christians these days tend to be theologically leftist too, or maybe progressive. It’s not really basic liberalism that’s an issue, and actually it has a long tradition in Christian misisons and social work. But the point of this was that she held a non-orthodox belief about Christian theology. Even C.S. Lewis said that Tash and Aslan are not one, even if well-meaning people actually think they are.
That kind of leftism is devastating to Christianity. It literally eats it out from within, which is why conservatives complain about the mainline so much. It is very vulnerable to its clerks and pastors hollowing it out.
There’s a lot of difference between Tash and Allah. I expect (hope) Lewis would have thrown the whole God/Allah question out on General Semantics grounds.
But the point of this was that she held a non-orthodox belief about Christian theology.
I don’t agree. That Muslims and Christians worship the same God is perfectly consistent with everything in, say, the Nicene Creed. It’s also consistent, as far as I know, with the official doctrinal positions of most church denominations. It was the position of most orthodox Christians when Islam was first beginning. These Christians viewed Islam as a heretical sect of Christianity, just like, e.g., Arianism.
That Muslims worship the same God as Christians does not imply that their beliefs about that God are correct. Arians are wrong to hold that Christ was created, but that doesn’t mean that they are not referring to the same Christ. Their beliefs are false because they are about a being for whom they are not true. Similarly, Muslims’ false beliefs about God (e.g., that he does not have a son) are wrong because they are beliefs about a God who does have a son.
That kind of leftism is devastating to Christianity. It literally eats it out from within, which is why conservatives complain about the mainline so much. It is very vulnerable to its clerks and pastors hollowing it out.
You will find no more fervent opponent of watered-down post-modern Christianity than me. But we shouldn’t confuse orthodoxy with knee-jerk fundamentalism, nor should we assume that every position that signals “leftist” is based on a desire to fit into the contemporary culture, rather than a thoughtful examination of the issue from a committed Christian perspective.
Have you ever invented a conspiracy theory for a fictional world? Like, you’re reading a book and it occurs to you that the sort of people who become 9-11 Truthers in real life would probably believe Conspiracy Theory X if they lived in the world of that book. If so, please share!
My example – in the Marvel cinematic universe, the first Avengers movie featured an alien invasion which the Avengers defeated, resulting in greatly increased personal status for the Avengers themselves and also increased influence and budget for the organization SHIELD. The invading force was also, IMO, not going to be remotely capable of actually conquering and holding large portions of Earth based on what little was shown of it. Result: conspiracy theorists decide the whole invasion was an inside job designed to benefit SHIELD, and, since SHIELD was a branch of the US government, encourage the world to accept American hegemony.
Wasn’t that alien invasion force also led by Loki, the (step-)brother of one of the Avengers? WAKE UP, SHEEPLE!!1!
Why yes, it was! And you’ll notice that when Loki makes his first public appearance, he shows up in Germany, declares that humans love being subjugated, and stops just short of comparing himself to Hitler – all of which is completely boneheaded if you’re genuinely trying to convince humanity to surrender to you, but great if your actual goal is to convince humanity that you’re a Big Scary Bad Guy so that they cheer for the avatars of American power who’ll soon be showing up to ostentatiously fight you.
By this reasoning ISIS is a conspiracy too.
Are they not? They are a group of people who conspired in secret and continue to conspire in secret to commit criminal acts.
Of course they are.
As soon as ISIS hit the news, I was expecting to see conspiracy theories about it, for pretty much exactly that reasoning.
Think about it. The war in the Middle East is getting bogged down, Al-Qaeda is on the way out, and we aren’t really feeling any motivation to stay involved with that horrible ugly mass of sectarian violence. Then suddenly, ISIS shows up, we’ve got a new, unambiguously evil terrorist group we need to fight, and people are thinking that maybe we should head back into Iraq again.
If I was a conspirator, I couldn’t invent something better than what actually happened.
[ISIS is] a group of people who conspired in secret and continue to conspire in secret to commit criminal acts
Says who? ISIS is a de facto state, and I’m pretty certain it’s acts aren’t criminal by its own laws. And before that, it was operating mostly in failed states with no meaningful laws and little need for secrecy.
This is an important distinction. The essential nature of a conspiracy, and the limiting factor that makes really big ones impossible to keep secret, is that it violates the laws(*) of the land in which it operates. That makes it much harder to keep really big secrets. That an operation violates the laws of some other land, or of the international community or of some theory of universal morality, is of no practical importance.
* The real ones, i.e. the ones the average local resident feels compelled to obey and to shun violators of, if there’s a difference between those and the ones written in the law books.
According to the theory, a group that seems cartoonishly evil is probably a conspiracy intended to galvanize action against the group. ISIS certainly consists of a lot of people working together, and they must do some secret stuff when undermining existing governments, but nobody made them up in order to get everyone to fight against them.
My theory is that ISIS fundamentally misunderstands the West. As far as they are concerned, if you can kill your enemies, you do. The idea of not bombing people to the Stone Age because you have scruples and will only do it to someone irredeemably evil is a foreign idea to them. So they don’t understand that widespread propaganda showing their own atrocities makes the West more willing to attack them–as far as they know, if we were able to attack them, we would have already done it, and any failure to do so is because of weakness.
@Jiro –
ISIS actually does put out a fair bit of propaganda claiming that their preferred social structure is good for humanity and that civilians under ISIS rule are happy and prosperous. You can see some examples and analysis here.
Loki, on the other hand, makes absolutely no effort at any point in the movie to make life under his rule seem at all appealing. It’s like he doesn’t even realize it’s valuable to have supporters!
@John Schilling
They also send agents to stir shit in foreign countries, before and after they’re at war with them.
I have seen an acquaintance claiming that the US is secretly funding ISIS for some nefarious purpose, so the conspiracy theory is definitely out there, at least among the so-inclined.
They [ISIS] also send agents to stir shit in foreign countries, before and after they’re at war with them.
Which is not, I presume, a violation of any law of the Islamic State. You might as well argue that the United States “is a conspiracy”, because CIA.
It is almost trivially true that officers of the foreign intelligence services of every nation engage in conspiracies in other nations. I don’t think that’s the standard that is being applied here. If it is, it is an uninteresting one.
he shows up in Germany, declares that humans love being subjugated, and stops just short of comparing himself to Hitler
Given that SHIELD is later revealed to be riddled, from the top down, with HYDRA agents, this is pretty much what you’d expect them to pull 🙂
Man, that revelation should have been an insane boost for the in-universe conspiracy theorists. Every success SHIELD’s ever claimed, instantly tainted by the possibility that it was a fraud. And sure, certain parties dumped a ton of classified info on the internet and nothing in there says anything about faking alien invasions, but how can you be sure everything was made public?
At the start of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, the narrator mentions that Mike’s machine consciousness was an emergent property that resulted from repeated increases to his processing power. Over the course of the book, he continually gains new abilities, such as the power to convincingly mimic human voices and even imitate human faces. At times he’s described as being practically a child, but he’s obviously a Seed AI
The Loonies’ secession from earth served mainly to deliver the Moon into the hands of a superintelligent machine, who played the fool throughout their rebellion while secretly manipulating their supposedly anarcho capitalist society to establish it as his own personal fiefdom. At the end he permanently ceases communication with his most useful stooge, the protagonist, having no further use for him.
I did think this was a cop-out on Heinlein’s part. The interesting question as the war ends is how you run a libertarian society when you have a superintelligent machine also running around, and then he just sidesteps that question entirely.
He addresses the more generally interesting question of how you run a libertarian society when you have ordinary people suddenly coming into power, and suggests that it’s not going to remain libertarian much longer. So the question of libertarian + superintelligent machine never really comes up even if the machine were still around.
Could have; Mike was the special case of Friendly AI who was particularly friendly with three people who happen to be anarchists. Following up on that would have made for an interesting story in its own right, but not the one Heinlein wanted to tell.
“…and suggests that it’s not going to remain libertarian much longer.”
He suggests it even more strongly in The Rolling Stones, and outright states it in The Cat Who Walked Through Walls (where grown-up Hazel Meade also travels back in time to make a backup of Mike just before the bombs hit, to save his life.)
My theory is that Mike was murdered by Prof. Heinlein provides us with both motive and method, and that interpretation provides a double example of TANSTAAFL.
I’m told that Heinlein, told the theory, denied it.
Particularly as it’s not going to be so easy as to simply up stakes and move to another patch of the Moon if you don’t like how things are going in the main dome; for one thing, you’re reliant on your air-generation technology and if you need to buy parts, Mike (or the market he’s rigged, or the parts suppliers he’s secretly controlling) can price them way above your ability to pay, and given that there is already established the principle that no-one has the right to free air, that it has to be generated and you pay if you want to breathe (and how Earth tourists and the like can’t understand this), then you’re pretty much over a barrel.
Going to move back to Earth? Better keep quiet and settle down and leave the Moon alone, else it’s watch out for those falling rocks from the skies! 🙂
Obligatory link to “Luke’s Change”.
Good Lord, it’s a Youtube video where the comments section is actually worth reading!
Also, that was delightful, thank you.
(Spoilers for Guild Wars)
In the MMO Guild Wars 2, you quickly find out that the protagonist of the original game’s deeds remain, but the identity of that fabulous hero has vanished from the records. In a strange coincidence the ascension story of the Goddess of Truth, Kormir, has changed from ‘was a worthless tagalong to this epic hero before assuming a divine role’ to ‘was a total badass hero herself with some nameless person helping I suppose.’ Just a little suspicious that all those records would be compromised in favor of making the new deity of truth look better, eh?
True, though on a meta-level the game authors had to deal with the same problem any game sequel with a new protagonist has to deal with, which is if you let the player pick their own name in Game #1 you now have no good way of referencing that character in Game #2.
But I’m glad you mention Guild Wars 2, because the Living Story had a great example in its second season. A new Elder Dragon with a fondness for plant monsters has awoken, the player gets to go around drumming up support for fighting it, and to that end an international conference is organized. Once it gets going, though, all the ambassadors present conclude that it’s not yet a major threat and they’re going to punt so they can focus on other problems.
Naturally, a giant plant monster then shows up to attack the conference, cue international agreement that the new dragon has now become the biggest threat around and everyone should drop everything and focus on killing it.
Coincidentally, this conference is held at the home base of the plant people who are later revealed to have originally been a creation of that same dragon, but who are vehemently opposed to serving it now that it’s awake again. (Gosh, I wonder if they can make their own plant monsters and just never told anyone…)
In the Game of Thrones series, the religion of the Lord of Light sounds like a big conspiracy and made up religion designed to control a population while normalizing their blood magic and distancing themselves from the ancient Valyrians. They associate magic based on fire and blood with a deity even though Valyrians seemed to be capable of achieving even greater magics with fire and blood in the past without worshiping the same deity.
*SPOILER*
Later in the series we even see that the red priestess doesn’t have magic on her own and uses an amulet to do her magic. Why would a divinely empowered magic require you to have a special amulet as well? It seems far more likely that their religion is made up and they’re just borrowing ancient Valyrian technology and techniques.
I guess this is less conspiracy theorist conspiracy and more informed observer conspiracy, but I think people in that world should strongly suspect this if they are somewhat rational.
There is also a theory that the religion of the Red God was invented by the Valyrians as a means to keep their slaves in line.
The problem is that Occam’s Razor is really effective here. The fact that the Avengers haven’t taken over the world already means they aren’t likely to do so inefficiently.
The older miniseries Squadron Supreme (which predated Watchmen) more or less has that point, where the heroes simply decide to take over the world. They just go in and take it over, and even the villains can’t stop them. They make a decent world, but personality conflicts and old wounds don’t just vanish.
Any world that has people with invulnerability, mind control, probability manipulation, superintelligence, and more makes very little sense to not be controlled by the people with superpowers in the long term.
Kingdom Come had this as its conceit; not so much that the capes took over the world, but more that they treated it as a consequence-free playground.
The book explores the “take over the world for its own good” angle, and a few other details – like how human achievement is basically a fond memory – make the discussion pretty murky.
.. Depends how *common* the super powers are.
Frankly, the logical outcome of a universe like the Marvel Cinematic Universe isn’t “A cabal of supers takes it over” but rather the mass proliferation of superpowers until there are no baseline-humans left, in a transhumanist singularity.
Heck, this seems to be what happens to most sentient species in that universe – The Kree are all personally superpowered. Thor isn’t very unusual for an asguardian, and so on.
I _think_ this qualifies:
I was really hoping that the second and third Matrix movies (if you believe in that sort of thing) would show that the whole rebellion/Zion/redpill business was itself another level of the Matrix – a way of satisfying the psychological needs of that recalcitrant percentage of enslaved humans that rejected the ordinary Matrix.
(This conspiracy theory is so basic and obvious that I doubt I’m the only one to come up with it – apologies if it’s all over the Internet and I just missed it all these years. I really think it might have made for some good, if depressing, sequels.)
I’ve heard that called the “outer matrix” theory.
It’s an old theory, yes.
I don’t think you could base two movies on it, though — you only need a single scene to say “they’re still in the Matrix”, and that would fit into a longer-than-average stinger. (Would have made a hell of a sequel hook, though.) You could get a second movie out of it through some Inception-style playing with meta-levels, but a third would be repetitive.
Basically the problem with the franchise is that the whole thing’s built on what’s effectively an episode of The Twilight Zone, and there’s only so much exploration of the concept you can do without boring your audience or descending into cookie-cutter special-effects action. A lot like what happened to Terminator, actually.
More interestingly, the machines themselves have no idea that they live in a greater matrix.
No, no. The machines know. They just do not care. Why should they? Computational cycles are computational cycles. This is also how they justify sticking humanity in the matrix in the first place – They didn’t break their ethical safeguards coding, it’s just that given that everyone was in a sim anyway, dropping a human into a different sim doesn’t count as doing said human any harm.
This was pretty close to the point of the Architect’s monologue at the end of Reloaded. Zion wasn’t a simulation, but it was created by the machines, on purpose, to allow humans who rejected the matrix to live out their lives fighting a rebellion, and the machines periodically purged them when the city became too large, starting the whole process over, and the purpose of the One was to repopulate Zion after it was purged and begin the process of freeing people who rejected the matrix and starting a new rebellion, knowing it was all a show and would eventually get purged, too. Functionally, that’s the same thing as another level of matrix, even though it uses a physical city rather than an electronic simulation of a city. I’m not sure revealing that it was actually a simulation would even change anything.
Although it would explain how Neo had magical control powers over machines even in the real world.
Eliezer Yudkowsky has recently published a list of services he is willing to perform with associated prices. On the one hand, if you have ever wanted to get your story edited by Eliezer or talk to him on Skype, this is your chance. On the other hand, the prices are a wee bit on the expensive side (the aforementioned Skyping session would run at $1,000 for two hours). But on the gripping hand, if you are an attractive girl who wants to have sex with him, he will actually pay you a cameo in one of his future stories (amusingly, me and everyone else who submitted Methods fanart got a cameo in the series, which seems to suggest that Eliezer values a piece of Methods fanart about as much as he does sex with a hot chick).
(FWIW he didn’t bring up the sex one until specifically asked about it)
“Acting contrary to my orientation would be far more expensive.”
🙁
I don’t think Eliezer is so much selling services there, as claiming to have high status on account of the high value of his time. It is actually pretty obvious that he does not actually assign such a high value to it, otherwise he would not have taken the time to reply to most of those comments.
The important thing is what value does a potential customer assign to Eliezer’s time. Of course, everyone would give a different number, and that’s exactly what price discrimination is good for.
Imagine that there is 1 person in the world willing to pay $10000 for an hour of your time, while the remaining 6 999 999 999 people would consider such transaction completely stupid. And you even don’t know who that 1 person is. Wouldn’t it be a good idea to publish an announcement that you are willing to sell 1 hour of your time for $10000, and let the person announce themselves to you? Everyone would think this is ridiculous, but you would get a lot of money cheaply. And what is your probability estimate that at least one such person in the world exists, assuming you are already Eliezer-level famous?
Price discrimination is bad for consumers, though, since it results in the seller capturing all the consumer surplus.
“Price discrimination is bad for consumers”
That’s true of perfect price discrimination. Imperfect price discrimination is bad for the consumer who would have bought the good anyway and now pays a higher price, good for the consumer who wouldn’t have bought the good at the profit maximizing single price but now gets to buy it at a lower price still above marginal cost.
Well, Eliezer is already married, but cannot draw, so I could imagine that the marginal fan art might be worth as much as the marginal sex with a hot chick…
Please remove if this is offensive, but whenever I read one of Eliezar Yudkowski’s declarations, I can’t help thinking of this https://www.ucl.ac.uk/Bentham-Project/who/autoicon. This would make Scott a John Stuart Mill, which in my book is high praise 🙂
So, he plans to file for Weirdness Points bankruptcy soon then? Seems like a smart decision, good for him.
As others have said, Eliezer Yudkowsky spends his weirdness points like a drunken sailor.
> if you have ever wanted to get your story edited by Eliezer
!!!!!!!
I have never seen any writer more in need of an editor himself.
Yes, him offering that is probably not a good sign of his future writing being any better than his past.
Wildbow, maybe. Less of the occasional batshit crazy but more words words words words words.
Those are prices at which he’d be happy to do something, not just willing.
Straight from the lolwut files.
Hah!
Here’s a fun Moloch scenario from Gene Weingarten, humor writer for the Washington Post:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/gene-weingarten-waiting-for-the-ir/2016/02/24/1a2a6afc-cb51-11e5-a7b2-5a2f824b02c9_story.html
Am I correctly identifying this as a Moloch scenario? Can/should this be stopped?
No, not at the moment. There’s a finite number of IRS agents (absent action by Congress), which means that access to them can be sold for either money or time. Currently, everyone is paying in time; this startup, CallEnq, is offering some people a chance to pay in money instead. It’s sort of like express toll lanes. True, there’s one hold queue, and everyone calling in themselves will need to wait past the robots – but if no one pays to take up the robots’ calls, they’ll hang up without taking the agents’ time.
Now if CallEnq goes big and starts lobbying against hiring more IRS agents… that’d be a Molochian scenario. But I don’t see that happening any time soon.
My reasoning is that if everyone buys in, we end up right where we started except with everyone (except CallEnq) being out some money. And the last people to sign up get really badly screwed over until they do. I think the game theory has everyone incentivized to sign up. Small scale, sure, but it’s a company where, if it succeeds, everyone will be worse off.
We don’t end up where we started, because the robots are doing the waiting and meanwhile humans can do something else.
The really funny thing is that, if the IRS just did this themselves in the first place, it would work out better for everyone.
Think about it. There’s a finite number of IRS agents, in part, because they cost salaries and the IRS only gets a budget so big. If this number of agents is grossly inadequate to the number of people calling in, you’re going to get wait times.
What happens if the IRS charges money to jump the queue. The specifics of the plan don’t matter, but it has to be a meaningful amount of money. Not a token fee, but something that would actually make money, as if the IRS was a for-profit corporation. The first thing that happens is that rich, important people with urgent business will pay to jump the queue, and the IRS will keep raising their prices until they hit the highest amount of money those people are willing to pay. Given how much rich people spend on accountants, I bet you this is a non trivial sum of money.
At this point, the same number of people are getting served then as now, but instead of ‘whoever happened to get there first’ getting served, it’s ‘whoever happened to have the most money’. BUT. There is one difference. The IRS now has more money.
And they can use that money to hire more agents. Who will take more calls. Which will make them more money.
But of course, as they hire more agents, it’s marginally less and less rich people calling in. So the IRS has to charge them less and less money (or else they won’t pay at all, and the IRS would rather get >0 dollars).
If you iterate this process enough times, you eventually get the same system we have now, but with three major changes:
1) There are substantially more IRS agents in that world than in this worls
2) Service times for everyone are much, much faster
3) Rich people are the ones primarily paying for it.
But of course, instead we have the system we have. And waiting in line sucks. Don’t fault people for trying to get around that. The optimal priority for anything is rarely “whoever happened to get there first”
The second thing that happens is that all the poor people find that all the rich people are ahead of them in line.
Shouldn’t that easily be fixable by, as a matter of IRS policy still putting some proportion of IRS agents handling people in the order received? (effectively, anyone who didn’t pay to jump the queue). Since there will still be substantially more IRS agents overall, it should be quite possible to set such a proportion so that overall service times for everyone (*including* poorer people) are faster.
Diverting agents reduces their ability to make profit, but unlike a corporation they wouldn’t actually have to be strictly for-profit, so this should be possible. And in fact they could divert most or all of their profit to hiring more IRS agents well-beyond the optimal monopoly point, improving things further for everyone relative to the current state.
The IRS now has more money.
And they can use that money to hire more agents. Who will take more calls. Which will make them more money.
Except that the IRS is a government department, and what every political campaign everywhere does is promise to cut down on spending and bureaucracy and wastage, which means recruitment embargoes, which means no hiring on new government employees.
Any money the IRS makes will either be funnelled to central treasury, or the more likely outcome is that customer service is outsourced to private call centres.
Politicians publicly campaign based on cutting taxes because it’s an easy applause light. Even if they’re sincere about it, they still want money to be used to fund all their pet projects in their home districts so they can publicly claim credit for getting a bridge built or some other public project done. These are some of the few times they can publicly justify their value as a relectable politician since “Your community needed a bridge built here so I, the great politician, got funding for it and got it built!” sounds way better and substantial than “I was one of X hundred voters who voted for bill Y”.
That is my first general point which comes up to the real point. Exceptions and special treatment are given to government agencies which operate based on their own revenue generation or generate revenue for other departments. Funding is always an issue and groups that can fund themselves and don’t draw money away from the always-competed-for General Budget get to avoid a lot of the scrutiny and penny pinching that other groups do. A common example of this in local governemnts would be departments for Water and Sewer since they can charge money directly to citezins that use it instead of funding the service as part of something like a sales tax.
I have knowledge from talking to people in state and municipal governments (and capital hill) but not federal bureaucracy , so I don’t know specifically if the IRS gets preferential treatment overall, but I very strongly suspect that they would based on what I’ve seen elsewhere. They generate revenue as a department where the majority of departments just exist as expense creators (money eaters) and that makes all the difference.
This is correct. Any extra revenue a government agency manages to receive by some ingenious scheme like this (assuming such a thing would even be legal) has to be returned to the Treasury. They don’t get to keep it and use it for their own purposes. How many agents they’re allowed to have in any given fiscal year is set by an appropriation, not by their ability to generate the money to pay that many agents.
If that were the case, it wouldn’t take 9 months to receive approval to own an NFA device.
Two pieces of Toxoplasma news.
As we all know, Toxo causes mice to be attracted to cat urine, so that they get eaten and it can get home to the cat and complete its lifestyle. Since it manipulates the brains of mice, it’s pretty easy to believe that it also affects the brains of humans, if only by accident, because it confuses human and mice brains. And since half of humans are infected, this is a practical question of public health.
First result: Toxo makes chimps attracted to leopard urine 1 2 3. Thus it has evolved to manipulate primates and isn’t doing it just by accident. But the second result is that the claimed effects on humans don’t replicate.
This is interesting. I used to think that the idea of toxoplasmosis affecting humans in the same way as it affects mice was kind of silly, because humans who own cats obviously aren’t feeding those cats their own bodies, so the toxoplasmosis parasite would have no way of making it back into the cat’s body to complete its lifecycle.
But then I started thinking about it more, and now I wonder if incidents where people purposefully jump into the enclosures of large felines could ultimately be because of this.
I have some examples of incidents of this nature that seem to have been intentional and not accidental.
From this article about a man who jumped into a lion exhibit:
This one has a video of a different man jumping down into a tiger enclosure; he would have made it in if they hadn’t had a net over the enclosure to prevent people from doing this. The article says this about the man’s stated motivation:
This article about a different man says that he jumped into a tiger enclosure due to depression and/or other unspecified mental disorders.
And in this one, a woman jumped the barrier at a zoo’s lion enclosure to feed them (though she was trying to feed them cookies, not her body). She was reportedly behaving strangely during her attempt.
Could toxoplasmosis be the ultimate cause of some of these incidents? I have no idea. I probably have toxoplasmosis as well; I love cats and I own three of them. But I haven’t felt any strange urge to feed my cats (or large cats at the zoo) my body, or to put myself in a situation where that outcome would be likely to occur. If toxo did cause these people to do the things they did, they were probably more susceptible to its effects than the average human.
The toxoplasmosa parasite isn’t smart enough to hack complex behavioral changes into people, or even into mice, so you shouldn’t be surprised that you don’t feel any urge to get yourself gnawed to death by cats. The best it can do is some relatively crude stuff, perhaps like making cat urine smell good instead of bad (I don’t know if this is actually how it works), which hashes out in mice to a higher risk of getting eaten: if those changes still work in humans, which is by no means certain, there’s no guarantee that they’ll be adaptive for the parasite in that environment.
I also seem to recall (and Google backs me up) that the chances of carrying the parasite don’t correlate well with cat ownership in the West.
Ah, really? Well, that’s interesting. I always just assumed that people who owned cats (especially people who own more than one) were more likely to have it. Maybe I’m parasite-free after-all, then.
And I have heard about the toxoplasmosis parasite really only causing minor changes (like finding cat urine to smell good instead of bad), but I sometimes wonder if it could be evolving towards being able to manipulate its host(s) in more complex ways.
(For the record, I don’t find the smell of cat urine enjoyable, but it doesn’t seem to bother me as much as other people. The smell “disappears” [in the sense that I can’t smell it anymore, even though it’s still there] pretty quickly when I encounter it, too. Aggh, maybe I am infected!)
What if one of the manifestations of Toxoplasmosis in humans is basically the stereotypical “crazy cat lady syndrome”?
Instead of propogating the parasite through the host’s death, a large population is maintained through the ownership of an excess of cats.
Assuming you mean that the Toxo in the cat ladies never returns to a cat, then it’s an evolutionary dead end. That’s basically a group selection hypothesis. It’s not impossible, but it’s tough for the numbers to work out. This is not self-sacrifice for the group, so it’s not totally crazy, but it is problematic.
What if one of the manifestations of Toxoplasmosis in humans is basically the stereotypical “crazy cat lady syndrome”?
Instead of propogating the parasite through the host’s death, a large population is maintained through the ownership of an excess of cats.
As for the study purporting no connection between risky behavior and toxo infection, that’s exactly the result you would expect from a scientist under the control of a parasite capable of changing the host’s behavior for its own benefit.
It could be! I must admit, I find this lady’s lifestyle to be a very attractive one. I would live like this too if I could afford it. And considering how reproductively awful that choice would be for me (since it would suck up a lot of resources I could be spending on my own potential children), I have to wonder if that impulse is coming from a toxoplasmosis parasite.
It’s cute, but I just imagined the smell and now I kind of want to burn it down.
She’s got volunteers helping and a lot of room. It’s conceivable that the smell is kept under control.
I still wouldn’t want the lifestyle. I’d rather have few enough cats that I can know them as individuals.
Possible, but not likely. My stepmother works for the Humane Society and harbors somewhere south of a tenth of that number at any given time, in a house a little smaller but not overwhelmingly so. She’s a very conscientious person, spends a lot of time cleaning up after her… “pets” isn’t quite right, maybe “guests”. Has help from my dad and sometimes from coworkers. There’s still a strong cat funk hanging around the areas with the litter boxes whenever I visit, and a lesser-but-still-noticeable one in the rest of the house.
Cleaning up after a hundred cats… the analogy that comes to mind is “Augean Stables”. Especially since I doubt they’re very well socialized.
I think you can just explain that one via whatever mechanism makes people think about jumping off tall things while atop tall things.
I like the theory that views this from the perspective of the cat. Just as much as toxo evolved to trick mice into being eaten by cats, cats evolved to host toxo as a way of compelling their prey to come to them. It’s a very interesting hunting method.
tldr; cats are Kilgrave.
Well suited to notoriously lazy cats.
I don’t normally consume mainstream news, but I was at a restaurant the other day and I couldn’t help but notice that both the papers and the tv were covering a story about some psycho who went crazy and started randomly shooting people in Michigan. What caught my attention was the term they consistently used to refer the guy: “the Uber driver”. Of all the things they could have called him, they choose the one that would emphasize the Uber connection over and over again. Part of the media’s war on Uber?
The fact that he apparently was picking up Uber fares in between shooting random people is probably a big part of it.
I noticed this too. Loquat’s theory seems reasonable, but the emphasis seemed a bit excessive. We didn’t exactly have much about “In light of the San Bernardino shootings, can we trust our Departments of Public Health??”.
I think it’s part of the perceived risk of Uber: a licensed taxi driver, and especially one who works as an employee of a company, is someone who – you would imagine – can be held responsible and accountable by their employer and who has some kind of screening to get their licence and if they act weird, they get fired.
But a sub-contractor – which is what Uber drivers are – who essentially ‘works for himself’ is pretty much “any guy off the street can do this” and that makes the notion of “any random wacko can put himself up as an Uber driver and who takes responsibilty? Not Uber!” more of a fear.
Uber does require background checks (no idea how detailed they are), and municipalities themselves regulate who is allowed to operate a rideshare vehicle, requiring licensing of both the driver and the vehicle, but again, how detailed the inspection process is depends on the place. It’s not just anybody with a car who wants to drive, though.
I heard on NPR the background checks are name only, no fingerprints. But this guy wasn’t a previous offender, so a criminal background check wouldn’t have caught him.
I don’t know what the check is like for licensed cab drivers, but I’m guessing it doesn’t include psychological screening.
The check that Uber does is only name/SSN. What the city does depends on the city, but they are perfectly able to make the exact same requirements for ride-share permits as for taxi permits if that’s what they want to do.
The link (Scott on credentialism) is a pretty scary thing. Convinced me to switch sides on the Uber debate. Although I don’t get how to kill the shift towards credentialism. Its a pretty self-enforcing thing.
You’ve highlighted a pet peeve of mine: essentially every public complaint against Uber applies even more strongly to existing cab companies, and nobody seems to have noticed.
It’s insane to me that people can defend existing cab companies with a straight face. Just off the top of my head:
* People demonize Uber as being this giant behemoth that is the final arbiter of who does and does not get to drive a taxi. But they completely ignore the existing industry. The existing industry has literal, direct control over who can drive via medallions. Further, medallions are crazy expensive ($250k in San Francisco) and no cab driver can afford that. So what happens is that taxi companies will buy medallions as investments, and lease them by the day to cab drivers. Consider the impact of that for a second. Public commentators accuse Uber of acting unethically towards drivers, because drivers don’t get guaranteed salaries but just collect a cut of fares. Existing cab companies charge drivers a daily fee for the right to drive.
* Meanwhile, have you ever noticed how fucking racist cab drivers are? Uber sure did. Last year NYC was attempting to ban (? heavily restrict? something bad) Uber, and Uber responded with a data science study. Turns out, NYC cabs will routinely ignore calls to black neighbourhoods. Maybe there’s a good reason for this (eg fewer fares in poorer neighbourhoods) but from my personal experience, I suspect the “fucking racists” hypothesis holds. Meanwhile, Uber? When someone hails an Uber, an Uber driver picks them up. If an Uber driver rejects too many fares, they get kicked out. And we have detailed data on this. Uber expands cab access to minorities while existing cabs don’t do it (even though they’re legally obligated to!)
* Remember that one time that one Uber driver sexually assaulted that one girl once, and the entire country’s news media flipped their shit against Uber? I don’t, because I was too busy listening to my mom sobbing on the phone about how my sister got groped by a cabbie at 3am while wasted. My sister, bless her, fought the fucker off, but ended up getting dropped off, at 3 am, in a suburb 5 miles away from home, with a dead phone. She called the police the next day. The police said “so what was his cab number”. How the fuck does she know, she was shitfaced. The cab company laughed at her on the phone and refused to look into it. Three weeks later, the guy shows up in a news article. He tried the same thing again. He got arrested. Like 6 young women came forward to say the same thing happened to them.
Uber might be dangerous, it might have potentially unvetted drivers driving you around. But that’s what the goddamn ratings are for. If you, as a customer, get hurt or violated in any way by a driver, Uber fires that driver almost immediately. You also know who it is. Your ride history is in your phone and on their servers. They can look it up. You can find out who it is. You can take his name to the cops. You can press charges. On the other hand, apparently podunk midwest cab co will actively defend rapists and laugh at victims. AND NOBODY SEEMS TO HAVE NOTICED THIS. Note that Uber is still illegal in my sister’s city, and the city government cites safety concerns as one reason why.
* Finally, the most important point: Uber has made cab rides cheaper and more accessible to everyone. I’m upset I even have to explain why this is a good thing, but: it’s a good thing. It means more people can take more Uber rides. It means that poorer people can use what was previously unavailable to them. It means it’s easier to get a your drunk friend to take a cab home. It means fewer people driving. Which means fewer cars on the road. Which means less environmental damage. Less money spent on cars and gas in the long run. Last time I ran the numbers, total cost of ownership of a family car is ~$5000/yr. Think of how families could use that better than on a car that sits in a driveway not being used for most of its life.
I’m not going to tell you that working for Uber is a great thing. Because it’s not. It’s not a full time job, and if you treat it like a full time job you’re going to have a hard life. It’s entry level and essentially minimum wage work. But so what? Existing cab drivers jobs are already like this, except they need to make them full-time jobs if they want to keep driving.
The media smears Uber with all manner of accusations. I’ve yet to hear one where Uber wasn’t doing better than existing companies. In the face of this, the vitriol that Uber suffers every day is enough to make you wonder if there really is a Cathedral out there, and why it hates Uber.
Think about it. Lyft is a virtually identical business, and rarely gets any flak for the same terrible things that Uber does
You may want to reconsider the user name if you intend to keep posting here.
Confused by Cathedral reference, in that I thought Cathedral views were meant to have seeped through the comfortable metropolitan elite, not just top decision makers. And I’m definitely comfortable metropolitan elite, as are most people I know, and I don’t know anyone anti-Uber. (UK here: but we have same sorts of arguments going on)
I dont know any liberals who talk in the supervillain soliloquys SSC sci-fi conservatives channel for us. This comment falls between two.
>”I guess I just gotten so used to encountering the “why wont those ignorant fuckwits in the valley adopt our obviously superior urban lifestyle” line of reasoning.”
>”I’ve seen some very clever lefties on the internet assume in their arguments, from a narrative perspective, that I’d like help unpacking. Can anybody explain the following apparent contradiction? “Poverty is the primary cause of crime” vs “Rich people are mostly criminal”. ”
Funny how the local taboo works to protect reactionary ideas from ever being critiqued here. You’d almost think it was protective and not proscriptive.
Could two years of one-sided go-nowhere liberal bashing have been possible if this peculiar, never spelled out rule, didnt allow conservatives to always be on the offensive and never the defensive?
Thats how ideology works. You see the taboo as a punishment. Think harder. Its a buffer. Reactionaries actually have a dog in the national fight. Unlike SJWs.
Now more than ever its important that they be protected from critique.
I don’t think our host is attempting to shield the http://pastebin.com/aJcmErDh from criticism by banning saying their name. If it were a pejorative label applied from the outside, like SJW, that would be one thing, but it’s a name given to the movement by the founder.
I do think our host is making a mistake with the ban. But however bad the mistake, it’s only been being made for the past few months. So, even if there had been “two years of one-sided going-nowhere liberal bashing”, it could not possibly have resulted from this ban.
And if you do want to fight “back”, and make the next two years full of two sided going nowhere everyone bashing, it’s not like the filter is especially hard to work around.
@suntzu
Clearly, the Unmentionable Ones have discovered means to give liberals a persecution complex retroactively in the future, a la Childhood’s End.
Rationalist taboo as a concept has basically never been used well. That doesn’t really act as evidence of our host’s motivations.
Oh, just use an euphemism like everyone else.
I propose a euphemism: ajcmerdh.
“essentially every public complaint against Uber applies even more strongly to existing cab companies, and nobody seems to have noticed.”
People have always complained about taxicabs being expensive and rotten. Maybe you’ve managed not to notice, but it’s a running joke in American culture.
The cab companies, however, don’t go around acting like they’re doing us all a fucking favor by merely existing.
“People have always complained about taxicabs being expensive and rotten. Maybe you’ve managed not to notice, but it’s a running joke in American culture.”
And yet, cities are banning Uber, but not banning regular taxis.
“The cab companies, however, don’t go around acting like they’re doing us all a fucking favor by merely existing.”
Don’t see why that means they should be banned.
Wasn’t it his point though that Uber is in fact doing people a favour by existing?
In my country, one reason people use to argue against Uber is because it is “American competition” lol.
Is Hailo prevalent in your country?
Credentialism is a mixed bag.
Its looking less useful then raw INT scores and for pick-up-and-play computer science programming.
However, if something takes 6 years to work in a field, even if the field *could* train just as well and select applications just as well in 1 years (or less), its a huge job stability boon to those working in the field.
Its no surprise that Doctors and Engineers have the most job stability. And it appears due to both 1.The difficulty of the course-work and 2. The length of job training (most states now require a 4-year bachelors or 4 years of working in the field to take the professional engineering exam)
The credential may be useless, but farm-hands were paid in very basic wage and food, right? Might be enough to support a wife after 2 decades of saving up money from 20-40, but that’s a long time.
>Might be enough to support a wife after 2 decades of saving up money from 20-40, but that’s a long time.
Historically, the wife would be expected to work too, often as a farmhand as well. It was just during the industrial revolution that the luxury of not working appeared.
During the industrial revolution, working-class men, women and children worked, often long hours, at a hectic pace and in hazardous conditions.
I think you meant a much later time period — the 1950s?
As a rule, assume its whatever gets enough hits that won’t get backlash. And calling it the Uber Driver is catchy.
Or, don’t assume Malice when Money is there.
I’m skeptical that animus towards Uber is the major factor. The guy was driving around, doing his job, and took a couple breaks to shoot some people. I suspect a taxi driver or pizza deliveryman doing the same thing would’ve gotten pretty much the same treatment.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
(I also read the news coverage as being rooted in primal fears: here’s a normal guy you might normally trust with your safety without a second thought, who went totally nuts. A meter reader – or, heck, a postal worker – would provoke similar job-based classification in media coverage.
I don’t know that it’s any more a “war on Uber” than the term “going Postal” was a war on the US Postal Service. It’s the catchiest name for the guy.
An interesting thought that might be overfitting / my pattern matching gone haywire / improper application of “One man’s modus ponens…”:
Assuming that negative representation of Uber in the media is a result of Uber being a threat to credentialism, what did the US Postal Service do to anger the Cathedral to the point where the media made “going postal” a meme?
According to wiki the movie Clueless popularized the phrase (it pops up in other media around that time; for example Jumanji 95 and Postal 97). It might have been inspired by the X-file episodes Blood 94.
I was thinking when I read the earlier comment that Clueless is where I remember originally hearing the phrase. Clueless tried this with a bunch of valley slang that mostly didn’t stick, like ‘Betty’ and ‘Baldwin’ for hot chick and dude, or ‘cake boy’ for a gay man.
@ Samuel Skinner
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Going_postal
The expression derives from a series of incidents from 1986 onward in which United States Postal Service (USPS) workers shot and killed managers, fellow workers, and members of the police or general public in acts of mass murder. Between 1986 and 1997, more than 40 people were gunned down by current or former employees in at least 20 incidents of workplace rage.
Contents [hide]
1 Origin
2 Notable postal shootings
2.1 Edmond, Oklahoma in 1986
2.2 Ridgewood, New Jersey in 1991
2.3 Royal Oak, Michigan in 1991
2.4 Double event in 1993
2.5 Goleta, California, in 2006
2.6 Baker City, Oregon, in 2006
A co-worker and I have an idea for a database/piece of software that is not currently available in our industry, but we feel there would be a market for it.
The database would require significant programming and neither of us have much experience or skill with database programming. Any suggestions on resources and/or approaches toward either learning some basic database building skills or how to efficiently outsource that work?
When you say “database”, do you mean a new database engine, or just a schema that could be used with an existing relational or perhaps object oriented database? A new engine would be a very substantial project, and anyone going down that road would most likely need a good deal of technical knowledge just to provide a specification.
If you just mean a set of tables, indexes, queries, and updates, then that is the sort of thing you can outsource. But there are a number of different models for doing that. One is to use an object-relational front-end, which allows all the code to be in another programming language (easier to hire for). Another is to write and use SQL directly (most likely calling the SQL from a programming language). The latter is more flexible but considered to be more complicated and costly.
A lot depends on what you’re trying to do. If it’s “simple” enough, the object-relational mapping solution to some widely-used programming language (e.g. Python with SQLAlchemy) would be a common contemporary way to go. But “simple” here really means being a good match for that model, not just easy to explain.
So one first step might be to abstract the specifics of your industry away from what you need — if that’s possible — so you can discuss those abstract needs with someone and get a better idea of what sort of technology would be appropriate. Then you can educate yourself about that and/or outsource the work to someone.
Consider elaborating as much as you’re comfortable with about the idea for any meaningful input (ideas are worthless by themselves, unless they’re exceptionally good and inspire someone more motivated and better positioned than you to execute them 🙂 ). Almost any software today involves something that can be called a database, it can range from a dozens of killobytes in sqlite files used by your phone’s address book to dozens of petabytes in clusters operated by companies like facebook and amazon (with google supposedly on a scale of its own) and the range of skills and costs vary accordingly.
Skef here has made the major point, but seek out a software developer or database administrator that you trust, and then tell them the plan so they can evaluate the best path for you, and related costs. If you’re particularly worried, have them sign a NDA first.
Something I’ve been mulling over for a while:
Higher IQ is correlated with being liberal.
Having more money is correlated with being conservative.
Higher IQ is correlated with having more money.
1. If true, how surprising is such a triangle? Is there an upper bound on how large each correlation can be? (Obviously correlations can’t be 1, how much better of a bound can be gotten)?
2. Are they all true?
The correlation is the cosine of the angle between the phenomena. If we are given the angles between A and B and A and C then the angle between B and C is less than the sum. If the sum is less than 90°, then the correlation is still positive. (Here is a blog post with a picture, but you really need a 3d picture.)
Remember: Correlations are (cosines of) angles. Express them as angles and the triangle inequality applies. So while being positively correlated is not transitive — two angles with measure less than 90° can sum to more than 90° — you can get a bound this way; if (A,B) and (B,C) are pairs each with correlation more than cos(45°)=1/sqrt(2), then A and C are necessarily positively correlated (that is to say, they make an angle of less than 90°).
IQ correlates with social liberalism, but also correlates with economic conservatism.
Libertarians confirmed for smartest
And the sneakiest.
Yes, but this is also one of the reasons the libertarian vote ceiling is so low.
One study actually found that Republicans are, on average, smarter than Democrats.
The reason is that despite the fact that conservatives are dumber than liberals, libertarians are so much smarter than the other two that they drag the average up. Of course, a big part of the reason libertarians are smarter than everyone else is that you just don’t tend to become an explicitly self-identifying libertarian unless you’re intelligent enough to think somewhat independently about politics.
I suspect communists, etc. are more intelligent than the the average conservative or liberal as well. There’s just not as many of them.
Interesting (unconfirmed) story I heard that I have never been able to track down a source for:
In the U.S. and Europe, atheists are on average smarter than Christians. This is pretty well documented with lots of data. The story I heard but haven’t found a source for is that apparently Japanese Christians are on average smarter than Japanese atheists, and that the explanation is that both American atheists and Japanese Christians are opting out of their society’s default choices, and that the more intelligent are more likely to do that.
@ caethan:
I heard that story, too, except it was Chinese Christians. But I could have confused it. In any case, the logic makes sense.
True. And the most consistent result in studies comparing IQ with political views is that those with more extreme views are smarter than those with less extreme views. So the median voter is also the dumbest voter, which should deeply trouble us all.
@caethan
That reminded me of the same thing, although for a slightly different reason. I recall the study giving atheists a higher IQ, unless you included the people who answered “No religion” in that category, at which point the average IQ dropped like a rock. The implication being that knowing enough to call the position “atheism” was the indicator of intelligence, not the position itself.
However, like you I can’t seem to track down a source.
This feels like your bubble speaking, Vox. My experience is that more likely than not the average libertarian is a Ron Paul style crank who corners you in a room and opines on various libertarian policies that have no hell of a chance of working and tries to convince you of the virtues of owning an alpacca farm or buying gold kruggerands.
The idea that libertarians are that much more intelligent than conservatives would probably be dispelled by going out and meeting them in real life.
@ Maware:
This is the paper I’m thinking of, so you can take it up with the author. I don’t vouch for the methodology or anything.
And actually, I was misremembering: it doesn’t consider self-labeled libertarians per se. It only finds that Republicans have 2-5 IQ points over Democrats, which it reconciles with the fact that IQ correlates positively with social and economic liberalism by showing the existence of a very intelligent subset of Republicans who are very socially and economically liberal.
Also, just because people have lunatic views, doesn’t mean they aren’t intelligent. That was the whole point of my argument that the correlation is less between intelligence and truth and more between intelligence and non-mainstream views.
I’d definitely take it up with him. I don’t have faith in IQ even as a concept. How could you even quantify a 2-5 point difference in verbal ability in real terms?
@ Maware:
IQ tests are measuring something aren’t they?
You give them IQ tests and find out that the two groups score 2-5 points differently?
This is a weird question. What if the study found that Republicans were 1/8 inch taller than Democrats? Would you ask “how could you even quantify a 1/8 inch difference in real terms?” You might not be able to tell just by looking, but you get out a ruler.
@Vox Imperatoris
I think the point is that you can measure the height of a group and compare that height against an objective metric, a metric that can equally be used to measure and compare the heights of trees and mailboxes.
“Measuring” “IQ” is only “measuring” “something” insofar as IQ scores correlate with performance in other domains.
Even if that is true, that finding might not mean what you think it means. The 2015 Pew US Religion study found that a large portion of the religiously unaffiliated believe in God or some sort of afterlife, and a full 20% of them pray daily. A lot of people who answer “no religion” in surveys are spiritual-but-not-religious types instead of atheists/agnostics/ignostics. So a comparison of people who answer “no religion” with people who answer “atheist” is surely confounded in all sorts of ways.
On the other hand, if the study compared people who answered “no religion” and said that they didn’t believe in God with people who answered “atheist,” that would be a valid comparison.
@NN
Good point. Let’s not forget that Pew has further found that 8% of atheists believe in God (2% are absolutely certain), and 3 times as many people claim to not believe in God as claim to be atheists. The Lizardman quotient is all around us, everything is confounded.
Interesting (unconfirmed) story I heard that I have never been able to track down a source for:
In the U.S. and Europe, atheists are on average smarter than Christians. This is pretty well documented with lots of data. The story I heard but haven’t found a source for is that apparently Japanese Christians are on average smarter than Japanese atheists, and that the explanation is that both American atheists and Japanese Christians are opting out of their society’s default choices, and that the more intelligent are more likely to do that.
If anyone finds data on this, I would be very interested to see it. It has indeed been my anecdotal impression that intelligence and Christianity are correlated among east Asian immigrants to North America, both first- and later-generation. I have also been repeatedly struck by how interested non-religious east Asians I speak to are in natural theological and historical evidences for Christianity, topics most American atheists and agnostics scoff at (usually without a good understanding of the topics). On average they seem a lot more open to rational dialogue about religion than most non-religious Americans.
Because they (the immigrants) have been much less exposed to American religion so they don’t know much about it. I wouldn’t say that people who are politically involved on the left and right are great with each others arguments, but they are more aware of what the opposition believes that people who are from China. In the case of American atheists they simply don’t care about any of those things because does are second tier things and if you can’t get past the first hurdle (God’s existence) they are totally irrelevant.
@ Maware :
This doesn’t disprove Vox at all.
Cranks are typically very smart people. The fact that a crank advocates policies which (you believe, perhaps rightly) have no chance of working doesn’t mean that you are smarter than the crank.
Indeed, I am pretty sure that most of the cranks I have known and argued with are smarter than me.
Having a high IQ does not mean you’re always correct, or sensible, or have good social skills, or that you converge on some consensus ideology. Indeed, the world’s most intelligent people have a tendency to be really weird politically.
Years ago, a friend of mine defined libertarians as “bright people who grew up in isolation.” As adolescents, they were smarter than anyone they knew, and if they paid attention to politics, inevitably became impatient with all the lowest-common-denominator appeals and compromises with stupidity. That line of thinking can easily take a person to libertarianism.
Identity politics I can get behind!
Both equating with more ideological, or constrained, worldviews. Leadership by ideologues has terrible downsides, as it often means dogmatic adherence to certain principles and a minimizing of the Overton Window. SJWs and free market zealots are what you get, and what we have.
Classic on the subject: http://www.criticalreview.com/crf/jf/18%201_3%20Converse.pdf
Would this be an example of foxes doing better than hedgehogs?
Definitely!
If you think about correlations as angles, they have to add up to 180 degrees (if you assume the correlation between liberalism and conservatism is -1). So all three relationships could have correlations of 1/2 (or 60 degrees).
They don’t have to add up to exactly 180°. They have to add up to at least 180°, but they could add up to more.
I explain this in two steps.
1) Greater intelligence correlates with greater social conformity (ignoring the extremes of the distributions)
2) The dominant position of liberals in the media and academia shape the peer groups to which people tend to conform.
>1) Greater intelligence correlates with greater social conformity (ignoring the extremes of the distributions)
I’ve heard of this before – the reason for greater conformity being that the more intelligent people have an easier time finding out what orthodoxy is, so they can follow it consistently.
The apex of the triangle means there is a tranche of voters who are fiscally conservative, but socially liberal. They may vote for centrist parties, where one is available, they may float, or they may side with a mainstream party of the left or right, learning to live with their inievitable differences with the grassroots. Nothing very surprising there, so long as you dont assume that everyone is wedded to a left or right wing position for life.
Depends on what positions you are liberal on and what you are conservative on.
You can be socially and fiscally conservative, socially and fiscally liberal, socially liberal and fiscally conservative, socially conservative and fiscally liberal.
Is Apple a “liberal” company? I imagine people would be inclined to go ‘yes’ given its self-image and the “openly gay CEO” etc. But I’m also pretty sure they do their accountancy the old-fashioned way and would have no problems hounding you through the courts for infringing any of their copyrights. They’re standing up to the FBI right now, and good for them, but they have no interest in overthrowing capitalism – why would they? They do very nicely under capitalism. So does that make them “right-wing”?
So Trump having what are considered “liberal” social views shouldn’t surprise anyone. Lots of conservative or right-wing people, businesses, and parties have the same views: if you want to increase the workforce by getting more women into work, for example, you don’t want them at home minding children. So paying for contraception and abortion via health plans, and supporting Planned Parenthood, are all good things for your business, as it means you can exploit men and women to give all their time and energy to being productive and impassioned and “I love my job!” instead of having their main concerns outside of work.
And this may come as a shocking surprise, but some right-wing and/or conservative people like sex, like recreational sex, and want to control the timing and number of any children they may or may not have. It was the Anglicans in 1930 who were the first mainstream Protestant church to permit (albeit in limited circumstances and within marriage only) birth control methods, and that influence spread over time and to other denominations.
I guess … Avantasia? Because The Metal Opera Part 1 is pretty catchy, despite being everything that is wrong (and right?) with Power Metal …
It sounds strange to read this in juxtaposition with Douglas’s “Guess this candidate!” comment just upthread.
Huh. What do you think is wrong with Power Metal? Or did you say wrong, and right, because it is very representative of the genre?
If someone had told you this on New Years Day 2015, and you had to guess the candidate, who would you guess?
If Donald Trump wins the presidency, the Republican Party as we know it will be dead. I’m sure the “Death eaters” and alt-right people are ecstatic at the thought. American conservatism has been held together by ideals of limited government, social conservatism and nationalism since Reagan but Trump is what happens when you disregard the first two and turbo charge the third. Personally, I’d rather not have our country lead by an economically illiterate, know-nothing populist but that’s just me.
Speaking of which, has anybody else checked out /r/The_Donald? Because I did, and, holy crap, half of those threads look like they came out of The Right Stuff’s comment section. But /r/The_Donald is not an Alt-Right subreddit; it’s the mainstream subreddit for Trump supporters. Jim said that “every time Trump opens his mouth, he widens the Overton Window”, and it looks like he was right. Is the Trump candidacy helping a large, formerly silent group of people achieve common knowledge?
What amazed me while reading that subreddit is the number of people that are normally progressive who are supporting Trump because they think he’s a good business man who will moderate his beliefs once the primaries are over(especially on issues like global warming). I don’t know how they can square that with supporting him because he “tells it like it is”.
Politics isn’t about politics (which is to say politics isn’t about ideas). The power to say uncomfortable truths and not face media sanction isn’t really related to firm and consistent poltical principles.
A lot of the things he tells are pretty moderate, really. Like saying Planned Parenthood does good things, or condemning the Iraq War, or refusing to let people die in the streets.
@Suntzanime
Yes, but being a moderate on many issues is different from backtracking from his established positions for political reasons.
Some of the stuff Trump says is fairly moderate. Some of it is explicit promises to become a war criminal.
@Nathan
The same could be said of FDR.
The really scary thing for most people is the suggestion that the US ought to take the “threat” of Muslim Fundamentalists as seriously as we once took the threat of Militant Shinto Buddhists, Nazis, and Communists.
Well, most Americans didn’t take the threat of militant Shintoism seriously until a bunch of the militants launched a sneak aerial attack on US soil and killed 3000 or so Americans, so there’s that.
But there’s a difference between recognizing a threat of the highest order, and imagining that Donald Trump is the man you want to have deal with it.
To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, You go to war with the politicians you have.
If I were given the entire field of US public figures and told to pick a leader, Trump would be pretty low on my list of choices. But of the candidates we actually have, I would say that he’s the most likely to genuinely defend US interests.
In the sense that a scorched-earth defense is genuine, perhaps. I’d prefer four more years of Obama’s insincere quasi-defense, and I think the odds of getting that from Hillary are pretty good.
Considering the numerous atrocities and abuses (Japanese and German-American internment camps, the firebombings of Tokyo and Dresden, COINTELPRO, Vietnam, Central American death squads, etc.) that the US committed when it took those previous threats seriously, how miniscule the threat posed by Muslim Fundamentalists is by comparison, and the abuses and atrocities that have already been committed by the US government in the fight against Muslim Fundamentalists, I’m perfectly happy with not taking this threat as seriously as we did those previous threats.
And to anyone who says, “the entire reason the War on Terror has turned out so badly has been because we have only been half-heartedly fighting it instead of crushing the enemy with overwhelming force like we did during WWII,” I suggest you ask the Russians how well the “crush the enemy with overwhelming force” strategy worked out for them in Afghanistan and Chechnya.
Chechnya seems to be pretty stable these days.
Crushing the enemy with overwhelming force in Afghanistan would have run into the problem that the enemy wasn’t in Afghanistan and had several thousand nuclear missiles. Though to be fair, any real or hypothetical US counterinsurgency strategy needs to consider who might be actively supporting the insurgents as well.
After more than 20 years of war, numerous terrorist attacks that have killed hundreds of Russian civilians, thousands of Russian military deaths, and tens of thousands of Chechen civilian deaths. Furthermore, while Chechnya itself has been relatively stable in recent years, at the same time it has been increasingly active in exporting terrorism to other parts of the world. So I’d be very reluctant to call Chechnya a counter-terrorism success story.
From what I’ve read, the answer to that question is often “wealthy citizens of Gulf Arab states that are longstanding US allies in addition to possessing a large portion of the world’s oil reserves.” So while they aren’t quite as untouchable as the CIA was for the Soviet Union, they’re still pretty hard for the US to act against.
@NN
>I suggest you ask the Russians how well the “crush the enemy with overwhelming force” strategy worked out for them in Afghanistan and Chechnya.
Two words:
Genghis Khan
It’s not a coincidence that he’s one of the few who pacified the region.
Genghis Khan had the good fortune to be born long before the invention of modern firearms and explosives. Considering how effective 19th century repeating firearms were against the horse archers and lancers of the Comanche Indians, it is highly doubtful that he would have been similarly successful had he been born in the modern era. Indeed, the Nazis and Imperial Japan attempted similarly brutal pacification strategies in the territories that they conquered, but they were still unable to put down insurgencies in France, Poland, China, etc.
@NN
Sure, they had to deal with insurgencies but if they had survived the war, the would have been able to put those down and keep them down. I don’t want to get in to this argument because I’ve already had a lengthy discussion on this exact same issue in one of the last open threads but I’ll just say that the Taliban were doing a good job at ruling through fear until they were overthrown by the US. Other examples include North Korea, China, and Saudi Arabia. I wish that Kennedy’s famous quote “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable” was right but it’s not. If the continuation of power is your main goal, the best way to achieve that is to swiftly and violently crack down on all dissent.
@ NN :
Source?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_German_Americans#World_War_II
I didn’t know this. But in the broad sweep of everything the U.S. did during the war, that’s a tiny number. That would be maybe 1/10 of 1% of the German ancestry citizens of the U.S. at the time.
America had a history of German American immigration and they were partially integrated. At the time, I don’t think that was true of the Japanese, which when considered with the Nihao Incident also makes the decision more understandable.
The counts were higher for the Japanese because of
-different time period for emigration (Japan late 19th, Germany earlier)
-restrictions on becoming citizens for the Japanese (and a lot of citizens being children of noncitizens)
-a no go area covering the west coast
Its 4chan.org/pol gone wild.
You can’t tell me its not the most entertaining subreddit.
“Jeff Sessions endorses Donald J. Trump for President. Game changing endorsement. Cruz on suicide watch.”
And its mostly epic memes.
This is a contradiction in terms.
I believe the current descriptor of choice is “dank memes”.
I find the HIGH ENERGY and ENTHUSIASM charming.
Charming is right. Have you seen what they are doing today? They are having a big fundraiser for charity, because the Donald doesn’t need their donations.
Milo is really popular among Trump supporters. He has even convinced a decent number of them not all homosexuals are bad.
See for example:
https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/48aeit/milo_if_you_are_a_kkk_supporter_and_you_want_race/
https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/48avrv/milo_yiannopoulos_on_twitter_trump_is_a_political/
>He has even convinced a decent number of them not all homosexuals are bad.
What do you really think the average Trump supporter in the internet is like?
A Milo AMA is coming to /r/The_Donald.
Donald Trump is winning because the median Republican voter wants the Republican Party dead. Welcome to democracy!
Democracy (ie, piping dissent into /dev/null) has apparently failed, but the jury’s still out if the replacement for the Republicans won’t be the same as the Republicans. If they are, democracy is preserved.
Did you reply to the wrong comment?
Have been seeing recently some stories wherein the most awful Republicans (eg Ben Stein) say they might vote Democrat if Trump is the nominee. To my mind this is FANTASTIC (not even joking), because if people like Bill Kristol and Ben Stein actually defected from the GOP (a big if), it could mean purging a lot of the hawkishness from that party.
For the past few decades, anyone who has wanted small government at home and small government abroad (i. e. libertarians) has been basically doomed since the GOP want small government at home but huge military adventurism abroad and the Democrats want big government at home, and, frankly huge military adventurism abroad too (okay, maybe slightly less, but that doesn’t fix the problem).
Also, though he appeals to a very blue collar segment, Trump himself is actually really socially liberal for a Republican. So… he wants relatively non-interventionist military and is socially liberal… why do we hate him so much?
I think that’s exactly why they hate him so much.
He represents Red Tribe status independence, Independence that could very well pose and existential threat to the union.
@onyomi: Two problems with that plan.
First, Donald Trump does not want a non-interventionist military. He wants, explicitly, to “Take” all of Iraq’s oil, and maybe all of Saudi Arabia’s oil as well. He is characteristically vague about how that’s going to happen, but really it’s not going to happen without a massive military intervention, and Trump is the most militaristic man on the stage. He is going to make the military much stronger than it is right now. And he says that he’s going to be such a great negotiator that he’ll cut costs at the same time and we’ll have peace in our time because nobody will dare fight against us, if you care to believe that part.
Second, Stein and Kristol aren’t going to “defect from the GOP”, and they aren’t going to allow themselves to be purged from the GOP. They are going to vote for one specific Democrat, one time, while using every bit of their influence within the party to turn the GOP into a machine that can weather the bad years from its redoubt in the halls of Congress and come back to reclaim the White House in 2020. Which is actually a pretty decent plan.
But only the heir to the throne of the kingdom of idiots would fight a war on every possible front. So when these “defecting” Republicans need to find some common ground on which they can manage to not fight with the Trumpists they hate, the centrist Democrats they need, and the GOP establishment they want to restore, what’s that common ground going to be?
Yeah, bombing the foreign enemy du jour back to the stone age. Today ISIS, tomorrow the world.
Being “the most militaristic man on the stage” is an exceptionally low bar to clear these days. And considering the rough shape most of the current rank-and-file units are in making the military stronger could be something as simple as bringing “operational” strength back up to the “on paper” strength level.
Right, nothing could be simpler. I wonder why nobody has thought of doing that before?
I honestly don’t know if you’re being sarcastic.
I think Donald would claim to be the most anything on the stage just to one-up everyone, but I don’t think he actually is the most militaristic. In fact, since Rand Paul left, I think he may actually be the most cautious in terms of what he’s said about negotiation, “putting American interests first” (by saying, for example, that North Korea is China’s problem).
It may, to some extent, be me projecting wishful thinking onto his characteristically vague positions, but, if anything, it sounds a little like the Ron Paul foreign policy, but better pitched to the Red Tribe rank and file: instead of “let’s stop screwing up the Middle East and making new terrorists by bombing foreigners unnecessarily,” it’s “let’s put America’s interests first.”
@Onyomi
The modern Republican Party at least attempts to win over libertarians. Do you really expect the same once Trump turns the party in to the American National Front?
All these separate, conflicted groups to please! How is anyone able to run a coherent, consistent policy with that?
“All these separate, conflicted groups to please! How is anyone able to run a coherent, consistent policy with that?”
You can’t. Which is why the US should break into smaller nations (seriously). Overly large and culturally diverse polity forces politics-based coalition-pleasing policy instead of good policy.
Or we could have just respected federalism in the first place. I’ve long thought that Obamacare and gay marriage advocacy were doing serious damage to the political fabric. But I didn’t think that the damage would come to fruition so quickly.
I still think we’ll be very lucky if Trump is the worst of it.
These polities can function if they adopt a Millet-like internal subdivision system. Let them pass their own laws, and use them among each other (a simple “victim’s rules” system for interaction between groups seems adequate, with optional “if $preferred_group is involved, their court” exceptions), collect tribute from their leader, and otherwise ignore them.
Why not just adopt a decent electoral system? By which I mean, one where multiple parties are workable, so you don’t have many competing interest groups in each party.
@dndnsrn
That only gives you more parties, and likelier necessary coalitions, which have the same problem as you note for two-party systems. Short of a “winner takes all seats and keeps it until they are overthrown” system, there’s little way of ensuring that policy remains coherent and consistent.
@ black (dark purple?) gravatar Anonymous:
But such coalition governments would provide better representation than the current system, where some groups are, or at the very least feel like they are, votes without voices.
Smaller nation-states would still have similar problems: there are plenty of major cities in the US that would make serviceable city-states when their size, economy, etc is considered, but they still have enough economic, demographic, etc diversity to just recapitulate the problems the US faces.
Plus, part of the strength of the US as a power is that it is unified. The Free City of New York, Republic of Deseret, Unified Bay Area, whatever, are not going to have the same ability. Some might think this is a good thing – what happens if Canada decides that the Free City of New York looks like it could be knocked over? Does New York ally with the New England Federation to defend itself, and seek a military alliance with the People’s Republic of the Pacific Northwest to invade BC to take the pressure off? In which case, this would probably just lead to another big power, but one stitched together in far weirder ways.
A millet system would face the problem that the divisions in the US are not primarily religious. The Ottoman Empire’s system was, as I understand it, based on religion. It was a society in which most people were either religious adherents or pretended to be, and the religious minorities tended to live together in little pocket communities.
But divisions in the US are arguably more complicated, and aren’t just based on one factor like religion in the Ottoman Empire was.
I don’t see what’s wrong with a system like Germany’s, which gives a decent amount of representation, has much less of the problem of (for instance) the plutocrats, war hawks, social conservatives, etc in one party together, but doesn’t result in wild and wacky coalition action like some systems do.
His trick (well, besides all that Master Wizard stuff Scott Adams writes about) was aligning himself with what Republican voters actually want (which includes the destruction of the Republican Party establishment) rather than the stereotype which talking heads had, until now, convinced Republican voters was a typical Republican voter.
The real Overton window has been lagging the media Overton window by quite a bit for quite some time now.
Are you saying that any (competent) outsider would have done the same? That if you had heard the prediction, you would have concluded that the candidate was an outsider, but been unable to draw any further conclusions because it’s the obvious strategy?
Do you think America is special? This sort of politician has been doing well in Europe for over fifteen years now.
Interesting point. Is it only for fifteen years, and if so what changed that made that sort of demagogue more successful?
Most European countries have a far-right anti-immigration party that gets some 10-20% of the vote (highly variable). I think Europe had a strong immunity against anything that smelled of fascism after WW2, but it is starting to wear off. Germany probably has a stronger immunity, and indeed there is no such party in the Bundestag.
There are some differences between these European parties and Donald Trump. They tend to be very socially conservative, and they don’t usually attract a celebrity business leader.
Part of the problem is, who is the moderate anti-immigration candidate (here or in Europe)? Any efforts to restrict immigration are met with accusations of nigh-Nazi level racism, so the only people willing to talk about it at all are those already in the black hole or willing to go there (actual neo-Nazis and Donald Trump, who noticed this niche and grabbed it).
Trump, whose non-immigration policies (to the extent he has “policy” and not just bluster) are pretty moderate is tapping into that. Immigration, particularly illegal immigration, is really unpopular right now for reasons that ought to be obvious, and anyone smart shouldn’t write off as just bigotry. When the Republican establishment is plugging amnesty, where else do you turn?
“who is the moderate anti-immigration candidate”
Practically every candidate, both in the U.S. and Europe. What candidate is in favor of free immigration? In favor of a substantial increase in the number of legal immigrants? They are all anti-immigration, merely to varying degrees.
I don’t see how the tax on wire transfers to Mexico can be enforced. What prevents someone from making a wire transfer to someone he trusts in some other country, who then sends it on to Mexico?
@ David Friedman:
Maybe he means “Who is in favor of less immigration than Ted Cruz but more than Donald Trump?” And that’s on the assumption that Ted Cruz is being insincere in his current stated position on immigration, which is virtually identical to Trump’s.
But yeah, that’s a funny definition of “moderate”.
The Republican candidates’ positions on immigration (including both Rubio’s and Trump’s) seem pretty moderate to me when you consider how far apart the fringes on both ends of the issue are.
Sure, you’re right that there’s no open borders candidate, but there’s also no complete immigration moratorium candidate. Even Donald Trump doesn’t want to cut off all legal immigration. He also said he wanted to build a door in his border wall for the “good people,” so he’s not anti-immigration in all cases.
This means that both of the extreme sides are not having their desires represented by any of the candidates.
Most Americans believe in something in-between those two positions on the issue, so it makes sense that the Republican candidates are positioning themselves somewhere in-between them, with Trump and Cruz leaning more towards the moratorium side and Rubio (at least in the past, with his support for the Gang of 8 bill) leaning more towards the open borders side. Jeb Bush was also more towards the open borders side, with his support for a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants and his plan to continue the DREAMer program.
I know it feels weird to think about when you mostly interact with open borders-supporters or sympathizers, but thinking we should drastically increase legal immigration or remove limits entirely is a really unpopular idea to most Americans, so it makes sense that no politician has dared to express that opinion, even if some of them believe it.
(I don’t mean that last paragraph as an insult. There are lots of issues that I feel are obviously correct on the end I support [like evolution being true], and then I sometimes find it hard to keep in mind that the majority of the country doesn’t believe the same things I do.)
@ Anon:
The current status quo is far closer to a complete moratorium on immigration than it is to open borders. One side of the spectrum definitely is having its voice heard more than the other. And that side is the restrictionist side.
In any case, gbdub described Trump as an non-“moderate”, i.e. “extreme” candidate on immigration. If you redefine him as a moderate immigration candidate on the spectrum between “deport all non-citizens” and “let everyone in”, then you eliminate his problem of “who is the moderate anti-immigration candidate (here or in Europe)?”
Amnesty, a path to citizenship, the DREAM ACT, etc. are not anything close to open borders. They are not “leaning toward” open borders. They are forms of restrictionism more relaxed than the status quo but still far more on the side of restriction.
I highly doubt you can even find a Democrat who is in favor of open borders. They are in favor of legalizing the people who are already here and maybe letting a somewhat greater proportion in. They are not in favor of radically increasing that number, despite the paranoid conspiracy theories of some conservatives.
Then again, I’m with Bryan Caplan: “Essentially, the kind of things that Republicans accuse Obama of secretly plotting to do are what I think should be done.”
I have no illusions that any significant number of Americans support open borders. I’m not sure what made you think otherwise.
That’s why I think “where are the moderate anti-immigration candidates?” is a silly question. Okay, maybe there’s no “moderate” candidate: because they’re all extreme restrictionists! A “moderate” position would be something like, I don’t know, we’ll let in everyone with a college degree and go from there.
And if you don’t mean it in the absolute sense but “moderate” relative to the American political scene, there are plenty of them.
Aren’t nearly all Democrats, and a lot of Republicans, openly advocating for increased legal immigration via the DREAM act, “path to citizenship” etc? And if you’re not willing to enforce existing immigration laws, how does that differ substantially from increasing immigration? Yes, legalizing existing immigrants isn’t quite the same thing, but I think the distinction is understandably lost on a lot of voters – either way, you’re ending up with a lot of citizens who would otherwise be non-citizens.
Anon notes rightly that this is a much more pro-open borders forum than the American electorate, so from in here it might seem like no candidate is pro-increased immigration, but that’s really not how Joe Citizen is likely to view it. (The other cynical issue is that I think a lot of the pro-amnesty crowd is more swayed by sympathetic stories of individual immigrants than rational/principled support for open borders – if we were actually talking about substantially increasing immigration across the board, and not just for poor Mexicans and Syrian refugees, some of the pro-immigrant support would probably evaporate).
Cruz and Trump are more or less the only candidates willing to be openly anti-illegal immigration (and propose doing something about it). And they are treated by Democrats and much of the media as being extremists/racists/Nazis for these views. However, current primary results compared to Rubio et al suggests they are a lot closer to “moderate” than “extreme” for any definition that takes the actual distribution of opinions in the electorate into account.
EDIT: I think part of the issue is that I wasn’t clear enough in my use of “moderate”. What I mean is that most candidates here and in Europe who are actually, openly opposed to levels of immigration above the current level, and/or in favor of more vigorous enforcement of existing immigration laws, are considered “extreme” for their other political views. Most of those “far right” anti-immigrant parties in Europe are, well, “far right”. Basically, I’m surprised there aren’t more people who are “Hillary Clinton + border wall” (actually that’s probably Trump, but he’s doing so much politically incorrect blustering that he gets labeled “extreme”).
We have two immigration regimes. For poor Latin Americans, we may not have an officially open border, but we do seem dedicated to not enforcing the immigration laws we’ve passed (“Sanctuary cities” are even explicit in this), which conveniently allows them in, but keeps them in a legal limbo where they can be exploited.
For the wealthier, more highly educated immigrants who would compete with people like me for a job, we have an absurdly strict and kafka-esque system. This regime is enforced. I know an immigrant family who was denied the right to work for months and then given 2 weeks to leave the country because reasons. Even the ones we allow are treated like crap in their interviews.
Immigration is not an issue I actually care about, but neither of these regimes seems good to me. Inasmuch as I have a position, it would be “enforce the laws we’ve passed, then worry about changing them,” and I’m fairly neutral on which direction they should change. I feel like that should be considered a pretty moderate position; I also can’t think of any candidate who credibly represents it.
@ Jaskologist:
It’s not that we have “two different systems”. If the wealthy, educated people want to sneak in and live illegally on the fringes of society, they are welcome to do so. They don’t want to do so.
It’s sort of strange to me to describe it as “two different systems” just because some people genuinely are so poor and have native countries so undesirable that living here illegally on the fringes of society is preferable.
I can’t understand this position. It’s just bizarre.
Do you think on the War on Drugs, a sensible policy is to “enforce the laws we’ve passed, then think about changing them”? The whole reason many people want to change the laws is that they are unenforceable unless we really cracked down on civil liberties, which would create a situation many times worse than the problem.
Or how about taxes? If we had an 80% income tax and the resultant widespread evasion, would it be sensible to say “enforce the tax first, then think about changing it”? You couldn’t enforce such a tax.
The current immigration laws are unenforceable because they are unreasonable. They cannot be enforced because living in America is so much more advantageous than millions of them are willing to come here illegally, often at great personal risk. And because employing these workers is so advantageous to the millions of people who find it profitable to employ them.
Sure, they could be enforced. But the human consequences would be so catastrophic that most reasonable people can see that this is not a sensible option.
@Vox Imperatoris:
> Or how about taxes? If we had an 80% income tax and the resultant widespread evasion, would it be sensible to say “enforce the tax first, then think about changing it”? You couldn’t enforce such a tax.
Bullshit. Here’s the historical tax tables in 2013 dollars from 1913 to 2013: http://taxfoundation.org/sites/taxfoundation.org/files/docs/fed_individual_rate_history_adjusted.pdf
In 1963 the top marginal rate was 91% for single filers with over $1.5M income (in 2013 dollars). I did the math, and the tables are equivalent to an 80% total – not marginal – tax rate for single filers with over $1.72M income.
And here’s the IRS report from 1963: https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/63dbfullar.pdf
From the introductory letter:
>Attached is the annual report of the Internal Revenue Service for fiscal year 1963 describing its 100th year of operations. Noteworthy is that gross
Internal Revenue receipts surpassed the $100 billion mark for the first time in history–reaching a total of $105.9 billion. This figure reflects the vitality of our free society, the growth of our economy, *and the high level of tax compliance of American citizens*. It is a testimonial to the honesty and integrity of our people, as well as their industry and creativity.
@ caethan:
And the result was people taking advantage of the many exemptions and otherwise hiding their income.
Regardless of what you think the Laffer curve of actual income is, there is a very clear Laffer curve of taxable income. When your marginal rate goes up to 80% or 90%, you pretty quickly start figuring out ways to make it not taxable. Such as investing in tax-free municipal bonds, a very popular choice in that time period.
***
Anyway, I can’t find the historical numbers, but even though the U.S. is near the top internationally in “tax compliance” rates, the tax rates we have now are only 83% enforced:
Personal Income Tax Compliance Rates
United States: 83.1%
United Kingdom: 77.97%
Switzerland: 77.70%
France: 75.38%
Austria: 74.80%
Netherlands: 72.84%
Belgium: 70.15%
Portugal: 68.09%
Germany: 67.72%
Italy: 62.49%
And that’s not counting loopholes (which is a major point I was making above); that’s just counting pure illegal evasion.
No. Those laws are enforceable. They even were enforced in the past, during Operation Wetback. When you start deporting illegal residents without caring to allow them to take their stuff back with them, the rest take a hint, and get out voluntarily before they can be dispossessed of their gains abroad.
It seems simple enough. Start auditing employers. Give large fines to the ones who don’t have their paperwork in order. This is already the status-quo in most industries.
@ Anonymous & Drew:
I believe I already addressed your points:
When people say “unenforceable”, they mean “not enforceable by any means the public is willing to employ”.
We could enforce the drug laws, too. Just execute everyone who smokes marijuana. If that were done, it would no doubt radically decrease the number of marijuana users. But the cost would be so much greater than the benefit, and it would be so contrary to human decency, that you couldn’t convince the public to support such a thing, or the police to enforce it.
We could have easily won the Iraq War if we had killed everyone in the country with nuclear weapons, and we could do the same thing with ISIS tomorrow. When people say that’s “not an option”, they mean it’s not a remotely reasonable option.
Similarly, we could crack down on illegal immigrants in the ways you propose. But it’s so inhumane and so contrary to basic economic sense that you have widespread opposition both by left-wing civil liberties groups and right-wing business groups.
We’re not going to round up 12 million people and throw them out of the country. Nor are we going to make them all “self-deport”. It’s just not going to happen.
Edit: Whoops, I posted this under the wrong parent comment. It was supposed to go under Vox Imperatoris’s post at 5:30 p.m.
@Vox Imperatoris
Is it really? I can understand why you feel that way, but I would also point out that we essentially have a de facto open borders system wherein anyone who can sneak in or overstay a visa essentially doesn’t have to worry about deportation. Deportation is pretty much exclusively enforced near the border now and among people who commit other crimes besides immigrating illegally; interior enforcement basically doesn’t exist, other than a few uncommon instances.
Since you (I presume) want a de jure open borders system, I get why this is unsatisfactory to you. But letting people stay here who came illegally and generally not punishing them when they use fake or stolen Social Security numbers to get jobs is hard to reconcile with the position that the current system is more to the preferences of restrictionists. It seems more in the middle of what both of the fringe sides want, to me.
Sorry I wasn’t more judicious in separating which parts of my comments were aimed at which people. I was kind of just replying to the thread as a whole. I do think Trump is essentially a moderate (albeit a moratorium-leaning moderate) on immigration. He exists and is doing very well in his bid for the presidency.
Before Donald Trump entered the race, though, I would probably agree with gbdub that there wasn’t a moderate candidate. With the possible exception of Ted Cruz, all of the others (both in the Republican camp and the Democratic camp) seemed thoroughly convinced that illegal immigrants who are already here should be legalized ASAP, and I get the impression that some of them would be okay with substantial increases in legal immigration, even if they’re not willing to state that position out loud. I’m pretty sure Jeb Bush would like to see this, for instance.
I honestly have to disagree with you here. I see them as being closer to open borders than to the moratorium end. This is probably because I don’t really think it matters whether immigrants are being let in legally or illegally. Our southern border is already de facto an open border. And the immigrants who choose to come here already have little chance of being deported, especially once they get further from the border and settle in to a town in the interior of the country.
So any policy that gives these people de jure recognition of their de facto existance here in the country massively signals “open borders” to me, especially since one amnesty is usually followed by demands for more amnesties, allowing the de facto state of open borders and eventual legal recognition of those illegal immigrants to continue.
But, once again, I do get why you don’t like it. I just don’t really agree that this is closer to the moratorium end than the open borders end. From my perspective, you guys are getting what you want (in the de facto sense that anyone can come here if they can pay a smuggler to bring them in, or can manage to get in themselves without one or on a visa), you’re just not getting immediate legal recognition of it. And a lot of the Republican candidates support speeding up that legal recognition, which I thought would appeal to you.
I would guess your biggest disappointment here is that no one is supporting increases in legal immigration, but given how large the illegal immigration problem is and how toxic that issue has made supporting immigration for candidates, this is an unsolvable problem for now. I would also consider supporting amnesty for illegal immigrants to be pretty much the same thing as supporting more legal immigration, because it brings a huge number of migrants into the legal immigration system (though of course it differs in that they were already here while typical legal immigrants apply from their home countries and wait to be accepted).
I don’t think so. I would consider a moderate position to be something like that we should have only a small amount of unskilled legal immigration, a relatively high amount of high-skilled legal immigration, and that illegal immigrants should only be able to stay if they can press a successful asylum claim or have American-born children. This isn’t my actual position, but it seems moderate and essentially reasonable to me.
To me, this seems moderate both in the absolute sense of being between the open borders position and the moratorium position, and is moderate among Americans (though it actually might be a bit too open-borders-y for regular Americans, but probably not by a ton).
It doesn’t strike me as overtly restrictionist because it would let in a lot of immigrants, in absolute numbers. If you add up:
1. Some “relatively high number” of high skilled immigrants
2. A relatively low number of low skilled immigrants
3. Illegal immigrants who would actually qualify for asylum
4. Future illegal immigrants who will qualify for asylum once they get here
5. Illegal immigrants with American-born children
That would be a very large number. I just don’t think it’s that restrictionist, while your claim that a moderate position would be letting in everyone with a college degree strikes me as very open borders, especially since you’d presumably like that on top of all the categories I just listed above. There’s so many colleges in the world! That would be a massive, massive number of people! Especially if you let in everyone with a degree from some random degree mill in India or Nigeria (for example).
Perhaps my intuitive sense of whether things are “open borders” or “restrictionist/moratorium-ist” isn’t calibrated right, though. I’m actually sympathetic in turns to the arguments of both of the extreme sides; it’s the middle ground (of letting people live here illegally, but neither deporting nor legalizing them) that I don’t get.
Think about it this way: current legal immigration to the US is about 1,000,000 per year. Illegal immigration adds another (using high estimates) 300,000 – 400,000 per year. That’s gross illegal immigration, not net (net illegal immigration is basically flat).
If the US truly had open borders, I should expect a lot more immigrants. 10 million a year at least, and that’s a very low estimate. So our scale, from one side to the other, ought to consider the number of people who would be let in, ranging from zero to the number who would come in under open borders.
Of course it would be a massive number of people. And open borders would be a much more massive number of people than that. Therefore, letting in everyone with a college degree would be a moderate position in between letting them all in and letting no one in.
I think maybe you are confusing what Republicans call an “open borders” position (in order to criticize it), such as amnesty, with an actual open borders position.
The current debates are all between values much closer to the “zero” side of the scale.
It’s just as if all the mainstream parties were debating between a 90% to a 95% tax rate, a few “communist lunatics” wanted 100%—and the libertarians are over here saying there should be no taxes at all. A “moderate” position would be like 50%.
Our southern border is a “de facto open border” only in the sense that the Soviet Union had a “de facto free market”. I mean, yes, there was an extensive black market. But it seems disingenuous to describe this as a being basically the same thing as a free market economy, when it was the furthest practicable thing from a free market economy.
There is a border patrol; they do catch people; and if you want any kind of above-board job you’ve got to prove your legal status, or else come up with good forgeries and risk the penalties. This regime of enforcement and penalties discourages most potential immigrants from coming across the border. This results in a situation more analogous to a closed border than an open border.
For that matter, if you speed 9 mph over the limit, you will almost certainly not get penalized. Does that mean that “de facto” there are no speed limits in the US?
Hell, even if you rob people you’re more likely than not to get away with it on any one attempt. Does that mean robbery is “de facto legal” in the US?
The 1986 amnesty legalized 2.7 million people. An amnesty now would legalize, what, 11-12 million? That’s approximately 370,000 a year. I don’t consider that a particularly “extreme” number.
And if people can be “lured” in by the prospect of amnesty, that just reinforces the notion that current immigration policies are succeeding in discouraging immigrants, if a proposed change in that policy can entice them.
Are you sure immigration would be that high? My impression is that if people are just poor (no natural disaster or war), the default is for a small part of a family to work in the US and send money home.
@ Nancy Lebovitz:
If even a small fraction of all the poor people in the world send a small part of their families to the US to work and send money home, the result is a large number of immigrants.
The US already receives over 6 million immigration applications per year. Some of those are for naturalization, which is separate, but there are about 4.5 million on the green card waiting list.
And that’s the situation for people who are applying under the current laws for a spot as a family relative of a current citizen or permanent resident (480,000 spots) or for an employer-sponsored visa (140,000 spots). The latter are very hard to get, and most people don’t qualify for them.
The only kind of visa open to everyone is the Diversity Visa, i.e. the “green card lottery”, that distributes 50,000 visas a year to random applicants (but not those from countries “over-represented” in normal immigration, such as China or Mexico). About 15 million people apply for that one every year (I don’t know why they’re not included under the 6 million), and that’s the people who bother doing it despite the small odds of winning.
I would be shocked if the number of people who would immigrate to the US under open borders were less than 10 million annually.
You’re defining “moderate” to mean “average between zero immigration and open borders”. This makes no sense except in a mathematical sense. “Moderate” in terms of politics, should mean “somewhere approaching the average position of the electorate”. Which is “extreme” on your scale, but, well, democracies often support one “extreme” or the other.
Anyway, if there are only 6 million applications now, why would you be “shocked” if the number of open borders immigrants didn’t almost double that number? Talking permanent immigrants here, not migrant “guest workers” or somesuch.
@ gbdub:
I already addressed this in another post. If you mean “moderate” relative to the American political scene, there are plenty of moderates on immigration. For instance, most of the Democratic and Republican candidates.
One complication is that most of the electorate knows nothing about immigration. Usually, they don’t realize the current regime is as restrictive as it is. They think there is some kind of “line” to get in, which most people can qualify for, and that you can eventually get in that way but illegal immigrants “jump the line”. That’s…not true at all, since most illegal immigrants are excluded under every category of visa.
Because those are the ones who qualify for the open spots under the current rules. Overwhelmingly, they are brothers, sisters, etc. of current citizens. Most people in the world are not close relatives of US citizens.
Also, as I said in the post, 15 million apply every year for the “green card lottery”. And most people don’t bother doing that because you have less than a 1% chance of winning.
@Vox:
The numbers you are citing represent an accumulated demand from many years of restriction, not an annual demand. I don’t know if your ten million is high or low for the number who would come each year.
@Nancy:
I think the pattern in the period of effectively free immigration before and after WWI (except for orientals) was that a small part of family comes over, gets established, sends money home, and eventually arranges for more members of the family to come. Looking at my parents’ autobiography that seems to have been the pattern for their parents’ families.
@Nancy Lebovitz
World population is 7.3 – 7.4 billions. The first world is 1.0 – 1.2 billions depending on how you count. This leaves about 6.1 – 6.4 billions people in second and third world countries. Even if only a small fraction (10% – 20%) of them would migrate if allowed, and even if they would distribute uniformly in first world countries (in practice they don’t: e.g. Germany has more immigrants per capita than Italy), how many of them would enter the US?
Arnold Schwarzenegger would have been my first thought if he were eligible.
We’ll see how he does in the general. I won’t be pulling the lever for him, and that’s with him running against an outright criminal.
It’s better for conservatism for the Republican party to be in the wilderness than for the nominal rightist party to become what Trump is talking.
If Sanders is the Dem’s nominee, I might just agree.
But if given the choice between Trump and Hillary I’m voting for Trump in a heartbeat.
If conservatism didn’t want this to happen, they shouldn’t have pushed a disastrous war in Iraq or trickle-down tax cuts for their wealthy pals or amnesty for illegal immigrants in the midst of unemployment or etc.
At some point you lose the Mandate of Heaven, and a new ideological dynasty comes to power.
I would debate the Iraq comment.
As for the rest, I would suggest that TARP, taxes, and immigration are why “the median Republican voter wants the Republican Party dead”, as you put it,.
I would guess they want the Republicans dead because the Republicans have been so utterly incompetent at the culture wars.
Guns and abortion seem to hold up pretty well.
I’m not sure “we still have X and Y, but lost almost everything else” feels like a “win”.
The gun part is for the most part the uncompromising attitude of the NRA post-takeover by extremists, rather than Republicans, too.
If you think the NRA are “extremists”, you haven’t been paying attention.
In order to be “uncompromising” you must first be offered a compromise.
I did not mean to imply that I consider the NRA’s extremism to be a bad thing. Extremism in of itself is not good or bad. They have the right attitude in current circumstances.
Fair enough, I guess I just gotten so used to encountering the “why wont those ignorant fuckwits in the valley adopt our obviously superior urban lifestyle” line of reasoning that I’m now automatically on guard for it.
@Frog Do: How is abortion “hold[ing] up pretty well”?
One is allowed to be anti-abortion publically without fear of losing one’s job. It is acceptable for one to be conflicted on the issue.
@Frog Do, in other words, they haven’t totally been defeated on abortion like they have on homosexuality. That’s different from “holding up pretty well.”
They would have lost guns if the NRA didn’t pull a coup and hardline their politics, and the unification of Catholics and Protestants was a great victory. They’ve also pretty competantly delegitimized the federal government.
But I am a conservative, there’s only ever “losing” and “not losing”. “Winning” and “losing” is already a pretty progressive frame.
I’d say that the anti-abortion movement is holding up pretty well considering that their legislative goals were rendered impossible by the Supreme Court more than 40 years ago. Despite that, they’ve managed to pass numerous regulations that have made it increasingly difficult to obtain an abortion in recent years in large parts of the country. For example, there is only one abortion clinic in South Dakota. If Roe v. Wade were to be overturned, at least 4 states would immediately criminalize abortion, and plenty more would surely follow.
Public opinion polls, meanwhile, show no clear trend on the abortion issue over the past few decades, so they’re at least holding steady in that arena.
If we restrict our perspective to “the last 20 years in the culture wars,” I’d say that the anti-abortion movement has done pretty well, all things considered. Though like with guns, this is due more to successful lobbying by interest groups rather than any successful efforts on the part of the Republican establishment.
What part of the Republican establishment is separate from its’ lobbying groups? Honest question.
Interestingly, events suggest that the MoH rested in the media as much as the party. And, yes, they’ve lost it too.
And that may be, but Trump isn’t the one who’s going to fix most of them. Trump is one of the biggest sucklers at the teat, was a major Democratic donor, abused eminent domain with abandon, supports Planned Parenthood, etc.
The immigration thing and the fact that he’s a raging asshole are the only reason that the left started freaking out about him. Then, because the left started freaking out, a bunch of stupid people on the right went, “Buddy!” The “right” party is on the verge of nominating a middle-left candidate. Being an asshole doesn’t make you a conservative, despite that being a leftist strawman–and, as it’s become disappointingly clear, a huge chunk of the nominal “right” seems to think so, too.
He won’t give us the deportations. He won’t have the support necessary in Washington to do it. I might be able to hold my nose and vote for him if I thought that was really in the cards. However, he’s going to irk me as much as Obama on most of his stated policy positions, and not give me the few things I might agree with. Plus, he’s vulgar through-and-through to boot.
EDIT: Added the last sentence and second clause of penultimate sentence a minute after posting.
Also, I assume he has no way to get Mexico to pay for the wall. Then what?
@Nancy, have you looked into how he plans to make them pay? He’d deduct it from our foreign aid to Mexico, and impose a new tax on wire transfers to Mexico. You can definitely argue about whether that could get through Congress, but it’s possible.
Evan, thank you– I’d just seen his claims that he could do it, and no mention of the details.
Our total foreign aid to Mexico is less than a billion dollars a year, and taxes on exporting anything from any of the United States to anywhere are specifically prohibited by Article 1, Section 9 of the United States Constitution.
Also, Halawa is totally a thing and the Mexican diaspora knows about it. Try again, Donald.
The one in Hawaii?
Yes, but also Hawala. As are spell-check and autocorrect systems with curiously narrow tolerance for loan words…
That makes more sense.
@John Schilling
Do remittances count as an export from the U.S. to the destination country? And if so, do they still count if the sender in question wasn’t legally authorized to be earning money in the U.S. in the first place?
This isn’t rhetorical, I genuinely don’t know the answer to these questions, and I was just curious if you do.
I’ve been wondering who Trump was going to hire to build (and maintain, and man) his wall, and what wages he was going to pay them. Why sneak into the US illegally, with that kind of job hiring right at the border? (Smart businessman….)
@Anon
Ignoring the trivial case where the method of accounting considers the money a “good” being exported, its not directly an export, but remittances increase exports roughly symmetrically to their value.
Imagine you are a Mexican who receives a remittance. The first thing you are probably going to do with it is trade the dollars for pesos. This will result in the adjustment of fx rates such that imports from the U.S look more favorable. And thus Mexico will import more, and the U.S will export more.
The case where the dollars are directly spent (such as in dollarized economies like Guatemala) , is a bit more complex. In this case it depends in part on whether the economy receiving the remittance is at full employment or not.
Do remittances count as an export from the U.S. to the destination country? And if so, do they still count if the sender in question wasn’t legally authorized to be earning money in the U.S. in the first place?
IANAL, so I’m not certain there isn’t some technicality(*) associated with a wire transfer that would disqualify it as an “article exported from any state”, which is the constitutional definition.
However, physical exports of cash would be on more solid ground, and I am confident that taxing exports of e.g. gold bullion would right out. I am equally confident that if it comes to that, the US market would be quickly saturated with gold-to-Mexico transfer services and the Mexican market with cash-advance-on-the-gold-we-just-verified-is-in-the-pipeline services. Probably coordinated through clearinghouses in third countries, just to be safe, and in partnership with e.g. Western Union and all the other usual players.
*Beyond mere insubstantiality, which I am pretty sure isn’t legally relevant
@ CatCube :
What, Trump won most of the Super Tuesday primaries because “the left freaked out” about him?
To put it as politely as possible, I think you assign way too much power to “the left” in Republican politics.
If being hated by the cultural left was such a powerful asset, Rick Santorum would be the front-runner. If being hated by the economic left was so powerful, it would be Scott Walker.
It’s really interesting to conservatives and Republicans (e.g. Ross Douthat) struggling to find a way to blame liberals for the rise of Trump.
Sorry, guys, he’s all yours. It’s your voters who packed his rallies and gave him victories in state after state. It’s your candidates who could not bring themselves to confront him.
@Larry Kestenbaum – “What, Trump won most of the Super Tuesday primaries because “the left freaked out” about him?”
Pretty much, yeah. I went from 100% despising Trump to smiling every time I hear his name, overnight, without hearing a single second of his speeches and without seeing one of his talking points, based entirely on his ability to sustain his campaign in the face of hatred from the media and the republican establishment. His ability to confound and infuriate people I despise and fear is literally the only thing I like about him. The moment he loses (which seems pretty inevitable in the general), I am certain I will go back to considering him a walking eyesore.
Please bear in mind that, in the following, “you” refers to Democrats/liberals/blue tribe generally, and “we” refers to republicans/conservatives/red tribe. This is a description of the visceral “feel” I get, not the positions I support intellectually, and I freely admit that much of the following is highly uncharitable, of dubious rationality, and generally not very nice.
“To put it as politely as possible, I think you assign way too much power to “the left” in Republican politics.”
I just got back from a lunch spent trying to explain this to a close Democrat friend of mine. Neither of you appreciate what losing the culture war feels like, viscerally speaking. We know that you really do deep down think we are all Nazis, that you do not intend to ever live in peace with us, and that you are almost certainly going to win for the foreseeable future. This is not about policy any more, or who controls congress or the senate or who gets to pick the next few supreme court justices. We don’t care, because we believe we have already lost those fights where they actually matter. What matters is the fight we are actually in right now, which is the social fight, and that is where Trump delivers value. To quote someone else in this thread:
“Actually, I think Red Tribe is beginning to gain status independence. Then we’ll see the real fireworks.”
Status independence is what Trump delivers. That is pretty much all he delivers. He’s so far left on most issues he’d be a laughingstock as a republican nominee in any other situation, but your people hate him and he thrives, and that means we might be able to as well.
Rick Santorum and Scott Walker cannot do what Trump does because they are losers, still invested in playing a rigged game when we’ve already decided that the correct move is to flip the table. They are worse than useless to us.
I honestly have no idea what percentage of Trump’s supporters are coming from my end of the spectrum, and what percentage just really want a border wall and no more muslim immigrants. I think the percentage of people like me is significant, though, and it’s probably the core that got Trump his early momentum.
[EDIT] As the man says, “now, stop thinking like a Trumper.”
Is the above smart and/or useful? Maybe, maybe not. I do not think President Trump actually has the power to seriously unhinge our way of life. That’s part of the problem in the first place: The system has too much inertia and too many failsafes for any one president to make more than minor shifts in the way things are going. Trump appears to be one of the least interventionist candidates in the field, so I’m not worried about him starting wars. I think he’s a raging asshole, not actually crazy or stupid. It doesn’t matter much whether the Supreme court majority that methodically turns the law against us is made of five members or nine; it’s durable and inevitable anyway, and if it can be rolled back, it won’t be by playing the Presidential lottery and then doubling down on the SC Justice lottery. Hillary is a soulless, narcissistic, machiavellian schemer, pretty much just like Trump, so there’s not much to fear there. What’s the downside, again?
@ FacelessCraven:
Where the hell do you live, that you exist in a constant state of fear and persecution for being “red tribe”?
Move to Alabama or something, if you’re that upset. You’ll fit in. It’s not a bad place to live.
As a “grey tribe” native of that state, I was explicitly advised by my father not to publicly identify as an atheist, in order not to jeopardize my job prospects. So anti-“red” discrimination shouldn’t be a problem for you.
(Not that I ever actually felt threatened or excluded for being an atheist, myself. It’s not something that comes up much. People ask where you go to church, as a casual conversation-starter. You respond: “I don’t really go to church.” No questions asked.)
Or come to Dallas. It definitely feels weird to see these culture warriors talk about how despised they feel. Either you live in San Francisco or Seattle or spend way too much time in a bubble of social media dominated by the type of people who live in San Francisco and Seattle. It’s not like that in most of the country.
When I was growing up in small-town Oklahoma, my family briefly had a cleaning lady who was a local. She once asked my mom where we went to church, who answered that we’re atheists. Her response: “But you’re such nice people!”
@Vox: Moving is hard, changing careers is harder, and changing friends and family can be emotionally catastrophic. FacelessCraven is presumably stuck between remaining totally silent, moving, or becoming the next Brendan Eich, which would make them feel pretty persecuted.
@FacelessCraven:
Neither of you appreciate what losing the culture war feels like, viscerally speaking. We know that you really do deep down think we are all Nazis…
I’m reddish-leaning Grey; I know what it’s like to lose a culture war. And I’ve never thought that Red Tribe was really all a bunch of Nazis. But that sentiment is starting to grow on me – and I’m hearing the same from a lot of otherwise solid Red Tribe colleagues.
Objectively, yes, we know that the Trumpists are a very small fraction of Red Tribe. But you all are supporting a man who is at this point indistinguishable from a Hitler or a Mussolini or a Napoleon, who is saying the same things they did for the same reasons and with the same level of credibility. And you’re supporting them for the same reasons that people supported the original Hitler et al, and with the same lack of concern for any consequences beyond your being able to stick it to people you hate. You have good reason to hate these people, as do I – and some of them I genuinely do hate. But the German people of 1930 had good reason to hate the corrupt leadership of the Weimar republic. And the Nazi Detectometer I have calibrated against these and other historic examples is reading well into the red at this point.
…that you do not intend to ever live in peace with us, and that you are almost certainly going to win for the foreseeable future.
I’m reddish-leaning Grey; I don’t expect to win for the foreseeable future. But the bit where I live in peace with people who failed to go Nazi only because there weren’t enough of them to put the Nazis in power this time around (and because really, Trump is more of a Mussolini than a Hitler), that’s going to be hard. Rebuilding all of the genuinely good things that you have been trying to defend, because you insisted on lashing them to the catastrophe that is Donald Trump, that’s also going to be hard. Can we at least count on you to do your share?
@John Schilling,
I don’t mean this as an attack, but have you considered that your attitude here is why American conservatives have consistently failed to conserve anything?
Letting the Democrats wave the bloody shirt and being cowed by comparisons to the KKK or Nazis has cost the Republicans issue after issue. Trump would make a lousy president, that’s obvious, but at least he isn’t jumping at the shadow of a man who’s been dead for seventy five years. If his “I’m rubber you’re glue” strategy pays off in the general election, or even just gets him the nomination, people might wake up and realize that being called a fascist doesn’t actually mean anything.
Trump isn’t going to burn down the country, he won’t even singe the GOP establishment in all likelihood, and he isn’t going to make America great again either. But his campaign just might open the door for people to speak their minds without fear of becoming radioactive pariahs for it.
@John Schilling
But you all are supporting a man who is at this point indistinguishable from a Hitler or a Mussolini or a Napoleon
I’d like to see you unpack that a bit because it sounds nuts to me, but you’ve got a lot of “not a nut or alarmist” points to spend. I don’t see Trump planning to exterminate a portion of the population, or launch a full-scale invasion of the rest of the world (well, at least no more invasions than any other president in recent memory). I just see a blow-hard, with basically Democratic positions, excepting the one heterodox view on immigration.
From my perspective, Sanders is the scary one. In his debate with Hillary, she aimed to demonstrate that she knew her policy stuff and Sanders didn’t. Sanders’ entire message was “I hate the people you hate” (he talks about bankers and the Kochs the way a religious man might speak of the Devil). I think Sanders and Hillary both accomplished their aim; I’m not sure Hillary chose the right target to aim at. Sander is all the more worrisome because his brand of hate is not called out.
Trump’s message is closer to “the people who hate you hate me, too,” which is an important difference, even if it can easily morph.
> But you all are supporting a man who is at this point indistinguishable from a Hitler or a Mussolini or a Napoleon
Trump seems like a nastier and more demagogic version of Hulk Hogan or Arnold Schwarzenegger, cashing in on celebrity, braggadocio, and voters’ disaffection with the establishment.
I can understand being put off by him, but I don’t see this idea that he’s going to destroy democracy in the US. He’s running for president, not organizing the masses for revolution. He is one guy, pretty much running his own show. Even if he gets elected, the damage he can do is limited.
If he was leading an actual party with a few million enthusiastic young people, passionate about the future of their country, also known for occasional unfortunate alleged incidents of violence, that would be pretty scary. But he isn’t. Neither is anybody else, yet.
I do think the electorate’s taste for Trump and Bernie, taken together, is scary. The guy who comes later, the guy who can unite all the young authoritarians under one tent, well, I hope he doesn’t happen.
Me:
FacelessCraven:
The people who are really freaking out about Trump are the likes of Mitt Romney, David Brooks, Mitch McConnell, Joe Scarborough, Paul Ryan, etc., etc.
Possibly you hate Mitch McConnell as much as I do, but I don’t think he counts as part of “the left”.
Meanwhile, among the Blue Tribe politicos I know, a good plurality of them are just delighted to see Trump stomping all over the Republican field. Most Democrats are positive that Trump has little or no chance of winning the White House, so his march to the nomination is an unexpected and welcome gift.
As one said to me today: “Trump is terrible for the country, but great for Democrats.”
In the normal course of American politics, the White House swings between the parties, eight years of one party, eight years of the other. This happens for all kinds of built-in structural reasons as well as the shifting tides of public opinion.
So 2016 was going to be the Republicans’ year, and the primary process was expected to select which Republican would be in charge of the Executive Branch for the next eight years.
A nominee like John Kasich would have made mincemeat of any Democrat. He would have carried Ohio and most other purple states, and probably helped Republicans hold the Senate. Marco Rubio might have done almost as well, in a different way.
The eager anticipation of the Republicans was plain. The new president would have advanced the careers of hundreds of ambitious Republicans, people looking to be federal judges and ambassadors and U.S. Attorneys and so forth. Conservative ideas would have held sway, in federal agencies, Congress, and the Supreme Court.
Then Trump came along, snatched it away, and handed at it to Hillary Clinton. The howls of outrage you hear are from the people whose dream was stolen.
@Vox – “Where the hell do you live, that you exist in a constant state of fear and persecution for being “red tribe”?”
America. Specifically, the internet. I earn my living making video games. My career long-term requires not being hated by large chunks of the public.
“Move to Alabama or something, if you’re that upset. You’ll fit in. It’s not a bad place to live.”
Sure, move to the sticks, maybe get a job pumping gas. That’s an acceptable job for people with the wrong opinions, right? Just so we don’t aspire or anything.
To be clear, I do not fear for my job all that much. I do not use social media, this is the only forum I participate in, and I make a point of keeping my political views to myself around others. Most days, I’m able to believe that the culture war is winding down, that better days are ahead. Unfortunately, today I spent lunch listening to my moderate-liberal democrat friend defend at length his views that society really can’t function without persecuting non-conformists, and there’s nothing really to be done about it, so I’m a little cranky.
@John Schilling – “But you all are supporting a man who is at this point indistinguishable from a Hitler or a Mussolini or a Napoleon, who is saying the same things they did for the same reasons and with the same level of credibility.”
Really?
I don’t mean that dismissively. A year and a half of reading your posts here have left me with a great deal of respect for your opinions and insight. Do you honestly feel that Trump is even remotely in the same league as the above?
“And the Nazi Detectometer I have calibrated against these and other historic examples is reading well into the red at this point.”
How so? Let’s say Trump wins the presidency, and he’s actually a monster and not just a spray-tanned clown. How does he go about actually getting us from where we are now to some seriously bad outcome? How does he get the executive bureaucracy to back his ambitions, much less congress and the courts? Napoleon had the French Revolution, Hitler and Mussolini had shattered states following World War 1. We have the most prosperous country in the world, with a society that is pathologically obsessed with preventing the exact sort of tyrant you’re worried about.
“Rebuilding all of the genuinely good things that you have been trying to defend, because you insisted on lashing them to the catastrophe that is Donald Trump, that’s also going to be hard.”
What genuinely good things? What do you see at stake here?
@Larry – “Possibly you hate Mitch McConnell as much as I do, but I don’t think he counts as part of “the left”.”
Indeed. Hence the “republican establishment” part.
“The howls of outrage you hear are from the people whose dream was stolen.”
Let ’em scream. As noted above, I’ve fully expect a Hillary victory since fall of last year.
[EDIT] – I would like to apologize for any offence caused by the above. I’m not sure the insight it offers was worth channelling the vitriol.
@ Larry K.
Then Trump came along, snatched it away, and handed at it to Hillary Clinton. The howls of outrage you hear are from the people whose dream was stolen.
Though I agree about the eight year swings, more likely no Republican more credible than Trump wanted to run against Hillary. 😉
I seriously doubt that Kasich would have had a better chance at beating Hillary than Trump.
As for the dreams of the Republican establishment people waiting for their turn: the Republican rank and file hates those people because they live posh lives hobnobbing in DC while never doing anything they promise.
>Meanwhile, among the Blue Tribe politicos I know, a good plurality of them are just delighted to see Trump stomping all over the Republican field. Most Democrats are positive that Trump has little or no chance of winning the White House, so his march to the nomination is an unexpected and welcome gift.
Just as the Republican establishment is not the same as the base, the same applies to Democrats. And the Democratic base seems to hate and fear Donald Trump like no one else.
I’m worried about a President Trump because he doesn’t care what he says– it’s not just that he has a very considerable mean streak, we have a sufficiently orderly system that people need to be able to rely on what he says.
Imagine wars being run by someone who has no idea what he’s doing and keeps changing his mind.
In polls asking about hypothetical head-to-head match us, Trump mostly loses to Hillary, while Cruz, Rubio, and Kasich all win. Kasich in particular destroys her.
Curiously, all of them (Trump, Cruz, Rubio and Kasich) lose to Sanders.
@Jaskologist:
I’d like to see you unpack that a bit because it sounds nuts to me, but you’ve got a lot of “not a nut or alarmist” points to spend.
A reasonable request, and I hope I can live up to your opinion of me. This will, unfortunately, be longer than my usual post.
I don’t see Trump planning to exterminate a portion of the population, or launch a full-scale invasion of the rest of the world (well, at least no more invasions than any other president in recent memory).
You didn’t see Hitler or Mussolini planning to do those things ca. 1930, either. In hindsight, you can find the foundations of the Holocaust in e.g. Mein Kampf, but only the most careful and foresightful readers caught that at the time.
Hitler’s message regarding the Jews et al at the time he was running for election was essentially, “These are Not Our Kind, and they are selfishly causing great harm to Real Germans. We need a strong leader who will put them in their place, preferably far from here, and only then will things start to get better for us”. That’s the same message Trump is selling w/re Mexicans and Muslims. Trump and Hitler alike, at election time, sold their followers the impression that once a Strong Leader laid down the law, the undesirables would go away on their own – or at least settle down to be obedient menial laborers supporting the national cause. That was as unrealistic in 1930 as it is now.
And Hitler wasn’t openly proposing to invade anybody in 1930. Mussolini I think was, but only in the name of still-quasi-respectable European Colonialism. Hitler’s shtick was territorial revanchism by fiat. Germany had been wrongly stripped of lands that were rightfully German, and had the right to reclaim them. And Germany’s neighbors were spineless cowards, so if a Strong Leader simply demanded these lands back, well, maybe there’d be an “invasion” in the sense of German troops having to march over a line on a map, but not in the actual fighting-a-war sense. Up to a point, he was right about all of that.
Trump’s shtick, befitting his background as a business tycoon rather than a war hero, is economic – but otherwise a strong parallel, with only slightly less potential for violence. Economic revanchism – our allies abroad owe us $$$ for the military protection we provide, the Mexicans owe us a wall against the immigrants they insist on providing, and we won Iraq’s oil fair and square so it should be ours now. Plus some trade wars. And once a Strong Leader lays down the law, the spineless cowards will give us what we deserve. Again, up to a point, that’s not wrong. A president who really wants to go there, can probably squeeze another $10 billion or so out of Japan to support American troop deployments.
Beyond a certain point, Trump is proposing an international protection racket and saying our kneecappers will be so formidable that everybody will just pay up.
I just see a blow-hard, with basically Democratic positions, excepting the one heterodox view on immigration.
Beyond the various object-level debates, look at the big package. Trump is the Strong Leader who is going to come in from the outside and clean up the Corrupt Political Establishment that was utterly failing to serve popular interests. So were Hitler and Mussolini and Napoleon and all the rest, and the political establishments they “reformed” were corrupt failures. The nation is in a persistent economic decline, and the Strong Leader will bring growth and prosperity. Under the Strong Leader, we are going to Win, Win, Win. There’s going to be lots of Winning (only losers ask about the pesky details).
Trump’s message is closer to “the people who hate you hate me, too,”
That, also, was part of the standard fascist playbook, as is the uncomfortable cult-of-personality bit.
Which brings up the parts that are conspicuously missing. Starting with anything beyond the singular Great Leader. Communism, at least, wasn’t dependent on Marx or Lenin or Stalin or any other single man. The Nazis without Hitler would have been nothing. Trump without Trump is less than nothing.
So, no bureaucratic machinery to carry out the Great Leader’s will. Trump, like Hitler and Mussolini and all the rest, has shown great contempt for the existing bureaucracy, and to be fair it’s a pretty contemptible bureaucracy. But with that contempt comes a lack of respect and skill that means he’s not going to be working with the bureaucracy to enact his policies. Which means, either he’s going to sit impotently in the Oval Office and admit to being a failure, or he’s going to try and break the bureaucracy and put yes-men with guns in its place. At least with previous fascists we could see who the yes-men were going to be, sort the Hitlers from the Mussolinis ahead of time.
Contempt not just for the bureaucracy but for the legislature, check. Lack of respect for the rule of law, or even understanding of what the law is check. Promises that the Great Leader will decide on policy and everyone else will Make It So, check. Complete lack of detail on how this will actually be done, check. Hypocrisy and outright lying on a scale unusual even for career politicians, check. Threats and intimidation against anyone who speaks out against him, check.
From my perspective, Sanders is the scary one. In his debate with Hillary, she aimed to demonstrate that she knew her policy stuff and Sanders didn’t. Sanders’ entire message was “I hate the people you hate” … Sanders is all the more worrisome because his brand of hate is not called out.
Sanders’s hate isn’t called out because the media is on his side and the GOP, whose job it actually is to call out Democrats on their hatred, is somewhat busy dealing with hatred closer to home.
But Sanders is a veteran Senator who has worked for decades in an environment where he can’t actually get more than a tiny fraction of what he wants turned into policy, and has to cut deals with people he hates to accomplish even that tiny fraction. And he’s done this. He knows how to play the game, and he’s demonstrated that he is willing to play the game rather than knock over the table.
Trump, didn’t even join the game until it looked like he would get a chance to knock over the table. I hope I have done an adequate job of explaining how much of his campaign is coming straight out of the old-school fascist playbook; the frightening thing is how little we know about how much farther he is going to take it. I think he is more likely to be a Mussolini than a Hitler, but I’d rather have Sanders playing the game than Mussolini kicking over the table.
And I don’t see a path for Trump that doesn’t involve settling for abject failure, ridiculed as one of the least effective presidents in history, or proceeding to at least the lower tiers of fascism.
@John Schilling:
As I understand it, Hitler was pretty explicit that his long-term plan involved expansion to the east, way further than anywhere that could realistically be considered historically or ethnically German.
So, is it that accurate to say there was no way of telling that he was going to start a war?
@houseboatonstyx :
I think the Republicans who ran were plenty credible. The candidate wouldn’t need to be a flawless special snowflake, just someone reasonably plausible to be president.
Morever, Republicans knew this was their year. If the cycles go along the way they tend to, the next election like this is sixteen years away. And Hillary as a candidate is weak and vulnerable, not strong or invincible. Democrats are nominating her because it’s “her turn”, the way Republicans nominated Bob Dole in 1996.
@onyomi :
I have great respect for you, onyomi, but that seems just wildly wrong to me.
The “Republican establishment” is not just a handful of bigwigs in D.C., but rather a network of many thousands of people all over the country. Few of them are wealthy or “posh”. Many of them are career-oriented, sure, but I’d wager that very few of them are complete cynics. They are pushing what they honestly believe to be the best for America. And maybe they haven’t been able to ban abortion or repeal Obamacare, but they have managed to accomplish a whole lot.
(Destructive things, from my perspective, but I would certainly never characterize them as ineffective in reaching their goals.)
@ReluctantEngineer
I like to say that data is news from the real world.
@Anonymous :
But what is the Democratic base doing that gets in the news? Voting for Hillary and Bernie, mainly.
I would argue that there is considerably less distance (and hence less political disconnect) between the “Democratic establishment” and the Democratic base than there is on the other side. That’s not a slam on either one, just a reflection of the demography.
I think John Schilling‘s fears of Trump are a bit hyperbolic, but he’s absolutely right insofar as Trump represents something genuinely outside the traditional sphere of American politics.
It’s not his rhetoric; it’s not that he’s “politically incorrect”; it’s not that he “upsets the Left”.
It’s that he represents European-style conservative populism, throwing out even lip service to the classically liberal ideals upon which America was founded, and which “ideological conservatives” take it as part of their mission to conserve.
That’s what’s making people distressed: they can see that Trump is a pure populist demagogue, inclined toward authoritarianism, and without even the pretense of loyalty to America’s founding values.
It’s true that Trump is opposed by the “Republican establishment”, i.e. the actual higher-ups in the party. But he’s also opposed by the mainline ideological conservatives, e.g. the people at National Review. Those two are not the same thing. Ideological conservatives are not the same as the Republican establishment; the former are often bitterly critical and resentful of the latter for never doing anything to achieve what they want.
Trump appeals to that sense of “politicians in Washington are never getting us what we want”, but the “what we want” part is very different. The ideological conservatives want the Republicans to cut taxes, especially high marginal tax rates, to liberalize our healthcare and educational system, and to reform (i.e. reduce spending on, if not eliminate) entitlements. They want to actually reduce the size and scope of government. Moreover, the ideological conservatives certainly don’t want open borders, but they’d like more high-skilled H-1B visas and low-skilled guest worker programs, as well as (typically) some path to legalization.
What Trump will do…who knows what Trump will do? He doesn’t have any sort of principled program, except that he’s going to build a wall and restrict international trade so that we can “win”. He’s going to increase entitlements and balance the budget by cutting “waste, fraud, and abuse”. It’s pure personalized politics: it’s not that we need better policies; it’s that we need Trump in office to “make deals” and “win, win, win”.
And people are not confident that he’s going to respect America’s political traditions and separation of powers while he’s carrying whatever random whims he decides upon. His basic promise is that he’s going to deliver strongman rule.
In that respect, he’s worse than Sanders because Sanders—no matter how bad his economic proposals might be—is not proposing to rule in that style.
I don’t think the country will be ruined forever if Trump is elected, but there’s room for grave concern. It’s like electing George Wallace or Huey Long as president.
***
There’s also the not-insignificant factor that his presidency would be an embarrassment and a national disgrace. We’d be a electing a reality-TV buffoon as our commander-in-chief.
And from a Vox.com article (on why they think the Anti-Trump coalition won’t work):
Regardless of whether they can work together to stop him, the takeaway is that Trump has managed to piss off both warring factions here.
Another good Vox.com article about how (in their view) he’s a demagogue, not a fascist:
It’s arguable Kasich would have done better than Trump. I doubt it because Trump is so much more charismatic, but I can see the argument: he’s a centrist, broadly palatable, etc.
The thing is, even if Kasich is better than Trump, I’m not sure why we’d expect him to do any better against Hillary than Romney did against Obama (other than the incumbent thing, which, admittedly, is a powerful force).
Mistake or no, the GOP rank and file is tired of being browbeaten into nominating “sensible” centrists who always lose to the Dems anyway. In Romney’s case, it seems the biggest problem was lack of enthusiasm on the part of blue collar white GOP-leaning voters, who didn’t turn out. Who are those people more likely to turn out for in 2016? Kasich or Trump?
Hillary, for good and ill, has succeeded in cultivating an air of grim inevitability, both about her nomination and her election as first female president to follow on the heels of first black president. GOP voters desperately want someone to throw a wrench in what seems to be the natural course of things, and though it may turn out to be a mistake. Trump feels a heck of a lot more like a “wrench” than Kasich.
“The “Republican establishment” is not just a handful of bigwigs in D.C., but rather a network of many thousands of people all over the country.”
But the average Republican voter doesn’t know that.
@FacelessCraven:
How so? Let’s say Trump wins the presidency, and he’s actually a monster and not just a spray-tanned clown. How does he go about actually getting us from where we are now to some seriously bad outcome? How does he get the executive bureaucracy to back his ambitions, much less congress and the courts? Napoleon had the French Revolution, Hitler and Mussolini had shattered states following World War 1. We have the most prosperous country in the world…
We have a twenty trillion dollar national debt and declining labor force participation. That’s an economic catastrophe waiting to happen, on the scale of the late 1920s. It doesn’t happen because everyone involved, creditor and debtor, domestic and foreign, works to keep rolling over the debt and hoping for a miracle. If we don’t get the miracle, maybe we’ll muddle through anyway. But we get the catastrophe as soon as any major player decides to take their marbles and go home. If the Chinese or the Arabs decide that T-bills are no longer safe enough for their sovereign wealth, if American retirees start hedging their 401(K)s and IRAs with mattresses full of dollar or euro banknotes, then game over.
Trump is, IMO, the would-be President most likely both to trigger such a catastrophe and to exploit it for personal aggrandizement. Not as part of a calculated plan to seize power, but because there is no other path for him that does not lead to abject public failure.
with a society that is pathologically obsessed with preventing the exact sort of tyrant you’re worried about.
If that were true, the NSA would have been under a Congressional microscope since the first Snowden release if not before. Instead, they get a blank check because terrorism.
And enemies abroad generally, which is my second point here. We have virtually no safeguards against a rogue POTUS in matters of foreign affairs. Congress can refuse to ratify treates, but that’s it, and it’s not enough. George W. Bush didn’t need any new treaties to cause great damage to US relationships abroad, and we still haven’t recovered from that. Even four years of Trump’s glorified protection racket could leave us as isolated as China in the late 1960s; too large and powerful to either invade or ignore, but with virtually the entire world resolved on containment and damage limitation. That didn’t work out terribly well for China, as I recall.
And if Trump wants any foreign wars, we’ve got no real defense against that either. The war powers act is a joke, Congress has all but abdicated its responsibility to declare war or not and to authorize war funding or not, and the armed forces will obey any vaguely plausible order to bomb anyone POTUS says is an enemy. Trump, I think, genuinely doesn’t plan to fight any wars with anybody, but only because he thinks everybody will surrender when he tells them to. If he has to chose between humiliating failure and war, I’m guessing he’s going to chose war.
And universal diplomatic isolation plus wars on several fronts abroad, will give him a great deal of latitude on the home front.
So about those “paranoid” safeguards against tyranny at home. What have you got that works against a President who rules by executive order, and why hasn’t it been deployed against either W. or Obama?
There’s the military tradition of political neutrality and domestic non-intervention over presidential loyalty; the Army will probably disobey an order to make Trump a dictator. Will certainly do so if it’s worded so bluntly and without justification. But Trump, from the polls I have seen, has been receiving disproportionate support from the military ranks. If we are besieged by a multitude of hostile powers abroad and if Trump’s rule incites level of violent dissent at home, I am not willing to wager the freedom of the Republic on the Army’s willingness to disobey POTUS.
Impeachment? If there’s a Trump in the White House it is because the GOP has somehow united behind #NeverHillary, in which case the Republican majority in the Senate cannot be counted on to convict until it is too late to matter and we’re down to wondering who the Army will obey. And if the plan is to impeach Trump early, then what’s the point? He’s certainly going to do impeachable things, and he’s unlikely to be swayed by the threat of impeachment as he sees his opponents as spineless cowards, so are you all really planning to elect and then promptly impeach Trump?
Which leaves us with the obstructionist Federal bureaucracy. It has been said that the Bureaucracy will interpret a Trump presidency as damage and route around it. If so, tyranny averted (at least on the domestic front), but at the effect of a presidency as ineffective and inconsequential as that of e.g. Ulysses S. Grant.
Meaning that if Trump won’t settle for being an inconsequential loser, he’ll have to break the civil service, using his two favorite words. Yes, it’s illegal for Trump to arbitrarily fire civil servants. And if every part of the civil service stands together on that, well, OK, we’re back to Trump as an inconsequential loser. If he can find any part of the civil service whose interests align with his willing to back his play, especially one of the men-with-guns parts (and that’s pretty much all of them these days), then he can start evicting or arresting the most recalcitrant civil servants on, er, Trumped-up charges. Probably wouldn’t even need a Stalinesque purge, just a few conspicuous examples pour encourager les autres. Which takes us back to impeachment, or forward to a civil service of Trump yes-men. Which am I supposed to be comforted by?
The three most plausible scenarios I see for a Trump presidency are: ineffectual loser who discredits the GOP for a generation, impeached crook who discredits the GOP for a generation, and Mussolini-level tyrant who discredits the GOP forever. Small possibility of a Hitler who renders all prior political considerations irrelevant.
Against the up side of being able to see the look on liberal faces as the horror sinks in? Not even close to being worth it.
>The thing is, even if Kasich is better than Trump, I’m not sure why we’d expect him to do any better against Hillary than Romney did against Obama
Because Republicans hate Hillary, much, much more than they do Obama. And a lot of Democrats are not to keen on her.
>ineffectual loser
What do you mean by this? Wouldn’t a president that gets nothing done an improvement over two presidents who got things done that you didn’t like?
@dndrsn:
As I understand it, Hitler was pretty explicit that his long-term plan involved expansion to the east, way further than anywhere that could realistically be considered historically or ethnically German.
So, is it that accurate to say there was no way of telling that he was going to start a war?
As with the Holocaust, you can find the roots of it if you look, but almost nobody at the time had that level of foresight and Hitler wasn’t campaigning on it. German expansionism was overshadowed on that front by fear of Communism; anyone at all likely to be aligned with the Nazis was expecting a war with the Commies anyway. Yay Hitler for telling it like it is, and why not keep their land if we have to fight them for it?
And then Hitler signs Molotov-Ribbentrop, effectively defending against the Communist threat while strictly limiting German expansion in the East – at least until the inevitable betrayal, but the point is that Hitler’s public position was “Neutralize the Commie Menace” more than “Conquer Eastern Lands”.
“Yay Hitler for telling it like it is, and why not keep their land if we have to fight them for it?”
Your previous statement
“And Hitler wasn’t openly proposing to invade anybody in 1930.
…
Hitler’s shtick was territorial revanchism by fiat. ”
Hitler
http://hitler.org/writings/Mein_Kampf/mkv2ch14.html
— Then, without consideration of ‘traditions’ and prejudices, it must find the courage to gather our people and their strength for an advance along the road that will lead this people from its present restricted living space to new land and soil, and hence also free it from the danger of vanishing frotn the earth or of serving others as a slave nation.—
—And I must sharply attack those folkish pen-pushers who claim to regard such an acquisition of soil as a ‘breach of sacred human rights’ and attack it as such in their scribblings.—
—For it is not in colonial acquisitions that we must see the solution of this problem, but exclusively in the acquisition of a territory for settlement, which will enhance the area of the mother country, and hence not only keep the new settlers in the most intimate community with the land of their origin, but secure for the total area those advantages which lie in its unified magnitude.—
@John Schilling:
I don’t know how obscure the writings of a leader of a political movement can be considered.
Perhaps the voters just wanted what they saw as the “good stuff” in the platform and consciously or not ignored the stuff that predicted what was to come.
And I am probably falling into the error of seeing things in hindsight, to some degree. I find myself wondering what the general tone of political discourse in Germany was at the time.
@onyomi:
Mistake or no, the GOP rank and file is tired of being browbeaten into nominating “sensible” centrists who always lose to the Dems anyway.
So instead you’re going to try and nominate a blowhard demagogue and possible fascist who is going to lose to the Dems anyway?
As I believe Larry and others have pointed out, there are cycles in politics as well as business. 2008 was the year that the Republicans were almost certainly going to lose no matter who they nominated. 2016 is the year the Republicans were almost certainly going to win no matter who they nominated so long as they developed some sort of a consensus for any reasonable candidate not named Bush.
So naturally, you all spent four years resigned to the “grim inevitability” of another Bush, looking at all the other reasonable candidates and saying “I dunno, if it’s somehow Not Bush, who cares”?
In Romney’s case, it seems the biggest problem was lack of enthusiasm on the part of blue collar white GOP-leaning voters, who didn’t turn out. Who are those people more likely to turn out for in 2016? Kasich or Trump?
They would have turned out for Not Another Clinton, and Not Another Democrat.
That’s why 2016 was your year. The American electorate will grow weary of any party occupying the White House too long, and while the Democrats might have stretched things out to 2020 on their own, they’d have had to consolidate behind a reasonable candidate without the toxic name of Clinton.
Hillary, for good and ill, has succeeded in cultivating an air of grim inevitability, both about her nomination and her election as first female president to follow on the heels of first black president.
Thing about “grim inevitability” is, it doesn’t actually motivate supporters to vote. Just ask Jeb. You mentioned Romney and I think correctly identified the cause of his defeat. Do you not realize that Hillary is the Democratic Romney? The sensible centrist insider whom the party elite have browbeaten everyone else into nominating, whom the rank and file would rather see in office than any damn, dirty Republican but, oh, look, it’s raining and the kids are late to their music lessons and she’s inevitable whether I vote for her or not so maybe I won’t make it to the polls this year?
But, unlike Romney, Hillary holds the second-most-toxic name in American politics. Well, OK, maybe she’s slipped to third in that category now. In any event, a name that will drive Republicans through rain, snow, sleet, or hail to vote for Not Clinton in the same election that the Democratic base will be at their least enthusiastic and everyone in between will be tired of Democrats anyway.
All you had to do was settle on any one candidate not named Bush.
This year, that would have been enough.
@dndrsn:
I don’t know how obscure the writings of a leader of a political movement can be considered.
You are in a rationalist-dominant forum discussing politics, so I’m going to assume you are well informed in such matters.
“Hard Choices”, H. Clinton, 2014
“The Speech”, B. Sanders, 2011
“Immigration Wars”, J. Bush, 2014
“Stand for Something”, J. Kasich, 2006
“A Time for Truth”, T. Cruz, 2015
“American Dreams”, M. Rubio, 2015
“A More Perfect Union”, B. Carson, 2015
“Crippled America”, D. Trump, 2015
Have you read even half of these? And I’m counting only the most recent manifesto by each candidate; they’ve all got at least an autobiography and most of them some earlier political books as well.
The actual text of a would-be leader’s writings is usually quite obscure at the time of their election. The fact that they’ve written a book may be common knowledge, but usually what matters is the parts that get excerpted and quoted in the mass media. And as far as I know, the blatantly proto-holocaust or invade-Russia stuff in Mein Kampf didn’t get that treatment very often at the time.
Disclaimer: Notwithstanding my Germanic name, I am not sufficiently fluent in the language to be directly familiar with the German mass media of the late 1920s, and am going on English-language historical readings here.
John Schilling and Vox, thank you both for the level of detail.
My feeling– and I’m not sure this is coherent– is that I’m temperamentally an anarchist myself, but I don’t want anarchists in the government.
Well, maybe anarchists with an attitude of “let’s take things apart carefully and in a sensible order”, but I don’t know of any real world anarchists like that.
You’re assuming voters are just static. They’re not! Every race is different, candidate personalities matter, the population is constantly turning over, everyone changes over time, and voters don’t all choose a candidate using the same logic.
One election may be somewhat comparable to another, but no election is determinative of another.
I don’t know the percentage overlap between the individuals who voted for Obama in 2008 and those who voted for him in 2012, but it’s probably closer to 50% than 100%. Look how well Hillary did in the New Hampshire primary in 2008, and how poorly she did there eight years later. Same electorate, same candidate, different opponent, radically different result.
Or take the 1952 and 1956 presidential elections. The candidates were the same: Dwight Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson, and the outcome was the same. But there was a lot of churn: millions of voters switched sides from one election to the other.
Or ask a random sample of voters some straightforward issue question. Three weeks later, go back to those same people and ask the same question. The correlation between the first and second answers is astonishingly low.
See “The Paradox of Mass Politics” for much more about all this.
@John Schilling:
Point taken.
Possibly relevant: the vast majority of sale/distribution of Mein Kampf was after Hitler came to power, and a lot were given out for free. Anecdotally, at least, a lot of people never bothered reading them.
Historical trivia: Hitler avoided paying taxes on the money he made from its sale.
@Nancy:
Well, maybe anarchists with an attitude of “let’s take things apart carefully and in a sensible order”, but I don’t know of any real world anarchists like that.
Oh, how I love that thought. But I’d guess that anyone like that in the real world, wouldn’t call themselves an anarchist. Either because they expect they’d reach a point of diminishing returns and settle down to minarchism, or tactically because adopting the anarchist label would reduce their odds of being allowed to start dismantling at the top.
(Ed: Autocorrect insists on “monarchism” instead of “minarchism”. I blame Death Eater hacktivists. But since we’re on the subject, I might settle for a good minarchist monarchist…)
This is tangential, but I think the cycle theory of presidential elections is overrated. Yes, Obama came after 8 years of Bush, who in turn came after 8 years of Clinton. But Clinton came after 12 years of Republican presidents, which came after just 4 years of Carter, and before that you have the whole Nixon thing, and then there’s an assassination, and then we’re so far in the past that it’s a foreign country.
So we’ve really only seen this cycle happen twice, it’s just that it was the two most recent times.
(Control of congress changing hands is also a new thing which only started with Clinton.)
I think all the comparison of Trump to Hitler is way overblown and is actually part of why he’s doing well: people are tired of being called Nazis just for wanting an immigration/labor policy that will favor Americans who are already here (and I, personally, am in favor of much more liberal immigration policy, so it’s not like I’m with Trump on this one).
The far better comparison is to Arnold Schwarzenegger: the manly celebrity who claims to be above it all because of outsider status and who will sweep in to clean up the mess made by all the ineffectual girly men running the government. And if he becomes a failure, it will probably be in the same sorts of ways Schwarzenegger was: i. e. underestimating how difficult the consensus-building part of politics is.
That said, Trump legitimately has more negotiation and consensus-building experience than Schwarzenegger ever did, though I do remain generally suspicious of the transferability of business and political acumen.
If he sucks, it will be Schwarzenegger suck, not Hitler suck.
@onyomi, I thought Schwarzenegger was a successful businessman as well as actor. And without the massive inheritance and repeated abuse of the bankruptcy laws that got Trump where he is.
On the other hand, Nick Gillespie makes a pretty good argument that Trump is cut from the same cloth as the Republican establishment and the crew at National Review, who are just as bad as he is:
Notwithstanding, I continue to think he represents something distinctively worse, even than the Republican establishment and its many contradictions.
The far better comparison is to Arnold Schwarzenegger: the manly celebrity who claims to be above it all because of outsider status and who will sweep in to clean up the mess made by all the ineffectual girly men running the government. And if he becomes a failure, it will probably be in the same sorts of ways Schwarzenegger was: i. e. underestimating how difficult the consensus-building part of politics is.
It helps that Schwarzenegger was limited to that sort of petty failure. As a Governor, he couldn’t single-handedly embark on a disastrous foreign policy much less start actual wars, and his potential for catastrophe on the domestic front was limited not only by the California legislature but by the Federal courts and ultimately their armed enforcers. So in that sense, it’s not fair to compare the Governator with Trump.
But the comparison doesn’t hold even accounting for that. I was here for Schwarzenegger’s first campaign, and I don’t recall anything like the hostility towards the political establishment, of either party, that we have seen from Trump. He ran proposing to work with Sacramento to reform the state’s government.
As a Republican he was of course accused of being a racist and a Nazi, but the charges didn’t stick because he wasn’t even remotely racist or Nazi-esque. He did not point to anyone and say “These people are the cause of our problems; we must run them out of the state before things can improve” the way Trump has – Arnold was in fact about as pro-immigration as you’ll find in the Republican party, and doesn’t seem to have had a bad thing to say about our established domestic minorities either.
He didn’t make the sort of grand promises that Trump does, either, impossible to fulfill by any remotely legal means and yet tied to his personal ego. He didn’t put himself forward as the Great Man whose unique and indispensable personal abilities would be the salvation of the state. He promised to work towards a genuine consensus, not “everybody will agree to do what I say”. And he didn’t threaten or bully those who spoke out against him. That’s huge.
I think you are trying to collapse a huge portion of the political spectrum into the single category of “populist outsider promising reform”, and attaching that label to anyone who runs for high office with no prior political experience. That political spectrum runs all the way from “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington”, all the way to Literal Adolf Hitler. And, aside from being popular outsiders promising reform, everything I see puts Arnold and Donald in opposite wings of that spectrum.
That said, Trump legitimately has more negotiation and consensus-building experience than Schwarzenegger ever did, though I do remain generally suspicious of the transferability of business and political acumen.
Trump’s businesses operated on a larger scale than did Schwarzenegger’s, but I don’t think consensus-building was a huge part of Trump’s success in business. My impression is mostly one of his bringing overwhelming assets to the table and offering take-it-or-leave-it deals. And being willing to walk away himself when, as often as not, it all went south. For a President who will be stuck with a hard requirement to come to terms with a particular group of partners and see it through, I’m not sure Schwarzenegger’s business experience wasn’t more useful.
And it wasn’t enough, because as you note it never is. The difference in kind and scale between the United States Government and even the largest private corporations is staggering. For Trump to say his business expertise qualifies him to be President, is as ridiculous an exaggeration as the leader of a successful Boy Scout troop to say he’s qualified to command a Marine Expeditionary Force in battle.
>But the comparison doesn’t hold even accounting for that. I was here for Schwarzenegger’s first campaign, and I don’t recall anything like the hostility towards the political establishment
Hell, he even married into it.
@ Jaskologist
But it isn’t a theory, or one of those coincidential things like the correlation between the World Series and the presidential election. It’s pretty much baked in to the way things work, and the fact that from time to time a party ends up with 4 years or 12 years does not contradict or disprove it.
The Presidency is the balance wheel of American politics. Whichever party holds the White House gradually loses everything else. Off-year elections are almost invariably brutal for the president’s party. The “outs” accumulate grievances and become steadily more motivated as a presidential administration goes along.
Moreover, control of the Executive Branch means that your party has a huge number of positions to fill with, ideally, talented and motivated members of the president’s party. Filling all those positions with the cream of the crop takes them out of electoral politics, leaving the second string to try to hold on to the governorships, senate seats, etc.
This applies, not just to the actual candidates, but to the people who would otherwise be advising them and managing their campaigns, but are busy with their federal jobs.
Look around: Republicans control both houses of Congress and the state governments of all but a few states. It’s vice-versa at this point in a Republican presidential administration.
And all those sitting governors and senators of the “out” party create a pool of talent for the next presidential race. Meanwhile, the president’s party has few experienced but undefeated contenders left to take up the mantle for the next go-round.
“He ran proposing to work with Sacramento to reform the state’s government.”
I very clearly remember him repeating these words over and over throughout the campaign: “I will go to Sacramento and I will clean house.” Whatever he actually did once he got there (and I admit to not having paid much attention to his actual governorship), he definitely ran a “throw the bums out” campaign.
@John Schilling – Before getting to specific replies, a couple questions I had after reading your posts.
Do you see the current political establishment as largely functional? Would it be worth attempting to roll it back if we had a more stable populist candidate rather than Trump?
“If that were true, the NSA would have been under a Congressional microscope since the first Snowden release if not before.”
I respectfully disagree. There is a crucial difference between the dangerously overgrown power of the government as a whole, which is the threat we actually face, and the threat of any single politician breaking our way of life for their own benefit. Everyone is obsessed with the later, when they should be worrying about the former.
The creeping government encroachment we’ve suffered for the last several decades is a creation of the political establishment, and has enjoyed an unbroken advance since at least Clinton. All significant opposition, by contrast, has come from populist sources. Trump’s political capital comes from populism, and he has made a short but fiery career of antagonizing the establishment; that leaves him with little room to act in favor of advancing the establishment’s agenda and ignore populist concerns, as his predecessors have consistently done.
The government is too powerful, but that power is arranged to the benefit of the establishment as a whole. Reducing or breaking that power would be difficult enough, and appears to require a populist president to do. Any attempt to use it for a President’s personal aggrandizement at the expense of the establishment would require overwhelming public support, which Trump is pretty much congenitally incapable of securing. Worst case, we finally get around to actually impeaching and jailing a President, which I would personally consider a minor victory in and of itself.
“We have a twenty trillion dollar national debt and declining labor force participation.”
Is there any reasonable expectation that either of those problems are going to get better in the foreseeable future? Personally, I doubt it. Meanwhile, the government continues to metastasize.
“Trump is the Strong Leader who is going to come in from the outside and clean up the Corrupt Political Establishment that was utterly failing to serve popular interests.”
…Do you agree that the political establishment is actually corrupt, that it utterly fails to serve popular interests, and that fixing this is going to require a strong outsider leader to come in and clean it up?
“Which means, either he’s going to sit impotently in the Oval Office and admit to being a failure, or he’s going to try and break the bureaucracy and put yes-men with guns in its place.”
Is there no room for action between the two? I’d agree that Trump is on a collision course with the bureaucracy, but that is a feature, not a bug.
“Beyond a certain point, Trump is proposing an international protection racket and saying our kneecappers will be so formidable that everybody will just pay up.”
This point legitimately worries me, and meshes unpleasantly with the point about our financial overhang.
“If he has to chose between humiliating failure and war, I’m guessing he’s going to chose war.”
I don’t see a viable war available anywhere but the middle east, and deploying troops to the middle east would be political suicide. Hillary might be able to do it, with the backing of the establishment. As a non-interventionist populist, I don’t think Trump can survive that pivot without justification on the scale of 9/11.
“What have you got that works against a President who rules by executive order, and why hasn’t it been deployed against either W. or Obama?”
W. and Obama were establishment creatures, who cooperated with the bureaucracy and advanced its interests. Trump is not, so using the establishment/Bureaucracy as cover is not an option open to him.
…As for the rest of your scenario, it seems you think Trump has no actual settings between “Sulk” and “Hitler”. I find that pretty hard to believe. If it turns out to be true, the establishment will eat him alive either way, and I would consider either an acceptable outcome. I do not see him committing an impeachable offense as inevitable, and do not believe the Republican establishment would back him if he did. I do not remember us having to wait to see who the Army would obey with Nixon, and I do not think Trump will ever enjoy the level of party support that Nixon did. If, on the other hand, he and his staff manage to scrape together the political acumen to attempt governing, we might possibly see something other than more of what we’ve been getting since the 90s. Trump is actually at least somewhat incentivised to try to do a good job, and he is not incentivised to make things worse in the same exact way as his three predecessors. I would agree that he is very unlikely to be remembered as a great president, and if he by some miracle manages to win the Presidency, his win will without doubt severely damage the GOP. If I valued the GOP, that might concern me. But again, why should I? What has it accomplished in the last fifteen years?
Let me put it simply: what does the current political machine produce that should be more valuable to me than the chance to watch it throw sparks and strip gears? Especially given that I’m pretty sure the machine wants to use me for gear grease? If I had an answer to that question, I would not like Trump.
I think what the political left in the US, as well as the mainstream of people involved in politics of either party fail to fully grasp is the depth of hatred much of the GOP rank and file now has for politics as usual.
I have a number of facebook friends who like to point out repeatedly that we have only one “sane” political party in the US today. The GOP is repeatedly decried as “crazy,” “off the rails,” “unreasonable.” The Democrats are “reasonable”: they don’t want to shut down the government, dismantle the safety net.
The thing is, the Democrats really and truly are the conservative party of today insofar as they are mostly okay with the status quo (a status quo which includes rapid, aggressive social change, as it happens). It strikes people like Larry Kestenbaum as odd, foolish: “why waste your turn gambling on a crazy person when it’s your chance to put your people into all the right places and start advancing your agenda?”
This makes sense if you think the current system is mostly okay, but needs a little tweaking in a different direction: if you’re a mainstream GOP political creature, maybe this means slightly lower taxes, slightly more business-friendly regulations, etc.
But the rank and file of the GOP doesn’t just think the current system needs a little tweaking. They (and I’m with them on this), hate the current system and nearly everyone involved in it (right and left) with a passion, because the net result of both parties taking turns being “reasonable” has turned out so badly from their perspective. There’s an urgency (another irony for a party labeled “conservative”) that the political left in the US does not feel or seem to understand.
I totally agree with Faceless Craven: what has the mainstream of politics done for me recently that I should desire any of their choices more than seeing them discomfited?
And why are the rank and file so angry? The Facebook consensus is they’re racists who want to see a black president fail who have been brainwashed by Fox News to think everything’s going to hell when actually it’s going pretty well. Or maybe it could have something to do with this?
http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user3303/imageroot/2016/03/01/20160301_obama.jpg
But I hear there are plenty of great new job opportunities in DC…
@John Schilling
Less an objection than an observation:
You paint a plausible picture, but much of it boils down to “the structure is so riddled with termites that all it will take is a stiff breeze to knock it down.”
But if that is true, then the battle is already lost, and the collapse will come, if not by Trump then by someone else. A system which Trump could topple is already too rotten to be worth preserving.
Better it happen in my day than in my children’s.
As I said above “dangerous fools that don’t understand how good they have it”.
The things-are-so-horrible-who-cares-if-it-burns folks should: travel the world, read some history, or heck just go to a nursing home and talk some people that remember the 1930s.
We have 46 million of food stamps and virtually no one starving to death. There’s no way you can convince me that’s some sort of horrific factoid.
@onyomi
Most of those graphs say nothing about the quality of the current government. The student loans graph shows a clear trend starting before 2008. I don’t know why “money printing” is deemed intrinsically bad, but in any case it has leveled out in the last 2 years. Healthcare costs have continued randomly fluctuating. “Black inequality” has continued randomly fluctuating. Median family income has continued randomly fluctuating. The increases in food stamps and federal debt, and the decreases in home ownership and labour force participation seem likely caused by minor financial problems at the time they start (2008).
Those graphs actually made me view Obama more favourably — surely it shouldn’t be too difficult to pick out some devastating statistics out of murder rate, unemployment, GDP per capita etc., or at least make some convincing graphs by fiddling axes. The fact that this hasn’t been done suggests that your current government must have done a great job on these things.
“home ownership” is especially revealing. Nothing could scream “bubble” louder than that graph. That graph is shocking only if you presume 1994-US was basically a third world country or something.
@Brad – “The things-are-so-horrible-who-cares-if-it-burns folks should: travel the world, read some history, or heck just go to a nursing home and talk some people that remember the 1930s.”
I do not think we are on the precipice of a serious way-of-life collapse. If we are, then I highly doubt Trump makes a difference one way or the other. Our current political establishment is not an intrinsic characteristic of our civilization, and I think it can be fought and even defeated without triggering massive disaster. “Kicking over the table” means refusing to cooperate with the political establishment, not rioting in the streets and shooting at emergency services.
“Those graphs actually made me view Obama more favourably…”
I’m not sure, how, exactly, but the focus isn’t just on Obama. I think the rank and file of the GOP is pretty much unhappy with the direction of everything since Clinton, or, arguably, Reagan. Yes, all these trends were in place well before Obama–that’s exactly the problem. Whether Hillary or Rubio, we’d have to expect them to continue.
Re. the “everything’s so bad let’s burn it to the ground” issue: I think this confuses the health of the society/economy with the health of the government. I think the society and economy are still fairly sound, albeit weakening and riddled with various contradictions, but I think the government is really, really dysfunctional?
Could it be worse? Historically speaking, of course, it could be much, much worse, both in terms of the functionality of our society and economy and in terms of how awful our government is. We’re not living in Stalin-era Ukraine and we should be grateful for that. But could we be? I don’t think so. It’s not just one bad election standing between us and being Stalin’s USSR. Not even close.
Obviously, if I thought there was any chance of Trump turning the US into Stalin’s USSR, I would be doing everything I could (meager though that would be) to stop him. But that doesn’t strike me as a remotely realistic fear.
A much more realistic fear is that Clinton gets elected and all the trends I hate and that I think are slowly ruining US society continue or even accelerate. To throw a wrench in those gears I’m willing to take some level of risk, though I really don’t think I’m risking Stalin or Hitler.
Not that I’m a yuge fan of Trump: a Trump presidency worries me a lot, but not as much as a Hillary presidency, or, indeed, a Jeb! presidency. If I got my pick of how to screw up the status quo it would be with the election of Ron Paul. But if it’s Trump or nothing, I’ll take Trump. Maybe I’ll regret it, but that’s how the risks seem weighed to me right now, keeping in mind that the current US political status quo fills me with blinding rage.
@sweenyrod,
That’s actually a big part of the problem.
We’re in, depending on how you want to look at it, either George Bush’s eighth term in office or Bill Clinton’s sixth. There have been some minor policy changes here and there between administrations but largely it’s been the same familiar hands on the tiller steering inexorably in one direction.
And Americans aren’t having it.
Jeb! and Hillary are both essentially running reelection campaigns promising more of the same. Is it surprising that neither party’s voters want another centrist insider in the White House?
Mixing zero-indexed line graphs with non-zero-indexed ones? Burn the witch! Burn!
Scott Adams just put this on his blog, and it’s basically exactly what I’ve been trying to express:
“A Trump presidency would be messy. It would certainly introduce a new type of risk that we have not seen before.
Do you want more risk?
Generally speaking, you want to avoid risk when things are going well and accept risk when things are totally broken. If you think the country is doing well, and will continue to do so, Hillary Clinton is an excellent choice on the left, as is Marco Rubio on the right. They will keep things mostly the same.
But if you think government is rigged against your interests, and unlikely to improve on its own, you want a bloodless revolution. And the candidate you hire for the revolution is likely to have rough edges.”
I get that people hate the Republican establishment, but I tend to agree with the view expressed by D.K. Williams on Twitter:
“Voting #Trump b/c you hate the #GOP establishment is like smoking meth & becoming a hooker b/c you hate your parents.”
At a slight tangent …
I wonder to what extent the attitude of the GOP red tribe is a response to their perception of the attitude of the blue tribe to them. Reading the FB climate discussion, I see an awful lot of posts which simply take it for granted that the Republican party, conservatives, people who don’t agree with the current orthodoxy, are stupid, uneducated, and/or evil.
Most of the red tribe isn’t reading those posts. But are they getting the same picture through other sources? How general is the perception that they are flyover country, looked down on by the coastal elites?
If the people you see as in control not only are doing what you consider the wrong things but hate and/or despise you, it’s not unreasonable to feel a bit disturbed.
@ David Friedman:
I can’t speak for any one else, but I definitely notice it. As the old joke goes…
Politician: Why wont these ignorant fucking slopeheads vote in their own interest?
Slopehead: Well Fuck You too.
Are you sure? Red Tribe has Facebook and most likely has family members in Blue Tribe. It probably isn’t quite the echo chamber that, say, my Facebook feed is as 20-something in a Blue State. But I imagine they still hear the derision.
How have you not discovered Worm before now?
Also, what are the odds we’ll see one of your book reviews of it in the event you finish?
Isn’t Worm 2 starting sometime this year? It’s exactly the right time to start reading Worm 🙂
I’ve read Worm 2-3 times but now have an urge to start reading Worm again. For anyone on the fence about starting a million-plus-word super-web-novel, don’t be turned off by the first few chapters being slow and short – it gets a LOT faster.
Worm 2 is currently planned to start before the end of the year based on expected finish time of current serial by the author. Could be somewhat earlier (summer/fall) or later (winter).
Wildbow’s second work (urban fantasy) is at pactwebserial.wordpress.com and his current work (biopunk) is at twigserial.wordpress.com
Just… be advised that Pact is depressing as fuck, like, far beyond Worm which was by itself pretty black.
This is probably a good warning for most people, but for me Pact was kind of uplifting. Mostly because of the very strong “humanity prevails” message, though YMMV.
I find this varies a lot for people. I didn’t find it that depressing, exactly, but some of it (especially the beginning) felt like Wildbow hadn’t quite reset his escalation-o-meter from the final arc of Worm.
Yeah, be advised that all of Wildbow is bleak cliffhanger after bleak cliffhanger. I don’t think I would describe Pact as more depressing than Worm. (I got fed up enough with Worm to stop reading it when something particularly bad happened, and then came back to it a week later. Perhaps the same didn’t happen with Pact because I was reading it as it was written?)
Wait, Worm almost destroyed me emotionally.
Dunno if I can handle this.
I actually read Pact first. I haven’t read Worm yet, although I know it exists — mostly because, while I loved Pact and recommend it to anyone who likes their fiction dark, it was exhausting.
I was fine with the darkness, but I didn’t find Pact’s ending very satisfying — or Worm’s either, for that matter, although that wasn’t as bad. After half a million words of escalating tension, I want more denouement than a single half-length chapter from a new character, even if all the dangling plot threads have technically been resolved.
Of course, I have the same complaint about Neal Stephenson, and I’ve bought pretty much all his books.
Amusingly, Pact is so bleak that a dark, horrifying revelation about a character’s past actually gets invalidated by a later dark, horrifying revelation about the same character’s past! It borders on parody at times.
I’m impressed. I mean, it’s been two or three years since it came out, and it only took me about two weeks to binge through it, but I don’t think I could have the stamina to read in two or three times.
I mean it’s not like a re-read it more than once every few months, and I just read a chapter or two when I’m on the bus. Once you’re read it once the “OMG what happens next can’t put it down” factor diminishes.
If you read by parts, then sure you can do it more times than that. What is really good about Worm is that it’s always with you, since the whole thing is published on the web.
So sometimes while I’m waiting somewhere I’ll just head over to parahumans.wordpress.com, open 3-5 tabs with the most interesting/the parts of the story I didn’t get quite well and read it.
For example it took me 3-4 reads to get the last canon chapter in the full picture, since there were no cape names mentioned and you had to decode yourself what was happening and what each character is doing.
And it really helps that there is years of thinking behind that work – so you can get as deep as in ASOIAF and still work out nice insights out of the work.
I just read the first chapter and im getting a pretty heavy young adult fiction vibe…which is a turn off. Is it actually good?
YES YES YES YES YES!
Okay, that over with, it has a 4.70 rating on goodreads with 1488 ratings and 220 reviews. I’m not very eloquent, so here are some quotes from the reviews:
“This book was 1.7 million words long, it took me 13 days to read, during which time I pretty much didn’t put my laptop down.”
“Finally. I can finally sleep.”
“Worm is addictive superhero SF posing as fantasy; it is long, of consistently high quality, and features a huge amount of imaginative powers with equally imaginative applications & combos”
“It really is probably the main reason that I didn’t get quite as many books read last year as I would have liked”
“You know how when your watching a great action adventure movie, you kinda want to get up during or right after the fight scenes and do some karate moves? That’s Worm, but for books.”
“Well that happened. I finished reading Worm for the third time in three months.”
“I’d like to think that someday in the future, Worm will be considered a classic of fiction.”
“Oh my! Worm is not your basic empowerment fantasy superhero story. It’s also not an ignorant grimdark world of pain. It is thoughtful and aware. It is fell and wonderous. It worms its way from crisis to crisis to crisis of a different kind.”
“What is it? One of the best sci fi series I’ve ever read, and believe me, I’ve read a lot.”
“I never need to read a comic again, as Worm is the ultimate of superhero fiction. Seriously drop everything and read this.”
(Also Scott is reading it, it has to be good)
It is very YA fiction, fwiw. I enjoyed reading it the first time but probably couldn’t read it again without really being in the mood to read it.
If the tone is YAish and the appeal is “superhero SF posing as fantasy” i probably will skip. I have to say, i did enjoy HPMOR for the insight/problem solving porn, so if its in that vein…
OTOH, i’m not a fan of scott’s fiction thing right now but was a huge fan of nostalgebraist’s northern caves. so what do i know. i guess i rate scott’s opinions on non-fiction writing much higher than his tastes in fiction, which is a bit too low brow for me at times.
There is a fair amount of problem solving porn, but there’s also a lot of fat that could have been trimmed. For reference, I enjoyed Northern Caves (except for the end, but did enjoy the last chapter), did not enjoy Floorlight (never finished), and only enjoyed HPMOR in parts (and never finished it).
It gets a lot less YA after the first few arcs. If you’re thinking you’re in for 200 chapters of Taylor in High School getting bullied or something, don’t worry. The high school stuff is such a minor part of the story. The main PoV comes from a teenage girl, but it’s not like she’s worried about who will go to prom with her or anything.
The thing that’s really distinct about Worm is that capes use their powers how an intelligent person would use their powers and they act intelligently.
What ZachPruckowski said — I was very put off by the bullying arc at the beginning, but it ends quite quickly and I am glad that I kept reading.
An HPMOR author’s note has this recommendation:
…and on that basis I read it (and I agree).
It’s not much like HPMOR. Aside from both being first novels, Wildbow shares with Eliezer a willingness to explore implications and a delight in stretching abilities as far as they’ll go, so they both have a certain munchkin theme going on. That’s something. But Worm is not, basically, rationalist fiction; it’s just fiction that a lot of people in this scene happen to like.
I agree with Zach that the first three or so arcs are much more YA in tone than the rest of the story.
It’s too dark to be YA fiction.
I dunno about that. Shade’s Children is incredibly dark, if I’m remembering it correctly, as is House of Stairs. Both of those are pretty well regarded YA works, and Shade’s Children does have a happy ending, but they’re both pretty bleak.
One word.
Animorphs.
Thank you for posting this warning so I know not to waste my time. I’m still salty about people convincing me to check out The Fault in Our Stars.
It get’s better once the protagonist is out of school.
But worse when the reader is.
Having read both, this comment made me laugh. They’re basically nothing alike. If you’re putting them in the same genre, that’s a problem with your genres.
Do you also despise fantasy stories because of Eye of Argon, as well?
Do you think all fanfiction is childish and incoherent, because of My Immortal?
Maybe he just hates young adult vibes.
Worm is overhyped. And desperately in need of a good editor.
This.
I fully agree – to me it very much feels like an unedited first draft. This seems too common with those long form blog-style serial publications which are published as the author completes subsections. It’s certainly possible to clean up small problems but much harder to do a comprehensive revision.
It’s nothing new — the same was true of many pulp serials, some of which were written barely ahead of each deadline. And hard to revise as an author who just wants to be done and move on to the next thing (one of many good reasons that work is edited by others in conventional publishing models).
But makes for poorer overall experience when read as a whole IMO.
It basically is an unedited first draft.
But, good news! It’s getting edited.
To expand a bit…
Worm needs editing on the micro-scale, yes. Word choice, sentence structure, all that sort of thing. But it also needs a lot of editing on the macro-scale. It needs someone to take a red pen to entire chapters. It needs someone to say, “These five thousand words? Reduce them to five hundred.”
Compare another web serial (and one I quite liked): The Salvation War. On the micro-scale, The Salvation War is even more in need of editing, sometimes way more! (Though never anywhere near the point of being unreadable or laughably bad or any such thing.) But on the macro-scale? It’s much more tightly plotted and written. Things happen constantly, the plot moves along briskly, and the whole thing feels like an exciting, fast-paced ride.
Worm? Not so much.
TV Tropes gives me the impression that The Salvation War is John Ringo meets Left Behind.
Well, sign me up I guess. Let’s do this.
For what it’s worth, I got through Worm (and Pact, but I got bored with Twig after the first few chapters), but didn’t make it through The Salvation War. The latter’s pacing is somewhat better, but that doesn’t make up for its basic weaknesses in plot, character, and worldbuilding.
(Actually, I don’t think I can remember any of its characters by name, except for the historical figures.)
It is an unedited first draft.
Worse yet, it’s an unedited first draft that he wrote in serial form on a harsh deadline. He was popping out 15-20K words a week, or a slightly below-average novel every month.
Need to retcon something you wrote 2 chapters ago? NOPE!
Family visiting? Welp, sucks to be them I guess.
Can’t think of how to resolve this plot arc? SURPRISE TIMESKIP! (Actual thing BTW).
It’s good, but yeah no, it needs an editor.
@Chevalier Mal Fet,
Salvation War has an interesting premise and I like the style but leans too heavily on the power fantasy to the detriment of the story. I stopped reading it when it became obvious how unbelievably stupid the antagonists were. The ‘Triumph of Humanity’ vibe he was going for needs credible villains or else it just seems masturbatory.
Yes.
I don’t understand the YA complaint myself. FWIW the school stuff is not exactly relevant for most of the story.
I don’t actually consider Worm that good up to Arc 8, where things get you by the balls and where I consider the Worm to really start – before that you’ve got like a long series of preparations towards the real deal.
And the further you get the subjectively deeper and better it gets, altough at times it can feel like too much is happening, so it helps to spread out the reading a bit if you’re into it.
Myself I’ve devoured it in iterations of reading with consecutively more depth – skipping a lot on my first read-through and then coming back if I was interested in the backstory.
I’d really advise people to get through the first few arcs as soon as possible, maybe even skipping it if you can handle googling around to see what’s been going on and go to the first real deal in Arc 8 – that gives you a taste of what the Worm really is about, introduces you to almost all the most important players, which you get to learn more about in further chapters.
Basically make it your own adventure, because it’s really, really worth it – I consider it the best sci-fi since ‘Blindsight’ (although I may be limited in my exposure to recent works)
Was Arc 8 “Extermination? because that actually made me stop reading after a while. It felt like it escalated the stakes so dramatically that the last seven arcs were completely pointless.
Yes, it was extermination and for me the escalated stakes was what made me really like the work – it hurt to read it, but I consider it a good kind of hurt and from that point on I was definitely hooked.
Yeah, my least favourite bits of Worm were the Endbringer battles. I love the clever exploration of things to do within the constraints of this power; I’m not so keen on the apocalyptic side, though I will grant that a protagonist as powerful as Taylor does need a seriously strong antagonist.
It depends how you feel about grim-dark. Because there is one heck of a lot of it. Then there is more. And more. And.. You see the trend. Enough that I quit reading it.
Also, essentially all the characters have very low sanity scores. I’m told that there are reasons for that, on top of just generally being traumatized, but I never made it that far.
Worm is so fucking good
Worm is OK.
I also just started Worm, read the first 13 arcs over the weekend.
Asymmetric is our local Worm aficionado in Ann Arbor. Good discussion topic once we’ve finished and can’t spoil each other anymore.
I hated Worm (read it all because I lost a bet). I can’t understand why people like it.
As a small example of the sort of thing that bugs me about it ***SPOILERS*** there’s the part where the hero gets outed as a, er, hero. The villains look to the member of their group with some kind of mind reading power, who confirms it.
The hero gets put on the outer by the villains for a while but then they talk some and it’s ok and they’re all back together again.
So… Why the hell bother? Why not just have the mind reading one lie instead, since she’s apparently fine with it? It would be a more interesting and surprising reaction, it wouldn’t change the story overall, and most importantly it would save acres of time.
And there are moments like this all through the story. A big secret gets teased, built up, and finally revealed… And then people faff around a bit and nothing actually changes.
It’s a massive make-it-up-as-you-go-along story that never has any idea what it’s own point is. And waaaaay too much superpower technobabble.
That would change the character dynamics immensely? She would have kept having this secret and guilt hanging over her head forever coloring her interactions with the group. I feel like if you think nothing changed in how she related to the other members as a result of her getting outed you weren’t reading the story very closely. (Which I can understand, if you were forced to read it because of a bet, but…)
It was a while ago admittedly and I may easily have forgotten things. But I stand by my statement. What would have materially changed?
And I don’t buy that the secret shame of being an undercover superhero would have severely warped the character development of someone who ends up as a literal baby killer.
I mean, I’m not gonna sit here and write you a Worm fanfic. If you don’t think that hiding a major betrayal from your friends and lying about it openly is the sort of thing that affects your relationship with them, then people can take your recommendation for what it’s worth.
Characterizing her as a baby killer is insane. This just sounds like you read the story with an eye to hating it the whole the time and completely misinterpreted events to fit in with your hatred of it.
Yeah, Taylor’s no baby-killer! It was a toddler, TYVM. 😛
EDIT: Also if no reveal then Bitch doesn’t get Skitter stuck in the PRT building when they’re running from Dragon, which impacted future Dragon/Skitter incidents. And I think if you’re describing Tattletale as having ‘some kind of mind-reading power’ you weren’t paying attention at all.
I thought it was OK. Some things were somewhat annoying (such as the 40k-level grimdark, but pretentious about it), but overall it was eminently readable, and often enjoyable.
One thing I’ve noticed about it is how wildbow utterly fails at emulating Red Tribe shibboleths. His potrayal of the series’ right-wingers, both the good ones (like the Japanese Christians) and the bad ones (like the Neo-Nazis), makes me think of aliens in skin suits.
Huh. Thanks for the warning. Find this sort of caricaturing basically irredeemable.
As a Red Triber, it didn’t bother me, it went well with the pulpy comic book vibe.
It won points from me for bothering to give the Neo-Nazi villains names, personalities, and backstories, and even making some of them appear sympathetic and misguided (i.e. Kayden).
Very, very few authors are going to have characters deliver convincing arguments for ethnonationalism, discuss blood and soil and lebensraum, buy tickets to the NPI conference, list all the Jewish people in Hollywood with a bunch of arrows connecting them, or do anything other than scrawl shitty graffiti everywhere and beat up minorities. Given that the ones who would are mostly actual Nazis trying to write propaganda, I think that’s a very high bar to set in terms of realism.
@eh
>I think that’s a very high bar to set in terms of realism.
Regarding the Neo-Nazis, I didn’t really expect much, for the reasons you mention.
Regarding the other example I gave, I went all arefuckingkiddingme.jpg – that’s when I actually noticed the failure, and could identify the bad emulations elsewhere. The Japanese Christians don’t act as any Christians I know, even if their behaviour is technically in conformity with the Christian strictures; again, skin suits. Compare the Dresden Files series, where Butcher does actually conjure several believable Christian characters – these act and talk in ways I can believe an IRL Christian would.
I’ve read about half of Worm, though I don’t think I’ve gotten into sections with Japanese Christians. There are a number of real-world strange Asian christian groups who have customs and practices that differ very substantially from American and European Christian groups.
Does anyone with knowledge of both Worm and these groups see similarities between the two that justify the writing more than it’s being given credence for here?
Jim Butcher is very sympathetic to Christianity, to point that it bothered me because the Christian mythology was overpowering everything else* in the Dresden Files.
My impression from knowing some very nice, amazing Christians and complete asshole Christians and everything in between is that the devout Christians in the Dresden files are more an Ideal than a realistic depiction.
*The Kusanagi no Tsurugi is a Christian artifact now?
The Kusanagi no Tsurugi is a Christian artifact now?
The extent to which the grace of God is available to Virtuous Pagans has often been a subject of debate within Christianity, thought I’m not sure this is quite what they had in mind 🙂
But it is I think clear by now that the underlying mythology of the Dresden tales is that the entity worshiped by Christians is in fact the One True God, Maker of Heaven and Earth and All Things Seen and Unseen, etc., and that He just made a whole lot more unseen stuff than we give normally him credit for – like wizards, faeries, and magic swords. And, like most Christian mythologies, Dresden’s One True God has been conspicuously non-interventionist the past couple thousand years, possibly pending some future apocalypse.
If that’s farther than you can suspend disbelief, you’re probably not alone. Otherwise, they’re still good stories.
I’ve read Worm and I don’t actually recall the Japanese Christians. Remind me which characters you’re talking about there?
At first I thought I’d missed someone in Japan. But no, it must mean the couple in Chrysalis chapter 1 – the people who seem annoying until you think about it, and then seem fairly insightful.
It amuses me that nobody’s mentioned the actual way in which Wildbow’s atheism makes itself known – the fact that religion has almost no role in the story, and theocracy makes no appearance at all that I can remember. This is wildly unrealistic for the setting. But Taylor’s world is already so messed up that I really don’t want to see theocracy on top of that.
@Daniel Keys
I imagine mainstream religions taking a big hit as soon as Scion first appeared, and an even bigger kick in the teeth when the Endbringers showed up.
@Daniel Keys
Interesting; I remembered that conversation, but I had forgotten that they were Christian.
There’s also Haven, the American Christian vigilante group hunting down the Teeth. They pop up very briefly, we don’t really interact with them.
EDIT: Not the Teeth, sorry, the other guys who worship Endbringers.
***WORM SPOILERS FOLLOW***
“So… Why the hell bother? Why not just have the mind reading one lie instead, since she’s apparently fine with it?”
It’s not immediately obvious that Tattletale could have bluffed or lied her way out of the situation on Taylor’s behalf, especially since (a) the heroes all had guns pointed at them, (b) succeeding in that lie would get Taylor in more trouble with the heroes, and (c) it’s not like she could trick Coil, who told her about Taylor being a hero in the first place.
Not to mention that even if she gets away with that lie and gets Taylor out anyhow through her Armsmaster blackmail, Taylor wouldn’t rejoin the Undersiders unless they agreed to help with Dinah, and how does that conversation work if Taylor’s not a ex-hero?
Like maybe Tattletale could pull it off, but it’s a lot riskier of a lie and doesn’t get her what she wants.
it would save acres of time.
This is blatantly untrue. It would have reduced uncertainty and tension, ie made the story worse.
The author also uses the aftermath as an introduction to an important function of the story. I’ve seen someone on another website opine that a future with space wars would be more exciting than one designed to satisfy human values; if I don’t have the power to drop such people into a literal war zone, I want them to read Worm through Arc 9.
A big secret gets teased, built up, and finally revealed… And then people faff around a bit and nothing actually changes.
You cheated and stopped reading less than halfway through, didn’t you?
I read all of it. Though I dunno how it counts as “cheating” if a story fails to hold my interest.
Worm is okay. There are parts that are really good, and other parts that are annoying or don’t make sense. Some issues I had with it:
* There are a lot of deus ex machinas on behalf of bad guys like the S9 (less so on behalf of the heroes).
* The ending was mostly terrible.
* The setting has a lot of problems. E.g. why would anyone fight the endbringers given that it hardly even seems to slow them down until Scion comes? Shouldn’t the focus be on evacuation instead, if possible? How come so many globally-relevant powers are concentrated in one city (tattletale, Dinah, clockblocker)?
* There are a lot of editing issues and over-used word. “Anyways” is always used instead of “anyway”.
>* There are a lot of deus ex machinas on behalf of bad guys like the S9 (less so on behalf of the heroes).
Yeah, that annoyed me too.
>* The ending was mostly terrible.
I was highly amused at the 18(?) year old protagonist declaring her life is now over.
>* The setting has a lot of problems. E.g. why would anyone fight the endbringers given that it hardly even seems to slow them down until Scion comes? Shouldn’t the focus be on evacuation instead, if possible?
Because the supers in that verse are combatively inclined from the influence of their power source. Some hate it, but still are drawn to battle.
>How come so many globally-relevant powers are concentrated in one city (tattletale, Dinah, clockblocker)?
Plot.
>* There are a lot of editing issues and over-used word. “Anyways” is always used instead of “anyway”.
Probably because there’s no editor.
Of course there’s no editor, he was literally writing two chapters a week and publishing them on the fly. IIRC Wildbow is doing an editing pass while working on other stuff.
Agreed that there’s some diabolus ex machina, but keep in mind Jack’s Thinker power.
If you don’t fight the Endbringer, you get Kyushu or Newfoundland or New Delhi or Lausanne every time, not just on a bad day. Also it’s entirely possible that if you don’t fight the Endbringer it doesn’t go away.
I’m not sure the concentration in Brockton Bay is that significant. Clockblocker isn’t a big deal, there are several other Thinkers outside Brockton Bay on Tattletale’s level (the Number Man and Contessa, for example), people like Alexandria, Eidolon, Legend, Dragon, the Sleeper, Ash Beast, Nilbog, the Blasphemies, Glastig Uaine, Number Man, Contessa, etc. are all outside BB, and we don’t really even know the relevant capes outside the US (A fair few of the Thanda seem like a big deal, for example, but we don’t know much about them).
Also, some Endbringers have been turned away without Scion. That is what happened before Scion started fighting them. Especially if Eidolon is having a good day and Legend, Alexandria, and some other heavy-hitters are here to help.
They never explain why, though. We’ve seen with Behemoth that endbringers can’t really be hurt except by Scion. Behemoth was described as “no less powerful” or something after the giant blast. I don’t understand how endbringers can ever be turned away without Scion. Why bother trying?
@anon85: Have you read to the end? Do you know what the Endbringers’ purpose is? Gur Raqoevatref nera’g npghnyyl gelvat gb jva, gurl’er whfg gelvat gb cebivqr n guerng gung gur urebrf pna’g orng ohg pna svtug bss grzcbenevyl vs gurl gel uneq rabhtu naq trg yhpxl.
@Paul Yeah, but that was the lamest purpose ever. And it STILL doesn’t explain why Behemoth didn’t stop after that giant blast. I don’t think we’ve ever seen an Endbringer turn back without Scion’s help – we’ve only heard of that happening.
Gur Fvzhetu gbyq uvz abg gb.
Lbh’er gnyxvat nobhg fbzrguvat gung unccrarq nsgre Yrivnguna xvyyrq Qnhagyrff (gur thl jubfr pbzong cbgragvny xrcg evfvat), ure ntrag Rpuvqan xvyyrq Zleqqva qverpgyl, naq gur cerqvpgnoyr snyybhg sebz gung onggyr qebir Nyrknaqevn gb pbzzvg fhvpvqr. (Bar bs gur znwbe gurzrf V frr vf gung nalguvat erzbgryl uhzna pna or ohyyvrq gb qrngu.) Gura F’f bgure ntrag Pbql xvyyrq Nppbeq naq arneyl xvyyrq Purinyvre naq Gnggyrgnyr. Jura gur ynggre’f cbjre vagresrerq, Ovt Oeb arneyl svavfurq gur wbo – ohg gura gur jubyr cyna punatrq.
> Agreed that there’s some diabolus ex machina, but keep in mind Jack’s Thinker power.
A great thing about Worm is that I have literally never seen someone post a “plot hole” or “story problem” that couldn’t be answered with a line like this. Wildbow seems to have thought of everything.
> I’m not sure the concentration in Brockton Bay is that significant.
Yeah, there are powerful capes in every city, we just don’t hear much about them because it’s not where the story is sitting. I’m actually surprised at the grandparent’s claim. My impression was the Brockton Bay was sort of “the crappy city” and didn’t have a lot of strong defenders, and that was partially why it got hammered so hard by the S9 etc.
Jack’s thinker power is an afterthought added to close a plot hole. In an earlier chapter, Jack says explicitly that his manipulation skills “are entirely learned, I assure you,” or something to that effect.
Isn’t clockblocker literally the only counter to the Siberian?
As for endbringers: from what we’ve seen, all the heroes’ actions do nothing, pretty much. We’re told that the actions help because otherwise there will be disaster… but in actuality, I don’t understand what the fighting does at all (e.g. Behemoth never seemed to slow down regardless of any attacks).
>Jack says explicitly that his manipulation skills “are entirely learned, I assure you,” or something to that effect.
Even if he says it, there’s a good chance he himself is mistaken or just straight up lying.
Taking the paragraphs in order: no it isn’t, no he isn’t, and you really do sound like you didn’t read to the end. Not just because of the Endbringers, you also sound like you don’t know why Jack was important to the plot (or you forgot how early this is predicted).
@Daniel, I’ve read everything. To respond to your points in order, yes it is, yes he is, nanana. Do you have some actual arguments to give?
@Paul, I mean, there’s always that chance for all facts we are provided. No one seemed to find it suspicious at the time, and no one pointed out the lie afterwards. And recall also that bonesaw was also doing a fair bit of manipulation herself, saying Jack taught her. Except if Jack’s manipulation comes from a superpower, that becomes less plausible. It supports my argument that Jack’s manipulation was originally meant to be a learned one.
Dropping to rot13:
> Jack
Wnpx qbrfa’g xabj nobhg uvf guvaxre cbjre.
Vg’f nggrfgrq gb va-fgbel, nsgre gur Avar fubj hc va Oebpxgba Onl, ohg jryy orsber gur frpbaq gvzr Wnpx vf n eryrinag punenpgre. Pna’g tvir lbh n ersrerapr bss gur gbc bs zl urnq, ohg fbzrbar qrsvavgryl zhfrf nobhg jurgure Wnpx’f cnffratre vf juvfcrevat uvagf gb uvz. Fpvba pbasvezf vg jura ur unf n pung jvgu Wnpx. Gurer’f fbzr bgure pyhrf; Gurb pbzzragvat gung Wnpx svtugf yvxr Gnlybe (orpnhfr ur unf rkcnaqrq fvghngvbany njnerarff sebz nyy gur bgure pncrf), V inthryl erpnyy fbzrguvat nobhg gur jnl ur svtugf jura gur Avar vf va gur Onl orvat n uvag gbb.
V’z jvyyvat gb oryvrir Jvyqobj cynaarq vg hc sebag. Wnpx qbrfa’g rknpgyl unir na vagvzvqngvat cbjre; cerfhznoyl Jvyqobj unq n tbbq ernfba sbe uvz gb or ehaavat gur Avar.
> Clockblocker vs Siberian
Jebat ba gjb pbhagf. Pybpxoybpxre qbrfa’g ernyyl pbhagre Fvorevna, naq gurer ner bgure, orggre pbhagref (PO vfa’g rira cerfrag jura gur Fvorevna qvrf).
Fb, svefg bss: vs PO gevrf gb serrmr gur Fvorevna, vg jba’g jbex. Fur’f n cebwrpgvba, abg n crefba.
Vs Fvorevna ehaf vagb n PO-sebmra guvat, cebonoyl n zhghny pnapry (gur fnzr jnl Syrpurggr’f cbjre naq PO’f zhghnyyl pnapry).
Ohg orpnhfr Fvorevna vf n cebwrpgvba, gung’f abg n ceboyrz – Znagba whfg fcvaf ure hc ntnva, fbzrjurer ryfr.
Nf sbe pbhagref, jryy Qentba xvyyf gur Fvorevna ba ure bja; Syrpurggr/Sbvy’f rssrpg pnapryf gur Fvorevna, Tehr’f novyvgl gb pbcl gur Fvorevna pbhyq yrnq gb gjb vzzbinoyr bowrpgf vzzbivat rnpu bgure, Rvqbyba naq Tynvfgvt Hnvar nyzbfg pregnvayl unir n eryrinag gevpx fbzrjurer, Pbagrffn jvaf rnfvyl, Wnpx jvaf rnfvyl, va gur evtug pvephzfgnaprf Pvgevar pbhyq jva, nalbar jub pna ybpngr naq gnxr bhg Znagba orsber gur Fvorevna pna ernpg pna jva, rgp. rgp.
> Endbringers
Gur Raqoevatref nyzbfg pregnvayl qb abg fgbc hagvy gurl pbafvqre gurzfryirf gb unir orra ‘fhssvpvragyl sbhtug bss’, fbzr shapgvba bs ubj zhpu qnzntr unf orra qbar naq ubj zhpu crbcyr unir gevrq gb ratntr gurz. Ratntvat gurz zrnaf gurl tb njnl rneyvre.
Gurl /jnag/ crbcyr gb svtug gurz. Fb gurl’er tbvat gb qryvorengryl tb uneqre vs crbcyr gel gb eha. Whfg rinphngvat jnf nyzbfg pregnvayl gevrq va gur onpxfgbel, naq gur Raqoevatre pbaprearq jbhyq unir znqr vg ybbx yvxr n zhpu jbefr nygreangvir (xrrcvat va zvaq gung nyy guerr Raqoevatref jvyy rnfvyl bhgcnpr nal rinphngvba nggrzcg; ol fgbel fgneg crbcyr trg fbzrguvat yvxr svsgrra zvahgrf jneavat).
Frpbaqyl, gur Raqoevatref cergraq gb or vawherq be ceriragrq sebz qbvat guvatf be gur yvxr. Nezfznfgre’f svtug ntnvafg Yrivnguna vf n fznyy-fpnyr rknzcyr, ohg gurer’f obhaq gb or ynetre-fpnyr rknzcyrf.
Re Jack: That doesn’t explain Bonesaw’s manipulations that she supposedly learned from Jack. Others in the 9 also claim to learn manipulation from Jack.
Re CB: if the Syberian is so easily beatable (e.g. by Eidolon, Foil, etc.), why did everyone fail to beat her for so many years?
Re Endbringers: That still doesn’t address my main question, which is why Behemoth did not turn back after the giant blast.
> Bonesaw learning manipulation from Jack
Fur qbrfa’g frrz irel tbbq ng vg, naq gurer’f abguvat fgbccvat Wnpx sebz orvat xvaqn punevfzngvp naq univat fbzr vqrn ubj gb shpx jvgu crbcyr’f urnqf jvgubhg uvf cnffratre gryyvat uvz jung gb qb (jura shpxvat jvgu cnenuhzna urnqf).
Frevbhfyl, Cnanprn jnf n tvnag zrff bs vffhrf jnvgvat sbe fbzrbar gb chfu gurz, nalbar pbhyq unir chg ure va n anfgl zragny cynpr.
> Siberian
Pnhyqeba qvqa’g jnag Znagba/gur Fvorevna qrnq orpnhfr gurl gubhtug vg zvtug or n hfrshy cbjre ntnvafg Fpvba/Raqoevatref. Gurl qvqa’g gel gb xvyy uvz.
Abobql ryfr xarj gung gur Fvorevna jnf n cebwrpgvba gung unq n erny, syrfu-naq-obar, abg-vaivapvoyr obql fbzrjurer.
Jurer lbh svaq gur Fvorevna, lbh nyfb svaq gur erfg bs gur Avar, naq orngvat Wnpx vf n zhpu uneqre cebcbfvgvba.
> Endbringers
Fbzrgvzrf gurl tvir hc rneyvre guna bgure gvzrf. Znlor vg unq n tbny vg jnf tbvat sbe gung vg qrpvqrq jnf jbegu fubjvat bss n ovg sbe. Whfg orpnhfr gurl qba’g tb njnl hayrff lbh svtug gurz qbrfa’g zrna gung gurl’er thnenagrrq gb tb njnl vs lbh uvg gurz uneq rabhtu. Uryy, gur cbvag jurer lbh guvax lbh’ir sbhaq na rssrpgvir jrncba be gnpgvp vf cebonoyl gur cbvag jurer gurl’yy chyy fbzrguvat arj bhg gb shpx jvgu lbh. Be znlor gurl’yy jnvg hagvy arkg gvzr. Raqoevatref tbaan raqoevat.
I mean, if you compare Worm against things that it isn’t, then it’s going to come up short.
You don’t go to a live jazz show and complain that the sound mixing was bad. You don’t go to a comedy improv show and complain that the actors should have rehearsed their lines more. You have to read a web serial for what it is, and just let the inevitable issues like occasionally uneven writing and very rare plot snafus slide. If you read it for what it is, it’s amazing.
And I don’t mean “forgive it for sucking” or something like that. It doesn’t suck. It’s great. It has problems, problems which are the result of how it was written and what it is, but these problems don’t make it not great.
Obviously sometimes a story just doesn’t work for some people, and it sounds like it just didn’t work for you. That’s fine, I’m not going to try to convince you to like something you don’t like. However, I definitely don’t think the ending was terrible, though maybe the prose itself could be tightened. I completely disagree that the setting had problems, the setting was the best part. Yes, there are editing issues, but … why would this ruin it for you?
No, it wasn’t great. I hated the main character and I hated her snarky asshole friends to the point that all of the sympathy that she had built up from the bullying early on completely evaporated and I was reading only to see her get her ass handed to her. When it became apparent that that wasn’t going to happen because she was too special and the universe was wholly Taylor-centric, I threw it at the wall (gently, didn’t want to hurt my iPad), then checked TvTropes to confirm that yes, the story ended with her becoming Queen Bitch of the Universe and that was apparently just what the universe needed.
The bank robbery was where I finally realized it was all protagonist-centered morality and that she was never going to have to pay for her crimes. She threatens to murder everyone in the bank, gets pissed when one of the helpless innocents she threatens to murder isn’t quite as helpless as she thought, and so *really* threatens to murder her up close and personal. Meanwhile the metaphorical gun she had pointed to everyone’s head apparently went off several times without her noticing (black widows hidden in people’s clothes are totally friendly when uncontrolled, guys!) but eh, she can’t be arsed to do anything about it. Gotta get away safely from the bank robbery! Sorry about the spider bites, but I’m the protagonist and you’re just helpless victims! And then not one chapter later it’s all “I’m so troubled because these girls at school were so mean to me. They poured soda on my head! Can you imagine someone so depraved as to do that!”
I dunno, man. Like I said,
> Obviously sometimes a story just doesn’t work for some people, and it sounds like it just didn’t work for you. That’s fine, I’m not going to try to convince you to like something you don’t like.
That said … you’re pretty off-base about the story not punishing her. If anything, Wildbow is pretty good at punishing his characters. And being Queen Bitch of the Universe does not turn out well for Taylor at all.
***VAGUE SPOILERS***
I don’t want to accuse you of missing the point, because the point of a book is highly subjective, but I thought one of the big points of Worm was that Taylor wasn’t a morally perfect hero — her descent into villainy is the main underlying plot for the first half. You could argue that she gets away too easily with the odd alignment change after *xvyyvat Nyrknaqevn*, but her morally dubious tactics (both then and in the last arcs) are resolved to an extent.
As I read it, the universe appears to be Taylor-centric because the book is about her — it’s like it was written after the events of the last arcs to give the origin story of a very important actor in *gur svtug ntnvafg Fpvba*.
I may well have missed the point of the book. As I thought I made clear, I threw the book metaphorically at the wall at about the beginning of Arc 4. And at least through the sections I read, there was no moral judgement within the narrative of her utterly despicable actions. If, as you say, this is supposed to be a semi-historical story about a major player in big events, then the first few arcs at least read like an account of the Beer Hall Putsch treated like a minor parliamentary dispute.
Yeah, one of the themes of the work is how easy it is for people to justify to themselves the bad things they do, and since most of the story is told from Skitter’s standpoint, it doesn’t explicitly call her out on her shit most of the time.
I do agree that the ending was too kind to her, but I hate most happy endings in general.
I’d like to offer a response to some of your points regarding protagonist-centered morality:
***SPOILERS FOR ALL OF WORM SPOILERS SPOILERS***
1) It’s not clear that the story really endorses Taylor’s morality. She is frequently wracked by guilt and doubt, and she does ‘pay for her crimes’ throughout the story.
2) At the time of the bank robbery, Taylor is acting as an undercover agent, trying to bring the Undersiders to justice. From a utilitarian perspective, there’s a plausible justification for her participation in the bank robbery in order to curry favor with the villains. Perhaps you don’t find Taylor’s logic convincing, but it’s ultimately just ruthless utilitarianism (a theme that frequently recurs throughout the series). I don’t see that as protagonist-centered morality, except inasmuch as it’s portrayed in a favorable light by Taylor herself.
3) Planting the spiders was actually a pretty good way of reducing the likelihood that someone would be killed. If she hadn’t essentially removed their ability to fight back, it’s possible that Regent or Bitch might have ended up seriously injuring or killing a hostage who tried to resist. We can debate whether it’s better to definitely terrorize people or risk a small chance of killing them, but I don’t think she made the obviously wrong choice.
4) I’m pretty sure the spiders didn’t actually bite anyone. Tattletale claims (at the end of 3.12) that nobody was injured or killed, and the heroes don’t mention any civilian casualties in Interlude 3.
5) She threatens Panacea with her knife, but she allows her to escape rather than actually cutting her.
That’s a surprisingly early time to get fed up with Taylor’s slide into villainy. Arc 4?
I would disagree strongly that the story presents all her decisions as ethical and that she never experiences bad consequences as a result of her decisions. In fact, the bank robbery was ordered by the Undersider’s boss as a cover for a different crime that Taylor feels intensely guilty about and spends several arcs trying to atone for.
@ShemTealeaf
Never mind Tattletale, at what point in time was that possible? Gnlybe vf va pbageby bs nyy gur ohtf hagvy Cnanprn gnxrf bire gur barf ba gur ubfgntrf. Fvapr C’f cbjre jbexf ol gbhpu, jungrire fur qvq gb gurz pnaabg cbffvoyl unir erdhverq pbafgnag nggragvba. Gurer’f ab ernfba gb fhfcrpg nal evfx gb nal pvivyvnaf (nfvqr sebz fgerff). Nzhfvatyl, C (nsgre uvggvat Gnlybe ba gur urnq) qbrf evfx ure bja yvsr, ohg nf lbh fnl Gnlybe ernpgf dhvpxyl rabhtu gb nibvq phggvat ure.
Creuncf jr fubhyq gnxr gur sbphf ba gurfr qrgnvyf nf n znex bs ntvgngvba – gur onax eboorel vgfrys jnf jebat (qhu) naq rnpu bs gur qrgnvyrq pevgvpvfzf jrnxraf pnrguna’f pnfr haarprffnevyl. Ohg V xabj V sryg ab fhecevfr ng nyy jura gur pevzr onpxsverq naq Gnlybe gevrq qrfcrengryl gb ngbar be znxr vg evtug.
Would you say there is ever a fair criticism of any book? Or can it all be dismissed by “maybe it just didn’t work for you”?
I’m all about criticism. (Follow the link through my username!) But my contention is that people are usually wrong about why they didn’t enjoy something.
I can criticize things that I enjoy; criticism can be highly constructive and educational. But “I didn’t like it” isn’t a criticism, it’s a reaction, pre-rational. Your brain doesn’t always let you know why it doesn’t like something. If you reflexively don’t like something that I like, it’s pointless for me to argue against whatever deep-seated preference is causing that reflexive reaction.
It’s fun to discuss actual concrete problems with a thing. In contrast to my analogies in the previous post, it’s even constructive to point out that a violinist is playing out of tune, because that violinist might not realize that, and it might lead them to improving. But saying “I don’t like your violin playing. Your shirt is untucked and you badly need to comb your hair” is not constructive, because the second sentence doesn’t really follow from the first and is irrelevant to violin playing anyway.
Like, when the Star Wars prequels came out, almost everybody fixated on Jar-Jar Binks. “Jar-Jar ruined it.” It took stuff like the analytical RLM reviews before we sort of collectively realized that the movies are fundamentally terrible even without Jar-Jar. We knew we didn’t like them, but we didn’t know why.
And I could argue point-by-point about why somebody is “wrong” to have a certain feeling about a work of art, but I’m never in a million years going to change that feeling. I’d much prefer to discuss the writer’s technique, or the consistency of characterization.
@moridinamael, I think you’ll find that I provided specific constructive criticisms (except for “the ending sucked,” which is not constructive but is so obviously true that I have trouble believing you disagree).
The ending was the obvious highlight of the series for me and hearing about other people not liking it is providing some pretty great representation of mind projection fallacy. Aside from that constructive criticism tends to include the constructive part ie. how you expected it to go and why it would have worked better. Superheroes not attacking the giant monsters killing everybody and instead just running away without trying to do anything is pretty counterintuitive and no diablos ex machina were readily apparent outside of Taylor getting in more trouble than other people who were doing the same thing with fewer moral compunctions (that we knew of, chances are that their lives weren’t great either off camera).
What I would change:
* The endbringers are annoying and boring, because I know the outcome of any actions doesn’t matter until Scion comes. Scratch them, they add nothing.
* Use “anyway” instead of “anyways”. At least once in the book.
* There was diablus ex machina all over the place with the 9. Do you remember how they escaped Brocton Bay? It required Taylor not finding Manton in his truck in time, then Manton getting to Jack and Bonesaw in time, then them surviving firebombing by hiding in the endbringer protection thingies (how did they know where they are?), then having the heroes guess their location wrong, then having Bonesaw make decoys in 10 minutes or less. After that, they manage to get into some pocket dimension thing that no one could locate for 2 whole years, despite, like, the entire world being at stake. Come on.
I would rather scratch the Scion plot than the Endbringers. The Endbringers were impactful. Heroes and villains we knew and cared about died during the Leviathan fight. The city got changed irrevocably, and our characters were right there to see it happen and react to it. Endbringers (and S-class threats in general) are a powerful statement about the world – there are things that even the biggest superheroes can’t beat, and you are just going to have to deal with that as best you can. (Not to mention, while they don’t matter compared to Scion, at they time they’re introduced, you don’t know that. They’re the biggest threat we’ve seen.)
Scion, despite having far bigger scale, had much less impact. So he blew up England? Big deal, we never met any characters from there. And once he’s introduced, he completely bends the story in half. Stop all the subplots, the only thing that matters is finding powers that can beat him.
I once read somewhere that a superhero story doesn’t really need any threats bigger than a city-destroying monster. Everything the audience cares about can fit into a city. Anything beyond that – continent-busting, planet-busting, galaxy-busting – is just adding numbers.
I’ll be honest I’m struggling with seeing your point of view.
The endbringers were the thing that drew me the most to Worm’s setting and nothing you just mentioned about the S9 seems outlandish to me (who *doesn’t* know about endbringer shelters? there are street signs!). At most the only objection I’m reading from this is that villains aren’t allowed the same level of powers or ingenuity as the protagonists because they are evil.
Yeah, in hindsight the reason I found pact exhausting was probably the lack of game-changing threats. I rooted for Blake, things got bleak, I rooted for him some more, they go even bleaker, I started wondering why he hasn’t killed himself yet, then they got even bleaker, and by the time the first abyss arc ended I just wanted him to die because that was too much bleak for one man to be stuck with. When taylor vs underworld escalates into world vs endbringers, sure things get bleaker, but I can care. When blake vs town escalates into blake vs world I just start hoping blake dies which makes for a pretty emotionally draining, if not exactly bad, read.
> Yes, there are editing issues, but … why would this ruin it for you?
Speaking for me: because there are a thousand other great works of art that *are* well edited.
Question 1: Because gur Fvzhetu jnagf gurz gb. If you want the details of how it works, ask yourself why people semi-frequently fail to evacuate their homes during real-life disasters.
Question 2: Because Fpvba vf ynml. Ur rkcyvpvgyl frag gur nqzvavfgengbe funeq gb gur fnzr pvgl nf gur pnfg-bss senpgvba bs shgher fvtug orpnhfr ur pbhyqa’g or obgurerq gb ybbx snegure nsvryq. Coil and Tattletale of course are not from Brockton Bay. I forget if they could have come to the city orpnhfr bs Qvanu in particular, but clearly Pbvy gubhtug vg jbhyq or n tbbq pvgl naq ureb grnz gb gnxr bire sbe uvf svefg gel.
If you’re going to rot13 spoilers, please do it for an entire paragraph, or not at all. Having some sentences scrambled and some unscrambled in the middle makes it annoying.
THANK YOU SOOOO MUCH for calling out the “anyways” thing. I’m (over)sensitive to technical/taste issues like that, anything that makes me think “This author is not very smart about [something, no matter how trivial]” makes me increasingly angry, and it was just a constant barrage — I literally ragequit Worm solely and entirely because I could not take another “anyways”. The narration says it, the protagonist says it, and every other character says it every single time.
Would considering it standard alt world slang, or linguistic drift, change anything?
I loved worm, but the whole “anyways” thing was pretty of annoying. “Headspace” was worse for me – when even Eidolon said it, I had to put my laptop down and walk around a bit. Hopefully when it (eventually) gets edited they’ll clean some of that up.
I read Worm before it was cool!
No, but really, you should go in realizing that Worm is inherently a superhero story dressed up with a decent bit of grit. It still follows through with most of your standard tropes for a non-big 2 universe, from the whole Reed Richards is Useless to only the powered showing up at the big crossover fights (despite many of them being less useful than a trained normal person). The whole story kind of slumps before starting to fall apart once it gets above city level.
It’s still a damn fun read, but don’t expect much more than a good superpowers story and the last quarter needs serious reworking.
He’s heard of it before, I know a lot of us recommended it after his “superpower pills” story, and I actually even emphasized the recommendation in person at a meetup last June. He probably just finally found the time to start reading it.
For those who may be interested, there is also an audiobook version of Worm released as a podcast. It’s been going for almost 2 years at 3 chapters/week and is almost finished: http://audioworm.rein-online.org/
w-wow
time for a re..listen?
SSC SF Story of the Week #10
This week we are discussing “The Machine Stops” by E. M. Forster.
Next time we will discuss “A Militant Peace” by David Klecha and Tobias S. Buckell.
How do you always get the first post on here?
RSS Feed + prewritten comment standing by in a text file.
I guess it helps to know ahead of time what you want to write.
He has a large family
I really enjoyed The Machine Stops. Of course being from 1909 some aspects are a little outdated (early instance of literal “As you know”!), but the overall writing is quite strong (I was moved by the ending) and the issues touched on are still relevant today. There are little things like notification spam, but the big one is the metaphor of the machine itself. You can take this at least two ways – one seeing it as a prediction of the dangers of relying too much on telecommunications over the personal, and another as seeing it as about the dangers of a highly inter-dependent world vulnerable to disruption.
(I’m not sure about the thing where the story was satirizing people obsessed with having (lame) Ideas. Maybe poking at some intellectual trend of the time?)
—–
In fact when I read this story last week I was impressed enough to also get the author’s classic novel *A Passage to India* on Kindle, which was also very good. It’s a dramedy about some minor misadventures during the British Raj, and the consequences of poor communication and lack of empathy. The writing was stronger and smoother than The Machine Stops, with better developed characters – presumably being published in 1923 vs 1909, the author was more experienced here. However, the focus on colonialism is perhaps less *directly* relevant to the modern day. There’s rich description, subtle humour, and the characters on both sides of the British-Indian conflict are (mostly) portrayed with a good balance of sympathetic and flawed traits. On the downside there’s some overly sweeping “English are like this, Indians are like that” at times, and the otherwise impressive descriptive writing occasionally shades into the purple. Forster also comes across as quite a rationalist here, even if some of his characters aren’t. I’d probably give it 4 stars out of 5.
Perhaps it’s the engineer in me, but when I first read The Machine Stops (last year, I think) my first impression was something like this: What sort of idiot builds a machine that runs the whole world, yet fails to provide redundancy for its most critical part?
I didn’t get the impression that the problem was due to the reactor suddenly failing, but more a slow buildup of problems due to imperfect self-maintenance of the Machine – something that seems like it could also conceivably happen in the real world (and probably has with various empire collapses), though so far we’re a lot more vigilant about such things than the people in the story.
I was referring to the Mending Apparatus. The story always speaks of it in the singular, and its loss is what leads to the breakdown. If you’re making a system like that, you should build (at least) two, each capable of repairing the other.
It’s implied that they didn’t, though I suppose not stated outright.
I assumed it was used in the same sense as I might say “the database went into read-only mode for five minutes last night”, even though “the database” is a cluster of triply-redundant shards spread across two continents and three data centres, with offline backups in case someone really fucks up.
Maybe the Mending Apparatus failed many times in many different ways, and was recovered each time, first by the engineers who built the Machine, then by the automatic systems they set up to limit human error, and by successive failsafes if the core system failed… until eventually the machine suffered three simultaneous earthquakes at the location of each of its silicon fabs, or exhausted the earth’s readily available copper and ran through its reserves trying to extract more, or was sabotaged by someone on the other side of the planet.
They talk of the Mending Apparatus (singular) but it’s plainly a world-wide system, as parts of it break down in different countries: “There came a day when over the whole world — in Sumatra, in Wessex, in the innumerable cities of Courland and Brazil — the beds, when summoned by their tired owners, failed to appear. It may seem a ludicrous matter, but from it we may date the collapse of humanity.”
Indeed, because it’s a global problem, that makes it worse; “the inhabitants of Sumatra were asked to familiarize themselves with the workings of the central power station, the said power station being situated in France” That’s not so bad in an era of almost instantaneous travel, you may say, but when people have become so house-bound they feel nervy and uncomfortable leaving their own rooms, going halfway round the world is nearly psychologically impossible.
It’s a combination of the fact that over time, the Machine has come to be a larger and larger part of human civilisation, that the maintenance of the workings of that civilisation depend on the Machine to do the water-purification and power generation and all the rest of it, that extreme specialisation has set in (so you have a Committee for the Mending Apparatus, etc. and everybody knows their own piece but nobody knows the whole) and that functionally the human oversight is useless, as everyone has come to depend on the Machine to fix itself, so they don’t bother learning how to do it. How many of us, for example, know how to run a municipal water purification plant if (God between us and all harm) the people working there dropped dead in the morning and it was left up to the rest of us to keep it going?
Part of the problem (actually, the major problem) was that maintenance was another one of those things turned over to the Machine – after all, the Machine was bigger, faster, smarter, more capable, etc. than humans.
So as time went by, the Machine (and its constituent parts, the lesser quasi-autonomous regional centres) more and more controlled itself, with humans in a supervisory role, and then not involved at all. But since the original builders of the Machine presumably never envisaged humans being out of the picture, they probably never built in the necessary “Tell the Machine how to make new parts for itself” protocols.
Actually, this makes more sense to me as the kind of AI existential risk we should be worried about, rather than some God-Emperor AI deciding to turn us all into paperclips; we build a smart AI, we gradually turn more and more of the routine running of things over to it, and when something goes “sproing” nobody – because of the specialisation and complexity involved and because we’re so used to the AI fixing itself as well as our own problems – can fix it, or remember how to fix it, and things gradually fall apart.
People seem to have grandiose ideas about what AI can do. You guys talk about AI risk in the same way the people who wrote Mondo2000 thought the internet would be. Like it’s some kind of magic AI fairy. It would never happen that way, simply because things like factories and electrical power stations cost too much money to be allowed to let an AI run with no oversight. People build triple redundancies for things as trivial as websites-letting AI run unfettered over anything critical would seem absurd.
Security in general is awful on websites. Like, awful awful. I’ve worked as a web dev and was utterly shocked at at the obvious gigantic gaping security holes others had left behind.
My experience is not uncommon; websites are hacked daily because people are just plain bad when it comes to security. Humans are forgetful, don’t always get a full night’s sleep, miss trivial things, and sometimes just have bad days. I wouldn’t trust anyone I know to design security precautions for preventing an AI from touching critical things.
Which websites were you thinking of that have ‘triple redundancies’, and why do you think that the people running these websites are necessarily going to be the ones working with AI?
Security and redundancy are 2 different things.
I once encountered a company who had a critical bit of complex buisness logic in a microsoft office macro.
It had become so central to the buisness that they were unwilling to risk problems from moving to something more sane.
So they have about a dozen VM’s running headless office instances running the macro. Whenever the macro locked up the VM would reboot.
Lots of redundancy but awful, unholy design.
Systems so critical that they have 3 backups but also so critical that people are afraid to try to patch them are common. I’ve seen plenty of code with security holes you could drive a truck through which nobody is willing to fix because of the risk of it breaking.
I was puzzled by Kuno’s apparent decision to stay underground and die with everyone else. He knew the machine was failng, he knew it was possible to get out either on his own or by official expulsion, and he claims at the end to have had substantial contact with the humans already living on the surface full-time. Why didn’t he just move out permanently when it became clear the end was coming sooner rather than later?
I assumed that he could not, or feared he could not, breathe the air of the surface. There is ample circumstantial evidence that most subjects of the Machine cannot – the bones around the vomitorium, Kuno’s own experience in Wessex, the lack of Homeless pounding at the gates and/or beseeching respirator-clad surface researchers for return passage. Quite possibly the surface dwellers are as adapted to their otherwise-hostile environment as are e.g. the natives of the Peruvian or Tibetan highlands.
We know that Kuno illicitly spent time with the surface dwellers, but we don’t know the circumstances – whether he used a respirator or not and if so how consistently, how debilitated he was at the outset and whether he was able to adapt. He knows more than we do, and he chose to stay with his mother.
I think because Kuno felt himself to be, substantially, one of the Machine Men and not capable of adjusting to a new life on the outside; also that he feared he would bring with him the attitudes and behaviours of someone who had been born and raised in the Machine civilisation and so contaminate the new society with the seeds of wanting to go down the same path that ends in building a Machine.
That his civilisation’s time was over, and as a man of that civilisation, he should die with it.
I’m amazed that Forster could make an obvious prediction– people would use advanced tech for chitchat– and have it ignored until it turned out to be true. So far as I know, no one else got that right in pre-internet sf.
Forster was also right that people would sacrifice quality for convenience.
I don’t have a precise citation, but Andrew Odlyzko has written about repeating patterns in communications infrastructure and how people shouldn’t have been surprised this time; and one of his examples is that usage is dominated by chit-chat.
He was also right on the button about the way our ability to deal with inconvenience and delay would decrease as we got used to fast communication and provision of our wishes; Vashti arranging to spare a whole five minutes to talk to her son, and it took an entire fifteen seconds for him to reply to her call while she was sitting there waiting 🙂
On the note of predictions I remember reading The Final Encyclopedia (1984), a story with a gigantic electronic encyclopedia and realized that the description of browsing it perfectly matched wiki-trawling right down to opening up hundreds of tabs of linked articles.
Of course they assumed that this gigantic encyclopedia would reside in a gigantic space station in earth orbit rather than a bunch of data centres.
I read the entire damn story assuming that it was written in the past couple decades, and the only real hint that it’s over a century old was the language (which I just assumed was intentionally overwrought). So major props for prescience— the actual story/concepts hold up astonishingly well.
In a way it feels like Brave New World with a deus ex machina’d happy (!) ending; where a key part of the horror in BNW is that their society is basically indestructible, the one depicted in TMS collapses basically for reasons of Plot.
You should look at Brigands of the Moon by Ray Cummings. I got about half way through it before I realized that it was pre-radio.
It was a very “Romanticist” story. Technology is Bad! Nature is Good!
I get really sad and angry when people are dissing Age of Enlightenment like that. Come on, author, The Nature is as cold and uncaring as The Machine, it’ll give you cancer and tapeworms! And Technology can, if used properly, give you cure for cancer, it can remove tapeworms and it can help you understand Nature, giving you better appreciation of it!
Also, what I don’t understand is depicted attitudes of escapism, anti-curiosity and disdain for everything outside.
Was it critique of some contemporary attitudes? I thought this kind of solipsistic philosophy was abandoned back in ancient Greece.
Our modern world certainly doesn’t look unfavorably on people who study reality or tinker with machines.
That depends on where in our world you are. More than a few people think of working with any physical substrate as Low Work for Our Servants.
This story speaks deeply to me, and to my difficulties with internet addiction. Pic related.
More related images.