[Disclaimer: None of these immediately set off alarms, but I have not double-checked all of them to make sure they are accurate. Please correct me if any are false or misleading]
Zerão is a Brazilian football stadium with the dividing line exactly on the Equator, so that each goal is on a different hemisphere.
Maybe the most important article I’ve read this year: When Confounding Variables Are Out Of Control. A new PLoS paper argues that “controlling for confounders” doesn’t work as well as we’d like. Confounders are always imperfectly measured, so when you control for your measure of a confounder, you’re only getting a portion of the real confounder, and the portion you didn’t get might be more than enough to sustain a significant effect. So many studies that claim to have gotten a result after “controlling for confounders” but which haven’t used complicated statistical techniques that nobody uses are now potentially suspect. I’ve always noticed that correlational studies that control for confounders get confirmed by experiments much less often than I would expect, and now I finally understand (some of) why.
Related: Andrew Gelman: “Let’s just put a bright line down right now. 2016 is year 1. Everything published before 2016 is provisional. Don’t take publication as meaning much of anything, and just cos a paper’s been cited approvingly, that’s not enough either. You have to read each paper on its own. Anything published in 2015 or earlier is part of the “too big to fail” era, it’s potentially a junk bond supported by toxic loans and you shouldn’t rely on it.”
Related: Internal Conceptual Relations Do Not Increase Independent Replication Success. That wouldn’t make sense if the problem was just the normal vagaries of replication, and suggests that “the influence of questionable research practices is at the heart of failures to replicate psychological findings, especially in social psychology”.
Related: A long time ago I blogged about the name preference effect – ie that people are more positively disposed towards things that sound like their name – so I might like science more because Scott and science start with the same two letters. A bunch of very careful studies confirmed this effect even after apparently controlling for everything. Now Uri Simonsohn says – too bad, it’s all spurious. This really bothers me because I remember specifically combing over these studies and finding them believable at the time. Yet another reminder that things are worse than I thought.
Wikipedia: List Of Games That Buddha Would Not Play
The lost medieval City of Benin in Nigeria had streetlights, great art, and was larger than many European capitals. It also boasted “the longest walls in the world”, beating the Great Wall of China. I’m confused why I never heard about this before – not in a “neocolonialist society covers up the greatness of Africa” sense, but in a “even the people complaining about how neocolonialist society covers up the greatness of Africa only ever talk about Zimbabwe and Kilwa which are both way less impressive” sense. Also, how did one small British expedition destroy earthworks longer than the Great Wall of China?
Some very complicated and potentially questionable attempts to ferret out all the different personality traits involved in religiosity tentatively conclude that it is directly related to moral concern and inversely related to analytic thinking, which are inversely related to one another.
Vox: You Can Finally Stop Feeling Guilty For Eating Quinoa. Apparently some people felt guilty because they thought that quinoa-eating Westerners were taking all the quinoa and then Peruvians were starving. But a new study suggests that the increased Western demand for quinoa has increased welfare throughout Peruvian quinoa-farming regions both for farmers and for non-farmers, presumably because the farmers’ increased wealth is trickling down to non-farmers.
Vox: The Most Important Foreign News Story This Week Was About Russian Tax Policy.
Did you know: when the British Empire abolished slavery, it paid 40% of the government’s total annual expenditure as compensation to slaveowners.
The prison phone system is a national disgrace. Predatory companies make deals with the government to get a monopoly on calls to and from specific prisons, then charge inmates trying to call their families rates that are orders of magnitude higher than normal. I have some patients with incarcerated family and they confirm that this is a big problem for them. The FCC has been trying to cap rates, but was recently thwarted by the courts. This seems to me like one of the clearest and most black-and-white political issues around.
Business scientists run a trial to compare promotion-by-merit with promotion-by-seniority and include random promotion as a control group. Now the results are in and random promotion does the best. Even weirder, the result seems to have been replicated. This kind of reminds me the old saying that “anyone who can be elected President shouldn’t be allowed to do the job”. [EDIT: Study uses potentially faulty computer model]
New study in Nature by leading climatologists says that the consensus is now that the global warming hiatus is real. And here are some blog posts (1, 2) explaining the result in more accessible language. Both emphasize this doesn’t mean that global warming has stopped or was never real, only that it seems to be slower now than it was before. Leading theory – complicated ocean cycles working in our favor now may work against us in the next few decades, and we should still be careful.
Thirty-five overweight people were asked to do the same amount of extra exercise. They differed wildly in how much weight they lost. Authors theorize a distinction between “compensators” and “noncompensators” with different metabolic reactions to exercise.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, Gallup poll finds Clinton supporters are more likely to describe themselves as enthusiastic about their candidate than Sanders supporters. [EDIT: Maybe some extra complications. See here]
The largest area of dry land under sea level, by volume, is the Qattara Depression in Egypt. If it were ever connected to the Mediterranean, it would produce loads of hydroelectric power and form a giant lake in the middle of the Sahara. By my calculations it would also reverse one year worth of global-warming induced sea-level rise.
Ideal Conceal is a handgun which can be folded up to look exactly like an ordinary cell phone. Nothing can possibly go wrong. [But these guys think it’s a hoax]
Old studies: Australia’s experience in the 1990s proves gun control worked. New study: Australia’s experience in the 1990s proves gun control didn’t work. I am so past the point of trying to figure this out now.
Did you know: the computer game “Ecco the Dolphin” was partially based off the work of LSD-abusing delphinologist John Lilly, who thought reality was controlled by an alien conspiracy called E.C.C.O.
After a study a few months ago showing that toxoplasma didn’t produce behavioral changes in humans, a new study suggests toxoplasma is no more common in cat owners than anyone else. All of the cool toxoplasma theories are going out the window. [Edit: This is confusing]
Yasmin Nair: Suey Park and the Afterlife of Twitter. Firebrand Twitter activist Suey Park has reinvented herself as a speaker warning about the dangers of firebrand Twitter activism, now says that social justice is a “cult” and that “the violence I have experienced in SJW circles has been greater than that of ‘racist trolls'”. Nair questions the convenience of a pipeline between fame as a Twitter activist and fame as a person speaking out against Twitter activism. But part of me worries that the entire chain – Park engaging in activism, Park speaking out against activism, Nair writing about Park, and now me linking Nair – is part of the problem, in that it promotes paying attention to Twitter activism at all.
Higher amounts of dairy fat markers in the blood associated with less diabetes. Very reminiscent of past studies showing that whole milk drinkers are healthier than nonfat/lowfat drinkers. Unclear if this says something profound or just that milk is a healthier source of calories than a lot of the alternatives. Related: TIME: The Case Against Low-Fat Milk Is Stronger Than Ever.
Reason #6894019 not to mess with Finland.
Previously: a short conversation with someone can decrease prejudice. Later: no, sorry, that study turned out to be fraudulent. Now: okay, the study was fraudulent, but the conclusion was actually true.
Successful charter schools seem to do much better than public schools in educating the most disadvantaged minority children, but critics have scoffed that they must either be selectively admitting the best students or just “teaching to the test”. But one new study finds charter school success cannot be explained by selective admission, and a second finds commensurate success on non-test-related outcomes, including lower teenage pregnancy and lower incarceration rates for charter school students. Educational establishment vows to respond to findings by improving their own performance calling charter schooling racist a lot.
When Queen Elizabeth I wanted to claim the New World, she asked court mathematician/astronomer/historian/angel-summoner John Dee for scholarship relevant to the expansion. Dee hit the books and conveniently discovered that King Arthur had led a vast army to conquer America, Greenland, and the North Pole
Some changes in Italian penal law help us more accurately determine the time discount functions of criminals.
Police, emergency responders, and other professionals try to trace Internet users’ IP addresses to find out where they live. Untraceable IP addresses – a big chunk of the total – all show up as coming from the geographic middle of the United States, which happens to be on a random farm in Kansas. Here’s a look into the life of a random Kansas farmer who has no idea why everyone is after him.
Everything we knew about classical Chinese civilization came from attempts to reconstruct it after the Qin Emperor burnt all the books around 200 BC. Now for the first time archaeologists have found original texts from Confucius’ time, and they’re a lot less orderly than expected.
Study finds violent video games do not increase misogyny, as usual everyone ignores this, seizes on a single doubtful sub-subfinding out of context and reports that the study proves violent video games do increase misogyny. The only thing at all surprising about the whole process is that Science Of Us notices and complains about it.
New study finds Haidtian moral foundations aren’t stable, heritable, or predictive; Haidt says that’s because the study did a terrible job measuring them.
A team including Russian billionaire Yuri Milner, American billionaire Mark Zuckerberg, and scientist Stephen Hawking have announced a plan to build a fleet of interstellar (!!!!) probes. The idea is very clever and has at least partially overcome the obvious skepticism such a plan should warrant. But I can’t help thinking it’s another dead end like the moon landing – something that will make it into the history books but have no broader impact on human activity or the colonization of space. Billionaires are obviously allowed to spend their money on whatever cool stuff they want, and goodness knows this is better than another yacht, but my sympathies are still with the less glamorous projects of Musk, Bezos, and Branson.
The latest step in the sportification of the political process is the release of Decision 2016 Trading Cards.
Women With More Feminine Digit Ratio Have Higher Reproductive Success (p = 0.002) – mediated at least in part by longer reproductive lifespan. The effect is sufficiently strong that we should be really curious why evolution preserved the contrary set of genes – maybe they’re better for men?
The Lexicon of Intentionally Ambiguous Recommendations collects apparently complimentary phrases to use in recommendation letters for people you secretly loathe. For example, “you would be lucky to get him to work for you”, “I recommend this man without qualifications”, “You won’t find many people like her”, “I cannot recommend this person too highly”, and “Nobody would be better than her”. The obvious review for this book is Moses Hadas’ “I have read this book and much like it”.
What happens when people from primitive tribes without mirrors who live in areas without clear water see their reflections for the first time? They freak out. [warning: includes scary picture]
A beautiful theory killed by an inelegant fact: sex offenders have no more testosterone than anyone else. Not in this study, but IIRC violent offenders do have more testosterone than others.
Vox: Everyone says the Libya intervention was a failure. They were wrong.
GiveDirectly will be starting large-scale tests of a universal basic income in Kenya.
RIP The 10,000 Year Explosion co-author and anthropology/evolution blogger Henry Harpending.
No! Clinton supporters are more likely to describe themselves as enthusiastic about voting in 2016! It’s killing me how this is being reported, and I’m not even a Sanders supporter. The obvious response to this poll is “Of course Clinton supporters are excited about voting in 2016. Their candidate is going to win the party’s nomination, and run in the general election. Sanders’ supporters are going to have to hold their nose and cast a ballot for Hillary on election day. Why should they be enthusiastic?”
Thanks, fixed.
At the same time though, Trump’s supporters are even more enthusiastic than Clinton’s, and it’s looking less and less likely that he will be the nominee, never mind the general election. I’m not so sure that there isn’t something to this.
There’s certainly something to this. Just not at all the something that’s being reported.
Even if Trump does not get the nomination, he’s in a very different position from Sanders, in that he’s emerged as the clear front-runner of the Republican field. Being a Trump supporter right now must feel like being in the middle of a potentially successful revolution. Being a Sanders supporter must feel like… it always feels to be on the left of the Democratic Party: taken advantage of by the goons in charge.
If you think that Hillary’s been short-changed — that her supporters are secretly more enthusiastic than Sanders’ — then that’s an argument you can make, and I’d be interested to hear it. You just can’t make it on the basis of this poll. Not without a lot of stretching, at least.
I don’t necessarily think Clinton’s supporters are more enthusiastic, I just think that the enthusiasm behind Sanders is overstated because the group that is very enthusiastic about him has a disproportionately loud voice.
“and it’s looking less and less likely that he will be the nominee, never mind the general election.”
-Wait ’till we see the results from New York State. And, yes, Trump had difficulty gaining unbound delegates. But he’s a billionaire. He’ll find them, one way or another. And there is good reason to expect Trump to win the general.
Now you’ve piqued my interest – what is this good reason to expect Trump to win the general, and how much weight would you assign to that probability?
NY is going to go heavily for Trump, he’ll gain in excess of 80 delegates there easily. Even so, and assuming a sweep in the other northeastern states, he’s looking shaky. The key states to watch are Indiana and California. If Trump takes those two he’s very likely the nominee, if Cruz wins them he very likely is.
If Cruz wins Indiana and Trump wins California, who the heck knows.
(I am also heavily skeptical of Trump’s chances in the General Election.)
538 is as usual the place to go to get quantitative analysis of the primaries. They project Trump as getting 85 of the 91 delegates in New York, and still coming up about eighty delegates short of locking in a victory before the convention. New York is the last place to look for evidence of the hidden strength that will propel Trump to victory; New York is where he’s demonstrated his strength openly and it’s not enough to sweep the nation.
As for the thinly-veiled hint that Trump is going to bribe(*) the uncommitted delegates, first, he’s an alleged billionaire who has been very reluctant to spend his own money in this campaign. Second, you can’t bribe eighty party activists without having several of them talk, and that’s one of the few things that would give the rest of the GOP the moral authority to do what they have wanted to do all along – change the rules of the convention before the first vote.
*Yes, yes, we all understand that it won’t be literal envelopes of cash.
That’s only a problem if it involves literal envelopes of cash, as opposed to nice favors that a powerful politician can do for a mere delegate.
If things get to the point where, say, 35 more votes would get Trump the nomination, I can’t imagine every uncommitted delegate standing firm.
Almost everyone has embarrassing secrets they don’t want exposed. How likely are those secrets to remain secure when you’re one of a handful of people standing between a ruthless [near-]billionaire and his goal? Professional oppo researchers are very good at finding these things.
@Larry Kestenbaum – I know that Perot claims he was blackmailed into backing down by HW Bush, any idea how plausible that was?
@ God Damn John Jay
On the one hand, the GHW Bush campaign was thoroughly ruthless. On the other hand, Perot is perhaps not the most reliable reporter.
Moreover, “blackmail” is often used loosely to mean political pressure, or persuasion efforts that don’t rise to the level of, say, a threat to publicize photographs of the candidate in flagrante delicto with an underage sex worker.
I guess I don’t think a classic blackmail situation is more likely than not, but if it turns out to be true, I won’t be too shocked.
There were people inside the Perot campaign working to destroy it, because they saw Perot up-close and knew he couldn’t be allowed to win.
The same thing happened with the Edwards campaign, too. High-level insiders saw he was having an affair on the campaign trail and worked to sabotage the campaign since he wouldn’t drop out.
We complain a lot about tribalism here, and fairly, but sometimes the insiders of a tribe really do care about stopping a monster from their own tribe.
What evidence is there that he is not a billionaire?
What evidence is there that he is not a billionaire?
Well, Forbes thinks that he’s not nearly as rich as he claims, but probably still a billionaire. Fortune is even less certain. Trump is conspicuously secretive about his finances, accessible public records reveal little, and the core of his business model is branding himself as Essence of Pure Richness whether it is true or not. He can afford a PR machine to back up his celebrity-businessman status, but beyond that nobody outside of Trump’s inner circle (and maybe the IRS) can really say.
One relevant question, though: do his supporters agree with that assessment?
Several of the (admittedly small pool) of Trump supporters I know are basically shrugging off all polls and predictions that he won’t win, at least by delegate count. I can’t even say I think it’s an ignorant viewpoint given the track record of Trump predictions. These people will acknowledge that maybe the RNC will ‘steal’ Trump’s nomination, but that doesn’t really dampen enthusiasm. It just turns it to anger.
Most of the Bernie voters I know, by contrast, look at him as a dead man walking. Ever since Day 1 they’ve said things like “I don’t think he can win, but it’s worth voting for him to send a message”.
None of this means candidate energy is meaningless, but I’m not sure Trump supporters are responding with a mindset of “he won’t win but I still like him”.
Now I’m picturing Buddha standing next to a bunch of kids playing hopscotch and pick-up sticks, the whole while silently glaring at them with his arms crossed.
What on earth is the context of this anyway? Does the list have some significance in laying out Buddhist principles or something?
I’m going to assume that games distract you from the path to enlightenment. Buddha was pretty hardcore, and he’d try to avoid any temptations or cravings towards ’empty’ pleasure. The competitive aspect of games can also come at odds with the whole selfless, compassionate, altruistic philosophy.
But woooow, I’m mostly surprised at the list of games. Each of those seem to have survived in some shape or form to today. That tile one I remember making up, and playing as a kid! I wonder which games have been independently reinvented by children across the world.
Where is that post about the “floor is lava” game and how everyone seems to independently discover it even without hearing about it form other people?
No, he specifically said that these were not prohibitions. These were games he did not like.
The text is a code of conduct, only it’s given from the viewpoint of a worldling outsider. So the Buddha lists all kinds of supposedly good things that an unenlightened commoner would say (and perhaps be impressed by?) of him, the buddhist community, or the teaching. The implicit point is that the monks should live like this, and the explicit point is that when people talk about the Buddha living like this the monks should confirm it.
It’s not just games either. The Buddha abstains from rejuvenating dead fetuses, fortune telling (including predicting various end-of-the-world scenarios), talking about politics, antelope-skin rugs and wrestling shows.
These are stated as good ways of behaving, but also as trivial, “minor details of mere moral virtue”. I think the point is that concentration and insight are still needed, and proper behavior is not a substitute for them.
So it’s not only about games and also not only games that the Buddha didn’t personally enjoy.
I was picturing a meditating Buddha, one of his disciples and a bunch of kids. Kids are: “Mr. Buddha, do you want to play dice with us?” Buddha: “No.” Disciple *writes*: “Buddha won’t play dice”.
Buddha does not play dice with the world.
73 dollars? That’s a lot of money to pay for a short stack of cardboard that’ll be thoroughly obsolete in six months.
Did Honus Wagner cards become obsolete just because Honus Wagner stopped playing baseball?!?!?! In thirty years, having a mint condition Ben Carson will be enough to set you up for life!!!
https://youtu.be/c_L8VnYp7jE?t=5m5s
I am the proud owner of that exact Charizard card.
Yes, no, that’s how they killed comic books.
Instead of a universal income, just get the Kenyans to grow Quinoa.
Neat idea, but unfortunately as I understand it quinoa is one of a multitude of useful crops that would flat-out die in Kenya’s equatorial heat.
I’m not sure about the temperature requirements of quinoa, but substantial parts of Kenya have quite mild temperatures due to altitude.
Not a fan of the Vox article on Libya. While the framing to look at the counterfactual is correct, the author doesnt take that to the logical conclusion – how many civilians would Ghaddafi have killed, compared to the civil war occuring today? Seems like he buys into the “imminent genocide” narrative, but his reported death toll of 1,000-2,000 before the intervention (a number that is just a guess once you follow the source, and seems like its both military and civilian) doesnt suggest that – such a death toll, while tragic, is par for the course in any military conflict. Without any strong case that Ghaddafi was going to mass murder hordes of civilians, the 4-5,000 dead from today’s civil war make the intervention look like a net loss (depending on assumptions of course, but they go both ways).
Also simply assuming that Libya would have been Syria is a key part of the premise, the idea that no side could “win” – but its also ridiculous. The idea that no one can win a civil war in the middle east is made with a sample size of 1 in Syria (maybe 2 in Yemen), with no actual basis in any facts on the ground in Libya. If I recall correctly, the NATO mission was justified on the grounds of Ghaddafi’s “imminent victory”, which mandated a quick response. Sure, the war could have gone on for years – but there is little evidence, again, to suggest one way over the other.
Overall the article just makes the worst assumptions about one counterfactual, and the best about the others, then says thats an argument – which it can be, its a possibility, but to me seems like a poorly justified one.
Also, weren’t we supplying the rebels with arms and support well before the intervention was officially announced? Who’s to say the rebellion wouldn’t have fizzled out much earlier without CIA support?
Indeed, it seems quite plausible to me that rebels wouldn’t have even started a civil war if they couldn’t count on foreign support.
That’s a bit of a stretch. The first lesson of the Arab Spring was that, as in Tunisia, a bunch of agitated protesters willing to make sacrifices could shame an Evil Dictator into standing down and letting a democratic government take power. The second lesson of the Arab Spring was that, as in every place other than Tunisia, the first lesson was a lie and would just get a bunch of people pointlessly killed. But Libya was early enough in the process that the first lesson was still fresh in everyone’s minds and the second lesson hadn’t really sunk in yet.
That doesn’t make for a particularly big conflict, what with the rebels mostly expecting the government to cave after a few skirmishes and not being up for the reality of civil war. But it was I think pretty much inevitable that a bunch of Libyans with guns were going to try and overthrow the regime in 2011.
The article also ignores the most damning consequence of intervening under the rubric of “responsibility to protect”: it caused Syria.
Right, the intervention in Libya was 100% successful.
“Vox: Everyone says the Libya intervention was a failure. They were wrong.”
-Clearly shows what a crappy news source Vox is:
http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-skeptics/no-the-libya-intervention-wasnt-humanitarian-success-15710
“If I recall correctly, the NATO mission was justified on the grounds of Ghaddafi’s “imminent victory”, which mandated a quick response.”
-Exactly. The leadership of the perfidious West was afraid Gaddafi would imminently capture Benghazi, and, thus, pretty much win the war. Also, one could not expect Egypt to support the Libyan rebellion to the same degree Turkey, Jordan, and Israel supported the Syrian one.
“By my calculations it would also reverse one year worth of global-warming induced sea-level rise.”
-:-)
We talked about Libya here not too long ago, but I’m having trouble finding the thread. Bottom line, this is far from Vox’s best work.
1. The Libyan rebels had been essentially routed on all fronts by the time the first French airstrikes came. Those strikes, and the American and British ones to come, were decisive, and a testament to the capabilities of modern Air Forces with a clear mission, adequate resources, and appropriate rules of engagement. Absent those airstrikes, there would have been about three more battles, maybe a siege in Tobruk, and some mopping up. That would have been it for the rebels, at least insofar as waging open war against Gaddafi is concerned.
2. The only way this would have turned into genocide or mass murder, or violence on any scale much beyond the thousand or two people already dead, is if Gaddafi had decided to unilaterally engage in mass reprisal killings. Which he had conspicuously not done before, either during the decades of his rule or in the cities where he had defeated the rebels before the airstrikes. He was a ruthlessly efficient murderous dictator, and while that’s not generally something to be praised the “efficient” part includes being pretty good at killing exactly the people he needed to kill so that he’d be left with the maximum number of cowed, obedient survivors.
3. Is there anything you can’t justify by saying that the people you did it to were going to commit mass murder and genocide the next day if you hadn’t done what you did to stop them? I mean, if you can deploy the argument against people who have conspicuously failed to commit mass murder or genocide before, and you can just assert without evidence that their genocidal plans had already been set, and if it doesn’t matter how mass-murdery your version is because the propaganda says their version would inevitably be worse…
Didn’t Gaddafi’s forces fire a great deal on protestors, though?
And, yes, that article definitely showcases the quality of personnel that Brookings is hiring, and material that Vox is willing to publish. You’re definitely correct on your #1 and #3.
Maybe? The rebels sure said he did, and western media sure did uncritically report on a lot of rebel press releases as though they were facts.
But they said a lot of stuff, and most of it was bogus.
There was a lot of video from the conflict, so these things can be tested for accuracy.
The quantity and quality of the video allegedly showing Gaddafi’s forces shooting unarmed protesters leave much to be desired. If what I saw then and what I could find in a brief search now is the best the rebel propagandists can come up with, then there was no more of an imminent genocide in Benghazi than there was in, e.g., Ferguson.
Also, if you are in the position to film the opening stages of a genocide, try to point the camera at something other than the ground and don’t put your thumb over the lens. But even in those cases, the audio is enough to dispel claims of indiscriminate mass slaughter.
Yeah, Gadaffi wasn’t a nice man by any means, but he was famously not one of the “And I’ll kill off everyone not in my tribe once I seize power” African dictators. Libya was fairly stable and fairly well-off (at least, well-off enough that it was worth the while of the Irish government of the day in the 80s to send trade missions to get them to buy our dairy/beef exports) and my admittedly ignorant view was that a large part of the reason for Western intervention was in retaliation for the Lockerbie bombing.
Nice theory but here’s the real reason
http://www.infowars.com/libya-was-invaded-to-prevent-pan-african-currency/
Wake up sheeple etc
You brought up most of the criticisms I had for the Vox article, but I just wanted to add one more (very minor) additional error: the article states that Gaddafi actively suppressed social institutions and intentionally made the running of Libya dependant on him. In fact, Gaddafi was deeply concerned with how to allow social institutions to be created, given the conflicts between the population groups within Libya. How do you encourage social groups when you know they could very well be coopted by extremists? He was so concerned about this that he invited Robert Putnam to a personal meeting in order to get his thoughts on how to encourage social cohesion.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703408604576164363053350664
Now, it is entirely possible to take the view, as Putnam did, that Gaddafi’s concern was insincere and his fears were unfounded (though I would disagree given the electoral success of radical Islamic groups in Lybia recently). But to state without qualification that Gaddafi wanted to eliminate social institutions merely to keep all power vested in him seems… Disingenuous.
Hugh Roberts:
The [Libyan] Jamahiriyya’s formal institutions were extremely weak, and that included the army
Gaddafi, unlike any other head of state, stood at the apex not of the pyramid of governing institutions but of the informal sector of the polity, which enjoyed a degree of hegemony over the formal sector that has no modern counterpart.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n22/hugh-roberts/who-said-gaddafi-had-to-go
This link is the best account on Gaddafi’s Libya I’ve ever read in the mainstream media.
I think I remember reading something about Gaddafi’s son being educated in the West and very gung ho about democracy too.
“Gung ho” may be overstating it, but yes. I’ve seen him analogized to the fictional Michael Corleone, and I think it fits. He doesn’t want to run the family business. If he has to run the family business, he doesn’t want to run it the way his father did. But if his father is under attack, family first and death to those who stand against them.
Or, in the end, with them, and we’re still not done with the killing…
A weird story of the whole Libyan debacle (which I had waited for an opening to mention, because its kind of funny and non-serious) was that Ghaddafi’s son Mutassim Gaddafi dated an italian supermodel who responded to the war by defending him and his family and was promptly fired.
The funny part was that she had attempted an acting career featuring a role in a modern adaption of Cinderella- because nothing is ever a coincidence.
Every dictator has a son educated in the West who’s much more “reform-minded” and “democratic” than he is.
The dictator sets it up that way, so that when the West is tempted to overthrow Papa Dic, they figure they can instead just wait it out until he dies* and democratic reform-minded Baby Dic takes over and everything’s hunky dory. It is totally a Thing, and if I were looking for a business opportunity, I’d start Agronomous’s School for Much More Reformist Offspring of Strong Rulers (probably somewhere in Switzerland) and cash in.
The most recent example of such a succession was when Hafez Assad died and left things to his son Bashar. Turns out he was a lot more like the old man than we’d been led to believe.
(* Like Hyman Roth, dictators seem to always be dying of the same heart attack for twenty years….)
Didn’t Kim Jong-un have some Western education too? Turns out spending a few years in the hallowed halls of academia isn’t enough to convince you to do a bunch of reforms that will probably end in you getting killed due to the logic of Ceaușescu.
Heck I’m not even sure I would do a bunch of reforms if I were the scion of a cruel dictator. I’d want to, but be scared to death of getting killed for it. The best route to me seems to be to embezzle as much money as you can and move to Europe.
Yeah, I think I’d make a deal to get the heck out. If my country dissolves into chaos as a result… well, it’s not like there were good alternatives. Either I rule with an iron hand, which makes me an evil dictator, which seems like HARD WORK in addition to being distasteful. Or I do reforms and the country collapses into chaos with me getting killed (or captured, tried, and killed) in the bargain. Or I get the heck out and the country collapses without me, while I retire comfortably.
@Nybbler: You’d abandon your family to be brutally murdered, because fighting to protect them would be HARD WORK? You could find comfort “retiring” among the people who e.g. killed your kid sister a generation ago, promised the rest of you they’d lay off if you toed the line, and then set your father up to be murdered while they watched safely from a distance the moment the political winds changed, because opposing them might be dangerous?
OK, maybe you might. But that’s not how most families work, and it’s not a coincidence that dictatorship tends to be a family business.
I’ve read that the highly educated (non-Jewish) German academics had no resistance to Nazism.
No, of course if I have family the deal includes them. Unless some other family member really wants to run the place and is in a position to, in which case good for them.
As for them killing my kid sister… well, I’m probably not going to make a deal with that exact polity, but I’d hardly be a credible dictator-candidate if I couldn’t accept the necessity of dealing with people allied with my personal enemies. As for what they did to my dad… well, he would have done the same given the chance.
There’s no good answer.
I know Ghaddafi had a habit of intervening in African conflicts, almost always on the wrong side. Might the Western intervention been a net positive because it prevented future destructive Libyan interventions?
He was much less likely to do so with an American army in his backyard (Iraq). He was basically contained as an external threat at that point. Of course who knows how he would have acted in the power vacuum of the withdrawal from Iraq.
Your globe must look very different than mine
“In his backyard” did not mean “on the border of”. Point being that a large US ground force and a demonstrated willingness to use it probably dampened any Libyan adventurism (of the saber rattling, nuclear program, and terror exporting type) Gadaffi may have wanted to undertake. And yes I am aware Saudi Arabia is closer but that’s a bit different than an occupied Iraq with a US army on a war footing.
The French had ground forces in the Ivory Coast the year the Libyan Civil War started, and had been involved five years previously. Granted, France has nothing like the military power that America does, but they’re a nuclear state with one of the larger and more active Western militaries, and they have greater ties to, and historical willingness to intervene in, North Africa than we do.
During pretty much the entire period in which Muammar Gaddafi earned his reputation as an Evil Dictator in general and an enemy of the United States in particular, the United States maintained in Western Europe a rather larger military force than was deployed in Irag in 2011. Western Europe is also closer to Libya than is Iraq, particularly by sea, and does not require crossing multiple intervening Arab nations to reach Libya. On the various occasions when the United States found it necessary to deploy military force against Libya, this was done with US military forces based in Western Europe.
If there are reasons to believe that Gaddafi’s days of military or terrorist adventurism had ended by 2011, the relatively small and distant US presence in Iraq is not among them.
Completely atrocious article which as expected neglects to mention that the from the get go the “peaceful protests” involved Molotov cocktails being hurled into police stations (a development which would have the National Guard out on the streets and firing real bullets in the US itself).
In other words, typical Western MSM propaganda, which even many self-styled “rationalists” predictably lap up.
Let’s.
(1) Its GDP per capita (PPP) would not be down by more than 50%.
(2) There would almost certainly be no civil war by now.
(3) There would be no Islamic State: Sirte Expansion with outposts across the entire country.
(4) There would be no flood of African migrants crossing unimpeded into Europe due to Libya being a failed state at this point. (At least there’s a sort of measure of poetic justice in that. The only problem is that the most responsible parties – the political elites – are also the ones most able to escape the consequences personally).
Actually at the BLM protests in Minneapolis, activists threw Molotov cocktails at the police station there and nothing happened to them.
I’ve just recalled there is a decent book on the conflict available online, so in principle one can save oneself from extended arguments where you have to explain any single detail:
https://theburningbloggerofbedlam.wordpress.com/the-libya-conspiracy/
Basically, it was human rights impostors and UN officials who created the war.
That’s documented in the following film:
Libye: La Guerre Humanitaire (2011)
and its accompanying article:
http://www.voltairenet.org/Lybia-Human-rights-impostors-used
Yeah, no. Voltairenet is a well known haven for political crank of any kind, found by a Thruther.
Ant, April 17 at 5:15 – You imply guilt by association and attack the claim on the basis of the medium. You avoid tackling the arguments in the book I linked to, arguments that more or less debunk the discussed article.
Bottom line: you are avoiding the subject at hand.
Levantine, please read http://squid314.livejournal.com/350090.html . If you’re the sort of unusual person who takes arguments seriously, there’s a real risk of being taken in by arguments that are wrong but hard to disprove. If merely sounding plausible is enough to change your mind, and lots of people here think that way, there’s a real risk in exposing yourself to sophisticated arguments for positions that you currently believe to be false, that you’ll end up believing them whether or not they’re true. As such, pruning sources on the basis of guilt-by-association is a vital heuristic.
“Now,” you might say, “that sounds like an excuse to never have to change your mind!” However, there is a way to avoid this. If you like, summarize the presented argument here in the comments. This is a public place where criticism is invited, which improves the odds that good-sounding-but-wrong arguments will be called out. That, or make an argument that the voltairenet comments sections are properly contrarian and not, as I’ll guess blindly without looking, the sort of echochamber you get when every not-totally-committed voice would be shouted down as an ally of the system.
One thing that is generally overlooked when talking about interventions in North Africa and the Middle East is that there is no “West”. There is America calling the shots while being almost completely isolated from any consequences, and a patchwork of European states going along with it and/or running around like headless chickens, while taking 95% of the “Western” impact. The refugee crisis has enormously weakened the EU, which is something the US government must have foreseen when deciding on its interventions.
Once you take into account unspoken anti-European policy goals, a certain level of chaos in the Middle East starts looking like a success rather than a failure. If Vox really wants to make a case for America’s policies there, that’s the direction they should explore.
Except that in Libya, it was the French who called the shots. Well, the first NATO shots, which were the ones that counted. Masterful game of “let’s you and him fight”.
France’s president at the time was Sarkozy, probably the most pro-American French president ever, who was having trouble at home and hoped that a quick and cheap military success would make him look good in the following election. I still count that within the “going along with it and/or running around like headless chickens” category.
Whence my hollow laughter when too that Europe is free riding on US military might….not till refugees start swimming accross the Atlantic, it isn’t.
There is no united “West,” but the US does not call all the shots. France in particular has a heavy interventionist hand throughout the world. The intervention against the Islamic Maghreb in Mali was entirely French driven.
The refugee crisis has enormously weakened the EU, which is something the US government must have foreseen when deciding on its interventions.
You give the U.S. government far too much credit for foresightedness. Even if they’d realized that toppling Libya and attempting to topple Syria would create a flood of refugees, only bad old right-wingers said that trying to incorporate Muslim refugees into European culture was doomed to fail, and nobody listens to them.
Well, they should have realized that there would be a flood of refugees at least, since Gaddafi explicitly warned Europe that that would happen:
http://www.lejdd.fr/International/Afrique/Actualite/Exclusif-L-interview-integrale-accordee-par-Mouammar-Kadhafi-au-JDD-278745
Translation:
Though you’re right about the bad old right-wingers thing.
The hawks (France and the US, mostly) and their fellow headless chicken (everybody else in Europe that joined them in supporting the Arab Spring), probably thought that they would quickly wipe out the existing Arab governments and install stable pro-West governments (because this had worked so well in Iraq and Afghanistan…).
They only really succeeded in Tunisia (quite irrelevant country) and partially in Egypt (at least so far, but Mubarak’s government was already quite pro-West to begin with). Things went shit in Libya (government toppled followed by anarchy), Syria (Putin said: don’t dare to directly attack Assad or it is WW3), and they managed to screw up Iraq more than it already was.
I blame this on incompetence.
Egypt was already reasonably pro-Western. The government was willing to accept money in return for not attacking Israel.
The irony of the situation was that Erdrogan was a cruel tyrant willing to execute protestors then the revolution couldn’t have happened.
(Egypt’s big problem was that the entire world was in a recession and they bankrupted themselves to offer a program of subsidized fuel that was so regressive and ineffective that Freakonomics dubbed it the worlds dumbest Transportation policy)
“Unspoken anti-European policy goals” – but I thought a strong EU was considered very much in America’s (and the world’s) interest. At the very least, if the former Great Powers are subordinated to an unaccountable supranational bureaucracy they’ll spend all their effort fighting against it, which leaves them no time for fighting each other.
In the world’s, possibly. In America’s? Not at all. A strong EU might actually do something, or have its own opinions. Can’t have that!
It follows from your argument that Obama should advise the British to leave the EU. Have you told him? He doesn’t seem to have gotten the message.
The EU’s laws mean its strength is (somewhat) inversely proportional to its size, as every additional state means one more independent agent trying to gain what it can from it and veto stuff it dislikes. Aside from that, I could very well see Obama prefering the status quo of nothing getting done and states quibbling incessantly over one where some leave and the remainder get together to do some much-needed reform.
I said a strong EU, not a strong Europe. The point of the EU is to prevent intra-European wars, which it’s succeeded at so far. Nobody’s going to be up for another round of fighting over Alsace-Lorraine or Schleswig-Holstein when it’s such a pain in the ass to close the borders.
A strong EU is definitely in America’s interest. Here’s Zbigniew Brzeznski on the subject:
http://www.activistpost.com/2014/05/the-role-of-nato-and-eu-on-brzezinskis.html
I know everyone thinks of Americans as unabashedly realist, but America’s populist political nature means Wilson’s 14 points are just in the water supply now.
It depends how strong it is. An EU that decides to become a single country is not in the US interest (at least as long as the US interest includes maintaining world supremacy).
The UK is probably the most US-friendly EU country, and one of the most skeptical towards further political unification, hence its continued membership in the EU is in the US interest. Without the UK, the EU becomes pretty much the Third Reich minus Nazism.
Agreed, “unspoken anti-European policy goals” is rubbish. The U.S. explicitly and implicitly supports a strong Europe, and in particular would like to see a Europe more committed to its own military defense/security (and footing the bills associated with that). You could make a case that’s a shortsighted position, since a less-militarized Europe has been a more peaceful Europe. Yet shortsighted or not, it’s clearly the U.S. position.
Actually, that reminds me of a talk I attended (in the U.S.) a couple weeks ago to hear a Brexit-supporting conservative MP make the case for it. He was fairly eloquent and passionate speaking from a British perspective. But when asked why it was in the U.S. interest to support a move that would weaken Europe, he fumbled a bit before essentially admitting that it wasn’t (but the U.S. should keep out of it anyway because sovereignty, national self-determination, respect for the will of the people, etc.)
The US might like individual European countries to spend more on their militaries, but that has nothing to do with strengthening Europe as a unified entity. The US likes a situation where individual European countries are medium-strength and can serve as useful allies, but it definitely doesn’t want Europe to coordinate and act like a single power (keep in mind that the EU’s economy as a whole is larger than the US’s).
That is why the US has supported hasty expansion of the EU. With incomplete integration and weak European institutions, expansion has made it even more difficult for the EU to come to an agreement on anything. That’s just how the US likes it.
You’re much more articulate in expressing my opinion than I am. Thank you.
So why is the EU so phenomenally incompetent at looking after its self-interest? Can this be explained by some coordination problem or runaway holiness signaling?
Of course coordination is an issue. The EU is practically a classic issue on how the prisoner’s dilemma can screw people over.
Well, but it is so obvious that they’re dealing with lots and lots of PD-like situations? For example, if you think the expansion was overly hasty, how can one conceptualise this as mutual defection in a PD? How does being against the expansion while others are for it substantially hurt the interests of a country?
Even excluding Great Britain and the countries it’s rapidly expanding to?
@Whatever: I see what you did there. Yes, a smaller but much more politically integrated EU would be a bigger threat to US dominance than an EU that is economically larger but politically weak and uncoordinated.
I don’t think I was one to imply the EU’s horizontal expansion in specific has to do with the prisoner’s dilemma. If anything, it seems to happen every time some people see their chance fit to ‘steal’ some country away from Russia’s sphere of influence.
The case of veto rights is one example of the prisoner’s dilemma in action. It’d be generally better for the EU as a whole if every damn country in it didn’t have a veto, but they do, and as long as everyone keeps defecting by holding on to theirs the end of it is not long in sight.
Aside from that, the EU catches a lot of flak for national-level politicians taking credit for its successes, whilst simultaneously blaming unrelated problems on its existence.
Not everything may be a PD in the perfect sense, but coordination is definetly an issue.
@Outis: Those are interesting theories. I have to ask you, though: what has the United States government done in the past twenty years to make you believe that they have the competence to carry out such subtle manipulation?
Was it the brilliantly elegant way they brought about peace and pro-Western governments in Iraq and Syria? The cunning fashion in which strongmen like Putin or Erdogan have been prevented from consolidating power or attacking their neighbors, maybe? Or perhaps how good they are at keeping their most secret documents and personnel records from being splashed all over the internet or stolen by China? I must know.
@Stefan Drinic:
Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that. The unfortunately chosen “you” in my sentence was meant to be generic. The only way I can see of conceptualising that in particular as a PD is if it’s about holiness signaling, where saying that these countries should be included to save them from Russian influence is the defection. Somehow that doesn’t sound too plausible to me, but the problem is, I don’t actually remember what the arguments were, that was somewhere in my long-forgotten childhood…
The whole business of going along with whatever the US do can be seen as a PD, though. Given that there is no strong Europe, everyone wants to get on the good side of the US, but as long as they try that, there can be no strong Europe.
Yeah, nah, the expansion thing is definetly not related to the PD the way veto rights are. It’s true all the same though; Bulgaria kinda got fast-tracked into EU membership when some very pro-Russian politicians were looking to win the next election, and the Polish tried their best to join because, with their current leaders doing so now more than ever, they really, really don’t want to end up in their sphere again. They’re trying something similar in Ukraine, except this time it’s flaring up much more than it did earlier.
Are there U.S. “anti-European policy goals”? Or the US explicitly supports a strong Europe?
The basic notion of the USofA has to be made clear in order to answer these questions. The United States is largely based on its Constitution and the status of that Constitution. Every civil liberty in the US Bill of Rights is routinely violated. [*] The root of these violations is in the fact that the United States is far less than a sovereign country.
The United States of America lack monetary sovereignty: control of credit and banking. The United States also lack sovereignty in terms of defining its relations with corporations. Therefore, to talk of the United States pursuing their interests is to promote illusions, and submit to illusions.
[*] http://www.unz.com/proberts/does-the-united-states-still-exist/
Yet there is certainly an entity, encompassing what is considered the United States and quite active on the European continent. (Bismarck said “Whoever speaks of Europe [as a political entity] is wrong. Europe is a geographical expression.”)
It is approximate to NATO. NATO’s purpose has been once defined as “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.”
Does that set of goals require a strong or a weak Europe? It depends: 1. What shall we agree to mean by Europe? And 2. What is the specific situation?
One obvious implication, as far as I can see : A too weak EU or a too strong EU would be ruinous for the initial purposes of NATO.
@Whatever
Without the UK, the the US has a slightly greater GDP PPP than the EU, but the EU has a larger population, which means a larger potential for growth (Eastern European countries, in particular, have lower GDP per capita but tend to be growing fast).
I’m not sure what the “countries it’s rapidly expanding to” are supposed to be. Ukraine, perhaps?
Ukraine is one, yes. Serbia and some of its neighbours is another.
EDIT: also, re: manipulation..
Thirteen years ago now, the Georgian government magically managed to get overthrown in an otherwise peaceful manner.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rose_Revolution
The person who became president for the next decade thereafter, Mikheil Saakashvili, was a remarkably pro-Western sorts; having been educated in the US and worked at some prestigious places there, talks were had of Georgia heading an effort to connect the Caspian sea to Europa by pipeline efforts and even join the freaking NATO. Predictably enough, the Russians threw a fit, war happened, and after some chunks of Georgia got broken off such talks quieted down again.
Now, much later, Ukraine somehow, magically, manages to get itself a pro-western government. Nevermind that many of the protestors over there weren’t from Ukraine to begin with and were apparently previously involved in pro-western protests elsewhere; there is a pro-western government in Ukraine now, it’s all totally legitimate, obviously we should talk about Ukraine joining the NATO and the EU as well to make sure it doesn’t get overru-
– oh hey there’s a war again.
And why would you come up with new lackeys when the old ones are still around just fine?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikheil_Saakashvili#Governor_in_Ukraine
I mean, you can tell me that this is all a coincidence, and that these things just sort of happen, but the case for manipulation isn’t a very hard one to make. Looking further back you could also bring forward half of South America as evidence, but I’ll concede that there’s little subtle about US support for regimes over there.
I’m not sure how that implies a conspiracy. If you don’t like the Russians there are few people to side with to back you in that part of the world. We should expect a lot of commonality for that reason alone (similar to what occurred during the cold war).
@ Samuel Skinner:
Exactly.
Of course the US is going to jump in and offer support to people who are extending a friendly hand and wanting to join in with NATO and the EU. Why shouldn’t they?
But it’s quite a different thing to say the US does that, from saying they US orchestrates everything from behind the scenes like the Elders of Zion.
Even in many cases in Latin America, there is this kind of confusion. People will say that the CIA somehow brought about Pinochet’s coup in Chile. They did no such thing. The Chilean military arranged it and the CIA essentially said “good job, guys”.
If you are in Eastern Europe, and you are not pro-Russian for some political reasons (typically because you are a commie or a nazi), the situation seems quite simple:
Russia is poor, USA and Western Europe are rich. If you join EU, some of that richness may come to you, or it may be easier for you to find a better job abroad.
Russians already have a history of violence against you. USA also has some crappy history, but against other parts of the world. Serbia is an exception here.
If you try to go your own way, it is only a question of time until Russia becomes interested in your territory. If you are their neighbor, a military invasion is possible, but even if you are not, you should expect various Russia-backed groups appearing in your country and gradually gaining power.
So the logical way is to join either EU or NATO or both. (The specific choice depends on whether EU is interested in having you, and whether you believe that being in EU without being in NATO makes you safe enough from Russia.)
And the time is running out.
Re Chile
It is actually crazier than that. In 1971 the CIA paid some people to kidnap the head of the military. They ended up blotching it, shooting him and the incident backfired horribly (it turns out trying to get the military on your side is hard when you kill their boss).
So in 1973 when the new attempt came up the US just paid a guy to be a channel of information between the CIA and the plotters.
Yeah, this article is complete trash.
The random promotion study is based on a computer model. My priors say the computer model is far more likely to be bullshit than that randomly selecting people is actually the best way to promote.
“Every time I have to hire for a new position, I throw half the resumes in the garbage. I don’t want unlucky people working for me.”
Those were the lucky ones…
Something something Ringworld
I can imagine that in some companies random promotions would work better. Specifically in companies that are unable to distinguish between competent and incompetent employees, so in their evaluations “merit” is merely a synonym for office politics.
Promotions based on “merit” will promote incompetent people. Promotions based on seniority will also promote incompetent people, because those are more likely to remain in the dysfunctional company for decades. However, random promotions could once in a while promote a new competent person and give them a chance to improve something.
If the computer model truly reflects this, I admire the authors’ cynicism.
Sadly someone who looked over it said the model works by rerolling the competency of individuals after promotion (so promoting the worst employees is the best choice).
Now the question is, is the competence of an individual the same no matter what position they have in a company?
Depending on how strong the correlation is between competencies at different positions each employee, promoting the worst employees may be a good strategy in real life.
It will also work in any company where the competency of managment matters significantly less than the competency of non-managment employees, because it prevents the most competent employees from being promoted out of the pool of people actually working.
There are companies where this is the situation. Those companies would be better off just abolishing a bunch of managment positions, because this happens when the labor force is largely self-organizing, but the fact that a company doesn’t actually *need* mid-level managment at all, does not imply said company will actually fire it’s mid level managment.
You just basically described the Dilbert Principle.
Isn’t this all ignoring employee incentives? If the policy is to promote the worst, or promote randomly; then why should the competent employees bother performing well?
Stockholm syndrome
I don’t know anything about Benin, but those wall figures seem tremendously off. If the walls make a square then they would enclose an area of nearly 2 million km^2, about 220 times the size of New York. which just seems enormously implausible, especially for there to be no trace of them today. I suspect some shady arithmetic is involved somewhere.
The whole article just feels incredibly shady to be honest.
Edit: Having just read the comments it appears that even the Graun’s commentariat is shredding it.
They’re described as earthen walls, and as having been used as dividers between districts, not just as outer walls surrounding the territory. Given the former, one wouldn’t expect a lot to be left of them, and the latter helps a lot with your worries about the length.
Why would not much be left of them? It’s still hard to move x zillion tons of earth. Do they wear away with time because of wind and rain?
There are still plenty of remains of the earthen walls built by romans (limes) on their frontiers. Of course the walls are not standing, but they are still visible in many places 1500 years later because earthen walls are pretty thick and spreading the material requires a lot of effort.
Even where they are not visible their traces can be spotted from the air or using underground detection, methods that are regularly used by archeologists especially since cheap drones are available.
The far more recent walls of Benin should be highly visible.
Why do you think the walls of Benin are gone without a trace? They aren’t.
The Nybbler is right. Here’s a short page about the remains: https://www.wmf.org/project/benin-city-earthworks
As for the length estimate, Koutonin cites an article by the science journalist Fred Pearce, who in turn refers to Dr Patrick Darling, who seems to have come up with the estimate himself, after taking a look at various old walls and ditches in person.
(As far as I can tell, both Pearce and Darling are white men from the UK, so if you’re going to mock them in ALL CAPS, you should probably use a stereotypical English accent instead of an African-American one.)
Because a city that doesn’t use them as district dividers will actively level them as obstacles. The walls were the physical embodiment of administrative structure. With that gone, they became annoyances. So destroyed.
That makes more sense but doesn’t it make the comparisons to the great wall of China massively misleading? Like if it just counts the length of all the walls in the territory then they can be hardly said to be comparable to one long massive defensive wall. The length of all the drystone walls in medieval England was probably also massively longer than the great wall of china (and loads are still left today!) but nobody compares this to the great wall or uses it as evidence for some sort of civilisational greatness.
Also just because it’s earthen doesn’t mean it’s necessarily easy to get rid of. A lot of celtic hillforts are still noticeable today and they have lasted for several millennia not just a few hundred years. The climate in Benin could be much worse for earthen walls though. I don’t know.
Clickbait is dead, long live clickbait.
Did anyone seriously expect that not to be misleading?
(Ooh, we have built-in formatting now. Nice.)
That’s the part that annoys me. These kinds of articles always have to engage in that kind of showy one-upmanship where it’s not enough for Benin to have been a large and well-organized city that’s not well-known, it has to be better than all those white European cities and based on advanced mathematics and be apparently so peaceful people don’t lock their doors and a greater architectural achievement than the Great Wall and the Pyramids, all based on the scattered testimony of a few tourists.
These kinds of articles always have to engage in that kind of showy one-upmanship
Don’t forget “Europeans never had soap until they encountered more advanced and cleaner Asian/African civilisations” and “African-Americans invented the comb” 🙂
Yes, dear Celt, you invented a thing. I’m sure you’re very proud now 🙂
@ Deiseach: Well (according to Wikipedia) the first evidence of “soap-like substances” is from Babylon, and the earliest combs were found in Persia; this is roughly what I’d expect given the patterns with other technology. Being introduced from the Near East in prehistoric times isn’t exactly what most modern Americans would picture when they hear “Europeans encountered more advanced Asian/African civilizations”, though (mostly because continents are just a terrible paradigm for understanding anything).
The stone walls of Ireland would supposedly go ten times around the earth at the equator:
http://www.insideireland.com/sample15.htm
And indeed Ireland has a lot of walls. But they aren’t really comparable to the Great Wall of China.
WE WUZ KANGS
Hey that’s not very interesting or substantive and also, I’m pretty sure, intended to be broadly racist, so I reported you.
I found this when I googled that phrase, it seems like it’s from a sarcastic vocaroo that a black man recorded. Maybe lighten up?
That’s cool I guess (in the sense that it was 30 seconds of my life I won’t get back and lionel’s comment has now wasted my time in yet another way). Thanks for bringing it to my attention and all, but why you gotta be a dick about it? Not actually an interesting or a funny comment even if not intended to be read as racist, so I feel little remorse.
It’s definitely racist. It’s a meme from /pol/, 4chan’s white supremacist board, intended to make fun of overstated claims about African civilizations. You primarily see it in the context of threads about how dumb black people are.
Matt is correct. If you had an abundance of iron-carbon alloys, you could interpret lionel’s comment as being extreme shorthand for sabril’s comment below, which is essentially the argument being pointed to by the meme. But really, there are times and a places for “just joking” internet racism, and I’m not sure this is one of them. Even if we do accept that there’s no malicious intent, when presented this way it’s just a really awful argument, a square on a bingo-card. “Blacks are stupid” – “No they’re not look at these historic civilizations” – “Haha, can you believe they pulled the ‘we was kings’ line, ha, idiot.”
I don’t think making fun of the outsize claims of Afrocentrists is racist per se. Is it something a racist would do? Yes. Is it something *only* a racist would do? Hell no.
Still not a substantive or interesting comment for SSC, though.
The article reminds me of those invention myths that have been circulating for decades — claiming that it was a woman who invented windshield wipers, or that a black person invented traffic signals, etc.
The fact is that there are people out there who really really really want to believe that sub-Saharan Africa had thriving civilizations in the past and is now so dysfunctional only due to European misadventures. Anything which panders to those desires is suspect.
From what I’ve heard, Kush was comparable to Egypt. Do you have information otherwise?
I don’t think that is what he means by Sub-Saharan Africa.
“From what I’ve heard, Kush was comparable to Egypt. Do you have information otherwise?”
I’ve never heard of “Kush” before, so I would have to say “no.”
Anyway, I am not sure what your point is. First things first: Do you disagree with anything I stated?
Samuel Skinner, you may be right, although when I looked it up, Ethiopia is considered to be sub-Saharan.
When Egypt was a major empire, Kush– sabril, look it up– was at a comparable tech and wealth level, at least to a casual glance, and (from the art) it was inhabited by black people.
I haven’t studied Africa enough to have a strong opinion about whether the only thing wrong with is the result of European atrocities. The atrocities have certainly contributed. Marxist ideas have also had a very bad effect, though without benefiting Europeans/white people.
Have a couple of links about the ill effects of slave-taking, which include both the loss of a large number of people whose work would have enriched Africa if they’d been left in peace and the development of large scale defection of between Africans because selling Africans to slavers became both a primary method of gaining advantages and of self-defense (selling slaves to get European weapons to protect one’s people from neighboring slavers).
http://www.academia.edu/3022016/_The_Economic_Political_and_Social_Impact_of_the_Atlantic_Slave_Trade_on_Africa._
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~baileymj/Whatley_Gillezeau.pdf
I’d have sworn I’d seen a piece claiming that the parts of Africa where slaves were mostly taken from were still in worse shape because of damage to trust, but I can’t find it.
“When Egypt was a major empire, Kush– sabril, look it up– was at a comparable tech and wealth level, at least to a casual glance, and (from the art) it was inhabited by black people.”
Sorry, it’s not my responsibility to go searching for evidence to support your claims. Particularly when you don’t seem to disagree with anything I have posted.
“I haven’t studied Africa enough to have a strong opinion about whether the only thing wrong with is the result of European atrocities. The atrocities have certainly contributed.”
Would you mind identifying 3 such “European atrocities” and summarizing your evidence for the claim that they have contributed to the dysfunction in sub-Saharan Africa? TIA
Oh, go be edgy some other place. I know the mean old social justice crowd’s view of history is dumb, but yours seems to be no better.
European atrocities aren’t particularly hard to name, but it’s very easy to fall into the trap of ‘it was juuuuust a war’ or ‘they do that stuff on their own just fine.’ The French wars to conquer and (fail to) retain their parts of Africa were nasty ones; the amount of people the Belgians managed to kill in Congo is two million at least and somewhere over ten million at most; concentration camps were invented for the purposes of keeping under control populations the British found unruly, whether those were white South Africans or the very black Kenyans.
The adverse effects of European rule over Africa aren’t uniform, but they’re easy to point out all the same. Many African nations have borders that are painfully obviously drawn along unnatural lines, and their peoples are jumbled together moreso than unified. Having multiple ethnicities may work out well for the Swiss, if only because they’ve decided to stick together, but doing so involuntarily is just dumb. Similarly, the US and Mexico now agree the Rio Grande makes for a nice border to have, but if the border were instead a perfectly flat horizontal line because reasons, issues might instead emerge.
Aside from that point, completely dissolving prior institutions and then later pulling out without leaving a good infrastructure is bound to cause problems. The Japanese had a very long history of governing themselves, and made it into modernity with great ease because governance and politics weren’t too much of an issue. If people had come in, told everyone with a shred of local power to get lost and submit, and then pulled out again fifty years later, things might have looked a lot differently. One of the reasons former French, Belgian or Portuguese African colonies for example appear to do worse than those the British owned is that the British centralised their colonial rule less, and instead chose to delegate it to local sorts more.
Buuuuuut then talks about topics like these tend to end up getting dominated by the sorts of people who want to blame white guys for every evil ever or instead claim they were the messiahs of everything come to save the world, so my general expectations of this thread are low for now.
“Ethiopia is considered to be sub-Saharan.”
Ethiopia is (very) sub-Saharan. Kush isn’t Ethiopia, even though that’s what the Greeks called it.
For one dynasty Kush ruled Egypt. Mostly they were adjacent polities, Kush higher up the Nile.
“Oh, go be edgy some other place. I know the mean old social justice crowd’s view of history is dumb, but yours seems to be no better.”
Please quote me where I espoused (or seemed to espouse) a view of history which is “dumb” so that I know what you are talking about. TIA
“European atrocities aren’t particularly hard to name”
Then it should be very easy for you to name 3 and summarize the evidence that they had a significant contribution to today’s dysfunction in sub-Saharan Africa.
Please do so. TIA.
You mean exactly that one thing I just did?
That’s okay, thanks. I’ve posted enough in this subthread by now.
“Please do so. TIA”
Your tone is all wrong. Your speech and manner of address is overweening toploftical and bumptious.
“You mean exactly that one thing I just did?”
Umm, what you didn’t do. You claim that my view seems dumb, but you are unable to even point to what I supposedly claimed which was dumb. Probably because you are not responding to what I actually said, but instead to what you wish or imagine I said.
Nor are you able to point out 3 specific examples of European “atrocities” and summarize the evidence that they had a significant contribution to today’s dysfunction in sub-Saharan Africa.
“Oh, go be edgy some other place.”
Oh, go and think sloppily some other place.
Congo
– rubber prices went up. King Leopold decided to encourage cultivation instead of food and killed people who objected. Approximately a fifth of the population died.
– negative results; epigenetic (due to widespread famine), large scale social break down
-long term results; Belgium took over the colony; unfortunately they proceeded to run everything so there were no high ranking natives; when they decolonized…
-the first democratic government lasted less than 6 months. This was partially due to Belgium backing an independence faction in the country which started a war after only 17 days (Patrice Lumumba came into office on 24 June 1960 and Katanga rebelled on 11 July 1960).
Congo is the worst (the had the largest war since 1945 in their country), but there are other examples in other countries that have also screwed them up to varying degrees.
I find you’re projecting a lot here. If you’re not the troll others and I appear to think you are, you’re putting very little effort into sustaining proper discussion.
@ Stefan Drinic:
You forgot to number them one, two, three!
“I find you’re projecting a lot here. If you’re not the troll others”
Check back — you started our exchange with an attack. You said “go be edgy some other place.” You then asserted that my position seemed “dumb” but you refuse to clarify what position you are referring to.
Seems to me you’re the one who is projecting.
“The French wars to conquer and (fail to) retain their parts of Africa were nasty ones”
I didn’t realize that you were presenting this as an example of an “atrocity” and evidence of the same having an impact on modern dysfunction.
Please tell me (1) Which wars are you talking about; (2) where in Africa did they take place; (3) in general terms, what did the French do which was a problem; and (4) — most importantly — please summarize the evidence that this “atrocity” is a significant cause of dysfunction today in modern Africa.
ETA:
Oh, and please tell me what about my position is “dumb.” TIA.
No, thank you. I’ve posted thrice too many, and feel a bit annoyed at myself for having done so, let alone this post here. You can have this subthread now, it’s all yours.
Stephen Drinic,
Thank you for doing some replies. I was getting tired opposing sabril by myself.
“No, thank you. I’ve posted thrice too many, and feel a bit annoyed at myself for having done so, let alone this post here. You can have this subthread now, it’s all yours.”
i.e. you are unable to offer even a shred of evidence that these wars you refer to as “atrocities” are a significant reason for today’s dysfunction in sub-Saharan Africa.
But the funny part is that you aren’t even able to describe what my “dumb” position is. All you know is that it seems I am not a member of your tribe so I must be attacked. Which you have done, effectively demonstrating tribal membership. No need to actually present facts or evidence.
“Thank you for doing some replies. I was getting tired opposing sabril by myself.”
Why oppose me when you were not even able to specify what I said you disagree with?
The problem is that there were “thriving civilizations” in sub-Saharan Africa by comparison, if not quite to Europeans of the day, then at least to the ancient Romans, or Egyptians or whatever.
The trouble is that compared to modern western civilizations, the European civilizations of the time were pretty terrible, as in probably worse than the average place in sub-Saharan Africa today (almost the whole population at subsistence level on the edge of starvation, rampant disease, brutal dictators and warlords ruling most countries, every state has a civil war once every few decades at the longest), so the question of “then why are African civilizations so terrible today?” is pretty misguided.
It seriously baffles me how every time this topic comes up with statements like “comparable to the great European capitals of the time”, people on both sides somehow miss how important a distinction “of the time” is.
“The problem is that there were “thriving civilizations” in sub-Saharan Africa by comparison, if not quite to Europeans of the day, then at least to the ancient Romans, or Egyptians or whatever.”
That may very well be true, but I would want to see evidence before accepting such a claim. Please identify 3 such “thriving civilizations” comparable to ancient Rome or “great European capitals of the time” and summarize the evidence for your claim.
“so the question of ‘then why are African civilizations so terrible today?’ is pretty misguided.”
Did anyone ask that question in this discussion?
1. The Kush
2. The Zulu
3. The Ethiopian Empire
4. The Mali
5. Those guys who created the Sahara Desert through poor land management.
The trouble is, as I understand it, that all of these empires collapsed in really brutal ways that destroyed a lot of infrastructure (particularly 5). Basically when European explorers showed up Africa was in the middle of their 300 year dark age ala 600 AD Britain. Coming back from that dark age in direct competition with the world’s most globalized colonial powers know to history has been an unprecedented challenge that, unsurprisingly, most nation of Africa failed at.
Bonus Track: Some atrocities.
1. The Dutch intervention in Rwanda creates the Hutu/Tutsi ethnic strife that later leads to Rwanda.
2. DuBeers is literally behind the entire blood diamonds thing, they are the only world-wide diamond cartel of their kind.
3. Italy’s poision gas attacks in Ethiopia.
4. Arguably the Libyan interventions.
(5?). Was the CIA behind Angola? Does anyone remember?
The Sahara’s alternated between desert and non-desert for many thousands of years, but only once during historical times, and then only barely: the last green period predates the Egyptian Old Kingdom. Whoever inhabited the area then, we know almost nothing about, and I recall there’s a strong argument that large-scale agriculture in the area only emerged after — and maybe as a consequence of — the most recent round of aridification.
That said, when I went to Wikipedia to confirm this, I found these guys. Are they who you’re talking about? They’re not exactly sub-Saharan, but I hadn’t known they existed before, and now I want to read a novel set there; lots of dramatic possibilities.
“2. The Zulu”
Ok, and can you please summarize the evidence that the Zulu civilization was comparable to that of the European civilizations at around the same time? TIA.
It’s not clear to me why no one has mentioned Zimbabwe yet. Is it clear to anyone else?
The Zulu are more modern than the Aztecs. Speaking of which – “everyone” acknowledges, and “most all” American high school graduates are aware of, at least three “great civilizations” of the Americas – the Mayans, who declined into thatched roof villages long before the Europeans showed up; the Aztecs who were brought down by a coallition between the newly arrived Spanish and all the non-Aztec tribes who had been kept down by bloody non-European tyranny; and the Incas, who were a buncha tough bastards who would still be a going concern if not for the realities of epidemiology. (Plus/minus the Mississippi mound builders and the traders of the Caribbean.)
Non-European economic empires and city centers are an actual thing. But one does have to provide evidence.
Also – it’s a bit stacking the deck to list Euro-on-Africa horrors without any acknowledgement of nasty (human) behavior in any other direction. Given previous discussions on the Thirty Years War, it’s a bit much to expect the commentariat to react with pearl clutching horror at the supposition that Europeans might be horrible to other humans.
(Also: Blaming Rwanda on European colonialism is one of the more eyebrow-raising examples of the bigotry of low expectations of non-Euro humans that I’ve seen in some time.)
“Please identify 3 such “thriving civilizations” comparable to ancient Rome or “great European capitals of the time” and summarize the evidence for your claim.”
What time period are we talking for Rome? Because Africa never had a continent covering empire (if only because the terrain ruled that out) or a city that held over a million people because it had entire provinces dedicated to feeding it.
If you mean advanced states, the areas that traded with the Muslim world (west Africa, Ethiopia, East African Coast) tended to be similarly developed, but the rest of the continent… not so much.
It’s worth noting that sixteenth and seventeenth-century travelers love to talk about how much better foreign kingdoms are than Europe, and that their standards for accuracy are basically nonexistent. That Portuguese captain the article cites as saying Benin had no crime is almost certainly making stuff up. You can see this in a lot of accounts of the New World – they almost always make it sound like paradise on Earth.
I think that’s slightly uncharitable- I’m guessing that his statement of “no crime” was based on “I walked around the city and didn’t see any crimes being committed” (but you can easily get the same statement with “I lived in the city for years and didn’t see any crimes being committed”). “Standards for accuracy basically nonexistent” is probably still a decent guideline for a modern person trying to get information from it, though.
One thought comes to mind- are there perhaps an equal number of 16th and 17th-century travelers who talked about how awful the foreign kingdoms they visited were (as you’d expect with a random distribution with simplification and sensationalism), and modern people talking about great African civilizations only cite the ones that had positive impressions? That doesn’t quite match my sense, although I suppose my impression that Europeans of the time generally had such a sentiment is itself based on modern historians.
Other explanations that come to mind might include: such sentiments actually being pro-colonialist (as in explorers wanting people to fund further exploration; this is clearly the case with Columbus talking about how nice the Arawaks were); possibly books describing wondrous foreign lands selling better if that was a thing back then; the above-mentioned bias of knowing about their own civilizations more thoroughly and thus knowing their flaws better.
What’s interesting is that, with the possible exception of the last one when more European explorers were going to a given place, I can’t see a particular reason for any of those tendencies to switch in the 18th or 19th century. Did they definitely have a distinct switch from positive descriptions to negative descriptions somewhere around there?
I thought it was “anyone wants to be elected President shouldn’t be allowed to do the job”.
I don’t know if this is the correct reference, but a famous line from Douglas Adams’s Restaurant at the End of the Universe was “anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.”
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/2416-the-major-problem-mdash-one-of-the-major-problems-for-there-are
IIRC the book goes on to mention that on some planets, being elected president is grounds for immediately being arrested and sent to prison.
A chapter in Hayek’s Road to Serfdom is entitled “Why the Worst Get on Top.”
In Illinois, being elected governor at least constitutes probable cause.
Welcome to Illinois, where the dead don’t walk but they sure do vote.
I remember reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe as a kid, and (I distinctly remember!) thinking anybody who thought they were qualified to be the president proved they weren’t humble enough to be the president.
Because Frank declined the job of King when Aslan offered it.
“Begging your pardon, sir, and thanking you very much I’m sure (which my Missus does the same) but I ain’t no sort of a chap for a job like that. I never ‘ad much eddycation, you see.” (MN, Ch. 11)
I remember Aslan saying that was proof he was worthy of the job, (though I can’t find the quote to prove I remember correctly.) That massively effected my political beliefs.
That was Prince Caspian who was told by Aslan “since you know you aren’t ready to be King that proves you are wise enough to be king” or words to that effect. I think the Cabby was merely told he had a good heart or such.
Thanks you, Edward!
It was bugging me a bit, wondering if I’d made it up altogether.
Does this mean Washington was the only qualified president (i.e. turning down kingship)?
>President shouldn’t be allowed to do the job
>President shouldn’t be allowed
>President shouldn’t be
Doesn’t the fact the British Empire paid compensation to the slaveholders speak rather well of the Empire? The slaveholders would be among the richest best connected people in the land and would have fought hard against its abolition. Presumably they’d have used the argument of the iniquity of the expropriation of wealth by the government which would have been a huge fear at the time. Well the government dealt with that argument good and proper and still got the slaves freed. Yes, nowadays it sort of boggles the mind, but in a society when slavery was actually legal and only the rich had influence they’d have been looking at it a bit differently. So two cheers for the British Empire.
According to this source from UCL, several MPs who owned large numbers of slaves spoke in favour of and voted for abolition.
I think a large part of the difference between abolition in the UK and in the US is that major British slaveowners were absentees whose slaves were thousands of miles away (slavery has been illegal in Britain itself since medieval times). This meant that their slaves were purely a financial investment, and they had no problem with giving them up in return for sufficient financial compensation.
On the other hand, in the American South plantation owners enjoyed social advantages beyond the financial value of their slaves. I don’t think you would have seen a slave-owning Southern Congressman voting for abolition with compensation.
Slavery in the south was the institution that mediated social relations between all white and black people. Northerners offering compensation to slave owners would have to answer a very difficult question, what will replace the institution that mediates our interactions, what new social form will replace the old? Without a satisfactory response, I don’t think any amount of money was going to change things.
See also: outsourcing.
I wonder how much of their arguing for emancipation was because they saw the writing on the wall and knew that they would lose their slaves whether they liked it or not, so they figured they might as well get something while they still could.
That’s true, but I think it’s besides the point. Slave owners in Britain were necessarily absentee owners, but there were plenty of slave owners in the colonies that enjoyed social advantage from it. Colonists weren’t MPs and couldn’t even vote for MPs, but is that the right metric? Slave owners still had the option of rebellion, an option that they exercised sixty years prior. I think that the more relevant point is that the metropolis had overwhelming force.
The British Empire abolished slavery well after American independence.
I guess Douglas is talking about other colonies?
Presumably Douglas was referring to the Caribbean colonies, which held the vast majority of Britain’s slaves and were not granted independence in the Treaty of Paris.
@ Russell
I agree.
Anyone know how the British government was talked into spending 40% of a year’s income on restitution for slaveholders?
I’ll guess that a part of it was that annual govt expenditure was a lot lower proportionally back then.
Seems like an incredibly important question. Was it a primarily moral choice? I would be so happy if it were.
Yes. You may be interested in William Wilberforce.
Not only was Britain’s abolition v costly and unusually morally motivated but the action it took afterwards was as well: it relentlessly pursued the slave trade abroad, investing a huge amount of naval power in the exercise at the cost of much blood, coin, national security and economic power.
“
From Pape, Robert A. and Chaim D. Kaufmann (1999). ‘Explaining Costly International Moral Action: Britain’s Sixty-Year Campaign against the Atlantic Slave Trade.’ International Organization 53(4): 631-668. which is a very good overview of what lead to Britain’s immense moral undertaking.
Just a nitpick, but the abolition of the slave trade was in 1807, before the abolition of slavery in the Empire in 1833. 1807 is also the year that the USA banned the importation of slaves, the first year allowed by the 1789 Constitution.
Thank you Vaniver. Wikipedia has wet my appetite. I’m looking forward to studying up on him.
“Higher amounts of dairy fat markers in the blood associated with less diabetes. Very reminiscent of past studies showing that whole milk drinkers are healthier than nonfat/lowfat drinkers. Unclear if this says something profound or just that milk is a healthier source of calories than a lot of the alternatives.”
I suspect that it may be the diet soda correlation with obesity. People turn to lower-fat milk to avoid fat.
There’s a far more pedestrian answer
Making skim milk requires taking fats out and adding sugar.
I mean, it’s also likely that there’s something in milk fat that helps with metabolism, but there isn’t some magical connection here.
The data seems to suggest that much of the benefit is for men and boys, given that shopping decisions are done by the women of the household, it’s less likely to be a “fat people avoid fats” issue.
On a personal note, I’ve personally switched to Aussie Yogurt, which is the most fat yogurt you can buy. It’s superior in filling, tastes better, and hopefully is healthier than low fat yogurts. More expensive though.
1. That’s a less pedestrian answer.
2. It’s also false as anyone can see by looking at the ingredients list and seeing there is no sugar added.
3. Women of the house do choose things on basis of benefits to the others in the family.
2 OK sure, if you go out to your cow and spin your own milk you can have milk without cream. A similar unadulterated product is available to purchase in many places. That’s technically how skim milk is made: you separate milk sugars from milk fats. It’s kinda wrong to imply that they ‘add sugar’, more like, you’re taking more from the sugar part and less from the fat part. But it’s easier to hijack how people think about it by saying, “you’re drinking more of the sweet part and not the filling part”
But also some milk sold totally does add sugar.
The other day I had some milk that had for its first three ingredients: Reduced Fat Milk, Nonfat Dry Milk, Sugar. It’a not unusual for Low-fat dairy products sold commercially to compensate the removal of fat with sugar, especially in products targeted to children such as chocolate milk or strawberry milk.
This is also true of Skim ‘enhanced’ or Skim ‘plus’ (Which add milk powder), and low fat dairy products like yogurt and cheeses.
Labeling has improved for milk over the past few decades, so there’s a bunch of information out there from like the 1960s, but corporate America is still allowed a few tricks here and there.
They sell whole milk products with added sugar, too, you know.
The Ideal Conceal cellphone gun may in fact be a hoax.
http://zelmanpartisans.com/?tag=ideal-conceal
Carl Bussjaeger has done the legwork on this and it certainly smells fishy.
My local gun nut club disliked the idea anyway.
They say this thing would be so under-powered you would be better off just throwing your smartphone at attackers.
Shot placement > stoppan powah
Inb4 caliber flamewars on SSC
(On a related note, Zelman Partisans? Did that crop up when Googling the handgun concept, or just how many of us came to SSC via the gun blogosphere?)
Right, so explain how you get proper shot placement with the ergonomics and (lack of) sights of that thing?
…and how is it actually any more concealable or usable than any number of .22/.25/.32 automatics? how is this better in any way than a seecamp?
…If the idea is a hide-in-plain-sight weapon, the russian folding 9mm carbines are way better.
The design is supposed to have an integral laser sight built into it.
Also, is a glorified Derringer meant to be used at very close range, so it’s not exactly like sights are a necessity.
Heck, even the early incarnation of the Rohrbaugh didn’t include iron sights.
(coming to this party late)
You shove it in their face and pull the trigger. Nothing in the world likes getting shot in the face, and as long as you keep the shot below the eyebrows it’s VERY unlikely to skip off (this happens occasionally. Usually on shots that hit high on the forehead). If they don’t fall down immediately you pull the trigger again. With that thing you would then get in a fist fight with their friend. If he didn’t run (and 99% of the time it IS a he).
It uses the same cartridge and has about the same barrel length as a Ruger LCP. I’ve got, let’s just say “more guns than your average texan” and generally buy ammunition by the case, and I recently bought a LCP because I now have to travel places where I’m not legally allowed to carry a gun, and that LCP freaken *disappears* in the front pocket of a pair of properly (if not well) tailored dress pants.
And yes, the .380 is suboptimal as a fighting round. This (and the LCP) is not a fighting gun. It’s a “GTFO ME” gun. It’s a “No, I won’t get in the car with you” gun.
That said, this is not (in my reasonably well trained opinion) a good idea, and it will *probably* require a Title II tax stamp (any other weapon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Title_II_weapons#Any_other_weapon ). Things like this are much more heavily regulated at the state and local level (and not without good reason, in the opinion of this rather extreme gun nut[1]), and if you get caught with it you’re going to get the hammer dropped on you.
For not much more than the cost of that cellphone gimmick you can get a LCP, 2 spare magazines, a wallet holster ( https://smile.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=LCP+wallet+holster) and enough ammunition that you can at least get rounds, uh, where they need to be at 3 to 5 yards.
@ FacelessCraven
It’s only more “concealable” than what you mentioned in that it does not look like a pistol until it’s opened.
To the unobservant it looks like a cellphone. To the observant it looks like something that is trying to look like a cellphone.
It is not until the stock is down that it looks like a gun, and even then a not very gun like gun.
The Seecamp is, I am told by reliable witnesses (not owning one or having shot one…yet) the Rolex of “mouseguns”. It is a finely tuned little jewel of a thing. As a tool for preventing others from enforcing their will on you the Seecamp is, if you can carry it legally, and cannot carry something bigger, really your best bet. I would trust more than my LCP.
However this thing is better in 2 ways: One is that it IS more concealable because it looks like something else, and secondly because it’s 1/2 the price of a Seecamp, if you DO have to carry it places you’re not allowed to have it, and you think you might get caught you’re much more likely to toss this piece of junk down a storm drain.
just how many of us came to SSC via the gun blogosphere?
*raises hand* at least one over here.
@Schilling and Craven, the phone gun is about as worthwhile as the shoe phone, which is to say, not very; the highly concealable niche is already covered by derringers and such, as you say. I just don’t think “underpowered caliber” is a very salient objection. No h8 m8s.
@Hlynka, no shit? I used to read Ride Fast And Shoot Straight and The Smallest Minority and some of those guys back in like 2009. From there to Popehat (and Moldbug! though I didn’t read very much of his stuff at the time) to SSC. A bunch of them haven’t posted anything since 2013 or so, but it looks like a fair number are still up and running. Neat.
@Psmith
I started off with LawDog, Borepatch, Breda, and The Ambulance Driver Files, they lead me to Popehat, Instapundit, and the Smallest Minority who in turn lead me to SSC and the “rationalist diaspora”.
“Hoax” connotes intent to defraud and is an overly strong word for a rather everyday “product that has been conceived and maybe designed but hasn’t raised enough capital to be developed and manufactured.” The website is your bog-standard product pitch to gauge interest and gather potential-backer emails, and makes no claim to the thing actually physically existing yet. There are a million pitches that look just like that, most of which won’t even make it to Kickstarter.
Read the second link.
Leaving aside the obvious scaling issue (for those barrels to be 9.6mm in diameter it would have to be roughly 3 times the size of a normal smartphone) there’s some shadiness going on with their address and BATFE paperwork.
Already did. The second link establishes what I already said: it’s a product that has been conceived but not developed. Calling it a “hoax” betrays zero familiarity with how manufactured products are developed these days.
Isn’t that a necessary condition for this sort of hoax, though? You generally do have to conceive of a fake product before you can get people to pay for or invest in it, and if you do actually develop it then it isn’t a hoax any more.
In this particular case, a strong and well-supported argument has been made that these people will never develop the product they have “conceived” and do not intend to try.
“May”? If there was a single less useful design for a firearm that could cause more of a law enforcement/”think of teh chilluns” anti-rights reaction, I’d like to see it. Hell, the “cellphone gun” thing isn’t even a new law enforcement meme, though the last one I saw was allegedly a zip gun .22 built into an old Nokia frame.
I mean, the damn thing needs preparation before you can even use it as a gun, which is the last thing you want in a holdout. Plus the list of points of failure is substantial with that proposed design.
Seecamp was suggested elsewhere, but if you’re going for obfuscation I’d rather go with an NAA mini in one of the popular lanyard holsters. Sure, the ergonomics on the NAA aren’t any great shakes, but it gives you more shots, is reliable enough that you can count on it going bang when it needs to and not falling apart in your hands, is smaller, and has the benefit of actually existing and having product support.
Also, Seecamps are expensive asf.
I don’t think it’s so much a hoax as it is an example of vaporware.
There’s nothing in the design that is inherently impossible to make, and even the claims that it would constitute an AOW are over blown.
I think what we have is an example of someone who’s confused building CAD model worth going to market.
The fact that the website gave a false address and that the images provided contradict the stated parameters of the pistol would seem to indicate that this is something a bit shadier than “vaporware”
Other games Buddha will not play: Monopoly, Ticket to Ride, Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition, Call of Duty: Black Ops 3, and World of Warcraft ever since the pally nerf.
Wouldn’t Buddha be more likely to play a Monk? 🙂
Nah, he (He? does Buddha count as a god?) believes that the purpose of roleplaying is to be someone different.
You only capitalize pronouns for monotheistic deities, and most forms of Buddhism explicitly reject the idea of a monotheistic creator God. So Buddha is definitely a he, not a He.
>does Buddha count as a god
priest caste? tick.
something like a church with his own iconography? tick.
statues of him that people pray in front/make offerings to? tick.
canonical texts? tick.
something like a heaven? tick.
spoke about resurrection/rebirth? tick.
ascension? tick.
if it walks like a duck, talks like a duck etc
Buddhism’s heavens, hells, and reincarnation exist completely independently of the Buddha, though. After all, they all supposedly existed long before the Buddha reached Enlightenment. In fact, some traditional Buddhist texts discourage trying to get reincarnated in heaven, because the pleasures of heaven make it ill suited for trying to achieve Enlightenment.
I agree that Buddhism as practiced today (especially Eastern countries) looks like a religion. However, if you strip away all the supernatural bits (re-incarnation, the various planes and gods, etc.) you still have something quite interesting. You still have the mental training of meditation and its surprisingly sophisticated metaphysics. If you strip away the supernatural part of western religions I don’t think you are left with much of value.
I find Buddhist “metaphysics” (for lack of a better term) fascinating because of how well they align with modern empirical science. The albatross of essentialism has long hung around our necks and still refuses to die out completely. But the Buddhists always had a better intuition about the primacy of change. We in the West didn’t get it until Darwin.
For this reason I will identify as a Buddhist if pressed to identify with any organized religion. Though all major religions have mystical traditions, few are so well-developed as Buddhism, and, as mentioned, the metaphysics is much more sophisticated, to the point that Hinduism and Daoism ended up borrowing quite heavily.
Several months ago, I read an article which showed evidence that David Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature was inspired by the Orient.
IIRC, Hume’s ideas were transmitted to him via a Jesuit monk residing in Hume’s hometown.
The monk at some point had visited a Jesuit friend in an Eastern mission. This friend had spent the majority of his life trying to convert the Asian citizenry to Christianity, but also learned a great deal of Eastern metaphysics along the way.[REVISION: it turns out it was Desideri who had visited France, rather than Dolu who had visited Tibet.]
I’ll link the article if I can find it.
—————————————–
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/10/how-david-hume-helped-me-solve-my-midlife-crisis/403195/
Allegedly, the town was La Fleche, France. The name of the Jesuit Missionary who studied Eastern metaphysics was Ippolito Desideri. His mission was in Lhasa Tibet. The name of the middleman between Hume and Desideri was P. Charles François Dolu. The reason this historical link is underreported is because Desideri’s manuscript has been locked away in the Vatican’s archives for ages.
Given Hume’s central role in the realization of Modern Science, this suggests that the correspondence between Science and Buddhist Metaphysics was no coincidence (in keeping with the Kabbalah, nothing is ever coincidence). Rather, Modern Science was at least partly inspired by Buddhist Metaphysics.
Don’t exaggerate. It has recently been noticed by various scholars that some of Hume’s ideas have interesting parallels in Buddhism, and the article you mention shows that it could be the case that direct influence played a role, as Hume may have had some exposure to Eastern ideas (via the Jesuit in question). But a lot of Hume’s Western influences are quite obvious and well known, and most of the Treatise was clearly inspired by those Western sources.
Of course he was also inspired by other Western philosophers. Isn’t that common knowledge already?
Like, maybe the Jesuit had no influence on Hume at all. It just seemed like a novel hypothesis worth sharing. Maybe you’re upset that I said “inspired” instead of “influenced”, which you interpreted as saying the oriental influence was the only influence?
Yeah, the wording seemed to imply something quite strong. Apologies if that’s not what you intended.
I won’t play Monopoly either. It is strictly dominated by Chinatown.
It doesn’t look like the list rules out Magic: the Gathering. I wonder what deck the Buddha would play.
Turbofog – achieve victory by abandoning the desire for victory.
He gave up playing competitive formats when Pod got banned, but he’s working on a savage Jalira, Master Polymorphist EDH list.
The confounding variables link currently points to a Google cache link, is this deliberate? (The original article is here.)
Original article’s site was down when I checked, but seems to be up again so I’ve replaced it.
From what I can read there are two separate walls being referenced in the Benin article. In the capital city of Benin was a seven mile long wall that enclosed the royal part of the city and was destroyed by the 1250 British soldiers who conquered the city in 1897. The walls that were longer than the great wall of China refers to walls that totaled 4-8 thousand miles long and were in placed in the various cities and towns of the empire. By the time the British conquered it Benin had been in decline for about 200-300 years and the city was pretty much all that was left of the empire.
> By the time the British conquered it Benin had been in decline for about 200-300 years
Also, the reason of the decline was largely that Benin was too far from the coast and therefore could not compete with the coastal kingdoms that sold slaves to Europeans. The opening of the transatlantic trade route allowed the exploitation of a massive arbitrage opportunity. The Europeans were willing to pay tens of times more per head for slaves than what they were worth locally, and still made massive profits themselves. This completely rerouted the major trade routes in Africa and made former backwaters (eg. Dahomey) into major powers. They could then use their newfound advantages to prey on the previous powerful empires.
Does not really matter. Trade with Europeans was not causing development, on the contrary, it destroyed whatever crafts were already established there, including these very important to further development like metallurgy. Dahomey is actually good example of this, since it was basically a warlord, pirate, state.
A friend who works on digital approaches to Pre-Qin and Han texts recently reported an interesting finding: according to his analyses (which control for things like “this sentence is exactly the same but substitutes one grammatical particle or uses a synonym”), at least 40% of the pre-Qin and Han corpus is recycled. It isn’t surprising to find big chunks of text lifted and copied directly in a manuscript culture, of course, but this applies also to sentences and phrases. That is, it would be like reading an SSC post in which 40% of the sentences were not Scott’s originally, but which Scott had arranged in a novel way. Seems to reflect a more oral culture approach a la Homer.
Quotation is recycling, though, and the pre-Qin text that I’ve read has quotes all over the place. (Not 40%; I expected it was closer to 10%.)
I’m also curious what running the same analysis on, say, articles in a scientific journal would result in. I could easily see upwards of 20% of the text seeming ‘recycled,’ but where the number ends up depends on exactly how recycling is defined.
I am counting quotation as “recycling,” but what is more interesting and, perhaps, surprising, is the frequency of inserting whole, unoriginal sentences into a new composition without any attribution.
Right, but that’s the point of the scientific article comparison–many sentences in such a paper will be almost completely unoriginal. And using idioms or turns of phrase that are unoriginal is also very common, and people don’t attribute those. (“This expresses my meaning.”, for example, is a complete sentence that I picked up from reading Xunzi but wouldn’t reference as a Xunzi quote whenever I used it. It’d be used similarly to “Endorsed” or “This is what I was getting at” used after quoting someone else–both of which are also unoriginal sentences!)
To put it another way, without context for what the percentage is for modern corpuses, I don’t think there’s much reason to see 40% as a remarkable number.
I think he discounted very short, formulaic phrases as would be expected of a particular genre. Though another friend does find that using digital analysis to determine authorship in the Chinese case is complicated by the latter’s stronger generic conventions (yes, individual authors have their notable idiosyncrasies, but one must control for genre, since genre more strongly determined diction in the Chinese case than the Western).
I also don’t think you’d find anywhere close to 40% unoriginal sentences in modern scientific papers. Also, scientific papers are not of the same genre as the texts we’re comparing. We would need to compare Xunzi to, say, Kant, or something.
Regarding the Kansas article — my understanding is that (though the article doesn’t say it explicitly) the service used returns a radius of uncertainty as well, so that it’s actually returning a circular region rather than a specific location. The problem is that people who actually used the service were ignoring the radius. And so they had to move the centers slightly to avoid the problem discussed.
If they provided error bars, he would be saying that they explicitly disclaimed precise locations, not just that they never promised precision.
Hmm. Does his refusal to play dice throwing games preclude Buddha from playing Dungeons & Dragons? (Or for that matter, Dungeons & Discourse?)
That would be really sad.
It is known that religious strictures can be circumvented by loophole, so Buddha should be okay if he uses random.org instead.
Then again, maybe that’s actually an exhaustive list of every game that existed at the time, and the idea is to avoid all games because they encourage attachment to winning. In which case, never fear, Buddhists—you can still play Dwarf Fortress.
Dwarf Fortress instead encourages attachment to magma.
But winning is fun!
That’s the point of avoiding it. You cannot have fun if you want to achieve Enlightenment.
No DF then. Or possibly only very short games that are deleted as soon as a werecreature appears.
If the Buddha needs to play games which he has no attachment to, he’s going to end up attaining enlightenment via a long series of heartbreaker RPGs.
Or maybe FATAL.
There are RPGs that use cards as a random generator instead of dice. As there are no cards in a list, they’re okay.
Buddha takes 10 on every check, since mindfulness means he is never distracted or threatened.
Some of these studies are interesting and about stuff I’d like to discuss, but given that half the links here indicate that all studies are garbage, what would be the point?
Just write one comment assuming it’s true and then another comment assuming it’s false. Whenever someone links a study debunking that study, you just link to your skeptical comment proving that you were right all along!
Yeah, being That Guy who points out the blatant flaws in all the studies other people mention makes you unpopular
at cocktail partieson internet forums. Believe me, I know.I bet the people who spent years building a secret data center directly underneath that Kansas farm are pretty upset right now.
Speaking of sad deaths David MacKay, who wrote the excellent and free online Sustainable Energy – without the hot air, passed away yesterday.
For that matter his _Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms_ is quite good and online (and contains some pretty TeX-with-figures book design even if you don’t feel like diving into equations).
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/itprnn/book.html
🙁
Damnit.
The world needs more people like that with their heads screwed on, not less.
I was hoping to one day see an updated version of that book but no chance now.
I was howling with laughter on the climate science paragraph’s first sentence…expecting yet another the warming pause is not real…until I read the second half of it. What has happened? Have the scientists taken control of the climate asylum now? It must be mentioned that this is one in a long line of potential explanations for the pause, and there is little consensus on this subject.
A major pet peeve of mine on this not to be named subject was always that we are inundated with “hottest year ever” and so forth reports and it was to the point of absurdity that no media outlet ever showed comparisons of observational temperatures vs. modeled / projected temperatures.
A major debate with climate science is not whether warming has occurred or whether greenhouse gases are part of this, it is whether the models are useful and accurate enough to base policy on. To tie it into earlier parts of this post, the confounders in climate modeling are many, not least of which is the unknown magnitude of natural (non-man made) climate variability.
Even if you view the observed vs modeled temperatures charts in this link, what is not obvious is that these models have only been operating in prediction mode for ~15 years and they are almost out of their 95% thresholds *already*. (How they came up with these error bands is ludicrous if you want to examine this). Viewing the hindcast (historical) model sections of these charts show clear signs of overfitting, they match the historical record way too closely.
What the modelers lack is long term observational records for some of the parameters they are most interested in. For example there are not detailed aerosol measurements or ocean depth temperature observations or atmospheric temperatures until very recently (past 20 years). This has left historical models with a lot of guesswork. Perhaps they guessed well, perhaps not. Based on model vs observation, I’m leaning toward “not” at the moment, but it is still too early to tell. Many agree you need about 30 years to judge a model due to climate variability.
The oceans contain ~90% of the climate’s heat and move it around on a decadal long cycle. There is some evidence for a 60 year cycle, and if they store and release heat as part of this long term cycle it will cause significant problems with models until they get this part correct.
There was a runup of temperatures in the 80’s and 90’s and to vastly oversimplify things, modelers assumed that this base rate of warming would continue. Then the 2000’s came. So either natural variability is suppressing this base rate of warming or they got the base rate (i.e. climate sensitivity) of warming wrong in their models. This is not a detail, it is the foundation of climate predictions. There is a lot of political pressure from environmentalists to not adjust climate sensitivity in the downward direction.
I don’t think I am going out on a limb here to state that the major media outlets will ignore this story like an ugly step child.
I don’t even have a dog in the climate fight, but I would love a relatively nonpartisan site that made those comparisons public, ideally in some form that’d make it easy to crunch numbers on them.
For what it’s worth, I did a very simple version of comparing model predictions to outcomes on my blog some time ago. I had been told by people on one side of the argument that the IPCC did a wonderful job of predicting warming, by people on the other side that it did a terrible job.
So I read through the IPCC reports and calculated, for each, what one would have expected thereafter on the basis if what that report said. Then compared it to what happened. For details see:
http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2014/03/have-past-ipcc-temperature.html
For reference, the trend from 1990 to 2013 in GISTEMP is 0.166 +/- 0.081 c/decade, your numbers in that post are wrong. There’s a convenient trend calculator here.
I don’t think there is a nonpartisan climate site out there. This is definitely a “if you are not with me then you are against me” political environment.
This particular site does some fairly in depth examinations:
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2009/year-end-trend-comparison-individual-model-runs-2001-2008/
The models are running hot, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be on target given more time. It’s really more complicated than it seems. The models are run forward assuming certain external climate forcings (such as the expected rate of volcanic eruptions) so they could show errors even if they were perfectly programmed due to an out of range forcing introduced.
My guess is models are going to take literally decades to centuries to work out because the measure-evaluate-edit modeling cycle takes so long to occur.
But if a couple of events that we suck at predicting (e.g. volcanic eruptions) knock you outside your prediction, doesn’t that count against the usefulness of your model for policy purposes? It certainly seems to suggest that your signal to noise ratio is not that good.
Anyway that’s why I hated the “pause isn’t real” vs “pause proves global warming never happened” debate. It’s pretty obvious that something interrupted the 80s/90s trend. And that means that either we overpredicted climate sensitivity to CO2 output, or we underpredicted natural variability (or both). Either way, it means we still need to update our models. (Of course it’s also bleedingly obvious that it’s hotter now than it was a century ago, so something is really going on)
And, it means that the science is not “settled” and it’s important not to demonize everyone even lightly skeptical of doomsday predictions as a “denier” because there’s still a lot we need to learn about the climate. Dumping stuff into the atmosphere and assuming it will have no effect is hubris – but so is assuming our still fledgling enlightenment can both dominate and fully predict the vastly complex system of the planet.
Almost everyone in the pause discussion ignores the thirty year pause in the mid-20th century.
Read this post and its accompanying comments for some pretty good insight on just how badly the models are “overheated”. https://climateaudit.org/2016/01/05/update-of-model-observation-comparisons/#comments
Suppose it is the case that one side in the fight is acting in bad faith, massaging their data, selectively picking sources, and so on. Would you be able to distinguish between a nonpartisan site correctly diagnosing the issues and a partisan site slinging mud? How?
I get the argument you’re making, but for the Anthropogenic Climate Change side to be acting in bad faith would require a worldwide conspiracy and workforce that would dwarf the manpower that would have been required to pull off a moon landing hoax.
In this case, Occam’s Razor applies.
Collective bad faith does not require an organized conspiracy. If members of a community share common interests and incentives, their individual acts of bad faith may be highly correlated. See, e.g., the Social Justice movement, or most forms of racism since the end of Jim Crow.
So we are not all going to burn/freeze to death in the next five years? Well, colour me surprised! 🙂
The only advantage of being grumpy old person: you’ve seen all these flaps before about “Unless we do something immediately NOW we will all die, so give me $$$$$ to research this!”
Having lived through at least three “the end of the world because of overpopulation/oil will run out/the new ice age” scares, I have always taken the ”
global warmingclimate change” panic with a grain of salt. (Also, Al Gore’s big smug face pontificating on global warming while he jetted around the globe annoyed the heck out of me, which is not very rational, I realise, when it comes to deciding the merits of the case).Does human activity affect the environment? Yes. Should we be cleaning up our act when it comes to polluting energy production? Yes. Are we all going to die tomorrow? Eventually, yes, but not by one of these scares.
Climate projections, alarmist though they sometimes are, generally do not make predictions along the lines of “we will all die in five years”. It is common to see claims that such-and-such a model has us passing an irreversible tipping point in <10 years, but even those models reserve the actual apocalyptic consequences for a century or two out.
You could be forgiven for getting the opposite impression from media reports, but if death and taxes are the two great certainties in life, media sensationalism can't be a very distant third.
On the other hand, Deiseach is absolutely right that the outside view implies one should be somewhat sceptical of climate change alarmism. Not just in spite of, but especially because of, the fact that there is a consensus of 100% of scientists who are all 110% certain that this is definitely going to happen and double definitely going to cause Hell on Earth. Because that was also true of the previous imminent disasters that ended up not happening.
Like ozone depletion and Y2K and acid rain and smoking causing cancer?
I don’t think the outside view is on Deiseach’s side.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/02/how-common-are-science-failures/
Correct me if I’m wrong, but wouldn’t a fairly decent average be something like 2C warmer in 2100, and 2 feet of sea rise in that same time period?
And that’s SUPER-annoying (Among other things, farming seems to be very temperature-sensitive), but people talking about Florida underwater or the end of snow in the USA are just… no.
That sounds about right as an average, yeah. I’m talking mainly about the more fringey, speculative stuff, though, not the IPCC estimates or the various models they’re based on.
And that still doesn’t predict doom in the next couple decades.
Depends on the scenario. Wiki has a pretty good summary. I’ve been told that RCP8.5 burns more fossil fuel than is reasonably recoverable, but I’m not sure how true that is. RCP6.0 has a mean of 2.2c by 2100 and half a metre of SLR, so 2c and 2 feet is a pretty good estimate.
…Except that that’s relative to the recent past, not preindustrial. That is, it’s 2c warmer than nowish, which is already warmer than preindustrial by ~0.6c.
Quick calculation: CO2 has gone from 280 to 400. We’re ~half of the way to doubling (ln(400/280) / ln(2) ~= 0.51). Climate sensitivity of 2c implies 1c warming, sensitivity of 4c implies 2c warming, already at about +0.6 from preindustrial, so 0.4 to 1.4c more than we’ve currently got if we emit no more.
RCP8.5 is pretty unlikely, huge population increases, burning 10x more coal than today, etc. If China / India can reign in their development or use cleaner energy than the middle RCP scenarios are much more likely. I think China will do it for air pollution (smog) concerns mostly. If you have visited China recently you will know what I am talking about.
RCP8.5 was never intended to be a likely scenario, it was there to bound the problem. Activists routinely quote RCP8.5 numbers like they the middle ground.
Climate projections, alarmist though they sometimes are, generally do not make predictions along the lines of “we will all die in five years”
Ahem.
Given that we are now in the Year of Our Lord 2016, perhaps we should be expecting to all drown as the melted Arctic ice cap floods our coasts in
20152025?Though I agree: forecasts in 2009 for the Dread Year of 2015 are not “in five years time” but six years 🙂
And of course, you were all doubtless labouring under the malign effects of the Global Air Conditioner shortage in the over-heated USA last year?
I am so glad we in Ireland were spared the horror of mass rioting in the streets as desperate citizens turned on one another like rabid dogs, fighting over the last remaining stock of air conditioners, due to our Nine Months of Constant Rain from what would have been the summertime onwards 🙂
Arctic Ocean ice melting doesn’t cause sea levels to rise, because the Arctic Ocean ice is floating. Dr. Carlson could well be right about the ice free Arctic Ocean happening soon (the minimum level of arctic ice has been dropping, and the trend wouldn’t have to go that much further for his prediction to come true). What you quote doesn’t say anything about sea level rise, which would be caused by melting in Antarctica (and Greenland), melting that is thankfully proceeding much more slowly.
Hey, Deiseach, actually looked at a graph of Arctic summer ice extent? Just by eye that’s ~3 million kilometres of extent gone over 36 years, 0.08 million km/year, 5 million left, when arctic researchers talk about an ice-free or nearly-ice-free Arctic they mean ~1 million km**2 left (see this abstract for an example), so 48 years from now.
But there are definitely papers suggesting it could happen earlier, and straight-forward linear estimates of Arctic extent have been plenty wrong. Maybe Dr David Carlson prefers a quadratic fit, or something less statistical and more model-y. Arctic sea ice extent is an area where models are more conservative than the projections. See this paper, for example, looking at CMIP3 vs CMIP5 vs observations. 2025 is a perfectly respectable estimate. I certainly expect to see an ice-free arctic in my lifetime. And I note that the prediction wasn’t terribly clear on timeline – just ‘within a generation’, and noting that 2015 and 2025 both fall inside that area, with some implication of bounds.
tl;dr the only reason you think that one is ‘alarmist’ is because you’re ignorant. Also it doesn’t say “we will all die”
I have no idea what that last one is supposed to be. And maybe it’s funny to you, but living in Australia, whether or not your air conditioning functions in summer is a really big goddamn deal. And yes, air conditioners do have temperature constraints they expect to operate in and if they go outside them it reduces operating life.
Climate alarmism hyperbole is not hard to find. I expect most people ignore this stuff. I find it hard to believe it ever makes it to print sometimes.
Ignore climate change and 100m people will die by 2030, shocking new report claims
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2208953/Shock-report-claims-100m-people-die-economic-growth-drop-3-2-2030-climate-change-ignored.html
Goodbye Miami
By century’s end, rising sea levels will turn the nation’s urban fantasyland into an American Atlantis. But long before the city is completely underwater, chaos will begin
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/why-the-city-of-miami-is-doomed-to-drown-20130620
James Picone, “48 years from now” is not the same as “by 2015 – or 2025”.
I am indeed ignorant but having heard various Chicken Littles running around about how the sky is falling, and then the sky does not fall, when yet another one runs around I tend not to jump so quickly to belief that this time for sure it’s gonna happen.
And if you don’t think breathless forecasts of “I don’t know when but I know it’s gonna happen and we can’t stop it and it could be tomorrow or the day after” aren’t alarmist, what do you consider alarmist?
I’m not denying that there is something going on with the climate, I don’t know anything near enough of the science to have an opinion. But I can certainly have an opinion on how it is reported, how it is splashed about and presented to the public, and how people with an interest and conviction that Something Must Be Done are quite happy to see the mass of the public stampeded into a panic as the only way to get any change going.
@Deiseach
So:
* Chicken Little was screaming about the ozone layer. We changed our ways rather drastically with respects to CFCs and dodged the bullet.
* Chicken Little was screaming about the Y2K problem. We put in a truly impressive number of programmer hours and dodged the bullet.
* Therefore when Chicken Little screams about global warming we should do nothing.
I think there may be a flaw in that logic
@ Richard
Speaking of Chicken Little predictions, I recall being told in the 1970s that Social Security was going broke any day now, but here it still is.
Social Security might be a good analogy. It WAS unsustainable on its trajectory, and has been patched with numerous tax increases over the years.
SS is projected to max out at 6.5% of GDP before falling to 6.1% of GDP, so it will still require additional taxes, but it won’t balloon much further.
Medical care is the new hip thing to Chicken Little about.
I have fun in climate arguments citing the IPCC against the alarmists. One of my favorite lines:
“Some low-lying developing countries and small island states are expected to face very high impacts that, in some cases, could have associated damage and adaptation costs of several percentage points of GDP.”
Consider the last five words.
Several! That means more than two!
For some of these low-lying communities, that could run into the dozens of dollars! Hundreds even!
I’m not sure how much people who argue for strict and expensive measures against the GWO actually care about the economy and the GDP. They operate with those things insofar as they believe that it will convince the other people to support their cause. But I think their main concern is either with the modern lifestyle which they don’t like or with preserving animal species and biodiversity (which is where they probably might have the strongest case, although there might be more efficient ways to do it than battling GWO, but it requires one to admit that it is not the costs to humans which he actually cares about – at which point they might be worried about not getting enough support).
The study’s authors include several well-known climate scientists – Mann, Meehl, Xie, Kosaka, Santer, England, in no particular order. They were always scientists.
I’m still with Cahill et al. 2015 – there’s no statistical evidence of a change in trend.
p.s. it’s transient climate response, not sensitivity, we’re not at equilibrium yet.
You do realize that there is not necessarily a contradiction between saying that there is a pause and that that the trend is still going right? The underperformance of the last few years is counterbalanced by the overperformance in the 80’s and 90’s. But if the pause continues, then that won’t be true anymore.
Hasn’t the pause ended, with El Nino?
Of course, with all the adjustments to the data sets which were made to try to make the pause go away, the data is even more hopelessly contaminated than it was before.
One year doesn’t disprove a trend. If the years 2015-2025 are hotter than 2005-2015 then it would be safe to say the pause is over.
And the rapid warming from 1911 to about 1940 and from 1970 to about 2002 is counterbalanced by the constant to falling temperatures between 1940 and 1970. The IPCC special cased the midcentury pause to aerosols rather than interpreting it as part of a recurring pattern.
In fact, from your perspective, you are actually hurting your case by insisting that there is no pause. Because when the layman looks at a graph of global temperatures and quite clearly sees that the last 10-15 years haven’t been heating up he’s going to(quite reasonably I believe) believe that global warming has paused. Whenever you come and tell him “no, no that’s not a statistical pause”, he’s going to assume you’re pulling a fast one on him in the sense of “lies, damn and statistics.” And then he’s going to start questioning everything your saying.
So please stop telling us that there is no pause, because we can clearly see otherwise. Admitting that the last 10-15 years hasn’t been heating up as much as before doesn’t mean that you have to give the idea of global warming. Just acknowledge that there hasn’t been as much of an increase in the last few years and then point out that we are still following the same trend. As Mann has seen, denying it only hurts your case.
The pause implications are mainly about climate sensitivity, and that it begins to make the higher climate sensitivity numbers much less likely.
There were a lot of people in the 90’s that thought the models were too conservative and the rate of warming would rise sharply after 2000.
It is not unreasonable to suggest that the warming rate is the average of the higher 80’s/90’s trend plus the post 2000 lower trend. What seems pretty clear is that nobody really knows.
A lot virtual ink will be spilled on this subject but the only path to the real answer is to wait and measure, wait and measure….
It should be noted that many people claimed the run up in the 90’s could not possibly be due to natural climate forcings, or that natural climate variability effects were negligible. Many of those same people are now claiming a strong negative natural climate forcing is suppressing the 90’s warming trend.
As for the oceans, they have only had global deep depth coverage for less than 15 years, so anyone who claims to know the answer of historical ocean dynamics, doesn’t. They have attempted to model past ocean dynamics which are then used in conjunction with climate models. As the attachment to actual observations become more tenuous these modeling efforts become more what the modelers think the answer should be than a useful model with prediction skill.
I trust the weatherman because he has established prediction skill. The jury is out on climate models. See you in 2030 when a more definitive answer is available. Until then we should convert to lower carbon energy where it is economically feasible and try to make it cheaper so China/India will embrace it. The world won’t end before then.
I find it telling that the standard for determining whether climate models are useful has moved from 15 years to 30 years just as the “hiatus” reaches 15 years in length.
I seem to recall there being at least one prominent warmist who boldly stated that a pause for 15 years would be sufficient.
But perhaps thats just my faulty memory.
On the “hottest year ever” as proof there is no pause argument …
Assume that temperatures are trending up until 2002, constant with random variation thereafter. For the next decade plus, one would expect hottest years ever to be reasonably common–every time the random variation happens to be positive and bigger than before.
I also note that for about as long as the “pause” or “hiatus” has been under discussion, defenders of the consensus have assured us that the whole thing was a statistical artifact caused by the anomalously warm El Nino year of 1998. And to an extent they are right – 1998 was a clear outlier that should probably be discounted in any statistical analysis. Mind you, even with 1998 thrown out the hiatus is still real and statistically significant, though it doesn’t clearly show up until 2003-2004.
But if we have to throw out 1998 because anomalous El Nino years don’t count, then we probably have to throw out 2015 as well. The hiatus is real and statistically significant if we include both outliers, and it is real and statistically insignificant if you throw out both outliers. It needs to be addressed, and it needs to be addressed as something that is ongoing and may continue well into the future. I am glad to see that the community is taking this seriously.
I’m still trying to figure out if climate science can reliably describe the cause of the end of the last Ice Age.
Not that Little Ice Age thing in the 1700s, but the Ice Age that had glaciers south of the current border between the U.S. and Canada.
Once we get a good grasp of the causes of the beginning and end of that kind of Ice Age, then I think science can begin to quantify the human impact on Earth’s climate for the upcoming century.
I think you are referring to the most recent glaciation. The ice age we are currently in has been going for more than two million years.
I prognosticate that the guaranteed income experiment in Kenya will go so badly that it will be either gracefully terminated in due time, allowing for some milquetoast screeds in its defence (25% probability), or terminated too late, by necessity, demanding that it be never spoken of again (50% probability).
I prognosticate that it will go very well, and will be trotted out as This One Study Says It Will Work during online debates, which will persuade exactly no-one and won’t do anything to make the idea more popular.
I prognosticate that it will go decently but not spectacularly well, and people will keep eternally arguing about just how well/poorly it went, and whether its results can be extrapolated to national scale in the West. (Guess what? They’re already getting a head start on that last one, and I’m on Team Can’t Extrapolate From There.)
Dark Star Safari and its ilk have persuaded me that throwing money at Africans usually hurts them. That was written a long time ago though. Be interesting to see how this goes.
On the other hand, results from Give Directly have generally been good so far.
(I still prefer to support AMF, though.)
Bowling lanes are indeed an important charity.
I don’t know what the overall effect will be, but I predict that one outcome will be for recipients to work less than comparable Kenyans. In a situation where a country with a developed welfare system replaced it with a GBI, I would not expect this to be the case.
On the other hand, an argument against UBI I often see is that it probably wouldn’t replace welfare systems but would just be introduced as an extra layer on top of them.
I thought GBI was being proposed as a way to provide social stability in the face of mass unemployment due to the machines having taken most of the jobs. This sounds more to me like variation of welfare, especially since it is only for the poor.
I donate to GiveDirectly and I’m glad that they’re doing this experiment. Even if the results can’t be extrapolated to First World countries, it can still tell us about how to (or not to) do charity. But the headline of that article really rubs me the wrong way.
What If We Just Gave Poor People a Basic Income for Life? That’s What We’re About to Test.
By giving them a basic income for 10-15 years.
And it’s even written by GiveDirectly cofounders. I can see that a basic income for life would not be feasible for them, but that headline is really misleading.
…darn, that’s really unfortunate. So if the experiment finds a lot of people getting educations and good jobs and saving money, that could just be a result of them knowing the income will end which wouldn’t replicate with a lifelong guarantee.
Maybe if the study goes well, the correct response is to try a subsequent lifelong study, although unfortunately that means a 10-15 delay just in trying it.
I honestly doubt it. People in the West don’t often think ten to fifteen years out, and I don’t think there’s anything about the Third World that’d make people there more likely to do so.
There might be small differences, but discounting being what it is, I wouldn’t expect large ones.
The unstated assumption is that all of them will be dead in 15 years
” People in the West don’t often think ten to fifteen years out”
From which it follows that nobody enrolls in law school unless he has a scholarship that covers most of it. You are unlikely to recover the costs in the first seven years of practice.
I wouldn’t think med school plus internship would be much of a deal either.
“Not often” is not “never”. We’ve developed a handful of institutions revolving around specific long-term payoffs, mainly having to do with education, real estate, and retirement savings. But how often do you see people going after non-traditional versions of these, or inventing new ones?
People in the West (and outside it too) tend to be innumerate.
“You are unlikely to recover the costs in the first seven years of practice.”
Wouldn’t that imply that you are also unlikely to be required to pay back the loans in the first seven years of practice? In theory a lack of full consideration for long-term income could be balanced out by a lack of full consideration for long-term debt.
If they only treat some villages and not other that have access to the same market towns, then this will work at least to some degree. It’s only when you give a basic income to everyone in an economy that you run into the limits of a static pool of resources.
I’m confused why I never heard about this before
This is where I roll my eyes and do grumpy old-person tut-tutting about “what are they teaching them in school nowadays?”. Or else I jump up and down and go “This! This is why sciency-types need the humanities, and not just in a “we did an easy module for our degree requirements where we all wrote an essay” manner”.
The Benin bronzes? Not ringing any bells? Large powerful indigenous kingdom with European and other trade links, until they got on the wrong side of the British in the late 19th century?
Didn’t Scott major in the humanities for his undergrad degree?
There seems to be odd gaps in art and music, for one. This is why I’d grab all the curriculum setters who include the latest (by their reckoning, actually they’re twenty years out of date) trendy authors etc. for schools in order to be “relevant to the youth” and force them to include a good global historical overview, and not to be afraid of the Classical past because of Oh No Not More Dead White European Males notions; 16th century Benin is just as Classical as anything 🙂
I mean, people can’t realistically learn everything. Once you’ve added a “good global ____ overview” for every subject, there’s no room to specialize.
Well, it doesn’t have to be deep, just broad; for specialisation, people can then pick “Hey, this sounds interesting, I’d like to learn more!” rather than, as is currently complained of in the history course for schools in Britain, the 20th century curriculum is basically the Second World War and there’s not much in the years after that, much less modern history, and of course it gets reduced down to Hitler vs Britain.
Niall Ferguson, with whom I do not often agree, said in a 2011 article for the Guardian newspaper:
What’s the old phrase “jack of all trades, master of poverty”
It’s about as practical as making sure that every linguist spends a few years learning the “basics” of quantum physics: most likely effect making everyone’s lives worse.
I got a chance to try out no less than 19 subjects, it was first year of secondary school. A history course which covered every dead empire in that year would have little room for anything beyond “Benin existed”
In Scott’s defense, I have a PhD in humanities, spend a ton of time in museums and have never heard of this empire. Reminds me a bit of Cahokia in that it’s a case where you have a supposedly huge city which basically left no trace except, in this case, some large mounds. Part of me is skeptical that the scale of Benin (and maybe Cahokia) isn’t being exaggerated (comparing these walls to the Great Wall of China seems misleading), though I agree with Scott that even the people one would expect to exaggerate their significance don’t seem to (I see Nubia and Abyssinia cited far more often), but I think there’s another reason: we are very biased toward people who build in stone.
Honestly, the whole Benin Bronzes issue seems to be a pretty parochial issue that wouldn’t be part of an American curriculum. Just like I wouldn’t expect Europeans to know about the Battle of Wounded Knee or the controversy around the Black Hills & Mt. Rushmore.
Right, there are huge portions of history that simply wouldn’t pop up in any reasonable syllabus. Even closer to home, much of Central European and Eastern European history is glossed over compared to Western developments.
As an example, my ancestors, the Hungarians, walked over from Europe, conquered an ethnically diverse and economically vital region of Europe, created a superpower that lasted centuries, and then was crushed.
Not really my ancestors, though…”Hungarian” is more cultural than genetic. The conquered peoples all became Hungarian.
I mention this because I want to name a future son Attila, a very popular name in Hungary. My Wife is….uhh…not convinced.
There’s a lot of glossed over history, is my main point. Closer to home, we don’t pay anywhere near enough attention to the Western Hemisphere, even events like the Mexican Revolution that had a major impact on Western affairs.
I don’t know how history is taught at schools in Hungary, but what I remember (I’m Czech) is that once it covers the prehistory and antiquity (which is probably taught the same everywhere) and moves on to the middle ages it was mostly centered on the Kingdom of Bohemia and the Holy Roman Empire (which it was a part of) and subsequently the Austrian Empire with emphasis on Bohemia. Other than that, the only two countries which get covered in more detail and without huge gaps in time are France and England, most of the rest of Europe gets usually glossed over or is only mentioned if something happens there which affects Bohemia or Austria. Some countries are hardly ever mentioned at all – Ireland, Scotland, Portugal, the Low countries or Switzerland, Baltic countries, the various states in Italy. So it was more like France and England/Britain got a lot more coverage than anything else in Europe (or anywhere), save for the local history. I’m not sure where the choice of France and Britain comes from. Probably because they ended up being (HRE and Austria excluded) the countries (maybe) most influential on medieval and early-modern European history. Spain is also mentioned quite often.
Outside of Europe, there’s a bit about the pre-colonial Incan and Aztec Empires, then a little bit about the conquistadors and then nothing until the Boston Tea Party. Non-US American countries get very little coverage. Far East: Genghis Khan, Marco Polo, Pearl Harbour. Middle East: A little bit about how Muhammad came up with Islam and that’s about that, the Ottomans are only mentioned when they threaten Austria. Sub-Saharan Africa is rarely mentioned at all, save for more or less “The English conquered those places”.
By the way, not that you should care, but I think Attila is a horrible name 🙂
I mention this because I want to name a future son Attila, a very popular name in Hungary.
By the way, not that you should care, but I think Attila is a horrible name ?
How about Imre as a Hungarian boy’s name? I’ve always liked it, though my exposure to it was through Hammer Horror’s Countess Dracula where Sandor Elès played Lieutenant Imre Toth, which may not endear the name to your wife 🙂
And Imre Lakatos, the philosopher of science.
@TheAncientGeek
There is a mathematics professor at Cambridge named Imre Leader, who is not Hungarian but is named after Lakatos, who was his godfather.
The other famous Imre, of course, was Imre Nagy.
You spent that much time on Czech history? I’d figure ‘don’t stand too close to windows’ would have sufficed. It might’ve saved you all a lot of frustration just doing that.
Stefan, defenestrations are like Pringles – you can’t have just one.
@Stefan: :)) Actually, in Czech, there is an idiom “throw him out of the window, he will come back through the door”. Actually, I don’t know what it means exactly. I think it is supposed to be used to describe someone who keeps annoying you and won’t leave you alone 🙂
He’s a sea lion!
@Nancy: A sea lion?
A cartoon about a sea lion that just won’t go away— it’s been discussed here (probably not worth starting up again).
“A cartoon about a sea lion that just won’t go away”– wonderfully ambiguous phrase, that, and true either way.
Kush isn’t very well known.
Mary Gentle on the forgotten kingdom of Brugundy:
Burgundy was an important kingdom only briefly.
Also there’s the usual equivocation between “kingdom” and “civilization”. Burgundy may be forgotten as a state but the Benelux cultures that were its economic engine didn’t vanish and are of course known.
This is not the same thing as the civilization in Benin being ignored.
Anyhow there are lots and lots and lots of significant historical kingdoms and cultures people don’t know about. Nothing special with Benin and Kush and Burgundy.
Kush isn’t very well known.
At the risk of parading my ignorance once again, really? Because I knew of Kush from the Queen Mother of Kush being shown in Egyptian wallpaintings and Mentioned In Dispatches, as well as Kush trading with Egypt.
And once again, if I know it, it surely can’t be that obscure?
(I swear to God, I do recognise this stuff when I read it linked on here, I don’t rush off and Google it and pretend I knew about it before it was cool).
I do get very confused, though, between the Hurrians, Hittites and Hattians and I can never remember who came first: the Akkadians or the Sumerians 🙂
(I did have links to online Akkadian dictionaries/word lists for translation purposes because of following Tolkien blogs that, when role-playing as the Valar, used Akkadian to eke out the Valarin word list Tolkien gave but I’ve since lost/deleted those).
The problem with Kush is that it’s more famous under other names.
It is refered to as “Ethiopia” in the New Testament and in Latin writers (although it’s entirely unrelated to present day Ethiopia).
It is also known as the kingdom of Meroe.
“Nubia” sometimes denotes Kush/Meroe.
The Biblical “Candace”, after whom many women are named, was the queen of Ethiopia=Meroe=Kush.
I had always known that kingdom under those other names. I checked Wikipedia and realized that Kush is the same one.
I could simply be mistaken about Kush not being well known. I only found out about it because of a National Geographic article, and I haven’t seen much about it since. The article said that Kush got less attention because no one knew how to translate the inscriptions.
Maybe I’m estimating myself too highly, but I think I’m pretty knowledgeable by my generation’s standards, and I couldn’t have told you what Kush was, I only know about Burgundy from the Europa Universalis games, and as for Benin I only recall a quick mention in history class.
I might be overestimating my knowledge, but I really think Deiseach is severely underestimating hers.
“My Wife is….uhh…not convinced.”
Funny, I had the same reaction when I suggested we consider the name Barabbas for our son….
Everyone wants unique names, right?
I was lent a book on Wounded Knee back in the 70s, so it was in the cultural air at the time, and I was made aware of the controversy around the Black Hills of Dakota through watching Westerns (and these were the older, black-and-white Westerns, not the 70s consciousness-raising ones).
I mean, African art – like the Benin bronzes and ivories – is not exactly what I’d call “parochial”, especially when it comes to the USA and specifically invented culturally-sensitive festivals like Kwanzaa.
Maybe it’s just that I’m weird and had an unusual exposure to art and history in my rural Irish childhood? 🙂
Incidentally, a lot of people thought that when the Battle of Wounded Knee is mentioned in Bioshock Infinite it was a reference to Skyrim (I used to be an adventurer like you till I took an arrow to the knee).
So does that mean the Skyrim reference was itself a veiled allusion to Wounded Knee? Circles within circles!
I sure hope you know about every interesting thing in the world, because if you don’t I’m going to make fun of you and your education the next time it comes up.
True, kind, necessary?
Comment reported.
I was not intending to mock your education, Scott. I was surprised that if I, someone from the arse-end of nowhere in rural Ireland, was aware of the existence of the Empire of Benin, then how was it someone well-educated, from an urban background that was not unsophisticated or unlettered was apparently ignorant of it?
Again, this is one of those instances where I really should do the “Attention! Humour attempt forthcoming!” signposting, in order not to inadvertently cause offence (I want my offensiveness to be very advertent and intentional).
Go on, throw something mathematical at me, I’ll be shockingly ignorant, all can point and mock, and Cosmic Balance will be restored.
https://xkcd.com/1053/
James Picone, I definitely was not calling Scott an idiot; I forget that I am much older than he so naturally I have a couple of decades’ head start on bumping up against things in the world (that xkcd comic could probably shift the “Fraction of people who know it by age 30” up a few years).
My attitude tends to be “If I, uneducated bumpkin from the back of beyond know this thing/have heard of it, then it must be commonplace knowledge and surely someone who is demonstrably more intelligent, better educated, of a higher socio-economic class and from an urbanised background must also know this plainly obvious thing”.
I assure you, it does not often happen that I know Thing that smarter person does not know. This should not be seen as me mocking smarter person, but rather finding amusement in the oddity of how the world works.
Scott is perfectly entitled to make fun of my education when next I display my ignorance of a commonplace fact that everyone does know, as my education is largely autodidactism and a self-made (wo)man has been justly remarked to often be a waste of the original materials.
“My attitude tends to be “If I, uneducated bumpkin from the back of beyond”
Not a correct description.
One could get relatively well versed in humanities without ever hearing about Benin. (Talking about university level education.)
More of the mystery is why it isn’t included in pre-university level, either. At least wasn’t here.
When I was at UCLA in 1980-82, I helped set up an exhibition of “Benin bronzes” at Exhibition Park. The art was impressively well done and some pieces were quite charming.
Here’s an NYT review of an earlier stop of this art tour:
http://www.nytimes.com/1981/02/06/arts/art-the-glories-of-benin-s-royalty.html
Paging Ilya Shpitser
I don’t disagree, re: importance — this is about “measurement error.” The three biggies in causal inference are (in increasing order of difficulty): confounding bias, selection bias, and measurement error. This article is about measurement error.
The other big thing with “adjusting for confounders” is this is only correct if a certain model holds. If not, more complex adjustments are needed (see my thesis for details).
For people who read Judea’s book, the graph is:
C -> C*
C -> A
C -> Y
A -> Y
You want the causal effect of A on Y. You see C*, but not C. C is the real confounder. Conditioning on C* does not d-separate A and Y via a backdoor path. So adjusting for C* does not eliminate bias properly.
Pardon my inattentiveness. I’m not sure when easy to use formatting buttons appeared but they are a fantastic addition.
They were added a few days ago. Glad they’re working out!
In regard to the complimentary=sounding remarks in recommendation letters, I’m reminded of a professor I know who, in academic recommendation letters for students whose personalities he dislikes, has adopted the practice of writing “He/she is smarter than he/she is wise”.
When I graduated college the engineering department would have their own graduation ceremony the night before the whole university’s ceremony. At the smaller ceremony you could write a short thanks on a card that was to be read when your name was called. I got together with a bunch of my friends to all give horribly back-handed thanks to our most despised teacher. Mine was something along the lines of “I want to thank [teacher] for teaching me how to learn on my own”.
> After a study a few months ago showing that toxoplasma didn’t produce behavioral changes in humans, a new study suggests toxoplasma is no more common in cat owners than anyone else. All of the cool toxoplasma theories are going out the window. But how could this be?
That is not what the study you linked to said, nor what the previous study you alluded to said. The previous study had too small a sample, included the generally-accepted hazard ratio within its giant confidence interval, and called that a negative result. The study linked this time says:
> The risk of infection by T. gondii had a significant association with cat contact (P Interestingly, the risk of infection by T. gondii has no significant association with neighborhood cat contact versus no contact, and the analysis of the data extracted from a case-control study shows that there is no significant difference in the rate of cat ownership between those infected by T. gondii and those uninfected.
So observational studies found correlation (albeit with a fairly small hazard ratio), while a proper controlled study did not. Ok, question: is the effect size that the correlational studies found within the 95% confidence interval that the controlled study reported? Ctrl+F “case-controlled”, find the citation:
> Chiang, T. Y., M. C. Kuo, C. H. Chen, J. Y. Yang, C. F. Kao, D. D. Ji, and C. T. Fang. 2014. Risk factors for acute Toxoplasma gondii diseases in Taiwan: a population-based case-control study. PLoS One 9:e90880. (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24609112?dopt=Abstract)
And (drumroll)…
> having a cat in the household (adjusted OR = 2.9; 95% CI = 1.1-7.9)
Wait wait what the fuck? Something is very wrong here. I haven’t looked closely enough (in particular, haven’t bypassed the paywall) to find out if they re-analyzed that study’s data in a weird way, or if there were two case-controlled studies, or what.
some of the scientists responsible just might be cat-owning toxoplasmosed scatterbrains
I think the most likely reason the Benin empire is not celebrated today by Afro-Centrists et al is because they were unrepentant slavers and human sacrifice was an important part of their religion. Zimbabwe and other older cities don’t have eyewitness accounts of their societal problems so they are easier to idealize.
Zimbabwe and other older cities don’t have eyewitness accounts of their societal problems so they are easier to idealize.
Ah, like the Tumblr post I saw yesterday on “how to know if your ancestors owned slaves: Step one: Are you a white person descended from white people? Step two: Then yes!”
I’ve often wondered what the gay rights movement would make of the Anglican and Catholic Ugandan martyrs: one of the martyrs was a page at the royal court who opposed the king’s practice of having sex with the male pages, whether they consented or not, and the king did not take this religiously-based opposition well. (Not the only reason he and others were opposed to the growing influence of educated young Christian converts in the social hierarchy, of course). Would they say it was all down to colonial Christian propaganda and lies, and that no culture that accepted and practiced homosexuality was ever oppressive or exercised what we’d now call sexual harassment and coercion? That all past cultures, especially non-European ones, were tolerant and free and it was only repressive Christian colonialism that made sex shameful?
Link me this Tumblr post?
Link.
Looking at all of world history through the lens of current American race relations is not going to end well. It reminds me of the student activists who dismissed the Holocaust as “white-on-white crime.” (DISCLAIMER: This was at Oberlin, known for being on the bleeding edge of the loony left.)
jaimeastorga2000, are you by any chance the Tumblr Anon who asked me the following? Not trying to start ructions, genuinely curious since you managed to link to my Tumblr; if you are, that’s fine, if you’re not, that’s fine too 🙂
@Deiseach: I read a number of rationalist Tumblrs, including yours. I find your occasional rants amusing.
I notice that you didn’t answer the question.
@hlynkacg: That’s all the answer I’m giving. Confirming or denying being a specific anon is bad for plausible deniability.
Dear jaimeastorga2000, I think this is the first time I’ve ever been mistaken for a rationalist (unless you are being tongue-in-cheek, in which case I appreciate the humour even more) 🙂
If I may mangle Christina Rossetti’s poem by wrenching the sense away to adapt to my own situation:
Though now, remembering the content of my Tumblr and having been made aware that you occasionally read it, I am covered in confusion. Ah well, you already know I am not perfectly sane! 🙂
@Deiseach: If you get into enough rows with Tumblr rationalists, you can eventually become a part of rationalist Tumblr; just ask su3su2u1 and nostalgebraist. In fact, Ozy recently made a post about this.
Here you go.
The actually amusing thing here is that that’s the exact opposite of the truth.
African Americans have about 15% white genetic admixture – almost all of which is from slave owners.
How to know if your ancestors owned slaves? Are you black in the United States and does your ancestry there go back to slavery? Then yes.
That’s slaves in the US. Owning slaves anywhere… well, chances are most of us are descendants of both slaves and slaveowners somewhere along the line.
I’m white, but no ancestor of mine had owned slaves in the US (for the simple reason that I have no US ancestry prior to emancipation). But go back far enough… who knows?
If you immigrated into the US as an adult, you can accurately say that the average living African-American is both more closely related to slavers *and* has benefited more from slavery than you have. I don’t recommend actually saying it, though.
How to actually know if your ancestors owned slaves: are you a human?
My impression is that slavery came in with primitive agriculture, possibly with large-scale grain agriculture.
I’m not sure whether there are any people who have a lineage with no one doing early and/or large scale grain agriculture, but there might be a few.
IIRC the Aboriginal Australians never developed agriculture before European contact, so Aborigines who don’t have any white ancestors might not have slave owning ancestors.
Though this probably depends on which definition of “slavery” is used.
@ NN, Nancy
My Just-So is that, depending on environment, slavery becomes practical mostly after agriculture has made the world safe for stupidity.
Hm. How about some Rand Just-So fan-fic where the bad guys who won’t do their own homework, send some informed slaves out to fetch some safe mushrooms. Me, I’d have the slaves fetch hallucinogenics, free any hostages, and scatter back to each ex-slave doing zis own foraging.
@NN
There is some evidence that Aboriginal Australians did develop agriculture
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/bushtelegraph/rethinking-indigenous-australia's-agricultural-past/5452454
Considering what happened when europeans arrived in the america’s with new diseases wiping out large portions of the population and causing large sections of land to revert to fallow, it wouldn’t be too surprising if something similar happened in some of the richer land in Australia
Just looking at that cell-phone gun, there’s no way that thing is both chambered in 380 AND the size of an iPhone. The 380 ACP is basically a shorter, squatter, 9mm Luger round. The “phone” pictured would need to be at least 3 times size of a regular iPhone for the size of those barrels to be correct.
Edit:
And now I’ve read the zelman partisans link and I’m pretty well convinced that it is a hoax. The above issue in conjunction with solicitations for money and jiggery-pokery with the business address all scream “This is a scam”
If it were chambered in 0.25 ACP, it might be more dangerous to throw the pseudo-phone-gun than to shoot with it.
(And still be much thicker than the average iPhone.)
Basic economics wins again, I guess? At least, it’s my impression that economists would find this result extremely unsurprising.
Has this sort of fear ever been justified, where increased demand for X decreases the welfare of most people in an X-producing area?
I could imagine a scenario where the producers of X are an already rich minority and implausibly keep the increased wealth mostly to themselves and people outside the area, while the poor majority of the area implausibly don’t get into the X industry themselves, and mostly suffer increased prices for X. But notice how I had to say “implausibly”, twice.
But does basic economics say that? I’m wondering about the claim I see made by various people, along the lines: “Basic economics says that if demand increases then quantity sold will increase; that if supply falls, price will increase; and so on. Supply and demand is a reasonably accurate model of the real world. But, absent empirical evidence, we not only can’t know for certain the size of the changes involved, we have literally no idea what size to expect them to be. Basic economics says absolutely nothing about the probable elasticity of a given supply or demand curve. As such, we have no basis for expecting that the market will produce an optimal outcome in any area where we have not gathered lots of strong empirical evidence suggesting this is the case.”
So according to this, basic economics could equally say, “Supply of quinoa will rise until the original buyers as well as the new buyers can both get as much of it as they want, with its price remaining at roughly the level it was before the new buyers came along.” Or it could say, “Supply of quinoa will stay exactly the same, the new buyers will come in and buy up all the quinoa, causing the price of quinoa to skyrocket and the original buyers to starve.”
David Friedman, or any other economist here: what is wrong with the above argument? And why, if it’s correct, does there seem to have been such a strong consensus among economists for so long (although perhaps not anymore) that price floors and ceilings are a bad idea and almost inevitably hurt the people they’re intended to help?
That’s fine. The quinoa producers are flush with cash. They buy other food-stuffs and hire local labor to perform various tasks. The local labor then uses the money to buy other food-stuffs.
The real risk is shifting the entire agricultural system to a mono-culture system, and not having a financial system. All commodity prices rise and fall.
Maybe the localers’ demand for quinoa is really inelastic. How do you know it isn’t?
They can’t eat anything else?
Peruvians aren’t like Pandas, they ought to be able to eat other crops.
Maybe they really like quinoa. Maybe they don’t know how to cook anything else. Maybe the supply of alternatives is really inelastic too, as I said below. Maybe, maybe, maybe.
You can construct a plausible argument for this not being the case, but how can we know unless we test it? And if you accept that we do need to test it, in what sense are we relying on ‘basic economics’ to deduce this, rather than on pure data, that perhaps doesn’t even need to be attached to a model at all?
For what it’s worth, Peru has some of the best food I’ve ever eaten. They have a wonderful mix of South American and Chinese styles. Also, I definitely had rice more often than quinoa…maybe because they were exporting it all?
They can’t eat anything else?
Peruvians aren’t like Pandas, they ought to be able to eat other crops.
I would just like to mention the Great Famine here, about “can’t they eat anything other than potatoes?”
So who does eat quinoa as a main food source? The very poorest/lowest rung of the socio-economic ladder? I wonder if there’s an ethnic hierarchy going on here, as the raving about quinoa being a wonder-grain in the Western promotion of it has been all along the lines of “ancient native foodstuff” and when you’re talking about ancient native cultures, you may mean “indigenous people who got short end of the stick after colonisation”.
No dates or data on actual food sources given here, but the United Nations World Food Programme says of Peru:
Highlands regions sound to me the kind of areas where a staple native crop like quinoa would be the major food source, and if it is now become a cash crop, it could be exported instead of being consumed, the agents get the money, but the labourers are the ones suffering from lack of alternatives.
Again, harking back to the Famine, Ireland was actually exporting grain and butter and cattle, the ones who suffered most were the lowest class: the farm labourers with no land of their own, depending on wages which were depressed, and subsisting on an easily-grown, productive, monoculture crop that was vulnerable to disease. When it failed, they couldn’t afford to buy replacement food and a lot of the existing food stocks were cash crops going mainly to our trading partner, Great Britain, which depended heavily on imports of agricultural goods (not just from Ireland) to feed its burgeoning population in the industrialised cities.
Maize was imported from the USA as an emergency food source and sold at reduced prices but even this was not sufficient:
>They have a wonderful mix of South American and Chinese styles.
I’d say the biggest outside influence in peruvian cuisine is Japan, rather than China, but yes, it’s very good and generally highly regarded.
You’re correct, certain economic models would predict absolute chaos. But doing so requires a lot of odd assumptions, or bad policy and bad law.
It’s certainly not impossible. For instance, the shift to quinoa monoculture might actually result in decline of overall productivity per land with a commiserate rise in capital intensity. I am not an agriculture expert, but “How Asia Works” describes this process in some detail.
Essentially, subsistence farmers can use their massive labor to intensively cultivate patches of land. But for large-scale mono-cultural plantations, it makes more sense to scale back labor and substitute in capital, which lowers productivity per hectare but is overall more profitable.
A lot of regions rely heavily on rural farm labor, and Peru might be the same. These people own no land and are essentially proletariat of the farms. They are shut out, they can cultivate no land, and their job opportunities decline. Maybe they have nowhere else to move because of local political problems.
That’s steel-manning, though, and even if I think it might be true, I certainly wouldn’t assume it is true.
I would wager reputation most people are economically naïve and operate on a fixed-pie fallacy, though. If I eat more quinoa, there’s less quinoa available. End of story.
If local demand for Quinoa isn’t elastic, it really should be. At world market prices, wheat is more than an order of magnitude cheaper than Quinoa, so clearly if you’re poor at the level of “starving” you’d be better off selling Quinoa and buying imported wheat.
A big issue here is timescales.
Even if supply can adjust and is adjusting, things can suck badly while it’s in the process of doing so.
Crop supply to the international market is very inelastic in the *short term*; on the months-to-a-year timescale, because you have to plant it and wait for it to grow, you can probably more-or-less treat the supply you have as the supply you have. But over say ten-year timescales it’s probably pretty decently elastic.
I think you do sometimes see shortages or substantial price movements in lesser used commodities for this kind of reason, where some fad makes something produced in small amounts very wanted and supply takes time to catch up (or simply declines to catch up, if manufacturers expect the demand to end and are loathe to make expensive investments that will lose money when it does; American ammunition prices have been an example of this, IIRC).
It’s just the marginal person switches to eating something else, which just about everyone eating/using those niche things can do, and everything is fine.
And apparently they could do the same here, presumably because there was a good international market in basics, the imported food supply *was* relatively elastic, and quinoa is relatively expensive compared to other basics so the extra costs involved in importing food were readily absorbed.
Short-term inelastic supply of what they were eating isn’t essentially a problem, as other people have pointed out, if they can just buy something else.
Basic economic theory doesn’t guarantee that “if”, but maybe current economic realities do. At least when what you’re currently eating is expensive on the market.
I am not an economist, but the answer seems obvious:
If the price of Quinoa rises so much that locals cannot afford to buy it the money gained from the sales should be more than enough to buy wheat, barley, corn, rice, etc. Unless the price of food rose across the board Peruvians should be able to substitute cheaper imported grains for their expensive local ones.
Edit: Ninja’d
See above. Or maybe the supply of those alternatives is really inelastic too. Or maybe both.
Why would you expect them to be?
Increases in demand tend to result in increased production due to increased payouts.
In order for a supply of something to inelastic it has to be A) not produced by people, or B) subject to some outside constraint.
“In order for a supply of something to inelastic it has to be A) not produced by people, or B) subject to some outside constraint.”
Did you mean “perfectly inelastic”?
Inelastic only means that if price increases by one percent, quantity increases by less than one percent.
It is true that economic theory doesn’t tell you the size of the predicted effects. If the Quinoa is being grown by a small minority of the local population and consumed by everyone, then foreigners buying Quinoa results in a rise in the price of Quinoa, a net increase in economic benefit as economists define it (look for the discussion of “economic efficiency” in several of my webbed books), but that might mean that the local Quinoa producers are a lot better off and the local Quinoa consumers worse off. Under some circumstances total utility goes down. Economic efficiency is a proxy for utility, but an imperfect proxy.
Then I am glad I have an idea and have some empirical understanding of how food production works and that food supply is not infinitely inelastic. The extremely basic facts of how food can be grown is not hidden from the people who were worried about Peruvians starving. It was their (mis)understanding of economics that led them astray.
I keep on hearing in economics about how people respond to incentives and usually increased demand leading to increased prices usually leads to increased production because of the increased potential profits. Basic economics is full of reasons to conclude that it would be really weird for something to have perfectly inelastic supply. Also, basic economics includes the idea of substitution goods, which goes against the idea of people starving from the price of one good increasing.
Yeah, you can get (nearly) any result from an economic model with the right assumptions. But assuming that quinoa is all Peruvians eat and they have no capacity to grow more no matter how much they invest in doing so would be a really weird set of assumptions to make.
Middle East and oil? It’s led to some people becoming massively wealthy, in some parts of the country the wealth has flowed to the people to some extent, in other parts it’s just led to dictators and war.
But that’s more about the political system than the economics.
Oh, and the ivory coast and slaves. Congo under Leopold and rubber.
Right, I should have put in a caveat to my question about how it’s easy to dream up a bad result if government/coercion is involved.
I’m not familiar with that one.
It’s the example most famously held up to show the cruelties of African colonization (even contemporarily, iirc). He was the Belgian king under whom Congolese slaves had limbs chopped off and stuff.
I think wiki sums up the insanity pretty well
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congo_Free_State#Humanitarian_disaster
“Failure to meet the rubber collection quotas was punishable by death. Meanwhile, the Force Publique were required to provide the hand of their victims as proof when they had shot and killed someone, as it was believed that they would otherwise use the munitions (imported from Europe at considerable cost) for hunting.”
Yep, he unintentionally created an economy where the unit of exchange was human hands.
Indeed. Resource curse
I dunno if Ireland and its famines count, because that was less rising demand and more a drop in supply coupled with static international demand (I think? I’m a bit ignorant here), but the external demand did harm there.
Only in the short term, of course, but the “short term” is long enough to have a pretty bad famine.
From paradox history forum (and sadly not me)
”
As to the continued export of food from Ireland during the famine years, that is true. And yes, it is worth comment, since it was pretty routine and expected in times of famine emergencies to embargo food exports. This had happened in the 1760s and the 1790s. The difference in the 1840s wasn’t really ideology, but the new dependence of the English poor on Irish grain. English harvests had themselves been quite crappy in those years. Peel & co. were under no illusions. If they had embargoed the export of food from Ireland, the English poor would have come marching down on Westminster. When the choice is (or seems to be) between English starving or Irish starving, that was a no-brainer for an English government.
Now there was a brief surge in food imports into Ireland in 1847, in the immediate aftermath of the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846. For obvious reasons – the Corn Laws were lifted and food prices are high in Ireland. But there was still no attempt to embargo exports. And the surge died down anyway. Harvests were generally quite bad across the European continent in the late 1840s, accentuated by the disruptions caused by the 1848 disturbances, so prices rose there too (I forget if they also imposed export embargoes of their own). In any case, there was plenty of money to be made elsewhere.
At any rate, the refusal to embargo grain exports was not really the big mistake. Grain is grain, whether Irish-grown, European-grown or American-grown, doesn’t really matter. The point is bringing grain to Ireland, whether locally grown or not, during the emergency. Irish food leaving Irish ports during a famine makes for scandalous television, but that’s about it The point is ensuring food supply and distribution of food – whatever its provenance – during a famine. And that is where the English government really failed. “
It has happened. It has happened in *spades*. Banana republics, the congo and the rubber trade… Basically if the area in question can’t defend itself from colonial exploitation, then having stuff with a ready market abroad can turn out really badly. Massacres and enslavement bad.
It always bugs me when you attribute an opinion to a publication as opposed to a person. Can’t you say “Shadi Hamid writes in Vox that…” instead of “Vox says”? Shadi Hamid doesn’t even work for Vox and he surely isn’t setting out the official position of the organization.
It’s only really proper to attribute an opinion to a publication when it’s in an editorial. I’d maybe forgive it if the article was authored by Ezra Klein or Matt Yglesias but even those two have written articles in Vox explicitly disagreeing with each other.
This is a small irritant to me in practically every single link thread.
Nobody knows who Shahi Hamid is, everybody knows what Vox is. One attribution adds information, the other doesn’t.
It’s also not like Vox.com is a meaningless aggregation. Yeah there’s some disagreement between writers, but there’s also a pretty strong “brand”. The people they choose to hire and the pieces they choose to run are clearly indicative of a particular worldview.
The Libya piece is an opinion piece. If this had appeared as an op-ed in the New York Times, would you think it was correct to attribute it to the publication and omit the author? I don’t think anyone believes that that is good practice.
Vox makes it a bit harder by not having as strong a dividing line between news and opinion as the NYT, but this is still very clearly on the “opinion” side.
That’s kinda self-fulfilling.
If he wanted to be known for himself he should’ve started his own blog instead of writing for Vox
“Vox’s Shahi Hamid says…” leaves us with even more information.
For that matter, not reading Vox seems to leave us with the most information.
>New study in Nature by leading climatologists says that the consensus is now that the global warming hiatus is real. And here are some blog posts (1, 2) explaining the result in more accessible language. Both emphasize this doesn’t mean that global warming has stopped or was never real, only that it seems to be slower now than it was before. Leading theory – complicated ocean cycles working in our favor now may work against us in the next few decades, and we should still be careful.
I wonder if the people who have been claiming that global warming hasn’t slowed down are going to accept this. Either they admit that all the evidence isn’t in their favor or they get to be the crackpots who disagree with top scientists. Stay tuned.
Scott,
can you maybe add a content warning for the picture at the bottom of the mirror article? I would have appreciated a warning.
Since I was reading this just before going to bed, I was also not terribly happy about it 🙂 Now I can’t brush my teeth because a scary monster will come out of the mirror 🙂 Well, night night!
I didn’t even notice that the first time; I had to go back and look. Reminds me of my favorite creepypasta.
Lovecraft makes a similar point about the creatures from his universe.
Speaking of Lovecraft, this article and picture really remind me of The Outsider.
I think the picture is cool, but I’m still glad I didn’t see it yesterday evening.
I’ve discovered an additional part to the list of games Buddha would not play. It was inscribed on a stone tablet discovered at a dig site near Sarnath. It reads:
The Buddha was wise.
What you did there. I see it.
Also, better Dee/Arthur link: http://www.heroicage.org/issues/15/green.php
> By my calculations it would also reverse one year worth of global-warming induced sea-level rise.
The plan for making hydroelectric power using Qattara is not to flood the entire depression until it’s flush with the sea level. It’s to create a wide, shallow pool on the bottom that would evaporate at the rate that water is flowing in.
I find the project very interesting. Unfortunately, it will not be built any time soon, mostly because the best routes for the canal are, due to WW2, some of the most densely mined terrain on earth.
Step 1, Pentagon announces mine-defusing robot contest. Step 2, free earth-moving explosions. Step 3, profit!
densely-mined terrain seems like a problem we could solve. Mine flails exist, after all. Would it really be that expensive to just flail the hell out of the whole area? …The fact that mined areas are a big problem tells me I’m missing something, but for the life of me I can’t figure out what. Maybe I’m just not appreciating the scale?
From wikipedia’s article on mine flails:
Mines are really hard to find by design. Using a flail or something like a Casspir to detonate mines might be a good first step, but you pretty much have to go over every inch with metal detectors afterwards. It’s incredibly labor intensive and dangerous.
Even then, demined areas are usually only certified to a depth of 14 cm (about 6 in).
Isn’t there also the fact that the “Qattara Sea” would become incredibly salty?
Yeah, but given that it’s the Sahara already it’s not like you’re going to be damaging prime agricultural land or anything.
The proposals linked there talked about filling to somewhere between -20 and -70m from sea level. The depression bottoms out at -133m, according to wiki, so there would still be a lot of water trapped in the basin, slowly getting cycled out by evaporation. The exact amount would depend on the details of the shape of the depression floor, and that’s far beyond the effort a blog comment’s worth, so I’ll just assume Scott’s estimate was close enough.
If we can’t conventionally dig the required canal because it’s full of mines, why don’t we just dust off the Project Plowshare files? That’d get a nice big hole dug fast, and the nukes wouldn’t complain about the mines.
I wonder whether Saudi Arabia has something to do with Russian plans to wreck the Russian oil industry.
Maybe the situation is that given enough time, any organization actually *is* run by the agents of its enemies.
Ah, #CancelColbert. If Park hadn’t picked such a popular target and hadn’t misinterpreted his joke so completely, she might still be a social justice true believer today. But then we wouldn’t have heard of her, so who’s to say what would’ve left her better off?
There is something eminently satisfying about how true ‘the burned hand teaches best’ continues to be.
While normally I’m against mandatory courses, I can’t help thinking that making all incoming college freshmen everywhere take a semester-long course on the Cultural Revolution would put a damper on a lot of SJW activism.
I think the main thing to remember, which is so hard to remember, is that the people who did all the horrible things we can’t comprehend in the past were no different from people today.
Actually I was under the impression that this was the fundamental split between “left” and “right” wing philosophies.
The left seems to see “humans nature” as something that is malleable. while the right claims that it’s intractable.
Sounds about right, yeah. It’s also why SJ seems like more of a new hardline rightism with its own prefered groups than something that’s still actually leftist to me.
I think there’s too much of a tendency to paint any groups who did horrible things in history as evil and never explaining their motives from their own point of view.
I think it’s partly due to the fear that if people hear the reasonable-sounding arguments for positions then they might support them rather than developing better memetic resistance to similar future movements.
I’ve been wondering whether some of the people who read The Three Body problem thought the part about the Cultural Revolution was an invented dystopia.
I hope not; that would be unspeakably depressing.
But you noticed that “Uri” means “my fire”? Some people just like to see things burn.
“Uri” is “my light,” not “my fire.” But he’s certainly being illuminating.
Any study about gun control can be reasonably assumed to be politically motivated junk until proven otherwise. Any study proven otherwise should be re-examined before trusting, at least twice. My favorite remains the study proving gun control worked in Washington, D.C in the late 1980s (when the murder rate soared), though any study using “Cook’s gun prevalence index” to correlate gun prevalence with gun misuse gets a dishonorable mention. Since, as mentioned here before, that index is actually a measure of gun misuse.
McPhedran has been writing papers that argue against Australia’s gun laws since at least 2006, so this is par for the course.
On the matter of the pause, I had a blog post making essentially the argument sketched here some time back, along with a link to a published article making the same argument with more evidence:
http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2015/09/an-explanation-for-pattern-of-warming.html
Impressive.
>But part of me worries that the entire chain – Park engaging in activism, Park speaking out against activism, Nair writing about Park, and now me linking Nair – is part of the problem, in that it promotes paying attention to Twitter activism at all.
And then there’s the danger you haven’t even considered – retwittivism.
It depends on the individuals and the organization, but I think part of the problem is that meritocracy is that most people have a hard time separating merit out from all sorts of other things in their judgment for promotion. Technical competence is often overwhelmed by other factors like workplace politics. People are able to improve their promotion prospects by taking credit for others work, playing people off against each-other, avoiding making waves or questioning things, avoid outshining superiors, avoiding difficult projects, feigning victim-hood at the right time, appearing confident and relaxed at other times, tribal affiliation, and often just plain being charismatic and likable (which seems to do wonders for covering up dreadful incompetence). Most of these things have a weak inverse correlation with competence in my experience, and so I could definitely see random outperforming other methods in some organizations. Competence can be effective to a certain degree too, especially in combination with a bit of charisma. But if it tries it go it alone, all these factors will motivate people to twist and distort the facts in the promotion process to fit with what their emotions tell them about who makes them feel the most warm and fuzzy on the inside.
Do you really believe that people who are incompetent are being picked at a higher rate? Sure, businesses aren’t perfect but it strains belief that all businesses are so terrible at their job that they can’t even tell which employees are better than others. It’s not that hard and people doing the hiring have some incentive to pick good candidates.
Managers who don’t want to be outshone have an incentive to promote the incompetent over the compotent. Also, if competence is negatvely correlated with charisma, and charisma outweighs competence in promotion decisions, then the less competent will get promoted.
The higher you get in an organization, the more important charisma is. To the point where someone with high charisma and low competence can rise to executive (or equivalent) levels, whereas someone with low charisma and high competence will go absolutely nowhere.
When you’re in high leadership positions, charisma is just as much a part of competence as technical skills. I’ve only been in “middle management” level positions (company command in the Army), and the personnel management and development skills are an order of magnitude harder than basic technical skills like engineering.
I got a lot happier when I got to a job where I’m handed a pencil, a pad of paper, and a technical problem.
But if you promote incompetent people that also makes you look bad. People will remember whose idea it was to promote the guy who turned out badly, as they will give you at least some credit for scouting out new stars (though whether that credit compensates for being outshone by your new hire may depend on personality priorities).
‘Incompetent’, here, is being overloaded. It’s referring to ‘technical incompetence, combined with competence at playing organizational politics to enrich one’s reputation at the expense of the organizational whole’.
Promoting Alice, who uses her authority to refactor, re-engineer, and do a bunch of crucial, invisible back-end work totally looks less good than promoting Bob, who makes a big splash by re-tasking the mobile team to abandon the old, slow standards. Bob’s work can be spun much more easily as important and visible to the promoter’s boss, making the promoter look good, and so on.
I can only speak from my own experiences in large companies… but there’s incompetence and there’s incompetence.
I had a manager who was a lovely guy, to be fair to him he didn’t actively get in the way of his teams work very often but if the team needed anything that involved him doing actual work… be prepared to wait a few weeks or months.
I’m guessing that more than 90% of his time was dedicated to self-promotion. Making himself look good to his superiors through mostly superficial means. Attending vanity-meetings for superiors, showing his face at meetings related to likely-successful projects and generally boosting the perception that he was successful.
He was extremely competent at self-promotion but contributed almost nothing. Again, lovely guy, hell, part of his skill involved being likable.
Middle management seemed to have a very high proportion of such people. They work hard, they’re very good at what they do assuming that what they do is self promotion, they’re not lazy but almost everything they do is dedicated to self-promotion and increasing their perceived value pretty much orthogonal to any goals of the company.
On the other hand grab someone random and put them into the same position and there’s a good chance that they’d dedicate a lot of their time to trying to help their team and probably be out-competed by people who are taking all the energy they could put into helping their own teams and instead directing it towards self-promotion.
It’s like how the first generation of politicians in a new regime are often (semi-random) idealists and can often have great successes but they’re eventually pushed out by psychopathic career politicians who’ve optimized themselves for political climbing orthogonal to actual ability to lead or competence as administrators.
@Murphy: “Meditations on Moloch”.
@Murphy:
Your actual manager was successful. The hypothetical manager you describe would be effective.
Successful vs. Effective Real Managers from 1988 still applies.
By the way, do successful managers count as rent-seekers?
Do you realize how strong of a claim you are making? The implication is that I could start a a business and hire minimally competent people and wipe the floor with my competition just through that. Any manager who consistently hires incompetent employees is going to get in trouble with his superiors and the business owner is going to lose money. You can’t base something so contrary to common sense based off one or two studies.
Which is exactly what happens.
The problem is that it’s illegal to accurately assess competence because such an assessment is racist and sexist because for some reason every assessment lies and shows that women and NAMs are less competent. Therefore all promotion in organizations large enough to be noticed has to be done by personal judgement – personal judgement, of course, isn’t racist or sexist because it’s illegal to have racists or sexists in positions of personal judgement.
Um, women have been outperforming men academically at every level of education in the West for decades. Even in math, studies have found that women and men are basically tied at standardized tests of mathematical ability. Men do have a statistical advantage in spatial ability, but women have a statistical advantage in verbal ability, and these tend to cancel each other out in most IQ tests.
Aren’t those studies showing average ability? And since men have a higher variance (and the worse men aren’t in the pool of hires) the pool of male candidates is better?
Another study that I read a while back but I unfortunately am currently unable to find claimed to have done the math and found that greater male variance could only explain a very small portion of the gender gap in the “hard sciences.” The paper also found that the discrimination theory wasn’t consistent with the evidence, and concluded that the primary reason for the gender gap was most likely differences in interests, not differences in ability or opportunity.
On the question of male vs female IQ, I believe their equality is an artifact of the test design. Women do better on some sorts of questions, men on others, there is no obvious basis for deciding just how many questions of each sort are on the test. I thought I had read that the usual tests were designed, by suitable choice of questions, to give about the same average IQ for men as for women.
Am I mistaken?
I don’t know if the tests in that study were designed to attain gender balance. Note that they left out two of the most widely-taken standardized tests in the US — the SAT and the ACT. The SAT-M and the ACT mathematics show a consistently higher score for men.
https://research.collegeboard.org/sites/default/files/publications/2012/7/researchreport-2006-5-historical-view-subgroup-performance-sat.pdf
Apparently the NAEP is given to all 12th graders whereas the SAT and ACT are taken by college-bound students (usually 11th graders) only, which likely makes a difference. In particular, if there were higher male variance in the population, that would show up as higher male average on a selective test. And further, “college bound” for men is currently a more selective criterion than “college bound” for women, though that is a relatively recent phenomenon.
Even the NAEP has shown a small but consistently higher mean score for men at age 17.
Exactly. The goal of the educational system isn’t so different from the promotion / hiring process in corporate America. In corporate America the legally mandated phrase is “equal opportunity employer” – in eduction the goal is “closing the gap”. We all know that “equal opportunity” means meeting minimum numbers (and never using biased objective measures – only unbiased and fair subjective measures) – not maximum numbers.
In education, “closing the gap” is mostly racial (and subject to endless hand wringing) but women’s lower and more evenly distributed is also a concern. That one, at least, they’ve been able to solve by making school intolerable for boys and suiting it as much as possible for girls. As the original anonymous pointed out – objective measures tend to be biased so move to subjective measures as much as possible. Testing shows boys doing better but better grades are given to girls. Of course.
I’m not going to make a Scott Alexander length post about that study you linked but almost every paragraph contains an intentional deception – a statement that’s technically true but doesn’t actually get at the core of the argument while looking like it proves the point of the paper.
So the academic underperformance of “non-Asian minorities” is proof of their innate intellectual inferiority, but the academic underperformance of men is proof of the existence of a massive conspiracy to oppress men? That sounds totally consistent and not at all like a product of motivated reasoning.
Incidentally, the conspiracy to oppress men is so good at keeping itself hidden that investigations of gender bias in University Admissions instead tend to find that many American colleges are actually secretly engaging in affirmative action in favor of men.
Is that really so hard to understand?
Every single measure of intellectual performance shows the exact same racial gap – as La Griff du Lion called it – the fundamental constant of sociology. Academic underperformance, life outcome underperformance, brain volume underperformance, gestation period underperformance, etc. Men and women show no such differences in favor of women.
With regards to sex differences, they’re much smaller than racial gaps – about 4 IQ points in favor of men (although that’s on IQ tests where the component factors were weighted in such a way as to most closely align the scores of men and women) and they’re accompanied with huge differences in temperament, attitude and inclination. Primary and secondary educators are almost universally female and progressive – women so they design and teach the way they’re comfortable and progressives so that they see “equality” the way they see “diversity” – if the favored group comes out on top, that’s equality – just like “diversity” simply means the presence of NAMs (NBA? Diverse. PGA? Not diverse.).
Meanwhile, the objective measures keep showing the unapproved truth – men are both smarter than women and are highly overrepresented at both tails of the distribution. The objective measurements say one thing – the highly motivated to show the opposite of reality subjective measurements show the opposite. Shocker.
Erm. Hang on.
@NN:
My understanding is that IQ tests are
riggeddesigned to score men and women evenly overall. That means women could be significantly smarter than men (on average) and the tests would never show it.Off-Topic: Hey, you can select text and then click one of the formatting buttons! I’ve been putting in the quote tag and pasting into the middle of it like a chump! We really need a “how to read and write SSC comments” FAQ.
(Poor) managers arent incentivised to hire or promote maximally incompetent people, but rather those who are only fractionally worse than themselves. Also, better managers have more opportunies elsewhere, so are not so incentivised to protect themselves. So what you get is slow decay in some cases.
The Competence:Sociability tradeoff isn’t that implausible. It’s a natural consequence of comparing people who’ve stabilized at similar levels given similar experience.
To see it, imagine Bob, a median engineer who’s hit rank X after Y years. Bob’s peers are going to be people who are (+competence / -charisma) or (-competence / +charisma).
After all, if the person were (-competence / -charisma) they wouldn’t have become Bob’s peer. And if they were (+competence / +charisma) they’d have been promoted ages ago.
So, long term, the pool of people available for promotion at any given level should follow a curve where management has traded off competence for charisma.
Citizensearth’s position could be true under conditions as mild as, “Managment tends to over-value Charisma for technical roles.”
There are a bunch of reasons why this could be the case. Soft skills could be easier for managers to evaluate. Or, as @The Nybbler suggests, managers could be biased by coming from roles that do need more charisma.
I’m offering it as a partial not full explanation (otherwise we need to explain why the empirical data there is wrong). I take your point that it’s not a full explanation, and certainly there is plenty of organizations where this isn’t the case and things work effectively. Especially in small technically focused organizations there little room for this (contributing to the tendency for small business often manages to outperform much larger organizations in many situation). But in large organizations the individual hiring incentives don’t line up as closely with choosing competence in achieving organizational/official goals (except in exceptional internal cultures), and so skills like navigating the political/social environment are comparatively more important for the individual or small team. And I think its easy to overestimate our ability to accurately identify the most competent people – humans are so terribly prone to all sorts of bias.
Might not the efficacy of various hiring and promotion strategies (including random) vary depending on the specific labor market? For example, in my field right now, and, I think, many others, there is a glut of overqualified candidates competing for too few positions. In such a situation, we would expect random selection, if not to actually outperform merit selection, then at least to work out better than it would at a time or in a field with a lower labor supply.
Seems reasonable, except I’d imagine random selection would be at a disadvantage where the competing field was highly varied in suitability, as opposed to it simply the average being high or low.
Why should prisoners have an inalienable right to cheap phone rates? It’s not like prisoners are forced to use the phones – if the companies are making money, then they are obviously providing more value to the prisoners than the fees they charge. States choose to use private companies to provide these services because the private sector can do it more efficiently than some bloated government bureaucracy dragged down by public-sector union bosses.
After all, why shouldn’t the state seek to transfer the costs of imprisonment onto the prisoners? Prison is a punishment, so making it costly is, if anything, a net good for our society as a deterrent against crime. This blog has a group of readers who are, for the most part, very invested in civilization and open to debate. It’s easy to forget that there are people in this world who will only change their behavior under threat of force.
I think there’s externalities in keeping prisoners (who probably aren’t rich) connected to their families and non-criminal social networks and not just exclusively socializing with a bunch of hardened “colleagues” who they are inside with.
If I kidnap you and then offer to let you go if your family sends me 500K this is fine because:
“It’s not like anyone is forced to pay the ransom– if the kidnappers are making money, then they are obviously providing more value to the family than the fees they charge.”
I’m sensing that some people didn’t read the name under which this comment was posted.
oh wow I actually did not!
@ Protagoras
I was about to say the same thing.
God damn it, Tröllson!
Tröllson: “At least I have chicken”
Likewise, Carlos Slim, the largest individual shareholder of the New York Times, has been perhaps more effective at punishing illegal aliens than anyone else, by using his telecom monopoly to extract high charges for talking with their loved ones back in Mexico.
Prison phone system contracts and international calling monopolies are essentially updated forms of tax farming.
That baleful program was manifestly unpopular in Ancien Régime France and other Old World places over the past few centuries, so why should it be any different when dressed up in more modern clothes?
What’s up with the title? I’m guessing its a tweak of some well known phrase and Scott hasn’t just taken to swearing at random times?
Yup.
I feel like the sixties are recent enough that they really, REALLY should have known better.
http://willrabbe.com/microblog/2011/6/1/most-underrated-political-slogan-they-cant-lick-our-dick.html
“Did you know: when the British Empire abolished slavery, it paid 40% of the government’s total annual expenditure as compensation to slaveowners.”
A lot cheaper than the American Civil War …
Ralph Waldo Emerson had put forward a plan to buy out U.S. slaveholders for something like $2 billion, but it never got any traction. During the Civil War, Lincoln floated the idea of buying out slaveholders in loyal Union states, but it never went anywhere.
@Steve Sailer – “but it never went anywhere.”
Why?
Don’t know. But Southern arrogant bloodymindedness is a candidate for why slaveowners weren’t interested in a deal:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S72nI4Ex_E0
The cotton price boom of the later 1850s explains something about Southern intransigence. A generation before, when tobacco farms were wearing out from exhausted soil, Southerners had tended to be apologetic about slavery and some argued that it would fade out in the future so no need to abolish it now. But as new cotton fields opened up in the deep south, the world price for cotton stayed very high, leading newly rich Southerners to take up a boastful King Cotton ideology about how slavery wasn’t a necessary evil, it was a positive good. Cotton prices peaked in 1859, but during the Civil War it turned out to be fairly easy to expand production in places like Egypt, India, and Brazil. The south never really recovered.
Yes, and the South was too big to buy out. But the question was: why didn’t Lincoln buy out Kentucky during the war?
I don’t know. Lincoln talked about buyouts of Unionist slaveholders, but nothing much came of it.
There were other missed opportunities. For example, a glance at a map shows that Virginia seceding after Fort Sumter was a colossal disaster that may not have had to happen — other slave states at the same latitude such as Kentucky and Missouri did not secede. Then there’s another tier of upper south states that did secede late, such as North Carolina.
It would seem as if there was an opportunity to stop secession at no more than the crazies in South Carolina and the six states inland from South Carolina, but that Lincoln didn’t seem to pay much attention to how to isolate South Carolina and keep it from infecting Virginia. Lincoln’s early lackadaisicalness drove Seward crazy.
But all that’s forgotten.
Between Virginia’s rabid secessionist governor who was calling out the militia against the US Army before the secession convention even met, its rabid pro-slavery legislature, and its planter aristocracy, I don’t see how Lincoln could have kept it in the Union. How could he possibly have isolated South Carolina, much less the early Confederacy? The South – or, at least, the Southern aristocracy – had a strong regional identity; politicians from across the South had been meeting together since the previous summer. Are you recommending Lincoln send in the army to cut railroad and telegraph lines? It was his calling for volunteers (which the far-understrength army sorely needed) that caused the Upper South to secede.
Interesting, and thank you all much for the history!
Flooding parts of the Sahara has been discussed for some time. I know of at least two science fiction novels that deal with the idea, “The Invasion of the Sea” by Jules Verne, and “The Secret People” by John Wyndham. It was such an out-there idea that I didn’t even know where it came from until I came across discussions of the Qattara Depression.
There’s also the opposite, even larger-scale proposal.
Not as big as that, but speaking of big, weird engineering projects:
http://therealdeal.com/2016/03/26/architects-win-prize-for-plan-to-destroy-central-park/
Also a real giant engineering project: Lake Volta
Uh huh. See also my page:
Obesity Facts
For links to studies and trials with much larger samples.
When Park says this, do we have any way of knowing that she means actual, y’know, violence? I am skeptical here.
She’s comparing it to the violence done by “racist trolls”. So if she means something other than physical violence, she’s also comparing it to something other than physical violence by the “racist trolls”, so the comparison is not misleading in the way that just saying “people are violent to me” would have been misleading.
I think it is misleading; it suggests that both are violent when, I’m guessing, really neither is likely to be.
More generally, I guess my point is, this sort of thing, whether you consider it to actually be misleading or merely somewhat unclear (and devaluing the word “violence”), seems like a reason to generally not consider Suey Park to be very credible, regardless of whether she’s for SJ or against it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_characteristics_of_the_Buddha
Including:
Thousand-spoked wheel sign on feet
Toes and fingers finely webbed
Hands reaching below the knees
Well-retracted male organ
Body hair graceful and curly
Area below armpits well-filled
Forty teeth
Jaw like a lion
Saliva that improves the taste of all food
Eyelashes like a royal bull
Fleshy protuberance on the crown of the head
and
His navel is without blemish.
I looked it up and apparently this means circumcised – correct me if I am wrong. One site suggested that it was circumcised, and another elaborated that it was like a horse- whose genitals look circumcised.
Okay, I looked it up some more, and this means he can literally suck his penis up into his body so that people will not be compelled to lust upon seeing it.
The “well-retracted male organ” or the navel?
I thought it was like a horse in that a horse’s genitals appear to be fully encased within a sheath, which is how I’ve seen it translated elsewhere. Far from meaning circumcised, I think it means the opposite: having a penis the head of which fully retracts within its foreskin.
Some of these things have to do with Yoga practices. The long tongue–sometimes described as so long it could touch the eyebrows, for example, probably relates to the ability to perform khechari mudra, and some yogis (and daoists) also cultivate the ability to retract the testicles within the body, so that might be yet another explanation of the retracting genitals.
Many of these others are just plain weird, of course, to the point anyone possessing all these qualities would look like an alien, but my best guess is that it is just a long compilation of every physical characteristic considered desirable and/or associated with ascetics, in many cases exaggerated to a point that would be comical if real.
Some apotheosized Chinese heroes get similarly bizarre physical descriptions: the Three Kingdoms heroes like Liu Bei for example: he also has arms past his knees, earlobes he himself can see, big red lips…
You all are making me really, really want to fall back on a literal reading of Genesis 1:27, “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him”
Related to bogus name-preference effects: Nicholas Christenfeld’s dumbass “Theory of Deadly Initials”, purporting that people with “bad” initials (like B.A.D., A.P.E., etc.) have worse outcomes, and in particular shorter life expectancy than people with “good” initials (like G.O.D., A.C.E., etc.).
One particular problem with the paper: people with good initials supposedly outlive people with bad initials by seven years on average. You’d think someone else would have noticed this by now.
Christenfeld is a serial producer of bad research. He was also responsible for the claimed result a few years back that infants look more like their fathers than like their mothers for some incompletely-thought-through pseudo-evolutionary reason. I discussed this on my blog a while back.
This is beautiful. Thank you.
(I would add that having bad initials signifies bad parenting, since my parents’ original choice for my name had bad initials but they realized that beforehand and changed it. If better-educated / more caring parents are more likely to do this, that would explain the effect. But it looks like the effect doesn’t exist anyway, so whatever.)
Were they going to name you Alexander Scott?
Don’t most people just…not have initials that form an acronym? Mine are CJB. Would that be good ir bad according to Christenfeld?
Presumably it would be neutral.
@Dominus:
Did you read A Clockwork Orange in the Summer of 1984 at F&M?
Who wants to know?
Sometimes I think economists are too dismissive of other work in social science, and then I see articles like that Westfall and Yarkoni piece on confounds. Confounds are a real problem, but the solution is not fancy correlations with arrows (“structural equation modelling”) as they present it. That just masks the problem with a different bunch of hard to follow and subjective assumptions regarding the structural relationship and rotations around the variables. It’s sort of how economists thought about identification back in the 70s.
For most of these problems we should be looking for exogenous instruments or shocks.
Is anyone surprised the prison phone system is a disgrace? Not because you necessarily knew about the particular issue, but because, given the incentives involved, I’d be surprised if it weren’t a disgrace.
I only knew about it because of relatives in the same area of the industry- otherwise, it seems to fall victim to the unconscious and powerful ‘Nobody Cares About Prisoners’ effect.*
There are a lot of reasons that get cited for restricting and limiting inmate communication, but I’ve always suspected that things would be better on the whole if we opened it up instead. There are security risks inherent in that, but I wonder if they would outweigh the benefits of reducing how insular prison society is.
*Actually some people care about inmates quite a lot, but statistically.
It’s also brought up in American Gods.
A few notes:
Although charter school success may not be explained by selective admission, it could be explained by selective kicking-out-right-before-the-tests-are-taken. I haven’t seen any studies on this, but it seems worth mentioning (source: my mother worked as an art teacher in a non-charter public school in a district with charter schools. She noticed a large influx of new kids in the late fall and early spring, asked where they had come from, and found out they were all from a local charter school and were expected to perform poorly on the tests, so the charter schools bumped them back into the normal school system.).
The obesity/exercise study was performed on both men and women, not just men.
I summed up the study as “selective admission”, but the abstract says:
“Skeptics of the KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) charter school network argue that these schools rely on selective admission, attrition, and replacement of students to produce positive achievement results. We investigate this using data covering 19 KIPP middle schools. On average, KIPP schools admit students disadvantaged in ways similar to other local students, and attrition patterns are typically no different at KIPP than at nearby schools.”
I think (though I am not sure) that “attrition patterns” covers what you’re talking about.
I’ve corrected the exercise patterns link; thanks for the tip.
But KIPP is also the most well regarded charter school network that exists. Using KIPP as a stand in for all charter schools is like using the Ivy League for a stand in for all colleges. They may be the same type of school, but they are not comparable on all levels. So that makes me question that study in particular. Also, I’m pretty sure most charter schools have an opt in lottery, so the people who go there tend to be more likely to care at least somewhat about education.
My take on charter schools vs public schools is that most of the problems with underperforming schools have little to do with administration or curriculum or teachers, but with a few unruly students who set the tone for a class and force the teacher to spend more time on classroom management rather than teaching in itself. Out of all the I-taught-in-an-urban-school articles I’ve read a common theme is always classroom management and that a few slightly more difficult students make it impossible to get anything done. Charter schools are much more liberal with their short suspensions and are usually more serious with discipline and do tend to expel more kids, not because of test scores specifically, but because of behavior problems.
Although charter school success may not be explained by selective admission, it could be explained by selective kicking-out-right-before-the-tests-are-taken.
But ordinary schools do this, or a version of this, as well. Over on this side of the Atlantic, in Britain low-achieving students may not be permitted to sit the advanced GCSE (the old A levels) or may be only permitted to take subjects at a lower level. In Ireland, they can be directed into the Leaving Certificate Vocational Programme (introduced in 1994) or Leaving Certificate Applied (1995) for the less academically gifted, instead of sitting the traditional Leaving Certificate.
All schools that receive funding/are seen as desirable by parents based on league tables for exam results will find ways of making sure they get the best results from their students, and if that means the less able students are discouraged from sitting the tests, in order not to drag down the overall results, that is what will happen.
In America it used to be extremely uncommon for public (as in government-supported) schools to compete with each other for students. The most common system was purely geographical – your children attend the school that your school district assigns to your home. If you want a different school, move.
Now some districts have charter schools, vouchers, and/or school choice, all of which were controversial even though they’re equivalent to common practices outside the US. But the old zoned schools are still the educators of last resort. They can’t kick out students like other schools can, so the poorest performing students will end up there. (Those students are also unlikely to seek out those alternative choices to begin with.)
Which leads to a fully general counter argument to partially privatized systems: the public element ends up as a last reaort ,and gradualy degenerate, even as the private alternatives improve, so that there is no aggregate improvement, only an enhanced abilit of the privileged to access better services.
The article on Chinese texts is interesting, better than the title/way it’s hyped led me to expect. The title and the media hype are all about this being the first pre-Qin political text discovered, which is false: the Bamboo Annals (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bamboo_Annals) were a similar discovery and caused quite a stir in 300 AD. They were historical chronicles but many parts clearly had a political agenda. Then they were lost themselves.
The media hype focusing on how the texts advocate meritocracy of rulers is also somewhat strange to me because I thought it was pretty clear that the Confucians would have preferred meritocracy of rulers, but accepted family succession as a sign of the fallen times. Isn’t this is what the Yao Yue passage in the Analects is about?
All that said the article itself had cool insights and was fun to read. An ancient text where Confucius discusses “divine insemination” is definitely a change from the typical picture. And the sociology of how these discoveries are being treated in China is also fun. I’m looking forward to reading the texts!
We also shouldn’t forget about oracle bones and bronze inscriptions… so it’s a bit of an exaggeration to say the Guodian texts are the “only” political texts dating before the Qin, which is not to downplay their importance, or the neatness of the fact that they’ve now all been translated into English.
How informative are oracle bones though?
Well, not very, but you can intuit historical/political information based on the questions they ask: “should we sacrifice the 3,000 POWs from the kingdom of X we captured in yesterday’s battle?” tells you that there was a battle at that time and Kingdom X lost. And that sometimes POWs were sacrificed en masse after battles.
Bronze inscriptions sometimes get a little more detailed, though.
How informative are oracle bones though?
Oracle bones are written on (you inscribe your question before making the divination). If Lord X or Emperor Y wants to know the outcome of the battle for/against the rebels, this is the kind of thing that survives and bears witness to “yes, there really was a battle as described in the folklore or legends”.
According to Wikipedia:
@onyomi
I finally got around to the article, and this paragraph seems like a howler to me:
I’m no sinologist, but every sentence in that sounds absurd to me. For example, last I checked, the I Ching was part of the Confucian “canon,” so obviously magic and divination played a big part. And I would expect a priori for philosophical schools to be fluid and mutually influential, especially in the early days.
Am I way off? Is the rest of this article worth reading?
I actually don’t see anything seriously wrong with that paragraph. I think the point is precisely that most of our understanding of the Warring States and earlier periods, as well as what constitutes “Confucianism,” as opposed to “Daoism,” or “Legalism,” etc. is heavily refracted through the eyes of Han Dynasty politicians and scholars like Emperor Wu and Guo Xiang. The idea that Confucius wrote the “Ten Wings” (commentaries) of the “Changes,” for example, is almost certainly anachronistic.
Also, I don’t think Confucianism’s reputation for secularism is undeserved. Confucius supposedly refused to discuss ghosts and spirits, and Xunzi, the third most important Confucian after Confucius and Mencius is one of the earliest thinkers whom I’d describe as an outright atheist. But I think it’s also correct to say that the Spring and Autumn and Warring States period were a world of many schools of thought competing alongside and heavily borrowing from one another. To divide them very clearly into a few major “schools” is itself probably anachronistic, an interpretation the Guodian texts seem to support.
Yes, to some extent that should be obvious even without these texts, but you also have to keep in mind the millenia of traditional interpretations of Chinese schools of thought which, again, come refracted heavily through the Han Dynasty, and exaggerate the extent to which these were clearly defined “schools” for the sake of the compulsive traditional Chinese categorizing impulse.
I haven’t carefully read the linked article myself since this isn’t news to Sinologists, but I wouldn’t say the quoted portion discredits it.
Switching from subsistence farming to commercial farming improves standards of living. Who could have possibly guessed?
But the real issue is: Is Westerns eating quinoa cultural appropriation?
/s
Not just Quinoa.
Maize, tomatoes, pumpkins, squash, peanuts, chili peppers, paprika, vanilla, chocolate, … .
I’m surprised you omitted potatoes and rice.
@Tibor
Rice? No, I think you’re wrong about that.
It depends. oryza sativa was first domesticated in China, and as we all know, East Asians are Schrödinger whites.
@vV_Vv
I read this thread way too fast. I thought we were talking about foods that originated in the Americas.
And if you go back enough also wheat, barley, oats, rye, beans… .
Now excuse me but I have to hunt some woolly mammoth for food and I haven’t seen any in a while.
More sensationalist nonsense from Vox.
A onetime GDP decline of 3.7% is not “catastrophic” by any stretch of the imagination. And while the budget after years of treading water has gone into the red (but with virtually no debt), the deficit still remains lower than that of most of the developed world years after the Great Recession.
Wishful thinking passed off as insightful analysis as per usual.
I have a question for you and your commenters. Im asking because it seems that many of you are interested in nootropics and while it isn’t technically a nootropic I have heard of people using it in order to control anxiety. The substance in question is Kratom. I have recently started lifting weights again at the age of 38 and the idea of something that would allow me to work out as hard as i did when I was in my 20’s but wont screw up my hormones (as roids seem to do) would be very appreciated. However the various claims about Kratom seem contradictory. There is some precedence for this in the wildly different effects of sativa and indica strains of marijuana but some of the claims seems to be more in line with snake oil than anything else. So has anyone here ever had any experinces with Kratom and if so how does reality stack up aagainst the claims made?
Anything that claims it will let you do the same amount of hard physical work as in your 20s but without the side-effects is snake-oil. The aging body is slowly breaking down; you will not have the same recovery capacity. 38 isn’t ancient and you can work hard, but you will not bounce back as you did when you were 19.
Looking up kratom on Wikipedia, it seems its main effect is as a pain-killer (it’s in the same family as coffee and it is used in its native habitats as a substitute for opium). So I’m taking a wild guess here and supposing that the effects of kratom are to blanket the pain signals from over-work; you’re hurting, you may have damaged your body, but you don’t feel the pain so you continue to work hard or over-work.
There is no magic pill to turn back aging.
I understand your point, but I wasn’t so much assuming it had no side effects as assuming the side effects would be far less than the other method of pushing harder and recovering faster which is of course anabolic steroids. While I am considering medically supervised TRT, I have no interest in using steroids as a performance enhancer. While I can’t do much about recover times even something that could mask some of the discomfort while working out would allow me to push harder.
Yeah, I’ll mirror what Deiseach said. The main relevant effect is pain-killing. Now, of the opioids, kratom is pretty much at the very bottom of the ladder. Still moderately addictive, still has opioid withdrawals, but you get pretty nauseous above a certain dose, so it’s effectively self-limiting (unless you are messing around with the extracts, which you really shouldn’t be doing), and you’re definitely a good deal less likely to get hooked on it than you are on things like hydrocodone or oxycodone. And even if you do get hooked on it, it’s more like the “I NEED my daily coffee” sort of addiction than a “I sold my pet dog to pay for it” sort of addiction.
I really think the medical establishment should be encouraging its use more. And for recreational use, its main effect is more anxiolytic (no duh, it’s a freaking opioid.)
But anyways, to return to your main point, there are different strains of kratom, that have more stimulating or sedating aspects, rather like sativa vs indica. And because of an unregulated market, some of the kratom is bunk. And people do vary a bit in how it affects them.
The basic alkaloid in kratom is 7-hydroxymitragynine (the opioid one), but there are several other types of opioid alkaloids, and ajmalicine is a sedative, and there are other miscellaneous psychoactives in there, but I’d really like to see the actual numbers, as I suspect many of them are in low enough concentrations to not matter. Think of it kind of like THC vs CBD in marijuana, but less studied.
The strains are generally distinguished by leaf vein color (red, white, or green), potency, and where it was harvested from.
See thats what Im trying to understand are the different vein colors really comparative to indica/sativa differences or is it all just hype. I guess at the end of the day Ill just have to try it out and see what happens.
Kratom is surprisingly awesome for productivity if you struggle with procrastination or something like that. (If you have no procrastination troubles and you want raw energy, I would suggest taking rhodiola when you get tired and making sure you have sleep/diet/exercise down pat.) It makes you nauseous after a while, so have some ginger handy for that. (Or maybe just take small doses over the course of the day?) I’ve heard that cycling different strains can do a lot to prevent tolerance. Re: strain differences, based on my limited experience I’m inclined to believe they are significant.
…oh wait, you mean lift weights? No idea but I’m not optimistic. I’d be slightly worried about doing lifts under the influence of kratom as it can be very significantly psychoactive, somewhat like lifting weights after a few beers. Try BCAAs?
Thanks for the info Fool. Is that coming from personal experience?
“Ideal Conceal is a handgun which can be folded up to look exactly like an ordinary cell phone. Nothing can possibly go wrong.”
As I suspect you know, and as Radley Balko has demonstrated numerous times, what could go wrong is that police already routinely shoot people for holding cell phone they “mistake” for a gun. Now they’ll really have an excuse!
Did you bother reading the “obvious hoax” part?
Yes, I did. But it’s really not relevant to my point, which is that it would be a real problem if someone actually DID develop such a gun.
Maybe I shouldn’t mention the gun that’s disguised as a tinfoil hat, which is then disguised as aiweht;oei4nvdsskld….
@Ted Levy – “Yes, I did. But it’s really not relevant to my point, which is that it would be a real problem if someone actually DID develop such a gun.”
I honestly don’t think it’d make much difference. The mistake the police do and will make is to confuse a cellphone (or wallet) for a handgun of any type. If they can see it’s a cell-phone, that means the person isn’t an immediate threat of shooting them anyway. The concern here is sneaking weapons into secured areas, not an increase in mistaken shootings.
https://photographyisnotacrime.com/2016/03/san-antonio-cop-who-shot-man-holding-cell-phone-fearing-it-was-a-gun-will-be-fired/
https://photographyisnotacrime.com/2016/01/las-vegas-police-kill-man-holding-cell-phone-fearing-gun/
http://www.ocweekly.com/news/orange-county-cop-shot-man-holding-cell-phone-claims-he-thought-it-was-a-handgun-6463597
There are score more similar articles
@Ted Levy, MD – “There are score more similar articles”
Indeed there are. But those are cases of the officers mistaking a cell phone for a (non-disguised) handgun, not of seeing a cell phone, recognizing it’s a phone, and thinking it might be a gun designed to look like a phone.
Right now the end results of of a police officer confronting someone ‘armed’ with a cellphone breaks down into four groups.
A)They realize it is a cellphone, and do not shoot.
B)They realize it is a cellphone, and do shoot.
C)They mistake it for a gun, and do shoot.
D)They mistake it for a gun, and do not shoot.
I would say that groups C and A account for the vast majority of all cases. And if it matters, I would suspect group D is larger than group B.
Now we introduce a, for the sake of the argument, gun that shoots well as most other handguns available for personal use, but looks very like a cellphone at any appreciable distance.
The numbers in group A will probably plummet, and move to Group C. Group B will also likely increase.
What we really need is a firearm that looks just like a raised hand with fingers outspread.
Would something in the line interest you?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTv9AhCuSU4
Re. the vidya-soggyknee article: “Boys should be encouraged to find a means of demonstrating physical prowess” is CREEPY now?
Jesus, I’m done. Apparently even baby lambs playing king of the hill are agents of the patriarchy now.
The trading cards aren’t a new idea, politically. I own an almost-complete set of Iran Contra Scandal Trading Cards from 1988.
http://www.authentichistory.com/1974-1992/3-reagan/5-irancontra/cards/Iran-Contra_Cards.html
Re the interstellar probes, have any of the articles reporting on it included a plausible means for something of the size and mass contemplated to transmit any information back here?
No, and they don’t have a way for the probe to survive the trip against the dual threats of dust-particle impact and galactic cosmic radiation, and they don’t really have a way to launch it in the first place – by my math (caveat: I’m sick this weekend and not solving second-order differential equations for fun, so this is a quick approximation) they need a laser with a power aperture of 5E14 watt-meters; a two trillion watt laser with a mirror the size of a large football stadium would about do it, or the equivalent. They talk about a hundred billion watts of laser power, so presumably they are imagining something five kilometers wide.
No, you can’t do it by combining lots of smaller lasers; the beam spread is defined by the optical aperture of a single element unless you can combine the elements coherently – and we don’t have the technology to do that with anything smaller than microwaves. We also don’t have the technology to push such a beam out through the atmosphere without it being horribly distorted. Those are two common bits of handwavium that people often invoke in laser propulsion schemes, but if you’re planning your project around future technological breakthroughs wouldn’t a nice fusion drive be more practical? I am assured we will have those in no more than twenty years…
They also don’t have a budget. Aerospace cost estimation is perhaps only slightly more accurate than reading chicken entrails, but diode lasers cost about $1/Watt in bulk, so that’s $100 billion right there. And I’m pretty sure there’s no place on Earth where the power grid can actually deliver a hundred billion watts, certainly not in the Chilean Altiplano or wherever. So they’ll need to build their own power plants. According to the DoE, the cheapest way to do that in the short term is natural-gas turbogenerators, with a capital cost of another $1/Watt. Cost estimation in basic infrastructure development, unlike aerospace, is I believe pretty well established.
If they’ve got $100 million in investment and a vague notion that this is going to cost them $10 billion in total, they’ve got maybe five percent of a plan and 0.05% of a working interstellar probe system. Whose probes will probably be dead before they leave the solar system and we still haven’t worked out the way to get their data back to Earth…
No, wait. If they genuinely have a five-kilometer optical aperture on Earth they can use that as the receiver for a laser communications link. Assuming the probe can reconfigure its lightsail as an optically perfect beam director, and they can fit a watt of modulated laser power in their one-gram electronics package, I think that gives a link budget sufficient for 560 kbaud from Alpha Centauri under ideal circumstances. There were only two or three bits of handwavium in that paragraph.
Meh. This sort of thing is a lot easier to do if you already have a spacefaring civilization when you start. And for the cost of launching these probes from Earth, you could pretty much build a small spacefaring civilization.
You left out the bit where the very light craft manages to survive 10-20,000 Gs. The best case here is for them to build a prototype, run out of money, and then have someone convert it to doing laser launch, which is at least quasi-plausible.
Please forgive me if this is too gender specific/unrelated for a link thread, but I’ve just seen this on reddit and I’d love to have another set of perspectives:
Current sales taxes on tampons and other feminine hygiene products: yea, nae, or other?
My take is complicated by the fact that in my jurisdiction, similarly important products (e.g. toilet paper) are currently taxed as any other non-essential product. Part of the local debate is over how essential feminine hygiene products actually are
On the one hand, it isn’t “fair” to expect one gender to front any special fees. On the other, there are many important products that are taxed regardless of how “important” they are. Further complicating matters are societal standards (can’t be freebleeding), the invisible hand of the market, alternative options (e.g. Diva cups), and the actual amount of wealth involved (e.g. taxes on feminine hygiene products amount to dollars per year per individual, but collectively account to millions of dollars of government revenue).
My current stance is that the taxes are not unjustified as part of the base taxation sample.
In the UK, tampon taxes are mandated by the EU, which I find entertaining to people who oppose both the taxes and leaving the EU.
Seems to me feminine hygiene products are as essential as toilet paper. But there’s no general “essentials” exception to sales taxes. In New Jersey, both tampons and toilet paper (actually all paper goods for household use) are exempt. In New York they are both taxable.
I don’t know of any state where feminine hygiene products are taxable and general hygiene products are not taxable. But if there are any, I’d bet it was the unintended effect of a web of unprincipled exceptions, not the moustache-twisting patriarchy trying to find a way to stick it to women.
But that’s not the point, of course. The point is to demonstrate the existence of the moustache-twisting patriarchy oppressing women, and use that to obtain power (and not just to add another sales tax exemption) for the group complaining.
It’s difficult to judge because there isn’t a comparable male-only product to see if that is taxed or not.
If they’re taxing toilet paper then taxing sanitary pads and tampons is not making an exception. Incontinence supplies seem to be taxed also; child diapers may or may not be taxed, depending on the state.
Medical supplies do not seem to be taxed; do you therefore count tampons etc. to be medical supplies or not?
I don’t see any particular reason to have any exemptions in a sales tax. If you want a progressive tax, the income tax is sitting right there.
Though I think the economic effects would be great if the US federal income tax were replaced by a national sales tax with exemptions for food and, maybe lodging and medical care, on which poor people spend a disproportionately large percentage of their income.
The current federal income tax collects almost no money from the bottom half of the income distribution, so although what you describe would be equivalent to a graduated income tax, it would be considerably less graduated than the income tax now is.
To me, that is a feature. Mitt Romney got in trouble for saying so, but the negative incentives created by the current situation seem pretty severe, both practically, and from the perspective of the notion of government as something “we” all do together the left so loves.
(They insist on everyone having a voice, a vote, etc., but when it comes to everyone contributing to the government, even if a much lower sum, they are suddenly silent; I think this is because the reality is that, for the left, one of the major functions of the government is precisely to take from the rich, successful, and able-bodied to give to the poor, infirm, old, and historically oppressed: the graduated nature is, in some sense, the whole point. But my point is that that reality doesn’t mesh well with all the nice rhetoric about “us” doing things “together.”)
Having everyone pay at least something provides a very good incentive to keep the tax from ever getting too high, and, moreover, encourages people to think of government spending in terms of cost-benefit (is this new program worth the inevitable increase in sales tax it will mean for me?), rather than as something which just sort of comes out of thin air, funded vaguely at some point by unsympathetic rich people and corporations (and this is precisely why the government wouldn’t want that).
Well, without disagreeing with what you say about incentives, one of the things I want us to do together is help those among us who are poor, infirm, old, and historically oppressed. So I don’t think a steeply progressive income tax is in conflict with rhetoric about togetherness.
Does the “us” doing things “together” include the old, poor, infirm, and oppressed themselves? If yes, in what sense are we doing anything “together” with them if they aren’t actually contributing? If no, then why can they vote? Or is their contribution of their desire/demand to be helped enough to count as part of the “us” doing things together? The latter sounds more like “taking stuff from people who have more” than “doing things together.”
Two conceivable ways this rhetoric about “us” would seem more justifiable: 1. you don’t get to vote that year if you didn’t pay any income taxes last year or 2. abolish the income tax and replace it with a sales tax which will still hit rich people harder (albeit not as much harder) because they buy more expensive things and because we can exempt things poor people spend a lot of money on.
I would personally be okay with 1. There were a few years in my early twenties when, though eligible to vote, I paid no income tax because I earned no appreciable income. If you had told me that I didn’t get to vote until I started paying into the system, that would not have seemed a huge injustice to me. But I’m sure it would to many people, so option 2 is better, though also not likely in the near future (but more likely than option 1, I think).
Option 2 also has the following benefits: besides the aforementioned incentive to keep taxes low, it eliminates huge amounts of money, time, and resources wasted on preparing personal income tax documents and, moreover, incentivizes savings and investment over spending: rich people who put their money into charity, or reinvest in companies (which usually employ poorer people) will avoid the tax. Rich people who buy a bunch of yachts will have to pay it.
Income taxation, perversely, disincentivizes making money in the first place, therefore disincentivizing the very growth which tends to make poorer people better off in the long run.
One big argument against limiting the franchise is that they are still subject to laws made by politicians who get voted for.
Perhaps the fact that poor people still have to abide by laws that disadvantage them make them part of “us” for these purposes.
Your language of “taking” and “giving” depends on the assumption that we are (at least pro tanto) entitled to every penny of our pretax income and that the federal government by imposing taxes is “taking” it from us. I do not see any reason to buy into this assumption.
I’m not sure if “togetherness” should be seen as anything more than a poetical metaphor. But we are all bound by the same social contract no matter what shape our life happens to take, which means we should get equal say when society considers changes to that contract. It seems bizarre to me to suggest that whether you get a voice in the political system whose laws govern you should depend on accidents of birth, health, natural talents, or age. You couldn’t find a job for a couple years, got hit by a car, or are too old to work, so you don’t get any say in determining your own fate. Sorry!
I sometimes worry if I am paranoid for thinking that every libertarian is about three bad arguments from becoming a fascist. But if you’re already talking about marking off society into the class of contributors and the class of parasites, and restricting the civil rights of the latter, well…
By the same token, sales taxes disincentivize commerce and thereby inhibit economic growth. Maybe there are recherche economic arguments for why we should think that income taxes hurt more, but you haven’t presented any.
I sometimes worry if I am paranoid for thinking that every libertarian is about three bad arguments from becoming a fascist.
Well, I think every social contractarian is about two steps from becoming a proud authoritarian, so I guess it cuts both ways.
Your language of “taking” and “giving” depends on the assumption that we are entitled to every penny of our pretax income.
Assuming for the sake of argument that we are not, what exactly is the moral case against slavery?
It seems bizarre to me to suggest that whether you get a voice in the political system whose laws govern you should depend on accidents of birth, health, natural talents, or age. You couldn’t find a job for a couple years, got hit by a car, or are too old to work, so you don’t get any say in determining your own fate. Sorry!
It follows from the previous assumption. If the money/resources you give the state belong to you, you ought to have a say in how they are used.
It all comes back to the old argument about whether the government belongs to the people or the people belong to the government.
Do you seriously think that the chief objection to slavery is that the slaves do not receive 100% of their pre-tax earnings?
Huh? How do you get from “you ought to have a say in how the government spends your taxes” to “old people should be disenfranchised”?
“But we are all bound by the same social contract no matter what shape our life happens to take, which means we should get equal say when society considers changes to that contract.”
Embedded here are many problematic assumptions I don’t share.
And I’m not saying this “you must pay in to vote” thing is a good idea (nor did I talk about a “class” of “parasites”: in my example, I was a “parasite” in my early twenties and a payer now); I’m just saying it is one conceivable way of justifying all the “stuff we do together” rhetoric, which I fundamentally don’t buy, though not the best one (the best one, as I said, was to actually have everyone contribute at least a little, even if the net contribution of the poorest ends up being only nominal).
Also, even if I were suggesting disenfranchising some large underclass of “parasites,” I’m not sure how that would make me any closer to being a fascist. Fascists are all about the “unity” of “das Volk” and the like. In fact, the whole “government is something we do together” thing strikes me as a bit fascist.
Re. the question of whether it’s better to disincentivize making money or spending money on consumer goods, it’s a more basic economic question which may come down to supply side v. demand side or some such, but to put it simply: do you really think that what is holding back Americans economically is their chronic tightfistedness? Their unwillingness to put things they can’t afford on their credit card? Their habit of saving and investing too much of their extra income?
The lower half still pay considerable taxes through sales taxes and regressive payroll taxes. Disenfranchising non-income tax payers is quite literally taxation without representation, and creates much, much worse incentives.
80% payroll tax, 5% income tax on the top 1%. All settled then!
My principal concern is low economic growth, protected cartels, and unnecessary regulation. My principal work concern is how we abrogate the contract with offshore Indian labor.
Do you seriously think that the chief objection to slavery is that the slaves do not receive 100% of their pre-tax earnings?
If by “pre-tax earnings” you mean “compensation for their labor”. Yes that absolutely is the chief objection to slavery.
Huh? How do you get from “you ought to have a say in how the government spends your taxes” to “old people should be disenfranchised”?
Simple…
Is “person X” paying taxes? If yes they get a say in how those taxes are spent. If not, they don’t.
Edit:
onyomi says: whole “government is something we do together” thing strikes me as a bit fascist.
It’s not just “a bit fascist” it is explicitly fascist. Society is the State and the State is society.
Fascism always involved persecuting those segments of the population judged to be disposable parasites, typically including ethnic minorities, the disabled, the mentally ill, beggars, and the elderly and infirm. We, the Contributors, the able-bodied, mentally sound Italians/Aryans/Spaniards, are all in this together. They are not among us.
Your proposal would restrict the franchise to pretty much the same group of people, mutatis mutandis for America versus continental Europe.
The economy’s in pretty good shape these days, so I’m not sure that anything in particular is holding us back. But the conventional wisdom I’ve heard about the last recession (and really, recessions in general) is that they are exacerbated by a collapse in demand which takes place when wary consumers opt to save their money or pay down debts rather than hit the mall, the so-called paradox of thrift.
“The lower half still pay considerable taxes through sales taxes and regressive payroll taxes. Disenfranchising non-income tax payers is quite literally taxation without representation, and creates much, much worse incentives.”
Firstly, let’s stop discussing this as if I think it’s a good idea. I don’t. I just said it was one conceivable way, and not the best way, to make the “stuff we do together” rhetoric make more sense, which may not be worth doing (better instead to jettison the rhetoric).
That said, I am curious as to what these much worse incentives you speak of are?
Also, (and again, I’m not suggesting we do this), the fact that most people pay state sales taxes doesn’t in any way inherently invalidate the idea: you could theoretically get to vote in the state elections and not the federal.
As for the payroll tax, only people who make at least some income are paying it, so those people are also paying at least a little income tax (though maybe almost none at the very bottom end). Not that I’m in favor of the payroll tax. And I certainly wouldn’t favor a national sales tax in exchange for anything short of total abolition of the federal income tax (and ideally all taxes to tied to income, including payroll, medicare, etc.).
The idea that social security is a pension “we” all “pay into” is another rhetorical fiction we could do without. Social security and medicare are welfare for old people, plain and simple. That doesn’t mean welfare for old people is necessarily a bad idea, but call it what it is.
And this is the meat of my complaint: if you’re going to have welfare for old people, call it welfare for old people. If you want to call it a pension then make it into a real pension like, I’ve heard exists in say, Argentina. Similarly, if you’re going to have a system where half the population don’t contribute to funding the government, then stop calling the government something “we” do “together.” Or, if you want to call it that, create a system where everyone actually contributes a little.
Really? Imagine a society where everyone is obliged to work (on pain of imprisonment, let’s say) and no one ever gets paid, but everyone is free to do whatever they want and has a nice middle-class lifestyle furnished for them by the state (nevermind for the moment whether the society described is humanly possible). Would these people be slaves? Would you judge their situation to be a particularly bad, or morally objectionable one?
Okay. Say I pay $40 in taxes, and you pay $10. Do your opinion get the same weight as mine in how those dollars are appropriated, or only 1/4 as much as mine?
“when wary consumers opt to save their money or pay down debts rather than hit the mall, the so-called paradox of thrift.”
I know the conventional wisdom. But I’m asking you (and anyone else who cares to answer): does this seem to you a real thing? Is this really plausible? Did everyone just cut up their credit cards and tighten their belts when the recession hit? Or did people continue living basically the same lifestyle but start putting more on their credit cards? My overwhelming impression is the latter.
Yup, that definitely sounds like slavery.
You’re “free to do whatever [you] want” except for the part where, well, you aren’t. If you don’t show up at work on time every morning it’s off to jail for you.
(Incidentally this isn’t entirely theoretical, this happens semi-frequently with alimony / child support payments. The amount you pay is constant whether you’re employed or not, so if for whatever reason you lose your job it’s not too hard to end up in prison over it. My dad almost had that happen when I was growing up.)
As for being entitled to your pay, this seems like the weirdest use of entitlement rhetoric ever. You are in fact literally entitled to your full wages. That’s what they are: the compensation you are entitled to for your work.
“Fascism always involved persecuting those segments of the population judged to be disposable parasites”
Though I don’t know about always (the Japanese case comes to mind), this does bring up an interesting issue: many libertarians, myself included, fundamentally object to being forced into an “implied” “social contract” with millions of people we don’t know just because we were born within the same arbitrary geographic borders.
Thus many libertarian proposals seem to boil down to “leave us alone” giving the false impression that libertarianism is inherently anti-social (actually, I think the opposite is the case, but that’s a different debate). But the state won’t leave us alone, so we move to second and third and fourth-best solutions: “You can use our taxes for this and not that, you can pass laws constraining our freedom but only if they are in keeping with this “constitution” or “bill of rights,” you can redistribute our money but only this much or for these purposes, or, indeed, conceivably, “you can force us to pay into this system, but only if you reduce the bad incentive of people who don’t pay in getting an equal say on how the money is used and how much we’re forced to pay in.”
I can see how, from the statist perspective, this looks like the libertarian trying to “kick out” the “undesirable” non-providers from the body politic. But from the libertarian perspective, we want to “kick out” everyone from the body politic, since we don’t believe politics is a legitimate and/or effective mode of social organization in the first place. But you tell us we can’t “kick out” everyone; okay, well then how can we at least limit the claims of “everyone” on us?
Yes, apparently:
“More than six-in-ten (62%) Americans say that since the recession began, they’ve cut back on household spending. Half say they have reduced the amount they owe on mortgages, credit cards, car loans and other borrowing. Of those who have savings or retirement accounts, more than four-in-ten (42%) say they’ve adopted a more conservative approach to saving and investing, compared with just 8% who say they’ve taken a more aggressive approach. These new habits of thrift and caution could well outlive this recession. Asked to predict their financial behaviors once the economy recovers, 48% say they plan to save more, 31% say they plan to spend less and 30% say they plan to borrow less. Only small percentages say the reverse—that they plan to save less and borrow and spend more.”
Racial minorities in Italy (before the German occupation):
“Signed by Mussolini, King Victor Emmanuel Ⅲ, the minister of justice and others, the Royal Decree Law of November 17, 1938 – titled “Laws for the Defense of the Race” – decreed that intermarriages between “Aryans” and “non-Aryans” were henceforth illegal (Art. 1), a law that applied equally to Jews and blacks, or any other non-Aryan people, regardless of nationality, thus forming part of a larger racial policy in the wake of Italy’s conquest of Ethiopia;9 Jews could no longer perform military service in peace or wartime (Art. 10a); Jews were banned from being guardians of non-Jewish minors (Art. 10b); Jews were henceforth barred from any state employment and from owning or managing any business with more than one hundred employees or which received defense contracts (Art. 10c); Jews could no longer own land that had a taxable value of more than 5,000 lire or urban buildings worth more than 20,000 lire (Art. 10d, 10e); Jews were banned from employing domestic servants “of the Aryan race” (Art. 12); and Jews could lose legal parental control over children “who belong to a religion different from the Jewish religion, if it is demonstrated that they give them an education which does not correspond to their religious principles or to the national purpose” (Art. 11).10 In addition, Italian citizenship granted to Jews after 1919 was henceforth revoked (Art. 23) and all foreign Jews – with the exception of those over sixty-five years of age or those married to Italian citizens – were ordered to leave the country within four months or be forcefully expelled (Art. 24 and 25).”
Details of the fascist persecution of other categories of undesirables in Italy can be found in the book “Ordinary Violence in Mussolini’s Italy.” It is true that the Italians did not carry out mass-extermination campaigns like the Germans did. But contempt for those who were unsuited or unable to contribute to the prowess of the nation, or the race, was everywhere a central tenet of fascism.
Onyomi, there is a substantial population that pays payroll tax and not income tax. The 47% figure exists solely for the purpose of deceiving you and it succeeded.
“Though I don’t know about always (the Japanese case comes to mind),”
Okinawa and Koreans are pretty clear cases of the Japanese treating their minorities like shit.
It’s possible to have a consistent moral philosophy which endorses a progressive income tax but doesn’t endorse slavery or the idea that “the people belong to the government.” I think you are failing the ideological Turing test if you can’t imagine consistent moral positions between “you are obligated to pay income tax” and “slavery is OK.” Probably your political opponents aren’t all completely confused and/or evil.
For example, consider the position that all people in the country have obligations to each other, that people with more money have a greater obligation, and that taxes and government are the means by which these obligations are discharged. Under this moral position you are not entitled to all of your income. But this morality does not endorse slavery.
The interesting thing to argue about is whether such obligations exist and/or whether government is a good way to discharge them.
“Okinawa and Koreans are pretty clear cases of the Japanese treating their minorities like shit.”
But they didn’t consider them to be Japanese at all. That is a problem with imperialism, not fascism per se.
But to expand on the earlier point: what if the people of India voted, one billion to 300 million, to redistribute the wealth of America to India? If we protested that this wasn’t fair, could they not by the same logic whereby libertarians are compared to fascists claim that we are unfairly disenfranchising them and excluding them just because they happen to have a different culture, ethnicity, etc.?
If someone from the taxation is theft crowd comes in contact with a property is theft type is there a big explosion?
We can only dream.
Usually just an exchange of insults no worse than “goddamn commie” and “capitalist pig”. Very disappointing.
Big explosions are theft!
Though I have to say I am intrigued by the thought of the question of whether a system in which you were required to work, but very nicely if not monetarily compensated, would ‘count’ as slavery.
“If someone from the taxation is theft crowd comes in contact with a property is theft type is there a big explosion?”
The latter seem to be quite rare nowadays.
“Onyomi, there is a substantial population that pays payroll tax and not income tax. The 47% figure exists solely for the purpose of deceiving you and it succeeded.”
Do you mean people who work but make less than the standard deduction? According to Google that’s only 2%. I guess the EIC would bring it a little higher.
@Dr Dealgood
Really? It sounds like a pretty good deal to me. With a few adjustments, we can make it strictly better than the status quo for >75% of the population. Say you only get put in prison if you work (including child-raising) less than 100 days a year, and the prison is one of those cushy Scandinavian prisons with the Playstations and the blackberry bushes. The only difference is that the consequences of unemployment are enforced by the government, rather than by the markets, and by nature. Why should that matter?
So I don’t think the wrongfulness of slavery consists in any significant degree in the fact that slaves don’t take home a paycheck. Better candidates: being denied autonomy over your own life, having harsh punishments inflicted on you, being treated like property, and being subject to the arbitrary whims of another person.
You say this is a fact, but it seems like a substantive moral judgment to me. Why? What’s the rationale?
@onyomi
I don’t think you bought into the social contract when you were born, I think you opted in when you attained your majority but declined to exercise your ability to leave the country. There are 197 ± 3 countries in the world you could have elected to live in, but instead you chose to stay here. To me, anti-statists are pretty thoroughly hypocrites, happily parasitizing the goods of the federal government while at the same time denying its legitimacy out of the other side of their mouths.
Not to mention state and local sales taxes, which end up being fairly regressive.
“There are 197 ± 3 countries in the world you could have elected to live in, but instead you chose to stay here.”
All of which also have governments. And while we’re talking about the less affluent: I may have the education and resources to move to and function in another country, but lots of people don’t.
To quote David Friedman from http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Libertarian/response_to_huben.html
(Huben): [Extortion by the state is no different than extortion by the mafia] is a prize piece of libertarian rhetoric, because it slides in the accusation that taxation is extortion. … The key difference is who owns what. The Mafia doesn’t own anything to contract about. The landowner owns the land (in a limited sense.) And the US government owns rights to govern its territory.
(Friedman): The Mafia don replies that of course he owns the territory–if you don’t believe him, go ask the current capo di capi. If you don’t like it, you are free to move to the territory of a different don; if you remain, you are implicitly agreeing to accept his “taxes.” Why is his claim any less justifiable than the government’s? He provides you with protection against other dons, just as the government provides protection against other governments.
My error. I see this argument occasionally from both libertarians and right-leaning types.
The state can fund itself in fashion that is not subject to political scrutiny, at all. The State can fund itself in all sorts of measures: payroll taxes, property taxes, and sales taxes, of course. But also items like use fees or (historically) tariffs.
People don’t like being taxed, so they organize politically to fight taxes.
If you, however, disenfranchise a huge portion of the population, they can effectively be taxed at massive rates, because the political establishment will receive no blow-back.
Actually, this very post has an excellent example of what’s allowed to happen when politically connected people rule over a group of disenfranchised people that no one gives a crap about.
Now, I get the general idea: net-taxpayers should pay and we should account for all the rest of these taxes. However, the actual point of the 47% of the line is not implement certain policy, it’s to use as political rhetoric to advance a certain viewpoint.
More broadly, I don’t think this is the actual problem in our system, from the libertarian POV. I would suggest the actual problem is that libertarianism is incompatible with human social structures that arise in urbanized societies, which tend to be more Progressive, in the late 19th century version of the word.
This may only be Western, but I think most human cultures will tend towards this vision as they become more urbanized. If you want a libertarian world, you need Jefferson’s vision of a nation of small farmers.
2% is not what google tells me.
Try this.
@onyomi
You’re saying that the social contract is unjust because, despite the fact that you had ~197 contracts to entertain, you found none of them appealing and so were “coerced” into taking the least bad option? Think about this for a second. Is this a sensible thing for a libertarian to say?
(It is also not really true that every country in the world has a government. Somalia and Western Sahara barely do, for starters. There are men with guns there, but you don’t object to men with guns, do you?)
onyomi
“But they didn’t consider them to be Japanese at all. That is a problem with imperialism, not fascism per se.”
You are going to need to define your words here because Okinawa was part of Japan since the 19th century and received the right to vote in 1912. Imperialism notably doesn’t hand out voting rights.
“But to expand on the earlier point: what if the people of India voted, one billion to 300 million, to redistribute the wealth of America to India? If we protested that this wasn’t fair, could they not by the same logic whereby libertarians are compared to fascists claim that we are unfairly disenfranchising them and excluding them just because they happen to have a different culture, ethnicity, etc.?”
Shockingly almost no one is actually utilitarian. And yes, the best option would be “redistribute in order to improve poor people’s quality of life” with the major caveat that the redistribution needs to actually show improvements; a major objection to this sort of thing is the amount of corruption and waste that is expected to pop up.
I think we’ve hit a bit of a wall in terms of values and/or worldviews. It’s difficult to articulate a response because your perspective seems to be very alien to mine, and I’m not sure if what I say will make any more sense to you than what you said did to me.
Anyway, my best attempt at an answer is that the two are connected. The reason you’re still a slave under that kind of system, regardless of how good your material conditions are, and the reason why you’re entitled to be compensated for your work is the same. Because a free man can choose not to work, and so has to be compensated for his work, while a slave must work regardless of whether or not he is given any compensation.
TL;DR: “A man chooses, a slave obeys.”
@ Earthly Knight:
The difference is that the 197 states were set up by coercive processes, not by consent, not even by consent under the duress of nature. Not even for the original founders was the government set up by unanimous consent.
What’s the difference between a system set up by consent and a system set up by force, if they work just the same? Nothing. But it’s like David Friedman on “capitalist trucks” vs. “communist trucks”: they’re unlikely to work just the same.
The underlying claim here is that, by having a minimal state or no state, we could have a more prosperous, more efficient system for everybody, or nearly everybody. If you disagree with that empirical claim, fine.
If I thought that, instead of having everyone “coerced” by natural needs to work for money, we could pass a law that would give unlimited prosperity to everyone without offsetting negative consequences, I would be in favor of that, too.
But enough with the “if you don’t like it, move to Somalia” crap. The US government could be a lot worse. It could also be a lot better. Potentially, we could even have a certain, specific system of private agencies (i.e. not the system prevailing in Somalia) that provide even better results than that. The fact that I participate in this system doesn’t mean I can’t criticize it or even call for it to be abolished.
Suppose the whole capitalist system really were an unjust system of exploitation. Would it be reasonable to criticize a communist agitator for accepting a job at a factory? “If you don’t like it, why don’t you move to the forest?” The obvious answers would be: “The capitalists own all the damn forests! Besides, as bad as capitalism is, it’s better than living in the forest. But communism will be much better even than this.” Your line of criticism would be just as inane in that case.
The fact is: I think the system of private ownership of the means of production produces good results compared to any practicable alternative, while I think the system of wide-ranging governmental authority produces bad results compared to certain practicable alternatives. That doesn’t mean there’s nothing to dislike about the system of private ownership, or that there’s nothing to like about statism.
It looks like the pre-war period was pretty brutal for the Burakumin and Ainu, too. But so was the rest of Japanese history, so it’s hard to know how much of a role the imperialist ideology played.
“despite the fact that you had ~197 contracts to entertain”
And all these other countries offered me citizenship?
@Dr Dealgood
For all but the wealthiest Americans, choosing not to work for extended periods of time leaves you hungry, bedraggled, and at the mercy of the elements. In the society we’re contemplating, choosing not to work for an extended period of time puts you in a cozy room with a playstation, the internet, and all of the blackberries you can pick. Is having choices forced on you by other men really so much worse than having choices forced on you by nature? This strikes me as more a matter of childish defiance than a well-thought-out ethical scheme.
@ Vox
I’m not quite sure what you’re saying here, but this almost certainly begs the question. You are trying to show that the social contract is unjust, that people do not become bound by the laws of a state just by freely choosing to dwell therein. You cannot do that by pointing at past instances of people freely choosing to live in the state and claiming that this makes it historically unjust. If the social contract is legitimate today, it was legitimate when the country was founded, too.
No. But it does mean that you can’t rightly deny its legitimacy, or claim that its laws are unjust across the board just by virtue of being enforced by the state.
No, but you have a lot of options. More options than many poor people do when applying for a job. What makes your accepting the least bad contract of the many offered you unjust, while their choosing the least bad option is an above-board exercise of their right to forge binding contracts?
If you like, you may think of nations as enormous corporations with their territory as property and their police forces as security guards. This puts the analogy in sharper relief. Liberal democracies make for better masters than ordinary corporations in almost every respect. They must publicly promulgate their laws, while corporations may be as secretive as they like. They abide by principles of due process, while corporations may, unless you have strong union protections, punish you arbitrarily and at will. They give you an equal say in how the country will be governed, while employees have no right to participate in running the company. They guarantee you freedom of speech and assembly, while corporations can fire you for expressing the wrong political sentiment or socializing with the wrong crowd. And so on. If you think about it, the social contract may be the fairest contract you (n)ever sign.
You say this is a fact, but it seems like a substantive moral judgment to me. Why? What’s the rationale?
Again, assuming for the sake of argument that people are not entitled to compensation for their labor what exactly is the moral argument against slavery?
If you like, you may think of nations as enormous corporations with their territory as property
…and this would appear be the position I illustrated earlier where people use their tax dollars to “buy” services from the government. However your position as described seems to take the opposite tack, it is not the territory but the people who are the property.
I said earlier: being denied autonomy over your own life, having harsh punishments inflicted on you, being treated like property, and being subject to the arbitrary whims of another person.
It is really fantastic that you see no middle ground between being entitled to every penny of your pretax income and being an out-and-out slave.
Taxation is slavery; therefore, some slavery is actually good. It’s best just to yield, there’s no point talking to a big-L Libertarian when they get like this about taxes. The non-central fallacy cannot be defeated head-on.
@ Earthly Knight:
What I am saying is that our ancestors didn’t all get together and sign some social contract, setting up a government with the unanimous consent of all present. In that situation, we would still have the problem of why children would be bound by that contract, and whether people can rightfully agree to bind themselves to the arbitrary whims of other people in the future—I don’t think people can rightfully sell themselves into slavery—but you can argue that agreement to the social contract is a condition of being allowed to inherit property, etc.
I got into a debate a while ago here about how even systems actually founded upon unanimous consent can be unjust. For instance, if a group of people got together and set up a theocratic commune where they all agreed to execute adulterers, I would not allow them to enforce that agreement upon an adulterer who got caught and regretted agreeing to that stipulation. It’s an unconscionable agreement. So I agree that if libertarians take contractarianism too far, beyond the bounds of what actually promotes human life and happiness, they wind up in virtually the same position as the worst statists.
However, we don’t even have that. The actual way all governments were founded is that some group of powerful people took over and forced their will upon the minority whether they liked it or not. In other words, they were not founded upon consent or any kind of actual social contract.
That’s the point of the capitalist vs. communist trucks analogy. There is no difference between a condominium association and a local government if they engage in the exact same actions. But if the one is founded upon unanimous consent and the other founded upon force, they are unlikely to behave exactly the same.
I deny its claim to being founded upon consent, in precisely the same way I would deny the claim by the mafia to being founded upon consent, if they were impertinent enough to make it.
What you’re saying is that the mafia can take over some territory including your property, and that if you don’t want to pay protection money, you can leave. Apparently, that’s a consensual system.
I don’t know what other sense of “legitimacy” you might be referring to. I also deny its claim to being founded on the basis of natural right or expediency, separately from the claim of being founded upon consent.
As for your other claim, I’m not saying that the laws are unjust because they’re enforced by the state. I’m saying the state is bad because it enforces unjust laws. And not contingently here and there; it’s set up in such a way as to virtually guarantee that unjust laws will be passed.
What makes the system, whereby the means of production are privately owned by a relative few and the rest agree to work for money, just is that it’s actually the best system for producing wealth and raising the standards of living of everyone. There is no superior arrangement.
The employers are not responsible for the fact that some people are poor; poverty is a natural fact to which capitalism and industrialization is the solution.
If there were a superior arrangement, such as communism, but employers doggedly stuck to capitalism because it served their short-term interest, then capitalism would be unjust.
What makes the welfare-regulatory state unjust is that it does a lot of unnecessary harm, and we could have a lot better system. If it were the best system possible, it wouldn’t be unjust. As it is, though, the state is responsible for the damage inflicted upon the people it harms.
“No, but you have a lot of options. More options than many poor people do when applying for a job.”
Do you know how many foreign countries offered me citizenship when I reached 18? 0. I had to work, effectively, under the table much of the time when I lived in Taiwan, and do all kinds of visa finagling because it was too hard even to get a long-term residence permit with the right to work a real job.
And anyway, even if, with more resources and education than the average US poor person, I could probably secure a job and, if not citizenship with full voting rights, then, at least some kind of long-term residence permit in a country other than the US, how many such opportunities exist for those poor US citizens who can hardly find a job here? They are really going to learn a foreign language and/or culture, leave their family and friends behind, navigate foreign immigration systems and even achieve citizenship/voting rights in a foreign country? Does the “social contract” apply equally to them, given they didn’t have the multitude of choices I supposedly have?
Of course they have governments. “Warlord” is just another way of saying “non-internationally recognized government that rules a smaller area than the area recognized internationally as the country”.
It is really fantastic that you see no middle ground between being entitled to every penny of your pretax income and being an out-and-out slave.
It is equally fantastic to me that you do not see the connection between a “a person’s time and labor is the property of the state” and the “the person themselves is the property of the state”.
You want to argue that we need to pay for the services we are provided? I’ll agree. However that is not the case you’ve made.
@Earthly Knight “The economy’s in pretty good shape these days”
I’ll be sure to let all my friends who’ve been unable to find jobs for literally months or years know that things are going great and it’s all in their imaginations. Maybe I should also let all the hobos sleeping on my street in on the secret.
@ Vox
I don’t see why you think this is relevant. The view I’m defending is that acceptance of the social contract is signaled by having the opportunity to leave the country while over 18 but electing not to do so. So a guy living in backwoods Pennsylvania in 1787 consented to the social contract by virtue of continuing to live in the US after the Constitution was passed. I agree that if, for instance, the Constitution had not enjoyed majority support among the US population at the time it was ratified that this would cast serious doubt on its legitimacy. But I don’t think this was the case.
(Note that I am prescinding away here from the fact that the franchise at the time was restricted to landowning white men. But I don’t think this is your reason for thinking that US constitution was historically unjust?)
Sure, but the problem there is that the law has unjust content, not that the government is by its nature illegitimate. These are distinct defects and we should keep them so.
But what if 99% of the population finds the constitution unjust and wishes it to be rewritten? Does the fact that our current political system is the best conceivable form of government outweigh the collective wishes of the governed?
@onyomi
Do you know how many people have offered me jobs out of the blue, or how hard I will have to work to attain the career I’m training for? If you’re trying to find a way that the citizenship market is worse than the employment market, you’re not succeeding. Getting exactly the job you want most in the world will in almost all cases be harder than immigrating to your country of choice.
Libertarians generally insist that a scarcity of viable alternatives to signing an employment contract in no way undermines the fairness of the contract. And you are at all times free to leave the country, if by no other means than by heading to the gulf and paddling out on some driftwood. You really need to be looking for respects in which employment contracts and social contracts differ which could plausibly ground the moral distinction you draw between the two. You haven’t really found any yet.
@Jiro
If this is so, then basically no region has at once been inhabited by man and free of government, in which case the libertarian complaint that “I don’t have anywhere without a government to flee to” rings pretty hollow.
Western Sahara is mostly desert, though, so if you were careful about it you could probably sneak in and be totally free anarchy yay! until you expire of heatstroke a few hours later. If libertarians are demanding not only that the region they immigrate to be uninhabited, but that it also contain arable land, well, that’s more unreasonable yet. Channeling libertarian thought on economics: why should you deserve a valuable piece of land which you have done nothing to earn and which has already been claimed by someone else?
@hlynkacg
Time and labor are not literally pieces of property, so let’s try and cash this out in non-metaphorical terms. What it amounts to, I think, is the claim that:
A person should be free to spend all of their time and energy as they like, or else that person is a piece of chattel.
I do not see that this follows. If anything, you are just reiterating the wildly implausible thesis that we started with, the thesis that anyone who is not entitled to 100% of their pretax income is a slave.
“In that situation, we would still have the problem of why children would be bound by that contract, and whether people can rightfully agree to bind themselves to the arbitrary whims of other people in the future”
Children get their lives run by their parents despite consenting to that as much as they have consented to past political decisions. Unless libertarianism includes state run crèches, you have to admit past decisions can bind individual who cannot have played a part in legitimizing them.
Look, man, the economy has been growing for 5 years straight and the unemployment rate is at 5% (the highest by state is 6.6%, in Alaska). I know that there are a lot of people who gave up looking for work during the recession and haven’t really tried much since, but if your friends have been diligently looking for jobs these past few years, they’re just not representative of the overall employment situation in the US. There will always be unemployed people, and there will always be at least a few homeless. Doesn’t mean the economy’s in bad shape.
What undermines the fairness of the contract is that it can be imposed on you without you having to sign it. Requiring an explicit agreement to consider a contract a contract prevents you from just being able to arbitrarily declare a contract with someone whenever you want to take something from him. Which is pretty much what you’re doing.
Of course if you ignore the biggest difference between “social contracts” and actual contracts you’ll find it hard to find differences between them.
Also, “leaving” like you suggest doesn’t allow you withdraw your land from government sovereignty, and it certainly doesn’t excuse you from paying taxes.
Think about all of the commercial transactions you participated in during the last year. How many involved you signing an actual contract? Almost all of our everyday purchases (with the obvious exception of software) are principally governed by conventional or implicit contracts, rather than written rules. When I pay for a ticket to a movie, the manager will throw me out if I start shouting racial slurs at the other customers, even though I never signed any contract to that effect. If I enter a Subway, purchase a bag of chips, and then proceed to slowly and conspicuously steal all of their napkins and straws, I’m liable to wind up having an uncomfortable conversation with a police officer, even though there was never any sign in the store regulating straw and napkin use. And so on. Capitalism would be pretty much unworkable without a heavy reliance on implicit contracts, because we’d spend most of our lives buried in paperwork.
If the objection is to implicit contracts in general, no capitalist economy could be just. So that can’t be it, either.
You are free to sell your land, of course. It does look like some minors will have to pay expatriation taxes, but unless they’ve inherited a fortune the tax will be trivial. I’m happy to agree that expatriation taxes are unjust to whatever extent they pose an obstacle to would-be social-contract opt-outers, though.
I just want to correct something that was mentioned in this thread. The racial laws in fascist Italy were introduced in 1938 to appease Germany, and represented a reversal of fascism’s earlier position on that point. Keep in mind that by that time Fascism has existed in Italy as a political movement for more than 20 years, and had been in power for more than 15 years, which is longer than the entire existence of Nazi Germany. This contradicts the idea that the oppression of Jews is intrinsic to fascism.
In those cases society dictates (some of) the terms of the contract, but the contract itself is still explicit (even if it may not involve a literal signature). Dictating terms can’t be exploited in the same way as dictating the existence of a contract.
If society tried to dictate arbitrary contract terms that the seller didn’t like, the seller would just explicitly disclaim the societal terms, since he and society would be working at cross purposes.
If the seller himself tried to dictate arbitrary terms, he’d find that nobody would make any more explicit agreements with him.
(Also, if you sell your land, you are forced to pay taxes on the sale. And the government gets to impose restrictions that affect the sale price of the land anyway.)
Remember that we are treating the territory of the nation as its property. Merely by walking onto a parcel of land, you become subject to the whims of the owner, even if you never agreed to any sort of contract, even, indeed, if you mistakenly believed the land was public. She may blast Iron Maiden at top volume until your ears start ringing. She may forcibly escort you off of the premises. If you refuse to leave, she may summon the police to have you arrested.
I do not see how the social contract is any different in thsi regard. So, I repeat: no libertarian could object to implicit contracts in general.
“you really need to be looking for respects in which employment contracts and social contracts differ”
One is an actively chosen, attested, voluntary agreement between parties and the other is a post hoc academic fantasy used to justify the status quo.
The differences between voluntary employment and citizenship of a state you were born in are numerous, but one obvious one: employment doesn’t depend on your geographic location for being allowed to quit. There are no private employers or companies which can tell me “so long as you own that house over there, you work for us and nobody else,” or “so long as you own that house over there, you owe us money.”
Private employers can demand you do x, y, or z as a condition for remaining employed, but they can’t tell you you’re not allowed to quit unless you move hundreds of miles away. They could theoretically say, “we don’t like our employees doing long commutes, so you must live within 50 miles of the company if you want to work here,” but they can’t say “you’re not allowed to quit this job so long as you live within 50 miles of the company.”
You might claim that, unlike a private corporation, the state has some claim to any land within its borders I might live on, and therefore gets to set the terms of my living there. I don’t think most Americans conceive of their private property in that way (as if the state is just allowing them to steward what actually belongs to it), but even if we accept that, that just makes the difference between residence in a state and private contract that much bigger: when dealing with private individuals and companies, you own you and your stuff and they own themselves and their stuff and you trade your labor and stuff as you see fit.
In negotiation with the state, on your interpretation, they own themselves and their stuff and they also own you and your stuff, at least partially. Negotiation with a party who already has a theoretically unlimited claim on your person and property is very, very different than negotiation with someone with no such claim.
Ironically, the closest an individual-state negotiation comes to a private negotiation is when the individual is not a citizen of that state. So in this sense states are like companies, I guess, if everyone were always born already an employee of some company and there was no reasonable option to ever quit other than to work for another company with similar claims on its employees.
I do find it interesting, however, that, in a thread where you’ve implied that libertarians want to disenfranchise the poor, infirm, and oppressed, you’ve actually proven why liberals’ favorite justification for the state (the “social contract”) doesn’t work for the poor, infirm, and oppressed.
One of the interesting things about governments is that they claim the right to forbid people in their territory to work at all. While businesses can have non-compete agreements, they don’t go that far.
I’m not really sure what you mean by “active choosing” and “attestation”, actually, but it seems to me that your remaining in the country is perfectly voluntary and a choice you actively make. You can see in my exchanges with Jiro above that active choosing and attestation can’t be restrictions on social interactions or exchanges in general for libertarians, anyway– too many contracts or pseudo-contracts that you’re committed to regarding as perfectly fair are neither actively chosen nor attested, whatever those words might signify.
Remember that on the view I’m defending you’re really just leasing your land from the federal government. The correct analogy, then, would be something like a farmhand living in a shack on a large ranch. Clearly, the rancher can require him to vacate the premises if the farmhand stops working or won’t sign his employment contract, even if the farmhand has nowhere else to go. By parity of reasoning, the federal government is entirely within its rights to require you to abide by its laws or prepare to doggy paddle to Cuba.
You seem to be misunderstanding. I’m noting an inconsistency in your suite of views, typical of libertarians: it is impossible to at once maintain that all of the contracts we would see under maximum capitalism would be just while the boilerplate liberal-democracy social contract is not. I don’t believe that all of the contracts we would see under maximum capitalism would be just, so I can consistently impose stricter constraints on an acceptable social contract.
“Remember that on the view I’m defending you’re really just leasing your land from the federal government.”
I noted that and pointed out how it isn’t the view most Americans hold of their private property. If most Americans actually conceived of their private property in such terms I think there’d be a revolution tomorrow.
But even if we accept that idea, then the analogy becomes: states are like private corporations… if everyone were born already employed by and bound to a particular company with no possibility of starting a new company or quitting, except, perhaps to immediately start working for a different company.
The fact that states “own” all habitable land in the world is not incidental. It’s crucial. To use the private company analogy, it would be like all land in the world being owned by 200 private companies, all of which had strongly enforced agreements to never sell any land to any entity other than one of the other 200. Also, if one of the 200 tries to form a splinter corporation, the original corporation is probably justified in killing them.
Could such an unjust state of affairs theoretically arise privately? Theoretically, yes, but practically, no. Because of the profit opportunity in defection, gigantic, absolute monopolies on valuable resources (and what could be more valuable than “all the habitable land in the known universe?”) have proven impossible to maintain without use of force. And most people have very much higher standards for when private individuals and companies are allowed to use force as compared to states. Certainly we wouldn’t think Apple was justified in burning down Microsoft headquarters to enforce a cartel.
How do we justify a system in which an individual can never “truly” own any land, but in which groups of individuals can, ideally if they killed someone to get it?
Most Americans think that any benefit they get based on government provisioning (including e.g. rule of law) or other people’s positive externalities or the like is minor, not worth talking about, and in any event their birthright. Whereas any uncaptured postive externalties they create or tax they pay are a massive imposition on hero-creators that earned every penny by sheer effort with no help from anyone, in fact in the face of active attempts to thwart them.
Just witness the backlash over “you didn’t create that”. Americans, particularly red tribe Americans, have breed deep in their bones the Marxist theory of value. If you are tired at the end of the day you perforce are carrying civilization on your back.
I’m not really sure what you mean by “active choosing” and “attestation”, actually, but it seems to me that your remaining in the country is perfectly voluntary and a choice you actively make.
Is there some previously-undiscovered force that causes people to be accelerated away from the territory of sovereign states unless actively resisted? You’d think Isaac Newton would have noticed, but since it has apparently escaped notice until now, I’m sure the Nobel committee will be recognizing your work Real Soon Now.
Alternately, it might be a bit of a stretch to assert that remaining in a particular nation is an active choice.
If you walk onto a parcel of land that is like property, that would be the equivalent of immigration and I agree that we can impose restrictions on immigrants that would be wrong on citizens.
A citizen is more like an owner than like someone who walks onto someone else’s land. Owners cannot demand arbitrary things from other owners in order for them to stay owners.
Of all the bad arguments you use, probably the worst is:
Please name a contract to which people are bound, which they did not actively choose. Because you won’t find it.
You’re right that many contracts are implied, but that isn’t the same thing. When I buy milk from Tesco, I don’t sign anything, and many of the terms are implicit. But I have to actively choose to buy the milk, and if I don’t, I’m not obliged to pay Tesco anything. And silence is not consent.
How different the “social contract” looks. I’ve never received an offer, and my purported “acceptance” is that I haven’t taken extraordinary steps to disclaim the non-existent offer! But of course the arguments you proffer aren’t genuine, mere Harry-Frankfurt-stuff. You don’t even proffer a hypothetical way that someone could decline all “offers” of social contracts altogether! That’s lazy trolling.
But you give the game away entirely when you claim that government imposition leads to fairer terms than the deals we freely make with companies. You’re not dull-witted enough to believe that.
@onyomi
You said this, but I don’t think it’s really true, at least of educated Americans. Most (educated) Americans understand that all transaction and titles of ownership are only valid insofar as they comply with all applicable laws and receive the ongoing tacit approval of federal authorities. This is all settled fifth amendment jurisprudence, as I understand.
You couch this in terms of land, but nothing requires you to do that. Say you live in a town in a remote desert and don’t have the money to leave, there are a dozen employment available to you, all of them are bad, you must take one or starve. If you agree to any of the contracts, pretty much every libertarian will sanction the deal as fair and binding. The social contract works pretty much the same.
@John Schilling
Like I said, I really have no clue what an active choice is and how it differs from a passive choice. Is an active choice one where you consciously contemplate all of the available options? But there are too many options available to us at any given moment, so this will ensure that almost none of our transactions qualify as “active.” The best I can picture an active choice is one where you’re kind of frenetically hopping around while nodding your head and smiling.
@Jiro
But this is just the view of the relationship between citizens and the state that we’re discussing. The state is like a condo board, while all of us are condominium owners: we own our units, but we’re still bound by the board’s bylaws, and if we ignore them they reserve the right to kick us out of our condos.
@ Salem
Really? So when I purchase a ticket at a movie theater, I do have the right to shout racial slurs at the other patrons as much as I want without being kicked out? My silence cannot be interpreted as consent to the theater’s unwritten rules, after all.
Not… really. Frankfurt cases involve my “choosing” to do x when it is not possible that I could have done otherwise because, had I done so, a rogue agent would have forced me by some kind of brain manipulation to do x anyway. The choices I’m talking about are perfectly normal, thisworldly choices: we have all contemplated, at some point in our lives, what it would be like to live in another country, but for whatever reason decided that we would rather stay, knowing full well that by doing so we would continue to be governed by the laws of the nation.
@ Earthly Knight:
The question is not whether it enjoyed majority support but whether it enjoyed unanimous support. And that does not matter in itself but only insofar as a system based on unanimous consent is likely to be better than a system imposed on people coercively. That is the point of the essay by David Friedman I linked that you apparently did not look at. There is no difference between a private government and a public government, so long as they do the same things. But they are unlikely to do the same things.
Your contention that backwoods farmers in Pennsylvania “consented” to the social contract despite rebelling as soon as 1791 in the Whiskey Rebellion is absurd. If the system were unjust, they would have the right to rebel against it whether they consented to it or not. But in fact they did not consent at all and did everything in their power to try to throw it off.
Why are you even trying to claim that government is imposed by consent? It obviously isn’t. And it need not be consensual to be justified; you may appeal to the consequences alone.
I find it much more plausible to support a theory of “homesteading” in government: since in order to have civilization and a minimally decent society, mankind (allegedly) requires centralized government, any individual or group who finds a group of ungoverned people living in anarchy has the right to conquer them and rule them. And he continues to have the right to rule in virtue of providing the government which the people objectively require. Whether they consent to it really has little to do with it given that government on the basis of consent would be impossible.
It’s the same as if you should find an abandoned child in the wilderness; I’d say you have the right to raise him. But of course you lose that right if you you abuse him in ways that violate the purpose of giving parents authority over children.
Sure, it’s a very large part of the reason. I don’t know why you act as if it wouldn’t be.
By your lights, slaves consented to the social contract. If they didn’t consent to it, they could always pay their masters for the monetary value of their lives and then leave. Of course, they couldn’t steal their lives from their masters, no more than the owner of a house can expect to exempt himself from the state’s authority and continue owning it without paying property taxes.
The system tends to produce unjust laws because it is by nature illegitimate. These two things are not independent of one another. I do not believe in a moral-practical dichotomy. If I found that the system produced good results, I would have to revise my theory to conclude that it is legitimate after all.
The purpose of the concept of legitimacy is to tell us which systems will work effectively and which will not, and therefore which ones people ought to submit to and which ones they ought to subvert. Otherwise, it’s nothing but a floating Platonic abstraction.
But if I were to conclude that it is legitimate, it would not be on the basis of being consensual. It would be on the basis of the kind of natural right to rule I described above. And of course such a theory could be modified by saying that certain forms of government (such as monarchy or dictatorship) are by nature illegitimate because they tend to produce unjust laws, but other forms like liberal democracy are by nature legitimate because they do not. So you wouldn’t have to actually wait for the dictatorship to oppress you before you had the right to rebel against it.
Of course it does. The whims of the people are irrelevant. What’s relevant is what’s in their actual interests.
Now, it turns out that a system where people are free to make their own decisions is much more in their interests than a system where they are dictated to. But freedom is not an end in itself; it’s valuable because it’s conducive to happiness. If totalitarianism were conducive to happiness, then totalitarianism would be valuable. But that would imply very different facts about human nature. That’s the whole point of natural law: human nature demands a certain sort of system in order to achieve given purposes.
In any case, if you have a system of individual freedom and people mistakenly believe that they would be better served by a system of greater state control, that does not make them justified in imposing it, even if they are in the majority. Anyone who wanted to oppose it would have the right to oppose it.
@ Samuel Skinner:
Children are incapable of running their own lives and have to be ruled by someone else. Therefore, parents have the right to rule them because it’s in their best interests. But I don’t pretend they consented to it.
If having an interventionist state were in people’s best interests, I would say such a state has the right to rule people regardless of whether they consent. I just don’t think it is in their interests.
The obvious problem here is that you’ve created an incentive to define anarchy as broadly as possible.
It’s basically the logic of colonialism. Which I mean to say as neutrally as possible — I don’t have the hate-on for colonialism that a lot of people do. But it does suggest some failure modes.
@Vox
“Children are incapable of running their own lives and have to be ruled by someone else. Therefore, parents have the right to rule them because it’s in their best interests. But I don’t pretend they consented to it.
If having an interventionist state were in people’s best interests, I would say such a state has the right to rule people regardless of whether they consent. I just don’t think it is in their interests.”
This isn’t interventionist state argument, this is argument to show the social contract is valid. If it is okay for individuals who you’ve had no choice in choosing to raise you, why isn’t the same acceptable for states?
“It doesn’t work well” is a different objection from “it is wrong”; notably it is testable. However that isn’t the argument Earthly Knight is dealing with.
Do you really need this spelling out, or is this just more distraction?
You formed a contract with the cinema when you bought the ticket. The cinema can’t just deem me to have accepted a contract because I was standing in the vague vicinity of the cinema. No, silence/inaction is not consent. I have to take some positive action to communicate my agreement (which might be as simple as saying “two tickets for Hail Caesar, please”).
On the other hand, once a contract is formed, you are right that some of the terms might be implicit (whether by law or by custom), rather than expressly spelled out by either party. So yelling in the cinema would (probably) break my side of the contract, even though neither party expressly specified that in advance. And, to take your analogy in a generous spirit, I agree that if I had assented to a social contract, then it might have additional implied terms (such as a duty of mutual good faith, for example) that were not explicitly specified. Such implied terms are often necessary to give effect to the agreement that was made.
But if there’s no agreement in the first place, there’s nothing to give effect to.
@ Nornagest:
It’s exactly the logic of colonialism.
And the fact that the people in charge have no incentive actually do what’s best for the governed is the main problem with colonialism and the state in general.
But if it’s actually the case that an extensive government is required to stop the Hobbesian war of all against all, then I didn’t creative the incentive to define anarchy broadly and arrogate power to oneself. The facts of reality created that incentive, and all we could do is try to mitigate it as much as possible.
Which we don’t do by telling lies about how the state is really consensual after all.
@ Earthly Knight:
At best, you are arguing against a deontological sort of “stupid libertarianism” that doesn’t recognize any distinctions of degree.
If you live in a company town and don’t have money to leave, you have very little actual freedom. If you live in the desert town, you have a little more freedom (it’s quite a bit easier to change jobs than to change countries or even cities), but still not much.
The point, as I see it, is that libertarians believe as an empirical proposition that laissez-faire will create more and better opportunities for people, giving them greater freedom of action. If laissez-faire led to a giant monopoly that controlled everything and called itself “Not the State, Inc.”, I don’t think any libertarians would support it.
Some of them have bad theories that make it sound like they ought to support it. But why waste time attacking that?
If your actual view is that libertarian policy will lead to some kind of neo-feudalism where people are ruled cradle-to-grave by the condominium association from hell, then say that. Because I would certainly oppose any kind of policies leading to that.
But I guess you’re right that there is a certain strand of libertarianism that says there is no moral difference between the United States and the Soviet Union; they are or were equally illegitimate. I think that is absurd. They’re certainly not equally unconsensual.
@ Samuel Skinner:
It would be acceptable, if it were in people’s best interests.
The reason it’s not in people’s best interests is not a contingent, random thing. It’s a matter of natural law. There are principled reasons, deriving from facts about human nature, that tell us whether such a system is compatible with it. It’s not a coincidence that, given the way people are, e.g. communism doesn’t work. Communism doesn’t work because of the way people are.
If it were to work, people would have to be different. Just as people would have to be different in order for cyanide not to poison them.
Natural law, natural rights, are not “supernatural law” or “supernatural rights”. They don’t pertain to some Platonic dimension. They are a methodology for helping to determine what social systems work best for people in the real world. That is entirely consistent with the usage of e.g. John Locke.
Or as Randy Barnett lays it out in “Of Chickens and Eggs—The Compatibility of Moral Rights and Consequentialist Analyses”
If there is a moral system in which something can produce the best consequences and yet be wrong, then that moral system is not founded upon what actually benefits human life and happiness, and I reject it.
On the kind of analysis that I am applying (and that libertarians like Barnett apply), it is impossible for there to be a conflict between morality and practicality. Because they are two methods for answering the same question, useful because they can check each other.
It’s like solving a math problem one way, then going back and solving it another way. If your answers conflict, you know you made a mistake somewhere.
People make agreements with condo boards using explicit contracts, not implicit ones. You’re trying to combine aspects of two different scenarios: condo boards (applies to owners but contract is explicit) with walking onto land you don’t own (applies to non-owners, have to comply with arbitrary terms) and building a Frankenstein of “applies to owners but the terms are arbitrary”.
You are again confusing consent to the contract’s rules with consent to the existence of the contract.
@ Vox
“It’s a matter of natural law. ”
You are going to have to elaborate because “It conflicts with human nature” and “it is used by everyone on Earth” are statements that do not mesh well.
@ Samuel Skinner:
It conflicts with human nature to a certain degree.
It doesn’t totally conflict. That’s why it’s not totally nonfunctional.
If I say cigarettes kill people and conflict with the requirements for human health, that doesn’t mean you’ll drop dead the moment you smoke one. Most people who smoke them live a pretty long time.
Some libertarians do tend to be apocalyptic and say that if we don’t stick to the straight and narrow path, we’ll surely fall into communist hell. I don’t think so.
I think that point of view is harmful for the same reasons that drug scaremongering is harmful. If you tell people their lives will be ruined if they smoke meth one time, and they smoke meth one time without having their lives ruined, they might conclude that meth isn’t so bad after all.
“Your language of “taking” and “giving” depends on the assumption that we are (at least pro tanto) entitled to every penny of our pretax income and that the federal government by imposing taxes is “taking” it from us. I do not see any reason to buy into this assumption.”
I’m curious about your alternative theory of entitlement. What do you think determines how much someone is entitled to? Does simple existence entitled someone to stuff that someone else has to produce, even if the existing person does nothing that produces stuff (broadly defined to include services)? If that isn’t it, what does determine it?
@Salem
Here’s a crisper example of a legitimate contract where no consent is solicited. Suppose you are walking past Mr. Ararat Hospital and have a brain aneurysm. An EMT notices, slaps you on a gurney, and pushes you, unconscious, inside. The doctors realize they only have about five minutes to operate and save your life: no time to get consent from your health care proxy. You awaken, five days later, completely cured and with a huge medical bill gauchely placed on your bedside table. We may even stipulate that, had you been conscious to voice an opinion, you would not have consented to the procedure. Not because you have a death wish or anything like that, but because you are a gambler and St. Mary’s across the street offers 95% the chance of survival at half the price.
It seems pretty clear to me both that (1) it was permissible for the doctors to operate on you, and (2) you are obligated to pay the bill, and to follow all of the hospitals rules and regulations, even the unwritten ones, during the course of your stay. So it is not true that even perfectly ordinary contracts require explicit consent to bind.
@Vox
I’m addressing the standard natural-rights-based forms of libertarianism that onyomi buys into. If you’re a libertarian by way of being a consequentialist with a dubious suite of empirical beliefs, that’s great, but it’s not really relevant here.
The claim is that implicit consent is given when the individual has the ability to freely leave the country after her 18th birthday and chooses not to, not that implicit consent is given when an individual would have had the ability to leave the country after her 18th birthday were she rich and with the say-so of her master. Virtually all slaves would not be bound by the social contract, on this view, which seems like the right verdict.
You… you haven’t met very many libertarians, have you?.
@ Jiro
If you think you’re right about this, formulate a condition which says “the type of implicit consent to the social contract you’ve described is non-binding, while ordinary contracts are, because of the following key difference: _______.” I suspect the result will seem implausible and wildly ad hoc, but let’s see.
“The lower half still pay considerable taxes through sales taxes and regressive payroll taxes. ”
Correct. But I think the proposal that set off this subthread involved replacing the federal income tax with an alternative.
A further problem with almost all arguments along these lines is that they assume what matters is who actually hands over the money. The easiest way to see that that can’t be correct is to consider two alternative taxes–a sales tax and a purchase tax. If it’s a sales tax you hand ten dollars to the seller and he hands one of them to the tax collector. If it’s a purchase tax, you hand one dollar to the tax collector and nine to the seller. The two are obviously identical–but one results in all of the tax “paid by” sellers, the other by buyers.
Putting a tax on something changes equilibrium prices. One can describe possible situations where almost all of a tax on high income people is paid by low income people, because in equilibrium the services the high income people provide to low income people increase in price by almost the amount of the tax.
Figuring out who really pays taxes requires more information than the IRS can provide.
@ David Friedman
I’m curious about your alternative theory of entitlement. What do you think determines how much someone is entitled to?
Why neglect the obvious? If you made your money growing potatoes and driving them to market, then the government which built the road before you were born is entitled to a share of your money to maintain the road. Etc.
@ Earthly Knight:
I wouldn’t say you’re obligated to pay such a bill at all. It seems to me incredibly unjust that you would be. You never consented; it wasn’t what you wanted; and while it may be in your best interest, the doctors were in no position to determine that. And if they are allowed to rack up charges on people without their consent, they’ll abuse it.
If I throw you a birthday party where I invite hundreds of strippers and you don’t want it and are completely disgusted by the whole thing, you’re not obligated to pay me back for it. Even if it cost me a million dollars.
Even in the example I gave earlier of children, the children may be obligated to obey while they’re being cared for, but this doesn’t create some kind of binding obligation on the part of the children to pay the parents back for the full costs of parenting. Especially if they don’t like the quality of parenting they were given. The cost of raising children is presumed to be paid back by the children in terms of the emotional reward the parents get from it. They’re not slaves the parents can wring unchosen debts out of.
The problem is that your idea of a “standard” natural-rights libertarian is a bad caricature of Murray Rothbard. Randy Barnett is a very influential, very “standard” natural-rights libertarian.
And even Murray Rothbard believed as a matter of fact that libertarianism was the system that would produce the best consequences, even if he did sometimes make remarks that seem to suggest bizarrely that we should support it even if it led to misery and death.
Then what was all the bullshit about paddling to Cuba?
Man, that’s some enthusiastic bullet-biting. Questions:
1. Would it make a difference if, had you been conscious, you would have opted to take the safe bet and go to Mt. Ararat instead? In other words, do you weasel out of the bill because you didn’t consent to the operation, or because you wouldn’t have?
2. Was it obligatory for the doctors to operate on you, or merely permissible?
What? Do you mean Cuba? The point is that your egress from the country must be relatively unrestricted: no slave-master hunting you down, no crippling expatriation taxes, and so on. Once you get into international waters, though, you’re on your own! This is intended to mirror the libertarian saws about how you have no right to free food even if you’re about to starve to death because that is Exactly the Same as Literal Slavery.
“Putting a tax on something changes equilibrium prices.”
This is a very important point which most people seem not to consider at all (the idea that you pay half your payroll tax and your employer pays half your payroll tax, for example), but which I also forget to consider consistently.
Maybe we can make a national sales tax as replacement for federal income tax more palatable by describing it as a tax the seller has to pay rather than a tax the buyer has to pay (even though it’s a semantic distinction).
“then the government which built the road before you were born is entitled to a share of your money to maintain the road.”
Which they collect as tolls or, a little less properly, in gasoline tax. If the post office delivers letters, its entitled to only deliver ones with stamps on them–just like a private post office.
How does that give the government a claim on my income to be used to provide goods and services that I don’t choose to use?
” But the conventional wisdom I’ve heard about the last recession (and really, recessions in general) is that they are exacerbated by a collapse in demand which takes place when wary consumers opt to save their money or pay down debts rather than hit the mall, the so-called paradox of thrift.”
That was a widely accepted view among academic economists from sometime in the 1930’s to sometime in the 1960’s. Less so since.
As a little evidence against it … . For a while, Keynesian macro was the dominant view. It continued to be popular with governments, since it provides an argument for spending money without collecting taxes, and lay people, and some economists.
It provides a reasonably simple formula for avoiding recessions and depressions. So if it’s right, how come they still happen?
“It seems bizarre to me to suggest that whether you get a voice in the political system whose laws govern you”
“a voice” is an odd description of rules that give you perhaps as much as one chance in a million of affecting those laws.
“which tend to be more Progressive, in the late 19th century version of the word. ”
You mean in favor of eugenic policies such as sterilizing the unfit, alcohol prohibition, Taylorism, stuff like that?
“but it seems to me that your remaining in the country is perfectly voluntary and a choice you actively make. ”
In order for that choice to amount to voluntary agreement to a contract, you first have to establish that the government owns the entire country and so is entitled to set the terms for remaining in it. Generally that claim is justified by a supposed social contract.
Which makes the argument circular, no?
Sorry, didn’t see your comment earlier. I favor a sufficiency view that a developed state in conditions of relative abundance has a (defeasible) duty to ensure that all of its citizens have whatever goods are necessary to lead a basically comfortable life.
There are a number of obvious objections to this view, which I’ll order from least to most practical:
1. Bad tradeoffs where, for instance, giving a penny less to one person exactly at the sufficiency floor makes a dozen people above the floor ten thousand dollars richer.
2. Inveterate squanderers, who burn whatever goods the state grants them, and so turn into bottomless money pits.
3. Determining where the threshold should fall in a way that isn’t utterly arbitrary.
4. Setting the welfare programs up in a way that doesn’t produce incredibly perverse incentives.
5. Is there enough money?
3 strikes me as a non-problem, and 1 as too airy and abstract to actually crop up in the real world. 2 seems serious but manageable, 4 serious and unmanageable. 5 is an empirical question that I don’t know the answer to.
(along with, of course, a maximal suite of civil liberties that can only be restricted to avert impending moral catastrophe)
“Of course they have governments. “Warlord” is just another way of saying “non-internationally recognized government that rules a smaller area than the area recognized internationally as the country”.”
I can’t speak to the Western Sahara, but the traditional system of Somaliland, Northern Somalia, was stateless. Currently there is a Republic of Somaliland that we and everyone else refuses to recognize. I suspect things are mostly under the traditional system and the Republic exists mostly in an unsuccessful attempt to get the rest of the world to leave them alone, but it may be substantial enough to count as a government.
But it isn’t true, as you seem to be implying, that all polities always have governments and it’s just a question of labels. There is a difference between a society with an organization that claims and to a significant degree maintains a monopoly on defining and enforcing rights and one in which rights enforcement is private and decentralized.
Re: The bill for unasked-for medical services
This sort of obligation does sometimes exist in American law (dating back to English common law, and present in other legal systems as well, ancient Rome had some similar concepts). It’s known as quasi-contract or implied-in-law contract. Basically, it’s created when A is given a benefit by B, under circumstances where leaving B uncompensated would be unjust or inequitable. The cases where this doctrine is applied tend to be fairly exceptional, and often involve either intentional wrongdoing by A or a contract that B wrongly but reasonably assumed to exist.
You can construct a contract law-sounding justification for some quasi-contracts, even in cases involving the provision of emergency medical services to an unconscious person. Something like: We’re simply enforcing the contract that the parties would have made were they able to in the moment. Maybe some of those parties wouldn’t have actually made the contract. But since the majority would have, better to treat that as the default presumption in those cases.
That said, it’s probably better to think of quasi-contract as a hybrid of contract and tort law, with features of each. It can be analogized to either, though always imperfectly. That it’s often grouped with contract law is mostly an accident of history.
I’m not sure what bearing these facts have on this conversation, besides that pondering whether quasi-contracts are real contracts or not has occupied contract law scholars for ages, and it’s widely agreed that they aren’t. If such obligations are to be justified (and I think that in limited circumstances they can be; certainly the occasional imposition of quasi-contracts hasn’t led to serious abuse, as one might fear, and it seems to be a fair way of approaching fact patterns that don’t fit neatly into a contract/tort dichotomy) their justification doesn’t neatly follow from those used to justify contract obligations in general.
Depending on exactly what you’re objecting to, the blank is filled in with “because they’re not implicit” or “because the terms are implicit but the existence of the contract is not”. Neither of those are ad-hoc.
Whether something is “restricted” is a matter of degree. Clearly, even to someone who is not a slave, moving has some costs. You have to sell your house (and pay taxes on the sale); you lose all your social connections, you need to pay the costs of finding a new job and of actually transporting yourself somewhere, etc.
You’re not defining “restricted” as “restricted by the government” (since the slavemaster is a private party), and you’re also not defining “restricted” as “non-financial restrictions” (since you admit that expatriation taxes count) . What exactly do you mean by “restricted” then?
@Knight: I favor a sufficiency view that a developed state in conditions of relative abundance has a (defeasible) duty to ensure that all of its citizens have whatever goods are necessary to lead a basically comfortable life.
That’s a lot of weasel-wording wrapped around a core of pure undiluted entitlement. It has the fundamental problem that no state can actually do this itself – the essence of the state is coercion, not production – so underlying the warm fuzzy notion of everybody living “comfortably”, you’ve got the ugly reality state coercing one group of people to produce goods for another.
But even you recognize that there are problems, so let’s look at those.
3 [Determining where the threshold should fall in a way that isn’t utterly arbitrary] strikes me as a non-problem
If it’s a non-problem, why do we have people arguing about whether e.g. poor people having cellphones is pure government largesse or bare minimum necessity? Where can I find the threshold for “goods necessary for a comfortable life” and the non-arbitrary justification for this floor, spelled out in a way that every reasonable person will agree on to within, say, +/-20%?
The goods necessary to give a person what they themselves will believe and describe as a comfortable life, cost maybe $2000/year – provided they don’t see other people like themselves enjoying much more than that. But, here in the real world, people will blow through $100K/year salaries trying to keep up with the Joneses and feel genuinely distressed and uncomfortable for their failure.
There is no threshold for a comfortable life. There is only the threshold at which you stop feeling sympathetic for people whose distress is as real as that of the non-starving poor.
5. Is there enough money?
Money? Spend all you want, we can always print more. But you can’t eat money, clothing made of money provides scant protection from a cold winter, and good luck educating your children by having them read the text on a dollar bill.
You need goods. And services, but thinking on that makes the ugliness of the proposed system harder to hide. Now, it is true that at the margin, a government can take money from one person and use it to pay a second person to provide goods to a third person. That works because we live in a generally free-market economy with a recognized right to private property, tax rates on the left side of the Laffer curve, and something less than a guaranteed entitlement to a comfortable life.
How does money motivate someone to work long hours producing goods and providing services, when they are guaranteed a comfortable life regardless and when they are not guaranteed a right to the money you just gave them? Yes, you can offer them the possibility of buying extra luxury goods and services, but even the most explicitly communist nations figured that out. And pretty soon the workers figured out that if they claimed the bonus for working past quota, the quota would be raised next year, and the bonus would be worthless because the shelves of GUM would be bare, and the black market was a more reliable way of turning initiative into luxury.
It simply doesn’t work. If you were willing to settle for not-starving, we could make it work, but you won’t. With the nebulous ever-increasing standard of “comfortable”, the system you propose can maybe run for a generation or so two on the inertia of wealth accumulated – and more importantly, of virtues learned – under a market economy. But providing for what you would accept as a “comfortable” existence for everyone, requires an enormous amount of highly motivated human labor. If you take away “…and if you don’t work, your existence won’t be comfortable” as a stick, the carrot of luxury goods and services needed as motivation, will be even more enormous – because those luxury goods will be competing with the luxury of leisure time in a comfortable environment. And the first time things go wrong, your principle of entitlement means you’ll break the promise of extra luxury for the workers to meet the “requirement” of comfort for the idle, and the various forms of defection will look that much more appealing.
Which will bring you to the inevitable end state – if the government must meet the “duty” to provide a comfortable life for everyone, then the government must claim the power to compel labor from everyone.
“Now, it is true that at the margin, a government can take money from one person and use it to pay a second person to provide goods to a third person.”
This reminds me of a youtube video with a title like “Democratic Senator so-and-so SCHOOLS Rand Paul on health care,” in which Rand Paul and one other senator are interviewing a doctor.
Either the doctor or the other senator says something like “I believe everyone has a right to adequate health care.” Paul responds with “isn’t having a right to someone else’s labor a little like slavery?” The other senator asks the doctor, “Doctor so-and-so, do you feel like a slave?” The doctor and the other senator smirk and giggle. Of course he doesn’t feel like a slave. Libertarian senator DESTROYED.
But the point everyone seems to miss (including Paul, weirdly enough, though maybe he just chose not to follow up for whatever reason) is that in this analogy, it’s not the doctor to whose services some feel entitled who’s being “enslaved,” it’s the people working to pay the taxes which pay for the programs which pay the doctor.
As with so much else in government, you spread it out and it doesn’t feel like such an outrage. If you just said “all doctors are mandated to work four months out of the year pro bono,” then that would seem a lot more unjust as something to force on people (though in substance arguably more palatable to those who favor steep redistribution, considering the average income gap between doctors and Medicaid patients).
Not that I’m suggesting in-kind services would be better than taxation. It would be much more inefficient. But the indirect, diffuse nature of it all makes it seem a lot more justifiable than it is in substance.
“If it’s a non-problem, why do we have people arguing about whether e.g. poor people having cellphones is pure government largesse or bare minimum necessity?”
At only a slight tangent, I have an old blog post where I tried to estimate what bare minimum necessities would cost. It came to about $500/year.
@ Earthly Knight:
Legally, I’d say it ought to be a question of whether you did or didn’t consent, not whether you would or wouldn’t, because that is not something that can be determined objectively.
Morally, I’d say if you would have consented, then you do have an obligation to pay them back, provided that it’s not too big a burden on you. In the same way that if someone does you a really nice favor, you should pay them back somehow.
I would certainly say it’s permissible, not obligatory.
@ Frank McPike:
You make a good point (I always find your posts extremely informative and appreciate them, by the way!).
If it’s common to have situations where people need to be operated on before it can be found out whether they’re willing to pay, then it may be beneficial to have a default rule where, because they are presumed willing, they can be stuck with the bill without their consent. This is if the alternative is doctors’ refusing to operate without cash in hand, and people willing to pay dying as a result.
But I nevertheless maintain that this is:
a) Not voluntary
b) Not a real contract, “social” or otherwise
It’s merely a case where other considerations come before consent.
@ Earthly Knight:
Yes, I meant Cuba. Sorry, I got it confused with the metaphor of digging a hole to China, I guess.
I still don’t understand the point of your argument. You seem to be arguing that the social contract actually is real and voluntarily consented to. It doesn’t help your case to analogize it to a situation where a man accepts the only job in a company town because otherwise he’ll starve to death.
Sure, if libertarians accept that this is totally voluntary, they have little grounds for saying that the social contract is totally involuntary (though there are still some important differences).
But it doesn’t help the positive case that the social contract is voluntary, to compare it to an employment contract that stinks of being highly involuntary. The proper conclusion is that they’re both coercive, involuntary, and not really binding contracts.
***
As for the right to free food, that is a different kind of thing entirely.
I would say (and I believe that e.g. Ayn Rand would say, based on certain comments she made) that you have the right to steal a loaf of bread, even from an innocent person, if your only alternative is starvation. You don’t have a moral obligation to die for that person’s minor benefit.
But at the same time, the other person has the right to his bread. We can use the standard example of Jean Valjean. Robespierre or Louis XVI have no right to the bread because their ownership of it is illegitimate; they are responsible for Valjean’s plight. But when Jean Valjean steals from the innocent baker, that baker hasn’t done anything wrong, he isn’t responsible for the fact that Valjean and his family are starving, so he has a right to the bread. Valjean’s need does not create a claim on the baker.
What we have is an irreconcilable conflict of interests. Valjean has a right to steal the bread; the baker has a right to keep it. The result is conflict. And the very reason why people like Ayn Rand support a system of laissez-faire is that, in such a system, there aren’t any irreconcilable conflicts of interest. Where there is both effective law enforcement and an abundance of actual jobs and wealth, stealing or robbing is not a rational act.
And as far as anarcho-capitalists would say, they would hold: you have the right, without paying anyone, not to be robbed, murdered, or stolen from. It isn’t proper that criminals should be able to prey upon you; those criminals are rightfully responsible for paying you back any damages they inflict.
But the problem is it costs money and takes effort to catch criminals. What you don’t have, is the right to force other people to undertake that effort for free. Or, more to the point, other people have a right not to be forced to do it for free. Therefore, there’s nothing unjust about someone demanding money before he will go and catch the person who robbed you. If you can catch the guy, you can rightfully force him to pay the costs of enforcement if he’s able. But you can’t expect people to catch criminals for free.
However, when we consider the situation with the state, that’s not what they do. They don’t just demand payment for services rendered, cutting off the services if you don’t pay. They demand payment and then claim the right to renege on their end of the “bargain” anytime they feel like it. And they coercively maintain a monopoly, preventing anyone from undercutting them and providing better service at a lower cost. So your “negotiation” is “take it or leave it”, where “leave it” means “paddle to Cuba”.
If that were the actual result of anarcho-capitalism: a single monopoly firm that was able to say “take it or leave it” in the same fashion, then I would say neither is that a voluntary system. The state has just been recreated, potentially in a worse form. I am not a die-hard anarcho-capitalist because I am not fully confident that that isn’t what would happen; maybe trying to maintain somewhat limited government by Madisonian methods is the best thing we can do.
But that doesn’t make the state voluntary, or the social contract real.
The other kind of argument is one about public goods. E.g. it’s not possible for the state to exclude you from the benefits of national defense or the wonderful educational system it provides. So if you don’t pay, they have to lock you up or kick you out to prevent free-riding. But that’s not an argument that these services are consensual, either. It’s an argument that the only way to provide them efficiently is through coercive methods.
@Jiro
You’re right that the principle would not then be ad hoc. It would be false, though: the unwitting trespasser and (especially) the brain aneurysm cases are straightforward counter-examples. Here is another: it sometimes happens that a man who knows only english will drive his pickup to a parking lot full of men who know only spanish, wait for several of them to hop in, and then shuttle them to a nearby construction site where they spend the rest of the day, for instance, moving soil. Would it be acceptable for this man to refuse to pay the laborers at the end of the day, on the grounds that he never entered into any sort of contract with them? Clearly not. Similarly, would it be acceptable for the laborers to spend the rest of the day playing pinochle in the shade, but still accept their wages when the manager returns? Again, no. So we have here an employment contract which is entirely implicit.
Probably it should be “unrestricted beyond whatever costs typically attend a citizen in a free society moving from one location to another.”
@John Schilling
It seems to me that the state produces (or bankrolls the production of) goods and services all the time. Roads, schools, stealth bombers, health care exchanges, etc. When you say “the essence of the state is coercion, not production,” I think this again depends on the following premise:
Fundamental moral dogma of capitalism (FMDC): You are entitled to 100% of your pre-tax income.
If we reject FMDC, there’s no reason to see the IRS as coercing tax dollars from people, because those tax dollars belonged to the state all along. The IRS, like a manager, is just shaving off its rightful share of the proceeds, and, like a manager, will summon security if you try and steal from it.
I asked Dr. Dealgood and others early what the justification was for FMDC. No rationale was offered. It really is just a piece of dogma, or a foundational moral belief, from what I can tell. In any case, I feel no inclination to accept it.
It’s a non-problem because there are about a dozen ways to solve it that are fair even if they are to some extent unprincipled. We could take the median or the mean of the reasonable estimates, or the high end, resources permitting. I reject universal agreement as a desideratum– all that is needed is an compromise that a majority or a supermajority find acceptable.
I don’t know, but it seems to work just fine both with the minimal safety net here and with the more substantial safety nets in various European countries. What I’m proposing is just a means-tested universal income.
@ Vox
So you’re fine with emergency room doctors refusing to save dying, unconscious patients if they’re not sure they’ll pay? I thought you said that the mental picture I had of the average libertarian was a caricature, not a photograph.
Okay. This was the central point I was making. I agree in principle that your ability to emigrate needs to be somewhat more robust to say that you’ve consented to the social contract. Maybe there needs to be at least one, or two, or three other countries with decent standards of living, which you have the means to immigrate to, and who are willing to take you without too much hassle. But this condition will generally be met for American citizens. Where it is not, I agree that the individual in question has legitimate grounds for complaint.
The unwitting trespasser does not have to agree to any contract, but if he doesn’t agree, he has no right to be on the land, since the only thing that gives him the right to be on the land is the consent of the owner. The owner can give or withhold his consent for arbitrary reasons; that’s how ownership works. If the trespasser doesn’t agree to a contract, no contract can be inferred, and the owner cannot make any demands beyond demanding that the trespasser be given the legal penalty for trespassing.
As Vox explained, the brain aneurysm case is an example where other considerations override contracts. It’s something done despite the lack of a contract, not because of the existence of an implied contract.
Also, I find the idea that a contract exists in the Spanish-speaking case to be bizarre. If someone is stupid enough to act as though people are hired without verifying it, or if someone is stupid enough to act as though he has been hired without verifying it, he deserves the bad consequences that result.
@onyomi
“But the indirect, diffuse nature of it all makes it seem a lot more justifiable than it is in substance.”
Some would say that it makes it be a lot more justifiable.
“Maybe there needs to be at least one, or two, or three other countries with decent standards of living, which you have the means to immigrate to, and who are willing to take you without too much hassle. But this condition will generally be met for American citizens.”
Shooting from the hip, I’d say this applies to, at best, 50% of American citizens. So how do we justify the “social contract” for the remaining 50?
Also, even if we very charitably assume 75% of Americans could reasonably move to Canada, does that really mean they’ve implicitly accepted the US government, if the Canadian government isn’t all that different? It’s like saying, “yes, you are required to keep paying for our regular pizza deliveries to your house. What, you don’t like pizza? But everyone likes pizza. There is a different pizza company which offers a slightly thicker crust you can sign up with. But you haven’t done that, have you? So you are agreeing to keep paying for our pizza. Not having a pizza subscription at all is, of course, out of the question, since if we didn’t hugely overcharge you for pizza we couldn’t provide all the hugely subsidized pizzas to poor people like we do. But look, you can have pepperoni OR sausage and you have obviously failed to sign up with thick crust pizza place across the street which charges more, so therefore you have basically agreed to pay us for this pizza. Since you make 6 figures, that will be $450.”
I thought that I made the point clear: a free man is entitled to wages for his work because without that compensation he can simply refuse to perform the work, unlike a slave who has no such option.
You might not like that rationale but I certainly gave one.
The libertarian line that says it is unfair to be born into a society and concomitant web of obligations and never have a chance to reject the deal has a lot in common with anti-natalists that hold it is unfair to bring a human being into existence without its consent.
@ Earthly Knight:
I see no more reason why the doctors are required to treat people who can’t pay, than non-doctors are required to give large sums of money to buy malaria nets.
Even if you accept a standard of altruism, it seems perfectly legitimate for the doctors to refuse to treat people who can’t pay, so as to earn more money to give to buy malaria nets or whatever. That would save more lives in the long run.
Really, though, I reject the framing of “permissible” versus “obligatory”. As an egoist and therefore a consequentialist, I believe that “everything not obligatory is forbidden”. Permissibility is more of a legal concept: should doctors be allowed not to operate on people who can’t pay? And I say yes.
It’s certainly possible, for reasons of benevolence (which I think is an egoistic virtue) and to encourage a good reputation, doctors may have an interest in taking on some charity cases, when it’s not too big a burden on them. It which case operating on those people is obligatory, for them, at that time.
But which I take it is not the sense in which you mean “obligatory”, which is something like it’s obligatory as a general rule with few or no exceptions.
The fact that there are multiple options is irrelevant when they all unjust, coercive bargains.
If I’m dying in the desert and somebody drives up and offers to rescue me in return for paying him 50% of my wages forever and obeying all sorts of crazy rules, that’s an unjust bargain to which I do not enter voluntarily.
It doesn’t change matters when 15 other people drive up and offer me essentially the same deal.
What matters is that they could and should rescue me for a modest cost, one which I am willing to pay, and one which would still have been in their interest to accept. But they are exploiting their power as monopolists to extort an unconscionable agreement from me, one which I am by no means obliged to honor once I return to civilization. I am obliged only to give them only a fair amount, or perhaps nothing as a punishment for their audacity.
This sort of situation is not the same as when, in a normal capitalist marketplace, an employer offers to hire someone at $10 an hour and not $100 an hour. The worker may indeed not be able to find someone willing and able to hire him for more than $10 an hour, so he has no better options. But the employer cannot afford to hire him for $100 an hour; his labor is not worth that much, and if he hired him at an above-market wage he would simply be arbitrarily favoring him above the other nine qualified workers he could get for the money. Since the employer is doing nothing wrong, he is not responsible for the fact that the worker has to work to live.
If the employer had monopsony power and could hire the worker at whatever wage he liked and hired him for less than he’s worth, then the bargain would be exploitative and inefficient. The precise advantage of a competitive system is that it does not produce such monopolies and monopsonies. Wages are determined by competition among employers for the available labor.
If there were indeed robust competition between states, with very low transaction costs and ease of entry and exit, then we would already have anarcho-capitalism because what would be produced by such competition for “customers” is libertarian policy. The reason we do not have anarcho-capitalism is that states use coercion to stop others from competing with them, and as a result they offer very monopolistic, exploitative “deals” to their “customers”.
If “private protection agencies” did the same thing and extracted literal ink-on-paper contracts in the same way, by the same methods, I should think libertarians would object to those as well. But states don’t even bother to do that. So the “deal” is even worse than the unjust but at least written contract that might be extracted by the monopolistic Condominium Association from Hell. I think the Condominium Association from Hell is a good reductio ad absurdam against “stupid libertarianism” that thinks the only thing that matters if whether you can get the guy to mouth the words “I consent”. But it’s not a good argument against libertarianism in general because libertarians do not actually like or approve of such contracts or think they will be common under libertarianism.
Or to restate things, if Libertopia—a society with a just social order—existed and I could move there at very little cost, then there would be a certain basis for saying that if I remain in America, I am consenting to its policies “implicitly”. But if all the alternatives are equally if not more unjust, my resignation to this one doesn’t constitute consent.
And as I said before, if communists are correct that all employment contracts are unjust and exploitative, my resignation to a particular one doesn’t constitute voluntary, binding agreement.
To quote myself from a related discussion on Tumblr:
Of course, it’s possible to think that all of your employment options are intolerable. The question is whether there is a practicable system that would give you better options. As Ludwig von Mises put it:
If there were no system better than contemporary welfare-regulatory state democracy, it would be quite proper to castigate people who complain about it: “You don’t have to like it, but this is the best possible system of social organization. Libertarianism would not bring about the conditions you seek; it would create conditions akin to those seen in Somalia. So if you desire civilized life, health, and happiness, you ought to prefer interventionism to laissez-faire.”
Maybe there needs to be at least one, or two, or three other countries with decent standards of living, which you have the means to immigrate to, and who are willing to take you without too much hassle. But this condition will generally be met for American citizens.
What definition of “decent standard of living” are we using here?
Because I’m pretty certain that the standard US and Western European idea of a minimum decent standard of living, can only be provided in the context of a roughly US/EU-equivalent social contract. Or whatever alternate source of governing legitimacy you prefer. But I’m not seeing a fundamental flaw in social contract theory, from the fact that there’s no place you can go that e.g. ensures that your home won’t be claimed by squatters if you leave it unoccupied for a day but doesn’t require you to pay taxes.
If you are willing to accept the compromised standard of living that inherently comes from a weaker or missing social contract, I expect there are plenty of options to chose from even for poor and/or underprivileged Americans.
@ Anonymous:
It does, actually!
And the rights of children are consequently the most difficult area of libertarian theory.
@ David Friedman
We can say that the government owns the country and is entitled to set the terms for remaining in it by virtue of the continual consent of the majority of the population. Implicit consent to a social contract can then be used to explain why dissenters are still bound by the laws.
In general, I think all macroeconomic theories have a track record of catastrophic failure at allowing us to predict and control future events. So I don’t think this gives us reason to favor on theory over another.
@ Jiro
You seem mostly to be quibbling about the semantics of the word “contract”, at this point. I don’t think that matters. What’s important in all of these cases is that people relinquish their rights or property without having ever explicitly consented to any sort of agreement. If you agree that this is the correct judgment in these cases, you have no grounds for rejecting implicit consent to the social contract on the basis of it being implicit.
Really? I’m guessing that the case occurs almost exactly as I’ve described it from time to time, maybe minus the pinochle. I also expect that almost everyone will agree that the if the laborers work, they have a right to be paid, and if the laborers are paid, they are obliged to work.
@onyomi
Here are your choices in the immigration case:
–Staying in the US
–Immigrating to Canada
–Taking your chances in international waters
And your options in the pizza case:
–Buying a pizza subscription from Company A
–Buying a pizza subscription from Company B
It’s the presence of the third option that makes the difference. You have two countries to choose from, both of which will guarantee you some minimal standard of quality of life and a decent array of civil liberties. You are also free to accept neither deal and face the consequences. This is analogous to the employment market offering you a choice between two pretty good jobs and indigence– you don’t have a right to live in a country whose government is tailored to your political views, just as you don’t have a right to your dream job.
@Dr Dealgood
I’m sorry, I don’t really follow. You’re free not to work, of course, it’s just that if you do, the government gets its rightful share of the proceeds.
> If laissez-faire led to a giant monopoly that controlled everything and called itself “Not the State, Inc.”, I don’t think any libertarians would support it.
You can’t predict what laissez faire leeds to because it is laissez faire.
If you had robust mechanisms in place to prevent outcome X and ensure outcome Y, then you could justly complain that anyone who brings up outcome X is strawmanning you.
But hopes, wishes and expectations are not robust mechanisms. If you can’t explain why the outcomes you don’t like won’t happen, the point is valid.
@ TheAncientGeek:
That’s the point of economic science, isn’t it? To tell us whether that will happen.
It’s also not the case that we have to try something before we can be reasonably sure that it will work. It is possible to deduce the results of an institution from a consideration of the incentives involved.
In any case, I’m not saying we should abolish the government tomorrow and see what happens. I am in favor of gradualism for many reasons.
@ Vox
Okay. Then assume it’s a slow day at Mt. Ararat, and the doctors have a choice between treating you and standing around and filing their nails. They don’t get paid in either case. Is it still acceptable for them to decline to treat?
This is a bad analogy– states don’t take 50% of our wages, and they use their tax revenues to the benefit of their citizens.
I do not think this is why. The burdens of immigration are not all that onerous, particularly between European nations. I think that the immigration market is uncompetitive principally because citizens in developed countries are unwilling to uproot from their homes, friends, families, and culture, to learn a new language and start afresh somewhere else. Other countries do indeed have freer markets than the US, if that’s what you’re looking for. Why have you elected to stay?
@ John Schilling
I think that the fairness of a contract is in part a function of the number of good, available alternatives. If your lifetime career choices are restricted to becoming a systems analyst for Oracle or operating the deep fryer at McDonalds, the contract with Oracle is going to seem awfully coercive. The same is true for states: the more immigration options you have, the fairer.
“I agree in principle that your ability to emigrate needs to be somewhat more robust to say that you’ve consented to the social contract.”
This approach to defining “voluntary” has serious problems. I haven’t read all of this long thread, so apologize if the point has already been discussed.
One possible intuition, and the one you seem to be leaning on, is “a choice is voluntary if you had other reasonably attractive alternatives, not otherwise.” But consider the situation in which, initially, all of A’s alternatives are unattractive and B, who has no responsibility for A’s situation, offers him a better option at a price.
A is a subsistence farmer who has to work hard all day every day in order to produce enough food to barely survive. B has, through years of toil, cleared and improved land and bred up superior crop varieties to the point where he can produce a more than adequate supply of food with much less labor. The initial setting was the Lockean forest–unlimited supply of not yet useful land. I assume that, to our moral intuitions, in that case B is the legitimate owner of his cleared land.
B, who is getting old, offers to hire A to farm his land on terms much more attractive than A farming his own land. Do you want to say that A’s agreement is involuntary, hence he has no obligation to keep his side of the bargain–to work when B isn’t watching him, for instance? That seems wrong to me–but seems the implication of your position.
The alternative intuition is that the choice is involuntary when the other party is doing something to you that puts you in a situation where bad things happen if you don’t agree–pointed a gun at you and offered the choice of your money or your life. Making sense of that requires some theory of rights, of what belongs to whom. Keeping you from stealing my stuff doesn’t count as “doing something to you,” my stealing your stuff does.
To put my point in a more emotive form, do you really want a moral theory in which someone who threatens to shoot you if you don’t do something for him and someone who offers to provide you an enormous benefit if you do something for him are in the same moral category? In both cases your agreement is, on your implicit theory, involuntary.
Getting back to the social contract, the claim that remaining in the country is assent to the contract requires that the government owns the country, hence expelling you from it if you don’t agree isn’t “doing something to you,” merely keeping you from trespassing on its territory, keeping you from doing something to it.
And if the basis for the government owning the country is the existence of a social contract, the argument is circular.
Creating an adequate theory of rights is a non-trivial project, but I think this at least points to why you need one in order to talk about what agreements are voluntary and when you are or are not obliged to keep them and others are or are not entitled to make you do so.
Going back to the question of why my income is mine not the government’s, the answer, from a libertarian rights standpoint, is that I got that income by voluntary transactions with willing parties. My actions resulted in there being more stuff without the rights of anyone else involved the process being violated, so the stuff is mine.
“Here are your choices in the immigration case:
–Staying in the US
–Immigrating to Canada
–Taking your chances in international waters
And your options in the pizza case:
–Buying a pizza subscription from Company A
–Buying a pizza subscription from Company B
It’s the presence of the third option that makes the difference.”
Seriously? So is it better if I change it to:
–Buying a pizza subscription from Company A
–Buying a pizza subscription from Company B
–Taking your chances in international waters
So all pizza companies will leave you alone so long as you live in a boat in the middle of the ocean and don’t try to do business with people on land. Would you then say I’m “actively,” voluntarily choosing to enter into a pizza contract? What if I said, “look, you don’t have to buy our pizza. You can always shoot yourself in the head. By your failure to shoot yourself in the head I take it that you still want pizza.” Am I then “voluntarily” choosing to buy pizza, since, after all, the option to kill myself was always there?
@ Earthly Knight:
No, that sounds pretty callous to me. So I think it would indeed be unacceptable. Morally, that is. Legally, I think it ought to be acceptable.
If you combine state, federal, and local levels, there are certainly people from whom the state taxes away more than 50% of their wages.
In Denmark, I understand tax brackets in that range apply to a great many people.
As for whether they use them to the benefit of citizens: they use them for what they purport to be the benefit of citizens—but which is not to the actual benefit of citizens. Because the very contention of libertarians is that the best way the state could benefits its citizens is by abolishing itself and privatizing all its functions—or at least all the ones except certain minimal functions.
Not by terrorizing them with the War on Drugs and other such things.
States claim a monopoly on the use of force within their borders. If you try to make and enforce your own laws, you will be targeted for arrest and killed if you resist. That is coercion. If the state allowed people to withdraw from their “agreement” to abide by US laws and abide by any given other extraterritorial laws within its borders, that would constitute the establishment of anarcho-capitalism.
The other point, which I did mention, is transaction costs. Precisely because states don’t allow competition within their borders, transaction costs of moving between states are extremely high. The considerations you point out are prime examples of transaction costs. That is why competition among states is not very intensive, which means they don’t produce very efficient policy.
As for your last point, there are other countries with more economic freedom, but they are less free in other very significant respects. There is no country that is unambiguously more free than the United States. Certainly none that is significantly more free to make it worth moving for that reason alone.
Even if they carved out a little piece of land in the desert somewhere and said “this will be libertarian-land”, that doesn’t necessarily mean I’m obligated to move there or else can be considered to “consent” to the current system. They’re still coercively in control of all the land worth living on! Now if that land is worth living on because of government policy, that’s one thing. But if the land is worth living on despite government policy, that’s quite another.
The US was certainly more free than the Soviet Union. But I don’t think people (even those who could have emigrated) were necessarily immoral for refusing to flee from the Soviet Union. That was their home; it was where all their friends and family were; the Soviet dictatorship had no right to make them leave in order to enjoy the benefits of freedom. It was obligated to give them the benefits of freedom right there in Russia. Not doing so was an injustice.
I do not believe that the US government inflicts anything like the same amount of injustice, but it also inflicts injustice. If it didn’t inflict any justice (or inflicted the least possible amount of injustice), it would be legitimate. But then it would be nonexistent, or virtually so.
You don’t have a right to live in a country tailored to your arbitrary and irrational political views. You do have a right to be free of unjust depredations.
Just as you have a right not to be coerced into an unjust employment contract. You don’t have a right to demand Pepsi in the breakroom fridge or a “living wage” when your labor isn’t worth that much. But you do have a right not to be forced into e.g. working at below-market rates by a monopolistic employer. Or to be paid the amount you agreed to work for, rather than told “Haha, if you complain, I’ll call ICE on you illegals!”
@ David Friedman:
I think they can be the same category, i.e. coercive, if the thing he wants you to do for him is unreasonably burdensome.
In the example I gave before:
If I’m dying in the desert and somebody drives up and offers to rescue me in return for paying him 50% of my wages forever and obeying all sorts of crazy rules, that’s an unjust bargain to which I do not enter voluntarily.
What’s the problem with this? Well, it’s inequitable! It’s a prime example of what people call being “gouged” or “taken advantage of”. In economic terms, this guy is using his monopolistic position to extract almost all of the consumer surplus out of me.
I know libertarians are sometimes tempted to say: there is no such thing as inequitable deal, as long as the harm the person’s going to suffer if he doesn’t accept wasn’t directly caused by you. But it’s ridiculous and unnecessary. One of the prime advantages of capitalism is the tendency toward the elimination of monopolies.
What if (somehow), a “private” corporation did end up owning all the water in the world and thus had the power to cut you off and kill you if you didn’t follow all their arbitrary rules? Would this be a good outcome? No, of course it wouldn’t! It would be terrible!
The proper libertarian counterargument is to say “that wouldn’t happen”, not “it would be cool if that happened; I see no problem here.”
In the real world, “price gouging” after a natural disaster is beneficial (even if some people do charge an inequitable amount, which would of course be something significantly over and above the extra costs of ferrying in supplies in a disaster zone) because it gives people the incentive to rush in supplies as quickly as possible. But if there were no such incentive, if the supplies were fixed and limited, it would not be good.
The same goes for the desert thing: it’s good to allow people to make binding agreements to pay a certain amount to be rescued, maybe even a lot. You want the incentive, after all. But there’s a certain point at which it is unconscionable and inequitable. In economic terms, it’s where you have the rescuers have sufficient motivation, but where the rescued aren’t rendered totally impoverished slaves.
It’s a variation of the “holdout problem”. If you know that your property is holding up the completion of a dam, you can milk them for almost the whole value of the project. And if people can do that, an inefficiently small number of dams will be built. Now, for public choice reasons, it may yet be a good idea to have strong protections against letting the property be taken through eminent domain this way. But you’re still kind of an asshole if you won’t sell for anything less than 90% of the value of the dam.
Similarly, in the desert case, the guy feels free to hold you up for as much as 99% of the value of your life to you. Because hey, 1% of the value of your life is better than 0%, right?
The issue of the doctor treating the unconscious patient is that it touches on the “Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics”–that is, by happening to be the surgeon on call when the unconscious patient shows up you are in a unique position to save that person and so are at least somewhat morally obligated to try, as you would be morally wrong to walk past a child drowning in a puddle and not make the least effort to save him.
Yes, the doctor could be earning more money do something else which he then donates to save 10 Africans from malaria in the time it would have taken him to operate on one patient, but if we stipulate he is just hanging around filing his nails, then that doesn’t apply, and I also don’t think it’s a bad moral guideline that moral responsibility to people in front of your face is greater than that to people in far off lands you’ll never meet.
Yet in the case of saving the drowning child, we would say the person was a monster to then say to the child’s parents: “so, how much is your child’s life worth to you? At least a few hundred thousand?” It would be problematic, I think, to try to hold someone legally responsible for not trying to save a drowning child, but certainly we can hold them morally responsible, especially if they weren’t, at the time, say, rushing off to see their imminently dying spouse. Yet I think it would also be very problematic for that person to then claim the child or his parents “owed” him a large sum of money, since, if they had been in a position to chose, they would surely have paid a large sum to save the life of their child.
So most people agree there is at least some moral responsibility and arguably a case for some legal responsibility (I think they call them “good Samaritan laws”?) to make at least some effort to help someone in dire peril when you are uniquely close to the situation. Yet we still wouldn’t say the child or his parents had in any implicitly “contracted” with the passerby for the service of saving a child’s life. It’s something one should simply do, and if, after the fact, the parents want to offer some kind of reward, well, then that seems like right thing to do, but certainly not something they consented to in advance by virtue of having a child.
@Vox:
I agree that there are (rare) situations where making all voluntary contracts enforceable has bad consequences.
But there are (at least) two different approaches to justifying libertarianism. One is consequentialist, one is in terms of some set of not entirely consequentialist moral arguments. I generally prefer the former because I think I have better arguments for it. But when exploring the latter, I think one should be willing to follow where the argument leads, even in cases where that isn’t optimal from a consequentialist standpoint.
@ David Friedman:
I agree that there are two different methodologies. One methodology is more empirical and inductive. It finds things like: every time we impose communism, bad things happen. The other methodology is more deductive and relatively a priori. It says things like: here’s what human nature is like, and why the system of incentives set up by communism isn’t going to produce good results with such people. (Of course, this is not totally a priori in the Cartesian sense because what human nature is like is certainly not an innate idea.)
But I think they ought to cohere, and that when they conflict you have a problem: you have made a mistake in one or the other or both of your methods.
Suppose you conclude, based on natural-law reasoning, that “all voluntary contracts should be enforced” (and consider the desert-rescue case a voluntary contract), then you find out that enforcing such contracts has terrible consequences. In that case, I think you should revise your ethical theory in light of that to account for the discrepancy.
One route is to observe: there seem to be at least two different types of voluntary contracts, equitable ones and inequitable ones. And this difference explains why some of them have good consequences when enforced and some have bad consequences when enforced. Therefore, let’s revise the principle to “all voluntary, equitable contracts should be enforced.”
The reason I think the moral and the practical should cohere is that I’m an ethical naturalist: I think “the good” is identical to a certain type of natural facts. Moral facts are subtype of natural facts, not an entirely separate category. I’m not an ethical intuitionist because I simply don’t believe that there is a faculty of “ethical intuition”; what people call “intuitions” are nothing more than “an inarticulate sense of something caused by one’s experience with similar situations”. (Which is a quote from Michael Huemer explaining what they supposedly aren’t, but which Richard Lawrence—and I—consider to be an excellent description of what they in fact are.)
This explains why, in e.g. the example of the fat man and the trolley, people have the “intuition” that they shouldn’t push the fat man in front of the trolley. All of our experience with similar situations in the real world suggests that this would be a terrible idea; it would have bad (expected) consequences. Yet in the example we are supposed to “stipulate” that it would have good consequences. This is too bizarre. It’s like ordering a jury to disregard evidence after they’ve heard it; even if they try, it’s very difficult.
You can “rebut” any consequentialist system with the following thought experiment: “What if the Holocaust produced those consequences? Would that make the Holocaust good?” The proper response is: that’s a big “if”.
If I think it’s okay to hurt someone in self-defense, I think it’s okay that the attacker be made to relinquish his health and possibly even his life to me without him having explicitly consented to any sort of agreement. By your reasoning, if I believe in self-defense, I must believe in implicit contracts.
Re: Spanish-speaking day laborers
If it was widely understood in a particular community that pulling up in a pickup truck was an offer of employment under certain conditions, and that getting into the truck was an acceptance of that offer, then courts could find that a contract was formed by those actions.
If they didn’t go that route, it would probably be treated as an implied-in-fact contract. That’s where two parties don’t technically form a contract, but they both act as though they have, and show a tacit understanding that an agreement exists. A court would probably require payment of a fair value for that labor.
Implied-in-fact contracts are distinct from the implied-in-law contracts I mentioned upthread (though it’s not unheard of for courts to confuse the two). While implied-in-law quasi-contracts are generally agreed not to be real contracts, implied-in-fact contracts are treated as though they are real contracts. And, unlike quasi-contracts, they are formed by the parties’ actions.
I’m not sure what bearing this has on the debate at hand. Much of the discussion in this chain seems to focus on teasing out, by intuition, what sort of agreements should constitute valid contracts. But the content of those intuitions we are drawing on has, in large part, been fleshed out by the state, and often for reasons that only make sense if you have a state (and a capitalist society, and various other conditions). It seems odd to be concerned with the particulars of social contract formation, such as when implicit consent is acceptable, when the particulars we think are appropriate would themselves be shaped by the outcome of that social contract.
For example, if, like the Romans, we had several levels of contract, each with different requirements for formation and dissolution and different degrees of associated seriousness, this conversation would proceed very differently. We would agree, I suspect, that fealty to a state would require a very serious sort of contract. It would then be intuitively obvious to us that the agreement must be oral and satisfy certain rather arcane formal requirements.
We, on the other hand, come from a society that allows certain sorts of implicit contracts (here I refer to implied-in-fact contracts, not quasi-contracts, which are not actually contracts), and doesn’t draw any firm distinction between those and the other sorts of contracts. Thus it seems intuitive that we can make agreements that are both implicit and have enormous, life-defining consequences (the Romans, conversely, made both sorts of agreements, but didn’t mix them).
If all we’re doing is drawing our intuitions for what makes a valid contract from a rough, osmotic understanding of our society’s law of contracts–which was never intended to serve as a basis for consenting to a state, and probably would look different if it was–then the justificatory power here seems very weak.
One way to avoid that weakness would be to outline the principles of contract most conducive to human flourishing in a non- or pre-state environment, and then hold that a social contract meeting those conditions is valid and binding. Many social contract philosophers laid out their own (at least partial or implicit) natural law theory of contract before using that theory to justify the state. Often it seems like at least some unusual or contestable choices they made in designing their principles of contract were subtly geared toward justifying the existence of their ideal sort of state. For example, Hobbes’s argument falls apart if contracts entered into in order to escape dire circumstances (or coercion by a third party) are anything other than permanently binding regardless of their content.
That seems like it’s maybe a bad thing–“It’s a valid agreement according to a set of rules I just made up to validate it” isn’t the world’s most convincing argument–but it makes a certain amount of sense. If our starting point in designing the natural law of contracts is supporting human co-operation and flourishing, and we believe that the state is an institution that accomplishes those things better than the alternatives, then a natural law that failed to allow for the formation of a state would be inferior to one that did.
But if that’s the argument, then the heart of the dispute isn’t about contracts at all; it’s whether the state is a beneficial institution.
@ Jiro:
To be fair, people do sometimes use that sort of language. Like: if you use force upon me, you’ve accepted the principle whereby I am entitled to use force in response on you.
Now, is that really, literally a contract? Does a burglar really consent to be shot with a 12-gauge shotgun by breaking in? No, that’s pretty overwrought.
@ David Friedman
Two things here: first, I don’t think the definition you gave would be a necessary condition for voluntariness. Even if you don’t have any other good options, enthusiasm might also suffice to make a deal voluntary. Second, it doesn’t follow from the fact that your employment is involuntary that you are not morally obligated to do the work anyway. It may be that A is obliged to work for B not because he made an agreement with B to that effect, but out of gratitude or other demands of fairness.
I don’t see how this follows. Even if B offers A choice which is involuntary for A, that doesn’t mean that B is doing anything wrong, and it certainly doesn’t imply that B is a bad person. If I can’t persuade a man that his house is on fire, I would be doing a good deed to point a gun at him and demand that he exit posthaste.
You may have missed this above, but I said that the government’s title to the territory flows from the continual consent of a majority, or supermajority, of the governed. Implicit consent is only needed to sweep any remaining dissenters into the social contract.
This presupposes that you had not antecedently entered into a contract with the state giving them a right to their share of the goods, though.
@onyomi
The point is that there must be the option to decline the deal. The reason why immigration is compulsory when you renounce your citizenship is that you’re trespassing on territory that ultimately belongs to the government. Unless the pizza companies own all of the land in country, the same doesn’t apply to them, so they can’t make the same demand. Now, it may be that you have no other possible source of food, and will starve if you opt out, so you end up with a choice between pizza companies A and B, and starvation. But it seems to me that most libertarians are committed to saying this is a fair deal. So, too, for governments.
The doctors’ demand is reasonable because they are asking for fair compensation for the labor they put in. I definitely think that if– as in the classic Singer case– you ruined your shoes rescuing the child, it wouldn’t be that unreasonable to bill the parents at some later date.
@ Vox
This seems to me like a bad position to take. The surgeons are morally obligated to operate, but the patient isn’t morally or legally obligated to remunerate them, no matter how much money he has?
You’re equivocating here. It may be true that the state does not benefit you relative to how well-off you would have been if you had kept your tax dollars instead. But it is false that the state does not benefit you at all, relative to how well-off you are after they take the money. The price gouger does not benefit you in either sense. So the analogy fails.
What does this have to do with anything? Remember that the model we are working in is: states own their territory, and so like any private landowner may expel you if you do not accede to their rules. We are then inquiring why the immigration market isn’t very competitive, given that most people in developed countries have a variety of states to choose among. I gave you what I think is the most plausible explanation.
@ Frank McPike:
Yes, this is a better statement of my point about how our “intuitions” about contracts (or whatever else) are in fact drawn from our experience with similar situations in our lives.
That is why I think it is a mistake to start with the concrete in morality and move up to the abstract. “Intuitions” are judgments, not percepts. It is not a good method to say: “Murder is wrong, miscegenation is wrong, and sodomy is wrong. What do all these things have in common, what principle unites them and explains why they all have this basic, intrinsic property of being ‘wrong’?”
The only reason you even think these things are wrong (rightly or wrongly) is that you accept—or picked up through social osmosis—a standard under which they are wrong. It is the standard that causes the specific judgment, not the other way around.
I agree with this as well. The heart of the dispute really is whether the state is a beneficial institution. If the state is a beneficial institution and your political theory says it’s totally illegitimate, you have a problem. If whether it’s legitimate has nothing to do with whether it’s beneficial, what the heck is the point of knowing whether it’s legitimate?
But I think another element, which you didn’t emphasize, is the “arguments are soldiers” dynamic.
Let’s assume two premises:
1) The state is coercive.
2) Anarchy results in a Hobbesian hell, while the contemporary state is pretty good.
All you really need to justify the state is 2). The fact that anarchy would be a Hobbesian hell is totally sufficient to justify the state. But the fact that the state is coercive is an argument against it. So the anti-anarcho-capitalist feels tempted to rebut every argument against it. Not only would anarchy be hell, but the state is absolutely, one-hundred percent, totally voluntary—the social contract is the paradigm of a real, voluntary contract. And people who think otherwise are nothing but ungrateful, freeloading bastards.
So when you get to someone like Hobbes himself, who wants to put the state on the firmest foundation, what does he do? Does he say that the state is really not voluntary, but you should obey it anyway because it’s in your interest? No, that’s pretty weak; what if it turns out that it’s not in your interest; why do you even have to do what’s in your interest? It’s much stronger to say: not only is it in your interest but you in fact already agreed and are utterly bound by your word—no backsies! And everyone agrees you’re bound by your solemn oaths, right?
Sure, we could define contracts in such a way that the “social contract” is a real, binding contract you really do sign by not paddling to Cuba when you turn 18. But it seems to me that the concept of a genuine, voluntary contract is a pretty useful one. If we have to justify the state, how about we do it in a way that doesn’t water down the concept of a contract into virtual meaninglessness?
This also helps us avoid drawing false inferences from similar-sounding situations. If a friend and I agree to go and split the bill at a restaurant, it’s totally fair and justified that we each keep our ends of the bargain and pay up. But if “we as a society” “agree” by the “social” “contract” to send a rocket to Mars, it does not follow nearly as easily that it’s fair to expect all of us to pitch in—because this kind of “agreement” to a “contract” is very, very different.
@ Jiro
Remember that you are trying to pinpoint the moral difference between everyday implicit contracts (or “contracts”, if you prefer) and the social contract which makes the former binding but the latter not. This is a lot easier for self-defense then for other kinds of implicit contracts: maybe you have a right to defend yourself when your life is in danger, or the attacker has sacrificed his rights by initiating violence against you, or the attacker deserves to bear the brunt of the harm caused by his wrongdoing, etc. You haven’t come up with a plausible candidate for how implicit contracts like those in the brain aneurysm case or the construction worker case differ from the social contract, though.
@ Frank McPike
The problem is that we don’t really have an alternative. You go on to talk about how a social contract should be evaluated by whether it conduces to cooperation and human flourishing, but this is just to say that you find these more intuitively compelling as moral desiderata than fairness or justice. You also say that our intuitions about fairness are suspect because they’ve been shaped by the conditions of our upbringing and culture, and that’s undoubtedly true, but it’s equally true of your intuition that cooperation and flourishing are the summa bona or the criteria by which systems of government ought to be measured. Moral beliefs, if they are to be justified at all, must be justified by some intuition or another, and your beliefs are no different in that respect.
@ Earthly Knight:
I said the patient is morally obliged to pay back if he would have consented, and if it’s not too big a burden on him. So yes, how much money he has, has a lot to do with it.
What are you talking about?
The price gouger obtains my “consent”, then he rescues me, then I have to pay him back what he charged me for the rescue. If you don’t like it, you can navigate by the stars or something.
The state builds all the roads, provides the “rule of law”, then demands that if you want to live and work in the United States, you’ve got to hand over a sizable portion of your income. If you don’t like it, here’s a flipboard and a compass.
They’re both providing me benefits; they’re just both monopolistically overcharging.
If there’s a difference, it’s that the state never even asked me if I consented to the arrangement. It just pretends I did.
The model you’re working in—and no one else in this thread. I don’t know how many times David Friedman has to point out to you that you’re begging the question by assuming the state legitimately owns the all the land of the country.
You have not argued why the consent of the majority legitimately grants them such title. If the majority even do consent—which they don’t, certainly not explicitly, and certainly not without being under threat of coercion.
Look, if I go to the moon and start a “libertarian” society there—call it Rapture—where I am supreme overlord of the whole globe, and anyone who wants to live on the moon has to abide by all my arbitrary decrees or be thrown out the airlock, it’s libertarian in name only. I have just created a dictatorship on the moon. Even if the initial wave of immigration is totally voluntary and I didn’t steal the land or anything, the problem is that they consented, but what about the children born on the moon? “If you don’t like it, buy a rocket to Earth.”
The very thing being objected to is the territorial model of sovereignty, the coercion, and the monopolization. The idea of anarcho-capitalism is to have “sovereignty” follow the person and not the land. Not to create a bunch of little feudal fiefdoms.
(I hasten to add that there is one major difference with the lunar dictatorship of Rapture: at least the initial population really did, by hypothesis, unanimously and voluntarily agree to move there. That is far more than can be said for the state. No state was ever founded upon unanimous consent, a point I have made repeatedly and which is quite relevant.)
Earthly Knight appears to be somewhat distorting the social contract idea as well. The idea is that the agreement to quit the state of nature and enter into society was truly unanimous. However, one of the ground rules agreed to unanimously (allegedly) is that majority rule ought to be allowed to establish a particular government for that society. So that even if some people oppose the government, they have agreed to the rules upon which it was founded.
It is the unanimous agreement part that is complete fiction. But that is the basis for the state’s alleged ownership of the country. Otherwise, they simply stole it from the minority who didn’t consent.
@ Vox
Okay. And in the case where he would have gone to St. Mary’s, the doctors are obligated to operate for free, even if he could readily compensate them?
State case: You pay the state taxes, the state spends them in substantial part on goods and services for you. If there’s any remainder, it goes to the needy and poor.
Gouger case: You pay the gouger money, the gouger spends that money exclusively on his own interests. Maybe he uses a tiny fraction of your cash to defray the costs of transporting you.
Not the same.
Here’s one option: because groups of people have the right to enter into associations for their common benefit which include measures to punish free-riders. Suppose that there are 100 tenants in an apartment building, all but one of whom wish to buy out their units and turn them into condos instead. They are doing this, moreover, because staying on as renters poses a considerable risk to their lives (maybe the pipes are full of lead, and the slumlord owner won’t repair them). The renters offer to pay the holdout’s relocation costs to a similar apartment across town, but she refuses– even though she realizes the change would be in her best interests, she hopes to squeeze a better offer out of the others. Would it be unjust for them to hire movers to take away the holdout’s furniture, and to change the locks while she’s away? I’m not inclined to think so. And that seems like its enough to justify a state.
All that I think is needed is that a majority or supermajority of the country’s inhabitants would, if queried, endorse the present form of government.
You’re confounding the thought experiment with unjust laws and gratuitous exit costs. Try it without those.
@ Earthly Knight:
Yes, bad luck for them. They thought they were operating on a normal sort of guy who wanted to be treated, but they were operating on a crazy guy.
Unless we go with Frank McPike‘s idea of a quasi-contract. In which case, you’re obligated legally to pay but not necessarily morally. And if morally, then not because you consented.
Okay, so the gouger purports to spend the money benefiting you, and to give you orders that are allegedly designed to improve your life. Maybe he even really does think that he’s benefiting you. Does that make it better?
I don’t know how many times or ways it’s possible to express this point without it getting through, but a key difference is that the condominiums are actually founded by the unanimous, real, and explicit consent of all the initial residents.
Whereas states are founded by a majority (if that) taking over without the consent of the minority.
If I invite three people into my house for a party, they can’t declare without my consent that my house is now a condominium governed by majority rule.
You said “implied consent” only applied to dissenters in the minority, not the majority. “Would, if queried, endorse” means “their consent is implied.” Explicit consent means “have been queried, do in fact endorse.” Of course, even that may not be informed consent. The “social contract” may be void due to misrepresentation and fraud.
In any case, it doesn’t matter if the majority consent. What matters is whether everyone consents. I am not disputing that the United States has a democratic, majoritarian system. I am disputing the fiction that this majoritarian system is justified because everyone in fact agreed prior to the formation of the government to quit the state of nature and enter into society, stipulating as part of that agreement to invest the majority with the right to decide questions for the whole.
If instead, you are merely arguing that a majority has a natural right to rule without the consent of the minority because government is necessary and unanimous consent is impossible, that is much more reasonable. But it’s not the same argument.
If there are no unjust laws or high exit costs (really only the first is important; the second contributes to the first), there’s nothing wrong with it. But unjust laws and high exit costs do in fact apply to the case of the US government.
I think most libertarians would object pretty strenuously to the idea that they could be morally obligated to help someone else for free even though the recipient could readily afford to compensate them. Sounds a bit like slavery to me!
Yes, actually. If the gouger reasonably believes that you’re lost in the desert because you can’t be trusted to take care of yourself, for instance, I think it would be fair for him, as a condition on taking you home, to confiscate enough of your wealth to provide a caretaker for you.
I edited an example into the above comment which suggests that unanimity is not needed. This is the difficult one, I don’t think “real” and explicit consent are plausible criteria for just condo board action.
We’re going to have to distinguish two types of implicit consent based on counterfactual features of the case, implicit consent where the consenter would not have endorsed the agreement if asked, and implicit consent* where the consenter would have endorsed the agreement if asked. Governments acquire legitimacy through explicit consent or implicit consent*. Malcontents are bound by the laws in virtue of plain-old implicit consent.
“The doctors’ demand is reasonable because they are asking for fair compensation for the labor they put in.”
Firstly, let’s not confuse the issue by using the verb “ask.” We are talking about demanding payment–as in, claiming an enforceable right to payment–not just asking. Anyone can ask for anything they want. I know this is just a bit of semantics, but it really grates every time I hear a politician say “we’re just asking the rich to pay their fair share.” They aren’t asking. They’re demanding.
Secondly, if I were a very skilled professional house painter, and, without asking, I showed up at your house and gave it a beautiful new paint job you never asked for, would I then be justified in demanding payment of you for my labor and materials?
@ onyomi
No. It seems to me that implicit consent goes by way of different mechanisms in the aneurysm and day-laborer cases. For the aneurysm, the patient’s implicit consent is given because the doctors have a strongly justified belief that the patient would have acceded to the operation, had he been able to, and because of the steep cost of inaction. In the day-laborer case, implicit consent seems to go solely by way of convention. Implicit consent to the social contract, I think, must also be by convention. Your house painting example doesn’t fit either model.
@ Earthly Knight:
You are confusing everything and obscuring the issue here.
The moral obligation is to treat a person immediately when he’s in a critical situation, rather than waiting around to see whether he’s willing and able to pay. That is sensible for many reasons.
That creates a reciprocal moral obligation on the part of the patient to pay back the cost of the treatment, if he can afford it, and if he would have wanted it.
There is no moral obligation to knowingly help people for free who can afford to compensate you.
In any case, that would certainly not be slavery. Slavery is a legal obligation, not a moral one. There are plenty of Christian libertarians who believe you are obligated to tithe money to the church even if the church could potentially find other ways to raise funds.
Yes, if he reasonably (but mistakenly) believes that, he is subjectively excused for his wrongdoing. I also believe that if government officials reasonably but mistakenly believe they’re doing good, they are subjectively excused for their wrongdoing. I’m not calling for everyone in the IRS to be publicly executed or something.
But the question is not whether the action is subjectively excused, but whether it’s objectively right.
A real condo board has the right to make decisions on a less-than-unanimous basis because all of its “subjects” in fact did agree to invest it with that power over them.
Your example of coercing the holdout to go along for the greater good of the vast majority may indeed be just. But it’s a paradigmatic example of something that is non-consensual. It’s possible for something non-consensual to be just, in dire circumstances.
For instance, Michael Huemer (an anarcho-capitalist) gives the following example: you’re in a lifeboat with several other people. Crazily and irrationally, they refuse to bail water, even though it’s going to sink. You try to bail it on your own, but you can’t do it all by yourself. In that case, it’s perfectly justified to pull out a gun and order people to start bailing water or be shot and thrown overboard.
You may notice that this is not an example of a contract, social or otherwise. It is an example of coercing people involuntarily.
If this is your real justification for government, you’ve shifted the goalposts. To something much more reasonable, in my opinion. But still to something very different from what you started with.
Implicit “consent” where the “consenter” would not have endorsed the agreement if asked is not “consent” at all. That is what we call “dissent”, which is the opposite of consent.
Unless you’d like to apply the legal maxim of “your lips say no, but your body says yes”?
***
As I was writing this, it occurred to me that there is a further, very important reason (besides the ones I mentioned earlier) why people love to argue for the social contract and that everything the government does is consensual. It vastly expands the authority of government beyond the “natural right”/”expediency” account.
It’s commonly accepted that you can consent—if not literally to anything—then virtually to anything. If someone ties you up and whips you, normally you can sue him for assault and battery. But if it was consensual, you (rightly) can’t.
But arguing that it’s for a person’s own good actually has to have some kind of purported objective basis.
So let’s imagine that a court is reviewing a law that authorizes sending a rocket to Mars. Is such a law just, or is it a violation of minority taxpayers’ rights, taking their money for no sufficient reason? If this law is seen as imposed on the minority taxpayers against their will but for their own good, then the government at least has to argue that the law benefits them enough to justify the coercion. But if “we” “all” “agreed” to send a rocket to Mars, and they implicitly “consented” too—then they simply have no case. How can you claim you were harmed when you agreed to it?
And honestly, all I really want from my libertarianism is this: apply something like the strict scrutiny test to everything the government does. Is what you’re doing narrowly tailored, using the least restrictive means, to advance a compelling public interest? If not, why the hell are you using coercion to do it?
For my part, I am not totally convinced that the very existence of the state passes that test. But if it does, I sure as hell don’t think the vast majority of what the government does passes it.
“the doctors have a strongly justified belief that the patient would have acceded to the operation, had he been able to”
But I just knew you’d love your new paint job and didn’t want to ruin the surprise! Plus, you said the doctor’s demand was reasonable because of the labor he put in, which is what I was responding to. If the doctor’s demand is reasonable it’s because explicit consent was unobtainable under the circumstance. My point is, just putting labor and resources into serving someone doesn’t, by itself, obligate them to you at all, regardless of how much work and resources:
http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3345
More importantly, most people are not unconscious when paying their taxes. Maybe you can say I owe a doctor who operates on me when I am unable to give consent but he has good reason to believe I would if I could, but I certainly don’t owe money to a doctor who operates on me despite my explicitly refusing to undergo the operation and/or pay. In fact, we’d say he’s committing a crime. Or, if I say in advance, loudly and explicitly, “okay, doc, you can do this operation if you really want, but I ain’t payin’ for it!” then would I still owe him?
And yet this is the situation with the government. I can say, “I renounce all future claims on social security benefits so I’m not paying the payroll tax anymore,” but this doesn’t actually get me out of anything.
@Vox Imperatoris
Yes, I think we’re mostly in agreement on the validity of this line of argument.
However, I do disagree with the arguments as soldiers interpretation. The social contract theorists I have in mind (maybe not Hobbes, but certainly Locke and probably Pufendorf) would actively disagree with “The fact that anarchy would be a Hobbesian hell is totally sufficient to justify the state.” On Locke’s account, the requirement of literally entering into the social contract is genuinely important for the state’s legitimacy–a state that claimed you had any duty to obey it simply because it could protect and govern you better than anyone else would be illegitimate without your consent (even if its promises were completely accurate). I’m not sure it does justice to that era of social contract theorists to treat the contract element as a purely rhetorical move, or as a response to an argument that does not need to be rebutted (especially since, Hobbes excepted, these were often attacks on the power of the state, not unequivocal defenses of its authority).
I would make a point analogous to David Friedman’s here: there are distinct and influential traditions of non-consequentialist approaches to state power and fitting them into a consequentialist frame (even when they seem to have inadvertently trodden into one) can distract from dealing with them on their own terms. I don’t think consequentialist and non-consequentialist theories necessarily have to cohere in order for the latter to be valid (though there are many instances where there should be feedback between the two).
@Earthly Knight
I’m not arguing–and don’t believe–that we should construct a natural law based on principles of co-operation or human flourishing. I chose those as examples because they’re common bases for deriving a natural law and I wanted to show that bringing natural law into the equation doesn’t make contract principles more helpful, without attacking a strawman.
I have no objection to formulating rules of contract based on fairness or justice, and then seeing if a state would result. But I’m not sure if that puts us in a different position than if we take human flourishing as the starting point for natural law. Either forming states is just and fair, and such contracts should be permitted if not required, or it is unjust to form states, and such contracts should be prohibited. In either case, I don’t see how contract breaks us out of a circular pattern.
I fully agree that people’s intuitions about these principles are shaped by upbringing and culture, though–at least to me–it seems that our intuitions about contract law are societally mediated in far more obvious ways than most. My point is simply that our intuitive sense of how contracts work is unlikely to be helpful in considering the question at hand, whatever our other moral beliefs.
My “case” is that they aren’t contracts.
@ Vox
Maybe not in general. But you’ve conceded that there is in this case. And that’s bad for your libertarian cred! More seriously, I think your intuitions are wildly idiosyncratic here: most everyone will agree that the doctors are obligated to treat and the patient obligated to pay. A few hardcore libertarians may insist that it is permissible for the doctors not to treat and permissible for the patient not to pay. But the combination of doctors obliged to treat/patient permitted to welch is pretty obviously the worst choice– it means that the doctors who did a good deed are denied their rightful compensation because the greedy and ungrateful patient invokes some weird counterfactual about his preferences.
I don’t know why you’re talking about excuses, but it seems morally permissible for the conscientious gouger to take a substantial chunk of your change if he reasonably believes it would be to your benefit. I think what we were originally after was whether the bargain would be unjust or coercive; my intuition is that it is still coercive but not unjust provided that the gouger is acting as he morally ought to relative to his evidence. It’s unclear to me what the moral is when it comes to the legitimacy of the state, as I said, I don’t think it’s a great analogy.
Here, let’s sharpen it a little: instead of kicking the holdout to the curb, the other tenants unilaterally charge the price of the apartment to her debit card (while agreeing to void the charges if she opts to move out). She decides to stay. Here we have a contract whereby a group of individuals justly establish ownership over a property without the unanimous consent of all its prior inhabitants.
That… seems false. Imagine, in the day-laborer case, that the manager plans to swindle the workers but never tells lies, and that if someone had asked him whether he intended to pony up at the end of the day, he would have said no. Does this allow him to weasel out of the implicit contract he negotiated by bringing them to the construction site?
@onyomi
I don’t think not wanting to ruin the surprise will be enough here, I think it has to be virtually impossible for you to ascertain my wishes, and enormously costly for me if you fail to act.
If the whole country is the property of the state, and they require as a condition for you to stay on their property that you pay the payroll tax, this looks kosher to me. The doctors could surely kick you out of the hospital if you refuse treatment.
@ Jiro
As you like: you haven’t come up with a plausible candidate for how implicit “contracts” like those in the brain aneurysm case or the construction worker case differ from the social “contract”.
And if your body and life are the property of the state, you can justify slavery.
Since I believe they aren’t contracts, and I also believe the social contract is not a contract, I don’t believe they differ in the relevant aspect. So there’s nothing to explain.
“And if your body and life are the property of the state, you can justify slavery.”
It is called conscription. Taistele Suomen puolesta!
“Since I believe they aren’t contracts, and I also believe the social contract is not a contract, I don’t believe they differ in the relevant aspect. So there’s nothing to explain.”
Do I need to link the LessWrong writing on the usage of language? You need to provide the word box that social contract fits in so we know what you are talking about. Are you declaring the social contract doesn’t exist or that it fits in some other category?
When EK claims there is a social contract, the label carries meaning–it implies that the principles upon which actual contracts are based also apply to “social contracts”. So I’m claiming that those principles don’t apply.
“Are you declaring the social contract doesn’t exist or that it fits in some other category?”
(Not addressed to me, but …)
I have long argued that “peace treaty” is a better metaphor. My willingness to go along with terms I don’t approve of or consider just reflects the fact that I don’t see any way of getting a better deal, given that other people have different views of the right terms.
A contract under duress is not binding. Peace treaties, on the other hand, are quite often signed under duress.
@John Schilling.
“3 [Determining where the threshold should fall in a way that isn’t utterly arbitrary] strikes me as a non-problem
If it’s a non-problem, why do we have people arguing about whether e.g. poor people having cellphones is pure government largesse or bare minimum necessity? Where can I find the threshold for “goods necessary for a comfortable life” and the non-arbitrary justification for this floor, spelled out in a way that every reasonable person will agree on to within, say, +/-20%?”
There’s no completely objective level, but on the other hand, the level of welfare spending can be thrashed out like the level of defence spending or anything else. Welfare doesn’t present any unique problem.
“The goods necessary to give a person what they themselves will believe and describe as a comfortable life, cost maybe $2000/year”
So what? I have never heard of a welfare system where individuals directly set their own levels. of benefit.
“Now, it is true that at the margin, a government can take money from one person and use it to pay a second person to provide goods to a third person. That works because we live in a generally free-market economy with a recognized right to private property, tax rates on the left side of the Laffer curve, and something less than a guaranteed entitlement to a comfortable life.”
So the combination of a welfare system and a freeish market, in other words social democracy, works. in theory, And aso in practice.
“How does money motivate someone to work long hours producing goods and providing services, when they are guaranteed a comfortable life regardless”
Status. Keeping up with the Joneses as you previously called it.
“and when they are not guaranteed a right to the money you just gave them? Yes, you can offer them the possibility of buying extra luxury goods and services, but even the most explicitly communist nations figured that out. And pretty soon the workers figured out that if they claimed the bonus for working past quota, the quota would be raised next year, and the bonus would be worthless because the shelves of GUM would be bare, and the black market was a more reliable way of turning initiative into luxury.”
So communism doesn’t work. But social democracy, which is something different, still does.
“It simply doesn’t work.”
Does the ‘it’ refer to welfare, or commumism, or what?
” If you were willing to settle for not-starving, ”
What welfare recipients have to settle for in a democracy is a compromise between what they would like, and what taxpayers are willing to support. There is nothing intrinsically unsustainable about that, and some countries have sustained welfare systems for a long time…social democracies, of course, not communist countries,
Libertarians may not like democracy, but that does not entitle them to ignore its effects, where it exists. I suppose the tendency to conflate social democracy and socialism is part of the project of ignoring democracy.
“we could make it work, but you won’t. With the nebulous ever-increasing standard of “comfortable”,”
And with the nebulous and ever increasing standard of ‘secure’, there is no way that defence spending is sustainable…? Welfare spending does not present any novel problems. In both cases there are beneficiaries who would like to see it higher, in both cases there are taxpayers who would want to pull it back down. in both cases, the sustainability of increasing amounts depends on the level of increase in relation to GDP…in both cases, sustainability is an implementation detail, not a matter of principle,
Your imaginary system where welfare recipients are the sole determiners of welfare levels is perhaps unsustainable in principle…but it is imaginary.
“Which will bring you to the inevitable end state – if the government must meet the “duty” to provide a comfortable life for everyone, then the government must claim the power to compel labor from everyone”
You can criticise a system for making a slave of everybody, or for supporting unemployed scroungers on the lap of luxury, but you cannot criticize a system doing both, since no system can do both.
A system with a welfare state, is not a system that compels work, it is a system that compels taxation if you work.
@ Jiro
Let us stipulate that whenever you, without having initiated aggression against another, are morally obligated to relinquish some of your rights or property you have consented* to a contract*. I say that by freely choosing to remain in this country after your 18th birthday you have implicitly consented* to its laws and bound yourself to the social contract*. Now, a libertarian might object to this claim as follows: if you haven’t initiated aggression against someone and you haven’t explicitly consented to any sort of contract, you can’t be obligated to relinquish any rights or property. That is, a libertarian might insist that all implicit contracts* are invalid. The brain aneurysm and day-laborer cases show that the libertarian is mistaken; almost all of us accept that we may sometimes be entered into contracts* without our express consent. So the thesis that I put forward cannot be rejected on these grounds.
Why would I want to stipulate to such a thing?
Moreover, you’ve added the clause about aggression specifically to exclude the self-defense example because it’s too obviously not a contract. It’s a gerrymandered definition.
@Vox
That’s the point of economic science, isn’t it? To tell us whether that will happen.”
Well, if they had proof that monopolies cannot happen in an unregulated market, you would be onto something. However, I suspect it s one of the many questions economists disagree about. While we are on the subject, Libertarians seem to swing from “monopolies are great” to “monopolies are evil, but invariably created by governments”.
” I am in favor of gradualism for many reasons.”
Is there a difference between a gradualist libertarian and a conservative.?
@ Earthly Knight:
No, I have not conceded that there is in this case an obligation to knowingly help people for free who can afford to compensate you. There is an obligation to help people, before you know they can compensate you. Which is like a favor for them. And thus if they appreciated the favor and have the means to pay it back, they should. If they didn’t appreciate the favor, or if they don’t have the means, they don’t have to pay it back.
And it’s not a counterfactual about the patient’s preferences; it’s a “factual“.
If this is idiosyncratic, I don’t care. I’m right; they’re wrong. I don’t think it’s determined by majority vote.
I am talking about excuses because if he acts reasonably but mistakenly, he is still committing an injustice and a harm. This is an example of mistake-of-fact, which is an excuse, not a justification. You’re doing something that objectively violates the other person’s rights, but we forgive you because you didn’t realize it.
Okay…that’s still coercive. There is no contract here between the holdout and the rest. There’s an agreement by the mob of non-holdouts to gang up on and coerce the holdout. But the social contract is supposed to be something everyone agrees to. Otherwise, you have indeed moved the goalposts.
This is a completely different kind of situation, and you ought to know it.
The employer has to pay up because the workers reasonably understood that a contract was being formed, he knew that they believed a contract was formed, and he consciously intended to swindle them. As Frank McPike was saying, this is an example of an implied-in-fact contract.
What he the employer is doing is attempting to defraud the workers by misleading them into believing that a contract has been formed, then not holding up his end of the bargain. If he hasn’t consented to the contract, then he’s liable not because of consent but because he defrauded them.
In any case, libertarians are not attempting to mislead the state into thinking they have consented to a contract with it. They make it clear that they explicitly do not consent, and are complying under duress.
Anyway, since you’re not responding to any of the main points I’ve made but only nitpicking a few minor issues, can I assume that you in fact agree with me that the state, if it’s justified, is not justified on the basis of unanimous, uncoerced consent to a social contract?
@ Frank McPike:
I don’t mean to imply that the “arguments are soldiers” dynamic is the only reason Hobbes or Locke appealed to the social contract. Just that it might have been a subconscious motive. And yes, part of their conception of the social contract was precisely to restrict its power down from “the king can do anything because he’s appointed by God”.
And this is another key point Earthly Knight is not being clear about: the distinction between the Hobbesian and Lockean ideas of the social contract. Now, I think both models are fictional. But they are very different.
Hobbes holds that the state of nature would be absolutely intolerable. Almost nothing could be worse. Therefore, in order to avoid this, people agree to the social contract virtually unconditionally and without reservation. You can rebel to protect yourself from being immediately killed, but that’s pretty much it.
If that model is true, then whatever the government does is ultimately authorized by the unanimous consent of everyone. Because while some people might not have agreed to this or that rule, they have agreed to the authority of the sovereign to determine the rules. Just as when you move into the condominium, you agree to follow the determinations of the board whether you like them or not.
Locke holds that the state of nature is not that bad, but simply relatively “insecure”. Therefore, when we enter into the social contract, we don’t invest the majority or the sovereign with the power to rule arbitrarily. The principles of natural justice preexist civil society and obtain even in the state of nature. And no one ever consented—or had the right to consent—to a policy which violates the natural rights of life, liberty, and property.
If the government should do something which is a violation of rights, an act that does not serve the purposes for which we entered into the social contract, that act is not lawful, cannot be presumed to be consented to by the minority upon which it is imposed, and is illegitimate. The people then have the right to revolution, to overthrow a government which habitually commits such acts. The government having failed to uphold its end of the bargain, the social contract is void.
In other words, by the social contract, the minority only agreed to obey just laws. If unjust laws are imposed, the minority has no obligated to obey because that’s not what they consented to.
As Justice Samuel Chase put it:
Now, Chase was not a libertarian and no doubt had a somewhat broader view of what constituted a just law. But this type of reasoning is integral to the concept of substantive due process, as Timothy Sandefur has made it virtually his life’s work to defend.
The whole article is well worth reading, but he brings up in particular the case of Loan Association v. Topeka, in which a state law investing taxpayer money in a private railroad was found unconstitutional.
As the court held in that case:
Now, I do not believe, as I have said, that the Lockean social contract is actually real. But the theory can be easily modified, keeping its substantive limits on government intact, by saying: it is not the case that everyone actually did or does agree to form a government for such-and-such purposes. But the state is in fact (the theory presumes) necessary for those purposes, which everyone or nearly everyone supports: the promotion of life, health, and happiness. Therefore, everyone who values life, health, and happiness is morally bound to obey the state, insofar as it genuinely acts for their promotion. (And if people don’t value those ends, the rest are not bound to allow them to promote death, disease, and suffering.)
However, to the extent that the state acts in ways other than to genuinely promote those ends, people are not bound to obey it.
@ Jiro
I gave principled reasons earlier why should not think of self-defense as a kind of contract*. But if you like, we can make a new category of contracts** which includes all contracts* along with cases of self-defense. I claim that the social contract** is no less binding than the more familiar sort of contract** we all accept. A libertarian might argue that there are relevant moral differences between self-defense contracts** and a social contract**; I concede that this is so. But we are still searching for a reason why social contracts** should be invalid while we take ordinary non-self-defense contracts** (that is, contracts*) to bind.
All your semantic quibbling has accomplished is to make it needlessly difficult to state the case. You still haven’t pointed to the moral feature of the social contract** which makes it relevantly dissimilar from the contracts** found in the aneurysm and day-laborer cases.
@ Vox
What if the doctors peek into the patient’s pocketbook before operating and find that he is a wealthy man? I don’t see how this could dissolve their obligation to render aid. I take it, then, that you believe that we can have obligations to help people who we know are able to compensate us for our labor, but that this does not give rise to a corresponding obligation for them to actually pay us. Like I said, I think this is a bad position for you to take, you’re not much of a libertarian if you think we can have moral obligations to serve the rich for free.
If you and I strike a bargain which (1) I justifiably take to benefit you, and (2) you explicitly consent to, it’s not clear to me that any rights violation has taken place, even if you were compelled by your circumstances to take the deal or perish.
Sure there is, there’s a written agreement with her signature at the bottom!
I’ve mentioned repeatedly that I do not think unanimity is needed, only a majority or a supermajority.
@ TheAncientGeek:
I think they do have, if not “proof”, more convincing evidence than the people on the other side, that harmful monopolies are not a prominent feature of unregulated markets, and that antitrust is a cure worse than the disease.
As far as saying “monopolies are great”, libertarians are indeed in the habit of arguing that the problems associated with monopolies do not result from there merely being one firm in a given market, but from the lack of freedom of competition. For instance, there may only be one grocery store in a small town, therefore it has a “monopoly” over that market. But this is not harmful because they don’t have the right to stop people from competing. Therefore, they are constrained by potential competitors and charge a competitive price.
And libertarians do often refute various progressive mythologies about fictitious harmful monopolies, such as concerning Standard Oil.
Bryan Caplan’s “The Efficiency of Free Competition” is the best and most carefully argued summary of the libertarian position here I’ve seen.
You ask:
I suppose a gradualist libertarian is, in some quasi-Burkean sense, “conservative”. But a gradualist libertarian (at least one such as myself) is also radically opposed to the status quo and is convinced that it does need to be greatly changed. He is just not convinced that destroying the current system overnight would produce a better one.
A gradualist libertarian (again, at least one like me) is by no means a “conservative” in the American sense. As in, he’s not in favor of restrictions on abortion, supports radically increasing the level of immigration, is opposed to moralistic legislation, etc.
The whole reason you were going on about social contracts was to claim that libertarians who believe in contracts also have to believe in “social contracts”. In order to make that claim, you need to show that they fit in the same category as defined by libertarians or as implied by libertarian principles. It doesn’t work with arbitrary new categories.
@ Earthly Knight:
Libertarianism is not a theory about moral obligations. It is a theory about whether government is necessary and if so of what kind, and therefore about legal obligations.
You can be a libertarian and believe that people have an absolute moral obligation to give all of their money above basic subsistence to the poor. Or even to the rich. As long as you believe that no one has the right to coercively collect on that obligation.
Libertarianism is not the same as individualism or egoism. It’s not incompatible with them, but it is distinct.
For one, your hypothetical is bizarre. I can imagine no way in real life that the rescuer could reasonably think that what he’s doing is justified.
The injustice is in the rescued’s being forced to take a deal that he knows is harmful to him, and which could have been a much better deal. It is still an injustice if the rescuer somehow isn’t reasonably aware of this; he’s just excused.
To take a somewhat more plausible example, imagine that I consent to allow a doctor to treat me with a drug. He reasonably but mistakenly believes the drug will help me, but I have an adverse reaction to it and die.
This is an objective harm and a violation of my rights: I have a right to life, not to be poisoned, and I certainly never knowingly agreed to be poisoned. I only consented to treatments that will help me, not ones that will kill me. But the doctor is excused because he reasonably didn’t know that the drug would kill me.
A justification would be: I was dying of a painful disease and asked the doctor to inject me with the drug, knowing it would kill me. Here, the doctor has done nothing wrong which needs to be excused.
What are you talking about?
In your example, they unilaterally charge her card (or break into the apartment or whatever). She’s agreed to nothing. She’s signed nothing. Unless you changed the example again?
The other tenants have signed an agreement to coerce her, but she hasn’t signed anything.
If they do present her with an ultimatum—sign this or we throw you out of your apartment—the problem is that they don’t own her apartment, so threatening to exercise control over it is coercion. It’s like a robber saying “Your money or your life!” The problem with that is that he doesn’t own either your money or your life, so he has no right to force you to trade them off. Giving him the money is in some sense a willful act, but you don’t actually thereby consent.
Then you don’t believe in the social contract. Social contract theory says that the agreement to abide by the will of the majority is unanimous; that’s why government’s authority over everyone (and not just the majority) is legitimate.
If you have come around to the idea that the social contract is a myth and that government has to be justified (if at all) on other grounds, please acknowledge this explicitly. Because that’s the basic point I’m trying to argue in this discussion.
“There’s no completely objective level, but on the other hand, the level of welfare spending can be thrashed out like the level of defence spending or anything else.”
The question is what “objective” and “arbitrary” mean here.
The political process produces some level of defense spending. Suppose that level has nothing to do with actual defense needs, only with the political power of firms that produce weapons, senators who want military bases in their districts, and the like. I think it makes sense to say that the level is arbitrary rather than objective in the sense we care about–not objectively linked to what the spending is supposed to be for.
Similarly for the case of income redistribution. Imagine a welfare state in which the upper classes have gotten effective control and use the excuse of helping the poor for a pattern of expenditures that on net transfers income from poor to rich. By your definition that pattern is objective and not arbitrary.
“So the combination of a welfare system and a freeish market, in other words social democracy, works. in theory, And aso in practice.”
Maybe. Go back to the question of why anyone works in that system and consider a different explanation than yours.
Before there was much income redistribution, if you didn’t work you lived a life of poverty, which was a good reason to work. If you were poor people looked down on you, your parents thought you were a failure, the women you might want to marry didn’t want to marry you. So being unemployed cost a lot of status, having a good job and keeping it produced a lot of status.
Now bring in generous redistribution. For a while, people work even though the material incentives to do so are much lower, because only a failure is unemployed, and who wants to be viewed, or view himself, as a failure?
Over time, it becomes more and more obvious that one can live a pleasant life without working–less money but more leisure. Increasingly, people who choose to live on welfare view those who work as patsies, people who foolishly spend their life doing boring things when they could be vacationing in Crete. Over time, the non-material incentives decline.
I think it’s arguable that this is happening in the Scandinavian welfare states, but I don’t know enough to be sure. Sweden in particular became rich at a time at which it was closer to the libertarian ideal, economically speaking, than most of Europe, then introduced a generous welfare system and seems to now be having some problems with it.
@ Jiro
The libertarian claims that ordinary contracts* bind while the social contract* does not. All I am doing is inquiring why. It’s the same as if you claimed that we are required to repay any debts incurred on Tuesdays but not any debts incurred on Wednesdays. If you can’t point to relevant moral features in virtue of which the two cases are different, you have no grounds to draw the distinction. It doesn’t matter what categories the libertarian starts out with– if she doesn’t classify like cases alike, those categories are defective.
@ Vox
Maybe. But it’s a really bad theory you end up with. I can be morally obligated to serve rich people for free, but compelling me to spend a few cents to save a starving child is unjust?
I agree, certainly, that the doctor’s actions harm you, but I don’t see how your rights are being violated, sorry.
Whoops, you’re right. The correct thing to say about this case is that the social contract is formed by the other 99 tenants, and the holdout gives her implicit consent by returning to her apartment.
I have proposed that a government’s title to a territory is established when a majority or a supermajority of the inhabitants either explicitly consent to the formation of that government, or would have consented if asked. I do not think this requires unanimity. The remaining citizens become bound to the social contract by virtue of freely choosing to continue to reside within the incorporated territory. You can decide for yourself whether you think this meets your definition of a social contract theory, I don’t really care.
What? Are you serious?
The whole reason we have tort is precisely because notions of contract aren’t nearly broad enough to encompass such situations. To take one example, if I defame Mr. Smith I might be ordered to pay him damages. That doesn’t mean, or imply, that I ever had a contract with Mr. Smith not to defame him. There are vast bodies of law (criminal, tort, etc) that deal with our obligations towards those we never entered into any agreement with.
The quoted passage is actually not what I wrote. It was:
“Let us stipulate that whenever you, without having initiated aggression against another, are morally obligated to relinquish some of your rights or property you have consented* to a contract*.”
With asterisks following “consented” and “contract” to indicate that these terms take the stipulative definition rather than their conventional meanings. All that matters is whether the mechanism whereby the aneurysm patient comes to be obliged to pay his medical bills or the mechanism whereby the day-laborers become entitled to their wages can be appropriated to justify the social contract as well.
@ Earthly Knight:
Again, you are confusing moral and legal obligation. You may be morally obligated to give a few cents to save starving children. It may even be unjust not to give it.
All the libertarian says is that it’s also unjust for a third party to coercively compel you to give money to save that child. It’s unjust because, in the real world, the integrity of property rights is more important and ends up saving more starving children.
Also, we shouldn’t pretend that your example has anything to do with reality. The amount the government spends on foreign aid to the absolutely poor (“starving children”) is totally insignificant.
Your rights are being violated because you didn’t consent to be harmed. The doctor misrepresented what the drug would do. He did so honestly, so he’s not to blame. If he had done the same thing with a dishonest, criminal intent, then he would be to blame.
The objective quality of the act does not change, only whether he is subjectively excused.
On the other hand, in the case where you consent to be euthanized, the objective quality of the act changes.
But this is not central to the point here.
In what sense is that consent? They just stole the title to her apartment and are using it to dictate terms to her.
You can say it was good that they stole her apartment, just like it’s good for Valjean to steal a loaf of bread. But they still stole it.
“Consensual” is not synonymous with “justified”.
It doesn’t matter whether you “care”. The fact is that you are misleading people by calling this a social contract theory.
You have a majoritarian theory where the majority steals the property from the unconsenting minority and invests the allodial title in the state.
You have not explained why the majority has the right to rule the minority. The social contract theory explains this by saying that the minority agreed to be ruled by the majority.
You say the state owns the land upon which my house sits; that’s why they can order me to follow the rules or kick me out. It’s not really my property; it’s the state’s property. Their house, their rules.
The question is how they got the land. In the example I gave of a lunar dictatorship, I “homesteaded” all the land on the moon and invited people to live there. To build a condominium, I buy the land from somebody and invite people to live there. But how did the state get the land? They just stole it, that’s how.
What you are evading is why the state is the legitimate owner of all the land in the country. It’s not because the previous owners consented.
If you think the case where the other people in the apartment coerce the holdout is an example of “implicit consent”, you are accusing other people of being idiosyncratic while using the term “consent” in the most bizarre way, which has no commonalities with other instances of consent.
Suppose a gang of men breaks into a woman’s house. They declare that they’ve voted themselves the owners, and that if she wants to keep living there, she has to cook and clean for them. If she stays, is that “implicit consent”?
You may as well ask “why does the libertarian think ordinary contracts bind, while just the declaration that the libertarian is your slave doesn’t bind”.
If you think they have something relevant in common, say what it is, don’t put the burden of proof on someone else. I can’t figure out anything you think the two situations have in common except that you think they are called contracts and they impose obligations.
@ Vox
Always?
I don’t see how this follows, I’m sorry. I think some degree of mens rea is probably necessary for something to qualify as a rights violation.
She elected to return to the apartment, and by so doing signaled her implicit consent to the deal. It’s implicit consent in exactly the same way as the other hundred examples of implicit consent I’ve already given.
You are claiming that an account of the state’s legitimacy only qualifies as a social contract theory if it requires that the state be initially formed by unanimous consent? Where did you get this from?
Sure I have. This was the purpose of the condominium case.
No, because consent obtained under unjust duress is invalid.
@ Jiro
We can spell this out in more detail, if you like. Let’s take the unwitting trespasser case, which probably offers the closest analogy. Suppose that you awaken to find yourself in the middle of a huge ranch. You come across a telephone pole on which the owner (i.e. the government) has posted a bill of rules (i.e laws) which he expects anyone who crosses his property to abide by. One of the rules is that, if you find any gold nuggets on the premises, a quarter of their value must be paid to the owner (i.e. taxes). The ranch is bounded on the north and south by other ranches (i.e. neighboring countries), which also have strict rules governing anyone who steps foot on their land, and on the east and west by inhospitable desert.
I hope you will agree that you are obliged to follow the posted rules or leave the ranch. By parity of reasoning, then, you are also morally obliged to follow the laws of our nation or emigrate.
@Vox
“I think they do have, if not “proof”, more convincing evidence than the people on the other side, that harmful monopolies are not a prominent feature of unregulated markets, and that antitrust is a cure worse than the disease.”
What about the government itself? Isn’t that a monopoly that exists only because the market for governance has no outside oversight or regulation?
To think that I almost missed a libertarian megathread!
Vox Imperatoris:
Setting aside the issue of the water monopoly, the injustice of which is complicated – do you think the water-seller is obligated to sell the water to the man in the desert? If not (as is my answer), then how can he do more wrong by offering some deal that makes them both better off than by leaving the man to his fate? If it’s permissible to let him die, then doing something that improves his welfare is definitely permissible.
[meta]
“Megathread” indeed. At this point, it’s longer than Hamlet and almost as long as Fahrenheit 451. We could publish it as one of the many volumes of The Dialogues, a Talmud-like add-on to The Sequences and The Library.
[/meta]
@Vox
“If this is idiosyncratic, I don’t care. I’m right; they’re wrong. I don’t think it’s determined by majority vote”
Ahh, the old argument from Subjective Objectivity. If you were running on Objective Objectivity, you wouldn’t gave to care about being in the minority, because you could prove they were wrong using objective reasoning…but as you are running on subjective objectivity, you have to accept that the majority can compell you to accept compulsion.
@ TheAncientGeek:
I have no idea what you are referring to with “subjective objectivity”. I believe that I can show that the majority is wrong using objective reasoning. That doesn’t mean they’ll listen.
And I don’t see why I “have to accept” that majority can compel me to accept compulsion. They haven’t show the necessity of it by objective reasoning.
Remember your original intent: you want to show that libertarian principles should imply a social contract. Unless libertarian principles imply that the government owns the country like a ranch owner owns a ranch, this comparison fails.
Just because *you* think that the government owns the country isn’t enough. We already know that a social contract is implied by *your* principles.
It may be that even though letting him sell the water at a high price leaves the thirsty man better off in the immediate situation, it also creates incentives that leave thirsty men as a group worse off. And just having it be permissible to let him die doesn’t create similarly bad incentives.
It is tempting to say “if you allow X, and Y doesn’t make anyone worse off, you should allow Y”, but that doesn’t actually follow, because of the existence of incentives.
So you agree now that, if we suppose the state may be seen as the rightful owner of its territory, there is absolutely nothing defective about the notion of implicit consent*, that a libertarian must accept that she is bound by the social contract*?
Jiro, that’s sounding like the ultimatum game, and it’s probably worth thinking about why people refuse very unfair offers.
“So you agree now that, if we suppose the state may be seen as the rightful owner of its territory, there is absolutely nothing defective about the notion of implicit consent*”
Not addressed to me, but I agree.
Do you agree that you have offered no reason that you would expect a libertarian to find convincing to think that the government is the just owner of all land, hence that your claim that if libertarians believe in contracts they must, to be consistent, believe in the social contract, is false?
@ Earthly Knight:
I haven’t had time to respond to your other points yet (I will later).
There are two issues here: first of all, you’re being obnoxious and misleading when you make up a word like “consent*”. To “consent*” to something seems to mean pretty much “you are obliged to do it for any reason”. But your phrasing of it is intended to smuggle in the connotations from actual consent, where you are obliged to do something because you actually consented.
In other words, what you are saying is: “Suppose we define ‘consent’ to be synonymous with ‘obligation’. I argue that you are obliged to obey the state for an unspecified reason which is something like a combination of fifty-million-frenchmen-can’t-be-wrong and utilitarianism. Therefore, since you are obliged to obey the state—or else leave the country—for those reasons, it follows that you consent to its rule after all.”
That is…not a legitimate form of argument.
The most obnoxious thing about it is that you have the arrogance to tell me what I do and do not consent to. If I tell you in clear terms that I don’t consent, I don’t consent. Period.
There’s an argument to be made that you have the right to coerce me anyway. But that reason ain’t because I “implicitly” “consent”. None of your examples of “consent” or even “consent*” (except the condominium case, which is a paradigmatic example of coercion) involve a case where a person clearly expresses that he doesn’t consent, yet gets overruled and is held to “consent” anyway. Your examples don’t involve this because such a case would clearly be one of coercion.
The unconscious-patient case doesn’t involve this. The day-laborer case doesn’t involve this.
This is, as I said, simply the legal theory of “Your lips say no, but your body says yes.” Whereas your other cases are, at best, “your lips are silent, but your body says yes.” The latter may thought to be “implicit consent” (though, as we know, there can be problems with it). The former isn’t consent of any kind at all.
Second, you say that if the state were the rightful owner of the land, then people would “consent*” (i.e. be obligated to whether or not they consent) obey it? I agree.
But what would be necessary to make the state the rightful owner of the land? What is the basis of property rights among human beings? Are they self-evident? Do they exist for no ulterior reason?
No, they are valid insofar as they advance the life and liberty of human beings. As John Locke explains:
Let us return to the example of the colony on the moon. Assume that the land is my rightful property to begin with: I have developed it and installed habitats and airlocks and oxygen-producing machines. And everyone I invite moves there totally voluntarily and of their own accord. So we have the most perfect (actual) social contract you could ask for.
But then I start making arbitrary decrees; I squander the “tax” money I charge for maintenance on useless or counter-productive projects, with the result that many habitats explosively decompress and kill people; I impose draconian and unnecessary “laws” regulating personal behavior. And I say anyone who doesn’t like it can buy a rocket back to Earth. And suppose a fair number of the residents can even afford the rocket, but it would mean leaving their home, their friends, and their family.
Am I still the rightful owner of the moon? No. I have let my property go to waste; I have squandered the increase; and I am even using it for positively harmful purposes. If we look to any of the reasons for which natural reason calls for the respect of property rights among human beings, none of them apply. So the residents are perfectly justified in reclaiming it from the “commons” to which I have defaulted it and overthrowing me.
So I say even if the U.S. government had been founded upon consent and an actual social contract (as was this lunar colony), the government has violated its end of the bargain and squandered the property with which it was (we suppose) legitimately entrusted. Therefore, its rule is illegitimate; its ownership of the territory is illegitimate; and people have no obligation whatsoever to obey it beyond that which prudence and fear of tyrannical power dictates.
***
What you are doing is taking a bizarre Rothbardian view of property rights (which does divorce them from connection to human life and happiness), then taking that theory out of the context in which Rothbard applies it (to cases where the property really is acquired without coercion), then asserting that the state is legitimately entitled to all the land in the country though by even Rothbard’s theory it isn’t, then saying libertarians are being inconsistent because they don’t accept the state’s claim here.
If, under Rothbard’s theory, the US owned all the land in the country, perhaps we would be obliged to obey it no matter how bad the laws were. But you are begging the question by assuming that this “if” actually obtains, when it fact it doesn’t because the US acquired the land coercively. Rothbard even says we should give it back to the Indians, for God’s sake!
I would agree that the state would have such rights in this hypothetical, but asking whether someone would agree to a hypothetical is often a trick question that is meant to imply some connection between the hypothetical and the real world. I don’t think “citizens are like trespassers and the state is like a third party land owner” applies to the real world.
Furthermore, the hypothetical is of no use in supporting your original claim, since you claim that by libertarian principles one could conclude there is a social contract. It is certainly not a libertarian principle that the state is like a third party land owner.
Also, I believe that even in this hypothetical, describing such rights as a contract or calling it consent would be misleading; your concept of “contract” or “consent” has little to do with what most people mean by such things.
I am skeptical of the moon example too.
If you legitimately come to own previously unowned moon land, it’s yours and it stays yours. You don’t lose your ownership for poorly maintaining it.
However, the only way you would be able to demand money from the residents in a way that is anything like government taxes would be if you had a contract with them saying “I can demand any amount of money from you and do anything I want with it as long as I toss in a justification, and I don’t have to provide anything except living space”. Nobody would sign such a contract explicitly (unless they would die without it, in which case we’re back to the example of selling water to a thirsty man in a desert). And those contract terms are too unusual and too extreme to be implicit.
Any contract that would actually exist in this situation would not be as extreme and would give the inhabitants recourse if you mismanaged the moon.
@Vox
In the latest iteration of the unwitting trespasser case, it seems pretty clear to me that no matter what you say, as long as you elect to remain on the premises, you are consenting to be bound by the owner’s regulations. This would really be a case where you consent by way of your actions while disavowing that consent with your words, like sealing a deal with a handshake while simultaneously speaking the word “no.”
@ Jiro
I don’t think that’s true. My linguistic intuitions in these cases are as follows:
Brain aneurysm: Contract, no consent
Day-laborers: No contract, consent
Unwitting trespasser: No contract, consent (once he reads the rules posted by the owner and decides to remain)
State: Consent, contract
I think our intuitions about “contract” chiefly track whether there’s a written document or not, while our intuitions about “consent” depend on whether the individual continues, once she understands the terms of the bargain, to take advantage of the goods or services offered by the other party.
@ Jiro:
Well, I mean obviously I agree it wouldn’t really happen, at least not on a scale beyond a few crazy cult members or something. But what if it did? What if people were really stupid enough to agree to that? You can insist that “they’re getting what’s coming to them”, but that still doesn’t make what I’m doing right. It’s not okay to be a crazy cult leader just because people agree to join your cult.
And more importantly, what about children born on the moon? What if I say to them “my moon, my rules” and tell them that if they don’t like it, they can take a hike out the airlock?
You say in that case we’re back to selling water to a thirsty man in the desert, but what is your opinion about selling water to a thirsty man in the desert? It seems to me that if some asshole forces you to agree to give him your entire net worth plus 90% of everything you make in the future in return for a quart of water, you’re perfectly justified in reneging on that agreement once you get back to civilization. And courts should back you up and not hold you to it.
Again, I’m not thinking this would really be a big problem. But people do make unconscionable agreements! In real life!
I don’t see why, in a libertarian or even anarcho-capitalist system, courts ought to or would enforce them.
Anyway, whether or we go with my position that this would wrong even if people agreed, the social contract as John Locke envisioned it was indeed not that extreme and gave the inhabitants recourse if the government mismanaged the country. It’s Hobbes who claimed that people basically agree to the deal that exists in the lunar colony, and for the same reason—they will be killed if they do not. So unless Earthly Knight endorses specifically the Hobbesian version of the social contract, the government still doesn’t own the land because they’ve violated the terms of the agreement upon which it was allegedly granted.
Why not?
If you buy a piece of property and abandon it, letting it go to waste, it is an accepted principle of common law that after a certain period of time you lose your property right to it. Now, I don’t think it should be the principle in a libertarian system that it should “escheat” to the state, but it seems perfectly just that it ought to return to the unclaimed commons.
Or even if you run a restaurant and throw away a large amount of perfectly edible food, it seems unjust for you to be able to say to a homeless man who wants to grab it out of the trash “no, that’s my food; I have a right to it, and I’d rather see it rot than go to you.”
Now you have to be sensible about how you apply this. You wouldn’t want to say “theaters have to give away all unsold tickets” because then no one would actually buy any tickets unless there were enough demand to sell out the whole house. Unsold seats aren’t actually “waste” or “unused”; they represent the theater’s investment in excess capacity to meet peak demand. By charging for seats even at the matinee where half the seats are empty (which naively seems unjust), they cover the fixed costs necessary to have a big enough theater to meet Friday night demand.
So our strong presumption should be: people are entitled to their property even if they seem to be letting it go to waste. But this is rebuttable, as in the archetypal case of adverse possession of abandoned property.
@ Earthly Knight:
I don’t know why I bother responding to you when you ignore all the central points I make and focus on peripheral ones. I suppose you “tacitly agree” to the ones you don’t challenge?
Your “unwitting trespasser” case is one where I “wake up” on someone’s land. How did I get there? Was I kidnapped and put there?
If I am kidnapped and put on someone’s land, I by no means consent to be there. Implicitly or not. It doesn’t matter whether or not I’m aware of the “rules” he’s posted; I don’t have to abide by them. If he’s the legitimate owner and wasn’t responsible for the kidnapping, then I suppose I can justly be removed from the land if I don’t follow his rules. But at no point did I consent to the proposition that I have to either follow the rules or leave.
By remaining on the land, I consent to nothing.
To address a couple of previous points:
The coercion comes in where they steal her apartment and dictate that she has to follow their rules or be kicked out.
If they legitimately own her apartment, it’s not coercion. But they don’t. Because she never consented to give them control over it, she is being coerced.
And then you contradict yourself when you deny that the woman “implicitly consents” to cook and clean for the gang of men by remaining in her house. By staying there, hasn’t she (by your standards) agreed to the deal imposed on her by those men?
After all, they outnumber her. They democratically voted themselves the owners of her house.
If there’s a difference between the two cases, it’s certainly not because the woman consents in the one case and doesn’t consent in the other. Rather, it would be that in one case they are (arguably) justified in coercing her, and in the other case unarguably unjustified.
This seems a bit off. (Unless putting up boundary markers counts as improvement/use, maybe.). Presumably the right to hold land includes the right to hold it as undeveloped parkland rather than farmland or housing developments.
@ David Friedman
I offered one way by which a state could justly claim ownership over its territory to Vox, above, which should placate all but the strictest libertarians:
“Suppose that there are 100 tenants in an apartment building, all but one of whom wish to buy out their units and turn them into condos instead. They are doing this, moreover, because staying on as renters poses a considerable risk to their lives (maybe the pipes are full of lead, and the slumlord owner won’t repair them). The renters offer to pay the holdout’s relocation costs to a similar apartment across town, but she refuses– even though she realizes the change would be in her best interests, she hopes to squeeze a better offer out of the others. Would it be unjust for the other tenants to unilaterally charge the price of the apartment to her debit card, while agreeing to void the charges if she opts to move out? I’m not inclined to think so. And that seems like its enough to justify a state.”
This approach is unsatisfactory on a couple of counts, though. First, it imposes incredibly restrictive conditions on creating a legitimate state– failing to adopt the social contract must pose a significant hazard to the would-be citizens of the state, and, what’s more, all dissenters must acknowledge that the social contract works to their benefit. Second, it gives no way for a state which was founded unjustly (as, empirically, nearly all states are) to subsequently acquire legitimacy, which one hopes should at least be possible. So I’ll take another stab at it.
Suppose that a wicked knight violently dispossessed your grandfather of his estate, whereupon the knight issued an edict claiming the estate for himself and his heirs in perpetuity. But the knight’s son was benevolent and just, totally dedicated to the welfare of his vassals, and one day your father (an only child) set aside his grudge, traveled to the village square, and freely and publicly swore fealty to the knight’s son, vowing to obey his laws (including the edict, which, as it happens, was still on the books). It seems to me that you would then have no right to recover your ancestral lands, even though they were unjustly confiscated from your grandfather, because your father’s public oath of allegiance relinquished your family’s claim.
What lesson can we take away from this when it comes to the state? Let us suppose that a nation was established in the distant past through conquest and bloodshed, and has ever since claimed absolute dominion over its territories. The analogy suggests that no one could lodge a legitimate challenge against the state’s title to its lands except those individuals who are (1) descended from original inhabitants of the land who did not explicitly consent to the state’s creation at the time (2) by an unbroken lineage of dissenters. So if all of your lines of ancestry contain at least one person who was either an immigrant or at any time freely pledged allegiance to the state, any pretenses you make to a type of ownership which transcends the state’s authority are void. And, once the last unbroken lineage of dissenters is exhausted, the state’s title to its territory becomes perfectly just thereafter.
This means that the American government, insofar as it has always claimed dominion over its territory, probably only has a handful of Native Americans and descendants of slaves to answer to. In the UK there might be no one left alive with any real grounds for complaint.
@ Vox
I don’t agree, although I think this may be a case where there is genuine diversity of opinion, rather than you persuading yourself you have idiosyncratic intuitions because otherwise your theory will founder. I don’t think it matters much, though. It’s clear enough that by choosing to remain on the property you incur a moral obligation to abide by the rules, and that obligation supersedes your explicit dissent, which is all I need.
Note that the condominium case had two additional features which yours is lacking: the holdout recognized that the contract was in her interests, and the status quo jeopardized the health and safety of the other tenants. I agree that the holdout consented (or “consented”) only under duress, but in her case the duress was warranted. In the example you’re considering, the duress is plainly unjust, so the victim’s consent is invalid.
@ Psmith:
It’s called “adverse possession”.
It varies by jurisdiction, but if you use land
a) As an owner would (not just walking or hunting on it)
b) Without permission
c) Openly and notoriously
d) Continuously
e) Exclusively (of the legal owner)
Then, if the legal owner does nothing to throw you off, you can claim legal title to it after a certain number of years. This is called “disseizing” him of the land.
The purpose of this is so that abandoned land does not get left in a legal limbo where nobody can safely make use of it.
And yes, of course you can use the land for a hunting ground or a park, so long as you actually do take steps to maintain your claim on it. So the system is not perfectly in accordance with what Locke set out (in that you can own land and never use it for anything including as a park, so long as you take action to stop other people from using it), but there is a similar idea.
@ Earthly Knight:
Soooo…it sounds like you agree with me, but have a weird idea of what “consent” means. In neither case was consent “valid” or actual. It’s just that in one case you think it was appropriate to act without her consent and in the other case not.
This is important, since it establishes that what the state does to the unconsenting minority is indeed unconsensual. And thus the question we must ask in justifying any particular government program is not “is this the ‘will of the people’?” or even “is this beneficial in some way?” but “is this so necessary that it justifies the use of coercion?”
This is Michael Huemer’s whole strategy in his book The Problem of Political Authority: we should judge the state by ordinary moral standards. It is justified for the guy on the lifeboat to pull out a gun and order people to bail water. But it is not justified for him to pull out a gun and order them to pay to build a memorial to Stonewall Jackson.
And he, Friedman, and Caplan all argue that even if there are some imaginable occasions upon which coercion would be beneficial (such as ordering the holdout to move), the problem is that it is impossible to give the state the power to do only good things. There are the facts of public choice theory: informed and rational public policy is a public good that people have no incentive to provide. Therefore, on net, giving power to the state is not justified.
I would give considerable power, even totalitarian power, to a government of angels. But I don’t have the option to give it to a government of angels; I only have the option to give it to a government of men. And that, to me, seems like the fable of the frogs who wanted a king:
You say:
I’m glad you think that I’m only being partially dishonest here…
And yes, maybe I’m obligated to obey the rules. But then he’s the legitimate owner, which the state isn’t.
@Vox, thanks, that clears things up a good deal.
A similar answer, except it’s the parents’ contract which covers residency for the children. Either the contract explicitly says the children can stay, it explicitly says they can’t, or it goes by default rules. Default rules would not say “they can never stay” and the parents would be foolish to sign a contract which says the children can never stay. If they sign a contract which says the children have to leave at age 18, so be it.
Exactly what you described, except that I would use different terminology. No, the seller shouldn’t be permitted to charge a million dollars for a glass of water. But that’s not because he has an implicit contract to sell at a fair price, nor is it because he is violating his ownership obligations.
I would agree that genuinely abandoned property is up for grabs, and that there are *some* situations where we can determine abandonment, but it seems to me that it’s really hard to come up with a definition that covers exactly what you want it to cover and isn’t prone to abuse (If I have a piece of jewelry I never wear, is it abandoned? What about the books on my bookshelf?). Especially if “abandon” means “use it inefficiently” rather than “not use it at all”–that’s a loophole you can drive a truck through.
@ Vox
I don’t think it’s weird. I didn’t invent the notion of implicit consent, it’s been around since the Crito, and is used commonly in everyday life (“she consented by taking off her clothes, lying down on the bed, and arching her eyebrows at me”). I agree that the concept has vague boundaries– what do we say about someone who buys a movie ticket while disclaiming any obligation to follow the movie theater’s rules?– but I can pretty much guarantee that if I went hunting I could find looser usages than mine.
” So if all of your lines of ancestry contain at least one person who was either an immigrant or at any time freely pledged allegiance to the state, any pretenses you make to a type of ownership which transcends the state’s authority are void.”
I don’t follow that. By your argument, wouldn’t it require that a previous owner of my land had freely pledged allegiance to the state? Why require all my ancestors?
And “freely” is required. If someone pledged allegiance to the state because the state would expel him if he didn’t, or if an immigrant pledged allegiance to the state because otherwise the state wouldn’t let him in even though there was a land owner who hadn’t pledged allegiance willing to sell to him, then the pledge was a contract made under duress and as such void.
The usual procedure to get the result you want is for the owner of land to give someone else, in your case the government, an easement or a license. I am told that I own half the width of the street my house is on–but I am confident that some previous owner gave the city of San Jose an easement when they build the road.
As long as your initially unjust government required people to swear allegiance, your argument doesn’t follow.
And your previous argument, as Vox keeps pointing out, isn’t an example of consent or a contract. At most, it’s an argument for why it may sometimes be legitimate to take property without consent.
“If someone pledged allegiance to the state because the state would expel him if he didn’t, or if an immigrant pledged allegiance to the state because otherwise the state wouldn’t let him in even though there was a land owner who hadn’t pledged allegiance willing to sell to him, then the pledge was a contract made under duress and as such void. ”
How is that duress? His argument is the area can be treated as the private property of the government; it isn’t duress to refuse to let you onto someone’s property if you refuse to abide by their rules.
My last comment might not have been entirely clear. Maybe it will be helpful to think in terms of standing. It looks to me like, in order to have standing to dispute the state’s claim to ownership over the land, you must meet the following conditions:
(1) You have (at minimum) one ancestor who lived in the country at the time it was founded.
(2) That ancestor had his property unjustly seized by the state at its inception, that is, the ancestor did not explicitly consent to the original social contract, and would not have consented if asked.
(3) None of the members of the lineage connecting you to that ancestor ever freely pledged allegiance to the state and thereby forfeited his or her title to the ancestral property.
Here’s a way of picturing it: imagine a family tree consisting of all and only your direct ancestors going back to 1776, with you at the bottom. Take each immigrant on the tree, blacken their node, and then blacken the nodes of all direct ancestors of the immigrant. Take each ancestor who freely pledged allegiance to the state, blacken their nodes, and then blacken the nodes of all his or her direct ancestors, too. Finally, blacken the nodes of any ancestors who supported the state at the time of its founding. For you to have standing to challenge the state’s title to ownership, there must be at least one fully white path to the top remaining.
I don’t think many people will meet these conditions, except maybe for Native Americans and the descendants of slaves, whose ancestors might have always nursed a grudge against the government. If your paternal grandparents were immigrants, for instance, and your mother at some time in her adult life pledged allegiance to the state, you lack the standing to object to the government’s claim to dominion over its territory.
There is clearly a contract giving the other 99 tenants the deed to the property, though, and if we agree that the contract is just, this gives us a model of how a government could rightly claim ownership over its territory without the unanimous consent of all present at the time of its founding. If the holdout decides to stay on in the building after it gets turned into condos, we can say that she is swept up in the contract by implicit consent. Similarly, if a government is formed out of exigency and committed to improving the welfare of all of its citizens, we may say that any dissenters at the time of its founding have their property justly seized and returned to them under the terms of the social contract. If those dissenters elect to remain in the country thereafter, they become bound to the contract by implicit consent.
@EK:
You proposed a condition that you thought someone would have to meet to have standing. I pointed out that I didn’t see why it made any sense. You responded, not by justifying it, but by repeating your condition.
If you go ten generations up my ancestral tree, I have about a thousand ancestors, assuming there aren’t multiple nodes that are the same person. Why in the world do you assume that any one out of those thousand can bind me? Would you similarly assume that any one of my grandparents can sell me into slavery?
Why would I have to have an ancestor from the founding of the country? An immigrant who comes in can buy land. If the government doesn’t already own the country, he can acquire land by whatever procedure we think just, say Locke’s mixing his labor with the land.
Your entire argument seems to require that we start in a world where the government is the just owner of the entire territory of the country, which is what you are supposed to be justifying.
I begin to understand Vox’s frustration. Either you can’t think through the logic of your own position or you don’t want to.
@ David Friedman:
I believe Earthly Knight is trying to say that the government became the just owner of the entire territory for reasons of expediency. Then, once it was the owner, anyone who voluntarily stayed or immigrated “consented” to the rules.
The part that he apparently doesn’t get, is that libertarians are not denying that you implicitly consent if the government rightfully owns the territory. The part we’re denying is that the government acquired the territory by consensual means. The coercion consisted in stealing the land owned by the unconsenting minority.
Let me say it one more time: The coercion consisted in stealing the land owned by the unconsenting minority. And this was coercion even if, as Earthly Knight thinks, there were expedient reasons for the government to engage in this coercion.
@ Earthly Knight:
You are really driving me up the wall here.
No one is denying the reality of implicit consent in some cases. The problem is that you keep saying it applies to this case by drawing analogies to fundamentally dissimilar situations. Then when someone points out the analogy does work, you, “Come now, you libertarians. Don’t be stupid. We all recognize the existence of implicit consent.”
I’m not lying on the bed naked, arching my eyebrows at the government, inviting it to come and sodomize me.
The movie theater patron has not consented to the rules, but he is violating the property rights of the theater owners by remaining on their property without consenting to the rules. He didn’t “implicitly consent” to their rules; the fact that he didn’t consent is the reason they have the right to kick him out.
The only similar case you have ever put forward is the condominium case.
But in the condominium case, as I have made clear numerous times, the woman never consented to have her apartment stolen. And yet it is on the basis of owning her apartment that the other tenants propose to compel her to follow the rules or kick her out.
If they rightfully own her apartment, and she agrees to rent it under those conditions, then she has implicitly (indeed, explicitly) consented.
The coercion consisted in claiming title to her property without her consent.
It is coercion just as much as in the case of the gang of men who break into the woman’s home. Or for the robber who demands “Your money or your life!” The coercion consists in the fact that the robber claims title to property (your money and your life) without your consent, and on that basis he gives you the “choice” of giving him one or the other.
@ David Friedman
I tried to rephrase the proposal because I feared I had not adequately conveyed my meaning. This fear turned out to be justified. You say:
But this is not the claim I am making. Having just one ancestor who swears to obey the laws of the country will not, in general, be sufficient to undermine your standing to contest the government’s claims of ownership. To have standing, you must have at least one ancestor who (a) owned land (or by rights ought to have owned land) at the time of the state’s founding, (b) did not explicitly consent to the social contract when it was first hammered out, and would not have if asked, and (c) is connected to you by a lineage no member of which freely pledged allegiance to the state as an adult. I apologize if I did not make this clear enough before, I had some trouble putting the quantifiers in exactly the right places.
To see how this goes, Massachusetts had a population of around 200,000 adults at the time the US Constitution was adopted. Suppose 20% of those people, 40,000 in total, did not explicitly consent to the constitution and would not have consented if asked. Setting aside native americans, you will have standing to challenge the federal government’s claim to dominion over Massachusetts only if you are descended from one or more of those 40,000 people, and it is not the case that the lineages connecting you to each such ancestor all contain a member who has freely pledged allegiance to the state. If no one left alive fits that description, the government’s claim to Massachusetts has become fully just.
This depends on a lot of contingent features of the case that it will be extremely helpful to abstract away from. For example, if the US government around 1900 could justly claim ownership over any continuous strip of territory along the east coast spanning the breadth of the country, they would have had the right to demand that pretty much any immigrant who entered the country from the east from then onward respect their claims to ownership over all other regions of the country, even if some of those claims were morally bankrupt.
I think you’re right that it would not have been absolutely impossible for an immigrant who wanted to acquire land which the government did not rightfully own to do so. But most immigrants travel to their adoptive homes not to settle uninhabited land or be free of the state, but because they wanted to take advantage of the benefits of the form of government on display there. These immigrants, I hope you will agree, have no standing to contest that very government’s claims to dominion.
@ Vox
Sure, but I have no idea why you’re talking about coercion when the topic we’re discussing is consent, unless you think being coerced into an arrangement precludes you from ever thereafter consenting to it. The point is that the holdout in the condo case at first explicitly refused to consent, but subsequently gave her implicit consent by moving back into her old digs after the regime change had taken place.
@ Earthly Knight:
I don’t see how you can possibly be this dense.
The subsequent implicit “consent” she gave was under duress, because if she did not consent, she would be kicked out of her apartment—which she never consented to give them. At no point does it ever cease to be under duress.
It is exactly the same as when the woman stays in her house after the gang of men breaks in and declares it their own. She “consents” to cook and clean for them because if she does not, she will be kicked out of the house.
I am happy to call it duress, too, if you like. What makes you think that duress always negates consent?
I agree that unjust duress negates consent, certainly. But I said that earlier.
@ Earthly Knight:
Whether you consent to something is not a function of whether the reasons for compelling you against your will are good or not. It’s a function of whether or not you are compelled against your will. You seem to be erasing the category of “He was forced to do something against his will, which was good for him even though he didn’t consent,” and insisting that, no, in such a case he really must have consented after all.
I’m pretty much done with this. If you just want to redefine the word “consent” to mean something totally different from what everyone else interprets it to mean, fine. But then libertarians are not being inconsistent, since they don’t use it in your bizarre way.
I don’t know what you think you’re getting out of this.
“You seem to be erasing the category of “He was forced to do something against his will, which was good for him even though he didn’t consent,” and insisting that, no, in such a case he really must have consented after all.”
Are we looking at the same parable?
]]]
The renters offer to pay the holdout’s relocation costs to a similar apartment across town, but she refuses– even though she realizes the change would be in her best interests, she hopes to squeeze a better offer out of the others. Would it be unjust for the other tenants to unilaterally charge the price of the apartment to her debit card, while agreeing to void the charges if she opts to move out?
]]]
In fact the answer is that in such a society where such a method is legal, of course she consented- contracts in said society include that option.
So, in your view, it is never the case that anyone will say that someone consents to x if that person does x only under duress or coercion? Please preface your answer with the word “yes” or “no” so I can know exactly where you stand.
@Vox
Subjective objectivity is where you have an argument for a supposedly objective conclusion that few people accept. IOW, its your opinion that is a valid objective argument.
@David
“There’s no completely objective level, but on the other hand, the level of welfare spending can be thrashed out like the level of defence spending or anything else.”
The question is what “objective” and “arbitrary” mean here.
“The political process produces some level of defense spending. Suppose that level has nothing to do with actual defense needs, only with the political power of firms that produce weapons, senators who want military bases in their districts, and the like. I think it makes sense to say that the level is arbitrary rather than objective in the sense we care about–not objectively linked to what the spending is supposed to be for.”
Defence is about dealing with the unpredictable. I dont think you are realistically going to get an exact, optimal answer to the amount you should spend. In that sense, it will be arbitrary. But that didn’t mean it will be completely broken. Schilling seems to think that if there is no objective answer to a question, there is no way of settling it at all. Both of you seem to think that a non-objective spending level is automatically a badly broken spending level.
“Similarly for the case of income redistribution. Imagine a welfare state in which the upper classes have gotten effective control and use the excuse of helping the poor for a pattern of expenditures that on net transfers income from poor to rich. By your definition that pattern is objective and not arbitrary.”
I am not saying that democratic mechanisms gave objective results. I am saying no one has put forward a mechanism that makes welfare spending necessarily rise out of control. The arbitrariness of the spending level means there is no ceiling to spending, but that would be a necessary condition for out-of-control growth, not a sufficient one.
“So the combination of a welfare system and a freeish market, in other words social democracy, works. in theory, And aso in practice.
Maybe. Go back to the question of why anyone works in that system and consider a different explanation than yours.”
I have heard of the material incentives theory. it is just that I, like other inhabitants of the rationasphere prefer a status based explanation.
“Over time, it becomes more and more obvious that one can live a pleasant life without working–less money but more leisure. Increasingly, people who choose to live on welfare view those who work as patsies, people who foolishly spend their life doing boring things when they could be vacationing in Crete. Over time, the non-material incentives decline.”
Do they? Is that theory of practice? The unemployed are not the only players in the status game. If the unemployed regard the employed as patsies, the employed can still regard them as scroungers.
“I think it’s arguable that this is happening in the Scandinavian welfare states, but I don’t know enough to be sure. Sweden in particular became rich at a time at which it was closer to the libertarian ideal, economically speaking, than most of Europe, then introduced a generous welfare system and seems to now be having some problems with it.”
What problems? I don’t think declining growth is necessarily a problem.
“The Nordic model is underpinned by a free market capitalist economic system that features high degrees of private ownership[5] with the exception of Norway, which includes a large number of state-owned enterprises and state ownership in publicly listed firms.[22]
The Nordic model is described as a system of competitive capitalism combined with a large percentage of the population employed by the public sector (roughly 30% of the work force).[23] In 2013, The Economist described its countries as “stout free-traders who resist the temptation to intervene even to protect iconic companies” while also looking for ways to temper capitalism’s harsher effects, and declared that the Nordic countries “are probably the best-governed in the world”.[24][25] Some economists have referred to the Nordic economic model as a form of “cuddly” capitalism, with low levels of inequality, generous welfare states and reduced concentration of top incomes, and contrast it with the more “cut-throat” capitalism of the United States, which has high levels of inequality and a larger concentration of top incomes.[10][26][27]
Beginning in the 1990s, the Swedish economy pursued neoliberal reforms[28][29] that reduced the role of the public sector, leading to the fastest growth in inequality of any OECD economy.[30] However, Sweden’s income inequality still remains lower than most other countries.[31]”
Sounds awful.
All issues of natural law and legitimacy of the state are basically nonsense., because property, legitimacy, etc are only defined within states. The question we should asking is whether we have constructed the kind of state we would want.
If you want all and only progressive taxation, why is the sales tax there? Purchase taxes often start as taxes on luxury goods, and expand to become taxes on almost everything except bare necessities.
This first became a wider known issue when it was being protested in the UK, where unlike the US tampons and pads were taxed as luxuries, a level above common hygiene necessities like soap, so the argument there is that they should not be taxed more than other necessities because they really are a necessity. In the US they are charged the same tax as other stuff, but I think there’s been some confusion over what is taxed how much in which place.
Another thing, tampons and pads are ridiculously expensive pieces of paper anyways, much more expensive than toilet paper or soap, so maybe there’s an argument that since they are so crazy expensive anyways that its an unjust burden on poor people so they should remove the tax or whatever, something like that. But those things are actually ridiculously expensive, and I’m one of the lucky ones, I can’t imagine how much money women spend if they have heavy periods.
It’s really an area ripe for disruption, in the economic sense. I guess that is what the moon-cup manufacturers are going for?
At the moment, there is no solution that is obviously superior for everyone. Heck, apparently some people even prefer tampons with applicators. The same goes for various models of cups — you don’t know if it’s right for you until you try it, and each try costs money and comes with a risk of a bad experience. But there are some dedicated cup evangelists writing reviews and sharing tips, which does help somewhat.
(E.g., MeLuna has alternatives to the traditional stem — a ring (easy to grasp) or a little ball (won’t poke your insides or jostle the cup), and comes in various colors. The plastic is pleasant to the touch, but somewhat less elastic / springy than silicone.)
In terms of disruption, the most interesting development seems to be FemmyCycle (yes, most of these things have hilarious names), which is supposed to be leak-proof. If it actually works and has no new issues, the only remaining problems are:
– insertion difficulties experienced by some women,
– lack of privacy / social tolerance for rinsing a cup / washing bloody hands,
– individual psychological discomfort due to dealing with blood / shoving fingers inside yourself.
PLACE YOUR BETS
https://www.captionbot.ai/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Go
How long until its shown this is all a simulation…anyone?
I tried the captionbot on some pictures I had on my PC and it failed at all of them, but then every demo I’ve seen out of Microsoft research has been a disappointment.
Being a bit cheeky, I uploaded this image and it came back “I’m not really confident but I think it’s a picture of an elephant”.
Some way to go yet, I would say 🙂
When google tried that it had to hand censor “unfortunate” results.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2015/07/01/google-apologizes-after-photos-identify-black-people-as-gorillas/29567465/
I see microsoft solved that problem. When you upload a picture of an actual gorilla, the system either calls it a bear, an animal or says it doesn’t know. I bet they completely censor “gorilla”.
…
After identifying shots of gorillas as sheep and cats, further checking leads me to believe the software is just bad.
captionbot appears to correctly identify this
http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2015/09/naruto-640×834.png
As “I think it’s a close up of a monkey.”
So it appears to still handle some apes, but yes, everything I tried with a gorilla it completely failed at identifying. Looks like they’ve just stripped out that entire section.
Try mannequins. It thinks they’re inappropriate.
http://www.shopequip.co.uk/admin/uploads/2000/2717_745_2000.jpg
When taking a quick glance at the actual data of that weight loss (compensators / noncompensators) study I expected to see two natural clusters emerge, but I get the feeling that it is (almost) beautifully normally distributed with the mean right at the predicted weight loss. What they label “(non)compensators” are just the groups of “people who lost more weight than expected” and “people who lost less weight than expected”. (In a similar way one could divide adult men into “tall men” and “short men” by whether they are taller or shorter than average height — it would be a descriptive label, but it would not be a natural category with respect to any underlying mechanics)
I haven’t read all of it, but what I perceive as the “actual” result of that study would be “the variability of weight loss in people who start exercising can be explained by change in energy intake (not change in resting metabolic rate)”, though I think they could just have done simple regression analysis to find that.
Peruvians aren’t western? Why not?
Because they’re not white. Man, come on, get on with the program.
Peru is one of the most heavily Amerindian nations.
Using Wiki as my reference here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_peoples_of_the_Americas
Peru’s Amerindian population is second only to Mexico’s. But Mexico is vastly larger (112 million). Peru’s Amerindian population is something like 13 million out of a total population of like 30 million.
My understanding is that Mexico also had an unusually strong, conservative, Spanish wing that increased the “Westernization” of the nation. Fun tidbit: A major factor in winning independence against Spain was that Spain was run by the early 19th century equivalent of “crazy liberals” and the Mexican elite wanted a damn king.
A little bit different than the whole Bolivar movement further South.
The Viceroyalty in Lima wasn’t anywhere near as strong.
They wanted an Emperor, actually. And had Franz Josef I. not rejected them (which he probably did because he had enough problems with keeping the Empire together as it was), there would have been an Austria-Hungary-Mexico of sorts 🙂 At the end they convinced another Habsburg, Franz Josef’s brother Maximilian to do the job but after a short while they decided that they wanted a republic after all and abolished the monarchy, so the Empire did not last very long.
Now that’s a piece of history I didn’t know! Austria-Hungary-Mexico. One hell of an administrative nightmare for sure.
Austria/Hungary/Mexico sounds like a good piece of alt-history.
And I thought that the Zimmerman telegram was proposing something new and interesting with a Germany/Mexico alliance against the United States…
Maximillian, you say!!?
http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=309
I’m just disappointed we haven’t had a links roundup called Linky McLinkface.
The random promotion study is pretty awful. Yes, it is a computer model (I would have just said a model) without any empirical work behind it. It’s a dynamic model of a firm with 6 levels of management and workers with random qualities. Each period, some workers quit, and from the remaining workers, some are promoted or not according to one of three naive promotion rules, one of which is ‘randomly promote’, and one of which is ‘always promote the best guy’, and one of which is ‘always promote the worst guy’. They assume that the firm is more productive when you have higher quality guys in better positions.
They first assume that when you promote a high quality guy, that he stays a high quality guy. In this case, ‘promoting the best person’ is the best policy.
They then assume that when you promote a high quality guy, he draws a new random quality. Surprise! Promoting low quality workers becomes the best policy! (Promoting randomly is in the middle.)
The authors characterize this approach as ‘game theory-like’. (And they cite an introductory game theory textbook.) There is not an ounce of game theory anywhere in this paper. There’s a gigantic literature in game theory on this topic, I’m not aware of a single model in which ‘promote randomly’ is the best policy by a firm. It’s the stupidest of research projects and it’s sad that it was covered by major media outlets.
I was under the impression that this was a slander against the Qin Emperor–he actually just burned people who had promised him immortality and then failed to deliver (along with their books).
It’s debated how trustworthy Sima Qian’s account is, though I don’t think it’s commonly accepted that he only burned such books as promised him immortality. It seems quite plausible he would have burned other texts he saw as subversive or heterodox, as would be wholly in keeping with his “standardizing” impulse (characters, axle lengths, etc.).
That said, there is definitely a strong, unjustifiable historical tendency to treat the new dynasty’s account of its hated predecessor with credulity. The traditional Zhou account of the fall of the Shang, for example, is suspiciously unflattering, and this sort of thing continues to this day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atrocity_propaganda
It is probably safe to say that, to the extent we don’t have a lot of pre-Qin editions of things, the role of “book burnings” is probably overestimated and the role of time and relative infrequency of writing underestimated. The situation in India is far worse, for example, but not due to a bunch of political book burnings. Rather more due to focus on oral transmission and use of more fragile materials like banana leaves.
Chinese historiography just appears to be very, very uninterested in actual Chinese history, and that pattern appears to continue to this day. I had a professor teaching us premodern Chinese history in Leiden, and he often told us how his (geographically) closest actual colleague happened to be in Leipzig. It’s not a widely practiced field.
Wait, what? Few people study Chinese history?? That seems, not at all right, though maybe one could argue it is understudied relative to its historical population size. I mean, every US college and university of any significance has at least one, if not a few China historians on the faculty. Or are you criticizing the way Chinese historians study Chinese history?
Yes, I am. The amount of even credentialed historians who take the old moralistic narrative at face value is depressing.
On the one hand I have totally been frustrated by Chinese historians’ and art critics’ tendency to romanticism and credulity with respect to their own traditions; at the same time, there have been many cases, as with the case of the Guodian Laozi, or, indeed, of the terra cotta army, which Sima Qian recorded but which was only found recently, when the traditional historicist accounts have proven right and the chronically skeptical Western observers wrong.
Moreover, it is surely not only the Chinese who are vulnerable to myopia and motivated reasoning when it comes to their interpretation of their own history and tradition. I would be very interested, for example, to read a Chinese historian’s view of the US Revolutionary and Civil Wars (which probably exist somewhere, though I haven’t looked into it), precisely because there aren’t all these political-cultural stakes involved in every interpretation.
Ehh. There’s Western scepticism such as that of Marx, who said that Chinese history just isn’t really history; people trying to just kind of dismiss China as something inconsequential, isn’t what I’m getting at; it still looks at history from the paradigm presented by ancient historiographers. The historians you want to look out for are those sorts who try to explain why Tang China wasn’t China’s greatest thing ever, or why the late Ming was in a much better spot in general wellbeing than it was a century before its fall.
I very much do agree on a Chinese reading of Western events being potentially interesting, though. I’d read the shit out of that if I could find anything of decent quality.
…he actually just burned people who had promised him immortality and then failed to deliver
How did he know?
I’m not familiar with the sources, but if the promise was phrased as “eternal youth” or something along those lines, failure is fairly obvious.
There also might have been test subjects on whom the Emperor could observe the effects of a diet high in cinnabar or whatever before subjecting his own august personage to it.
About the gun control study:
[sarc]
I thought “gun control” meant “hitting your target”.
[/sarc]
More seriously the question of “gun control works” or “gun control doesn’t work” depends on the definition of “working”.
As a hypothetical: If the number of fatal crimes (or assaults, or robbery-with-lethal weapon) does not change, but the primary criminal tool changes from gun to machete, does that count as a gun-control success?
As another hypothetical: if the Police can verify that most gun-owners have dotted each “i” and crossed each “t” correctly on the paperwork, does that count as a gun-control success? [1]
As a final hypothetical: if the Police apprehend a murderer, and discover that he purchased a stolen gun on the black market, is that a gun-control failure? [2]
In my opinion, “Gun Control” is a misnomer, as the law attempts to control the behavior of people who own or possess guns.
If the people are reasonably well-behaved towards each other, gun-control laws won’t change their behavior very much.
If the people involved have strong sociopathic tendencies, gun-control law may make it harder to (legally) acquire guns as a tool of violence. Of course, the ease of acquiring guns through black-market channels may make gun-control laws ineffective.[3]
[1] I would call this a paperwork-law success, not a gun-control law success.
[2] Of interest, the United States Dept. of Justice studied where criminals got their guns. This study was carried out in 1991, and again in 1997.
The DoJ got data from convicted prisoners who had used a gun in their crime. So this may not be the best representative sample of criminals who use guns, but it’s the best one available.
Something like 40% acquired from a friend or family member. Another 40% acquired their gun from “street trade or other illegal source”.
Of the remainder, something like 8% were from a retail store, 4% from a pawnshop, 1% from a flea market, 1% from a gun-show, and most of the remainder from “other sources”.
Link to the study
http://bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/fuo.pdf
[3] The size of the black market for guns–as well as the size of the gray-market for guns, and the ease of transfer from gray-market to black-market–is likely the biggest difference between Australia and the United States.
And it would make for a heck of a confounding variable when trying to apply the lessons learned in one nation to the laws and policies of the other nation.
eh, good a time as any to post this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwRtll3jjU4
https://www.ghostgunner.net/
Defense distributed is a great hobby for crypto-nerds and those who really like open source (because it’s hacking the law) or for the truly paranoid gun owner (the ones who were previously buying from private sellers and burying guns they had no record of owning).
AR-15s are very uncommon in most crime because they’re too large to conceal and they’re relatively expensive (all in they’re about twice the price of a cheap pistol). They’re very popular with shooters because they’re like PCs in that they’re easy to assemble and there’s a vast market for aftermarket parts.
Just for the record making the same part for an AK-47 requires access to just about any sheet steel right down to a garden shovel’s blade.
If you want to cut criminals access to guns, make small scale sales of gun to prohibited person very visibly prosecuted and focus hard on educating likely buyers as to the criminal nature of an act that otherwise doesn’t seem very bad.
@Bluto – “Defense distributed is a great hobby for crypto-nerds and those who really like open source (because it’s hacking the law)”
That’s my interest in it. I’m pro-gun, and I see the end-runs around the law being made by things like the above, California bullet-buttons and the Slidestock as tremendously encouraging signs for how a seemingly intractable debate is being nullified by innovation. As for the Ghost Gunner trailer, I think it’s interesting how they don’t even attempt to rebut the other side’s biases, but simply play right along with them, hamming it up the whole way. It’s something completely new, and that’s enormously refreshing for a fight I’ve been involved in for decades.
“Just for the record making the same part for an AK-47 requires access to just about any sheet steel right down to a garden shovel’s blade.”
I’ve linked it before, but it’s a goddamn masterpiece.
[CW: Guns, red-tribe rudeness]
I used to dismiss slidefire stuff as a gimmick, but I’ve been reconsidering. There’s an arfcom thread with some mighty impressive bumpfire SAW clones, some displaying pretty respectable accuracy. See for instance:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VWED4qUPMs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Hrgh5txFKg
http://www.ar15.com/forums/t_1_5/1641834_Official_Bump_SAW_GD_thread_Bump_Fire_Systems_stock_video_in_OP_.html
I have read that there is a link/correlation between Type 1 diabetes and milk allergies. (I am partial to the theory that milk allergies in infants may trigger an auto-immune reaction that attacks the pancreas.)
So people who don’t have diabetes are more likely to drink milk than those who do, but it’s not necessarily the milk that’s preventing diabetes.
The article about milk is about type 2 diabetes. Protip: diabetes means type 2 diabetes.
https://www.statnews.com/2016/04/12/unearthed-data-challenge-dietary-advice/
Lost data from a fairly well-designed study from the 1970s showed that substituting vegetable oils for animal fats and margarine lowered blood cholesterol and raised the death rate.
Nutrition studies are second only to gun control studies for sheer lack of value. There, the prevailing philosophies seem to be a form of asceticism, where what tastes good must be bad for you, along with a general anti-meat pro-veggie belief. Study shows that a little alcohol seems positive? Let’s do a bunch more studies to try and discredit that notion (it must be the flavonoids, yeah, that’s it, definitely not the alcohol). Study shows that heating and especially frying food produces carcinogens? OK, mission accomplished, let’s write recommendations to not heat food too much, all the way down to recommending only lightly toasting bread.
…and I really liked the material on Reactionaries…
Please tell me you don’t actually agree with that Vox article about how attacking Libya was right because of helping alleged civilians, and it’s just an interesting link. Because it IS an interesting link, and is also pure concentrated BS. Evidenced by the fact that the Benghazi rebels, whom Gaddafi described as “rats”, repaid the kindness of the US giving them a victory by killing a US ambassador.
It’s simply that his description was accurate. There never was any massacre of civilians in the plans, only a suppression of a brutal rebellion of traitors. Who proved their nature as traitors by that murder. Rats, they were. And right, he was. (In that particular case and this has no bearing on his bearing right or wrong in other particular cases).
I’m no fan of protestors, but I think it would be for the best if we refrained from metaphorically referring to human beings as vermin.
I think they lost the label “protestor” about the time they began an armed rebellion. And they earned the label “terrorist shitheads” when they decided to murder the ambassador of one of the nations that helped them in their struggle. By rights, we are at war with Libya. They have declared war on us, and we have declined to prosecute it.
The only problem I have with comparing them to vermin is that vermin have some positive characteristics. Check your speciest privilege!
I mean we can argue briefcase versus shotgun all day, but that wasn’t really my point. Conceptualizing human beings as vermin is barbarous, it doesn’t matter if they declared war on you or whatever. The United States has declared war on a group or two, and it’s certainly performed it’s share of foul murder.
Gaddhafi described them as vermin, not the poster. The poster was only agreeing with him; when you agree with someone who uses impolite words, you are limited to agreeing with the words he actually said.
(And it would be stupid for the poster to have “disagreed” on the ground that he agreed with the factual claim but would have expressed it differently.)
This is also an excellent example of why we shouldn’t have rules against such bad words. The rules always get applied regardless of context.
I’m aware that he’s agreeing with Col. Gaddafi. I’m saying it’s wrong to agree with him, you shouldn’t, he was behaving barbarously in this instance. If I seemed to be focusing my criticism on Sastan and Mikhail, it’s because Col. Gaddafi is no longer around to mend his ways.
I think you’re wrong to consider this an issue of bad words. The words are fine, vermin are real things and I’ve seen them. Rather, it’s a bad concept that those words describe, and if you agree with that concept you are doing a bad thing.
Ambassador Stevens was murdered by Islamist militias. The people of Benghazi subsequently rose up and drove the militias out of the city, in part out of outrage over the fallen ambassador, who was widely liked.
This point will be missed if you see all Arabs as a hivemind who are collectively responsible for the actions of each individual Arab, of course.
The buck always stops somewhere. Your insinuation of racism is noted and your opinion accordingly discounted. I am well aware (most likely far better than you) of the divisions within the arab world. And there was enough support in Benghazi to organize, support and finance a fifteen-hour siege of two separate American holdings without any resistance from the locals, or any interference from the government. With medium crew-served weapons.
If a white supremacist militia in the US wandered into DC, laid siege to a foreign embassy for the better part of a day, and killed a number of their diplomats, you think they might hold the US government responsible?
Oh, and that “drove the militias out” was bullshit. They did no such thing. They just held their weekly riot, and western media, desperate to show something positive for the area, characterized it as throwing the militias out. It never happened. Ansar Al Sharia never left, is still there. And the area is now a hive for ISIS. Apparently, the people who were murdering the ambassador were actually the moderates in the area. Says something about the local population, I think.
The attack on the embassy began at just before 10 local time and was over in less than an hour and a half. The attack on the CIA annex went on intermittently from midnight until around 6, when Libyan government forces helped to evacuate the remaining Americans.
I like that you’re holding the newly-formed and basically impotent government of a state that had just emerged from a civil war to the same standard as the most powerful country in the world.
Better question: if a white-supremacist militia wandered into Reykjavik and laid a two-hour siege to an embassy there in the dead of night, would you hold the Icelandic government responsible? No, of course not, because what the hell were they going to do about it?
I see. You know Libyans are vermin, and any evidence that they are human beings who behave with compassion and gratitude sometimes must therefore be spurious.
Your actual racism is duly noted and your opinion accordingly discounted.
You’re going to look long and hard without finding the word “libyans” in my discussion of who needs to be denigrated. It is clear from context (which you seem to be immune to) that the group under discussion is not “libyans”, but rather armed, violent insurgent groups. Who am I kidding? You’re not going to look at all.
Why don’t you continue this argument with yourself, since you’re providing my side of it, including wholly invented parts, and my motivation!
For anyone else reading this, here’s the current state of Ansar Al Sharia, at last reading of mine: They are the government of Benghazi. They provide the police, the courts, the governance. The only real threat they face is from the Islamic State.
http://www.hudson.org/research/11197-the-rise-and-decline-of-ansar-al-sharia-in-libya
Does that sound like they were driven out by popular rage to you? That whole story was a figment of western media imagination. A lie meant to diffuse American anger at such a vile and baseless attack. And it worked.
6 hours is kind of a long time, to be fair. One question I’d love to see is what we were doing to motivate the Libyans.
(You would think that with our people under armed attack, President Obama would be on the phone with Libya explaining that they needed to send everybody, and do it now.)
In your last comment you insinuated that the lack of “resistance from the locals” and “interference from the government” reflected poorly on both groups. You then talked about how, in what you strangely took to be an analogous situation, we would be justified in holding the US government responsible. If you were trying to say that only armed, violent insurgent groups were culpable for the attack, you did so in an exceptionally unclear way.
I don’t know why you think the expression “driven out” means “driven out, never to return.” It does not.
My guess is that they were waiting until the American reinforcements arrived at the airport, or for dawn to break. From what I could glean looking at about five different sources, it appears that the CIA annex didn’t come under sustained attack until around the time the convoy arrived, which was when the Seals were killed by mortar fire.
EK continues to equivocate between the earlier discussion of armed groups generally, and the later discussion of Benghazi specifically.
For now, let us leave the former and focus on the latter. EK has put forth the position (If I read him aright) that the murder of the ambassador and the siege of the CIA compound were isolated instances of one violent group getting a lucky hit in, and then being defenestrated by the outraged local populace.
My response to this is that the militia which carried out the attack was not driven out, and in fact have only gained power since their assault. They are no longer one militia among many, but the primary government of the city. They are under threat, not from any national government or western reprisal, but from other islamic radicals, even more heinous than they are! Apparently, far from kicking them out, the locals put them in charge once they had murdered the US ambassador.
As to the people of Benghazi, and Libya more generally. I do not assign them primary blame for Stevens, but the various armed groups are all outgrowths of that population. This is what they support. And you can tell which ones have more support by which ones win. And Ansar Al Sharia was winning, until the people found an even more likeable group in ISIS. And yes, that says volumes about the people of Libya. Specifically, it says that the social, political and religious center of the country is wildly islamist, and closer to ISIS than to Al Qaeda.
War is politics by another means. You don’t get terrorism or armed conflict without a LOT of support, especially without a strong national government to enforce anything. The members of the US military make up less than half a percent of the population, but their adventures and misadventures are the pointy end of the politics of the population of the US. So too with armed groups the world over.
So if I was unclear, EK, the members of Ansar al Sharia are vermin. They should be exterminated to the last man. The citizens of Libya are just a bog-standard hardcore islamist population, with all the bell curve ends that implies. The ones in Benghazi seem to be even more insane than that. And you are a misrepresenting apologist for all of them, apparently.
Can you provide any evidence for these claims? Militias do not in general rule by referendum.
Militias do not in general rule by referendum.
Of course they don’t; militias are more truly democratic than that.
With militias, everybody who actually cares, decides which one they want to join. Then we see who’s got the biggest battalions, and do what they say. If Nice Guys of Benghazi has more people with guns saying “Americans are our friends; lay off!” than Ansar al-Sharia has saying “Death to America!”, then Benghazi becomes a pretty nice place for Americans and the surviving members of Ansar al-Sharia either lay low or move someplace else.
But, “everybody who actually cares”. Militia rule does not allow the illusion that if you’ve got an opinion but not the stones to back it up, your vote counts as much as that of the guy who is willing to kill or die for what he believes in.
With militia rule, you know who your real friends are.
I think there are definitely other factors which determine who wins the militia battle besides who’s more willing to die for their beliefs. Experience, funding, arms, brutality, and proportion of fighting-age men all count for a lot. ISIS currently has dominion over large swaths of Kurdish territory in Iraq and Syria, for example, but this is not because the Kurds are eager to be ruled by a vicious Arab death-cult.
Here’s the link to the video giving a similar theory to what you said in the toxoplasma of rage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc
On the question of why more women don’t have feminized hormones and hence more children (the feminine digit link): There’s a general mystery as to why we humans have so few children in general. It appears that human females could straightforwardly have more children without much damage to the ones they already have and thus be more selected for. This isn’t just a mystery in humans, although we’re the most extreme example. It applies to apes in general. Thinking about a specific trait isn’t likely to shed much light on the more general mystery.
The preponderance of gun deaths are suicides; looking exclusively at homicides (as the linked study does) misses a big part of the picture.
But possibly a part that most people don’t care about.
Or rather, a part most people feel would likely be most readily transferred.
http://www.bmj.com/content/344/bmj.e2758 Conclusion: exercise doesn’t help depression.
TREAD carefully with your conclusions! Exercise to treat depression – is it effective? They say there are problems with the study linked above, like inadequate monitoring of the exercise, but also “A Cochrane review conducted by Mead and colleagues in 2010 included 25 relevant randomised controlled trials, many of which had methodological weaknesses, and concluded that exercise did seem to improve symptoms of depression but that the effect sizes were moderate and not statistically significant.”
Found something more recent! Exercise, Physical Activity, and Sedentary Behavior in the Treatment of Depression: Broadening the Scientific Perspectives and Clinical Opportunities
“In sum, evidence-based treatment for depression continues to expand, but successful treatment and maintenance of treatment response remain limited. Thus, there is a continued need for research into factors that predict successful treatment outcomes. Further research is certainly needed into the effects of planned exercise on depression, including the optimal dose–response and underlying causal mechanisms. However, additional longitudinal studies are also necessary to better understand the complex relationship between habitual physical activity, sedentary behavior, and depression severity. Importantly, these investigations should include children and adolescents. Studies that attempt to assess how changes in levels of activity and inactivity may moderate/mediate the response to empirically supported depression treatments will be particularly relevant. From a public health perspective, it may also be relevant to determine whether those who meet the minimum physical activity levels recommended for general health (40) respond with lower depression severity posttreatment compared to those who do not meet these recommended levels.”
Unless I’ve missed something, there’s evidence that depressed people move less than non-depressed people, but not a lot of evidence that more movement (I give the article credit for noticing that there’s more to movement than exercise– “exercise is only one subtype of physical activity, involving planned, repetitive movement, purposefully engaged in to improve fitness and/or health.”) actually helps with depression.
Cochrane concludes that exercise is no more effective than drugs or therapy. Don’t apply a double standard. The real conclusion is that depression is hard to treat. Don’t blame that on exercise.
Well I’ll be. Seems like at least one god really doesn’t play dice!
I have studied cults about two decades ago (by which I mean I have read books written by former members of different cults, and literature written by exit counsellors; met with or talked online with some former cultists; participated in meetings of various cults near my city; got bless by the holy spirit, i.e. got my forehead touched by a high-status cult leader, which usually makes people faint, except it didn’t work on me; all this for writing a report for a psychology class), so I consider myself an expert on the topic, and…
Maybe let me put it this way: it is difficult to find a cultish red flag that the famous online SJWs don’t show. (Control of communication. Being on the mystical right side of history. Obsessing about microaggressions. Calling out sins and public repentance. Scientific “truths” that don’t allow skeptical inquiry. Redefining words. Ignoring personal experience contrary to the teachings. Dismissing anyone white or male or cis as irrelevant.) If I tried to put all cults on a one-dimensional scale, SJWs would score lower than Scientology, but higher than Jehovah Wittnesses.
This often goes unnoticed, because most people are simply not familiar with the topic. They usually use “cult” to mean “a religious group I don’t belong to” or even “a non-mainstream group I don’t like”. And then, using the classical motte-and-bailey pattern, they conclude that the disliked non-mainstream group is going to commit mass suicide because that’s what everyone knows cults do. Which is obviously bullshit, and that’s why many people conclude that any talk about cults is necessarily bullshit. Unfortunately, as a side effect we lose the ability to discuss the dangers of real cults.
As I understand it, the cultish behavior is simply a way to hack human mind by providing a social superstimulus; or maybe something that feels like superstimulus today, but would be simply a normal life a few millenia ago. Humans behave irrationally when they feel afraid or surrounded by people who strongly believe in one thing (and seem willing to hurt those who deviate). Cults create conditions where these feelings can flourish: where everyone is either a faithful ally or a cunning enemy, where everything is black or white, and nothing is an exception from the all-encompassing final battle between the good and the evil; where all personal doubts must be cast aside until the war is won.
(This said; being a cult is a fact about a group, not about “faith”. That is, two groups can have almost identical holy texts but wildly different behavior, one of them would be a cult, the other wouldn’t. Same applies to SJWs. The social justice predators known from the media, the students who throw a hissy fit whenever a different opinion is mentioned at their university, that’s some obviously unhealthy behavior. Yet, there could be other people out there, sharing many of the official beliefs, but not participating in the group behavior. If those people do not participate in the cultish behavior, then what I wrote here does not apply to them. Maybe they are more numerous than it would seem, because the clickbait media focuses on the crazy ones. On the other hand, the crazy ones seem numerous enough.)
From the inside, being a cult member mostly feels like “being surrounded by good people who honestly try to improve the world”. Which obviously shouldn’t be constructed as a fully general argument against all good people who try to improve the world. 🙁 Other than relying on someone else’s authority, my only suggestion is to become familiar with how actual cults work (learn about more than one, to see the general pattern, instead of individual quirks), read some stories of their former members, and then try to find and read stories of former members of your group. (Of course if this is strongly discouraged in your group, that is a huge red flag.) Problem is, this can take a lot of time, that you would prefer to spend helping your group and improving the world.
Quoting a former SJW:
This guy gets it. Better late than never.
Are there any good “former rationalist” or “former less wrongian” articles which anyone would recommend?
Trying to google “former rationalist” and “former less wrongian” didn’t bring anything useful. (I didn’t expect to, but I didn’t want to skip the obvious first step.) After some googling I found this and this. (Not exactly what you asked for: you wanted good articles, I am having problems finding any. But I never said my google skills were stellar.) Then I remembered this one (that Scott replied to in the past).
Trying to think about people who used to be on Less Wrong but now aren’t, I remember a group of NRs, a user called “daenerys” who probably deleted her account afterwards, and maybe we could also include Eliezer Yudkowsky who prefers to post on Facebook these days.
In regards to your next-to-last link, it does occur to me that while in theory rationalists should be open to all sorts of thoughts, or at least all reasonably presented thoughts, in practice women-are-just-awful and black-people-are-just-awful at least show up a lot more frequently (and possibly get a friendlier reception) than men-are-just-awful and white-people-are-just-awful.
Because people don’t bring up stuff you can talk in other places?
You can talk about those things in other places, but rationalist places are where you can get a rationalist angle on them. Well, in theory, anyway.
@Nancy Lebovitz: I can do a “men are awful” argument, but is gender banned in the links thread if not relevant to a link?
dndnrsn, I wasn’t asking anyone to do it right now, or even to do it at all. I was describing a pattern I think I’ve seen.
However, the Open Thread is still live.
Ah, but no race or gender in the Open Thread.
You are definitely right that those sorts of arguments don’t get enough play, though. It definitely is a pattern. Somehow, I have this creeping suspicion that it has to do with the demographics here.
I would think that Samuel Skinner’s explanation used to be correct – people would use LessWrong to bring up the stuff they couldn’t discuss anywhere else, to make the most of their newfound freedom, as it were. It’s plausible that this entered into a feedback loop with demographics.
I agree with your observation. Not sure what would be the right solution. There is this “politics is the mindkiller” idea, but people usually assume it only applies to their opponents.
Personally, I would prefer a website where any topic can be discussed (even “if we killed 90% of white cis het men, would it make the world a better place?”), but it gets discussed rationally, everyone presents their arguments, at the end they either agree or disagree, and the same topic is not mentioned again unless someone has something new and substantial to add. In practice, with sensitive topics this doesn’t happen: some people don’t argue rationally, keep replying even if they have nothing substantial to add, and will bring up the topic at the nearest available opportunity. The worst part IMHO is that the topic is never over, despite making no factual progress.
@Nancy Lebovitz: This relates back to an issue I wonder about – are rationalists really any better at finding flaws in their own cognitive models, or is any gain there correspondingly offset – or made even worse – by a better ability to rationalize? Hence openness to debating something like “Could Escaped Killer AI Destroy Humanity?” is in some sense different and less personal directly affecting than (exaggerating for humor) “Should Reactionaries Be Sent To Re-Education Camps To Improve The Revolution?”. Even conservatives who would be oh-so-edgy to debate something like whether public flogging would increase respect for law (of course presuming they aren’t going to be the ones who get flogged), aren’t going to abstractly debate whether purging themselves from all positions of influence would be a net improvement for society. I guess “in theory rationalists should be open to all sorts of thoughts” goes to show that the theory is too simple.
There’s that invisible premise.
Differences in outcomes between men and women are cause by differences between men and women.
Differences in outcomes between races are caused by differences between races.
If we pretend that those statements aren’t true and instead adopt the invisible premise that all groups are the same (except for skin tone! and how you urinate!) then explaining the real world becomes near impossible.
Having the real world be impossible to explain coherently might be a sore spot for people attracted to something called “rationality”.
That was Rationalism 1.0 though – Rationalism 2.0 is all about picking your preferred sex and sharing the same 5 or so women. When anything wider does get discussed, Rationalism 2.0 is limited to suggesting that maybe the lunatics running the asylum should try acting slightly more sane.
@ Nancy Lebovitz
You can talk about those things in other places, but rationalist places are where you can get a rationalist angle on them.
Maybe I’ve missed something here, but what percentage of wordage at SSC comes from posters who’d describe themselves as Capital-R Rationalists?
Viliam, my guess is that if you wanted a forum where all policies about large demographics would get a fair hearing, the best thing would be to push people to do current risk evaluations.
What makes politics into a mind killer is people having a visceral reaction of “my life would be very bad if this policy were pushed to its limit”.
The challenge is that “just talk” sometimes does turn into action.
That’s fine, all well and good. We just need to be able as a society to draw the line between who is in the group and who isn’t. The problem we have now is quite analogous to the problem with muslims (although far less violent). We have a relatively small, hard core of serious anti-western activists, vaguely associated with a much larger group of sympathetic-but-not-totally-on-board-with-all-the-tactics people.
What we need is to be able to distinguish and label each group. This can then be used to drive a wedge between them and their support network of more moderate people.
How many of these so-called warriors have you yourself met, face to face?
Can’t speak for Villiam but I know at least 3 personally, several more online, and have met hundreds if you count getting yelled at by protestors as “meeting”.
Not being an American reduces my exposure to them significantly.
Face to face I only met one such person (a friend of a friend), she kept accusing me of various things for a few minutes, and I guess we both concluded it is a good idea to never meet again. It was about ten years ago.
May I suggest then they you are getting exaggerated tales from the following groups of people: 1) those that are desperately looking for boogieman to justify their inherent paranoia and desire for a grand struggle, 2) right wingers that are happy to find any handle to attack their hated left-wing enemies, and 3) people that have been really hurt somewhere along the way and have developed an entire worldview around this hurt (see e.g. the divorcee wing of the MRAs, or rape survivor misandrists).
I like this forum generally, but it is totally unhinged when it comes to a few topics– one of which is so-called social justice warriors, especially as to their influence and prevalence. Even on QM and AI there is at least vigorous discussion, but not SJW.
I think that if you’re not at a university, social justice is only a danger to the extent that anything on the Internet can be a danger.
No movement on the Internet is very important if you don’t happen to be directly targeted. (Ignoring indirect effects, like when you can’t buy an uncensored version of a video game.) And the chance of being directly targeted is pretty low.
(On the other hand, even a small chance of being targeted can have an outsized intimidation effect.)
There are places besides universities where SJWs are a danger. In these places, everyone knows you don’t speak against these people or bad things could happen. Facebook (the company itself), for instance, appears to be such a place. Object to Black Lives Matter on their writable walls, where they never had any rules before, and you’re considered disrespectful and malicious.
The anon is just engaging in what the SJWs like to call ‘gaslighting’ (from the movie, a bit of slang sliding into obscurity before they took it up) — doing stuff to people and then pretending they are crazy when they mention it.
I see you ignored the poster saying they’d met far more.
@The Nybbler
I work in tech in SV and I’m a white, straight man. My politics are the same technocratic (i.e. libertarian leaning) liberal-ish blend that many programmers in their 30s an 40s ended up espousing.
I’m not sitting in some foreign country or flyover country and dreaming up elaborate fantasies about shadowy conspiracies based on giving too much credibility to overwrought blog posts or small incidents blown wildly out of proportion.
If you want to claim something is going on in the indy game journalist world or the science fiction fandom world, I can express skepticism but I don’t care enough about either subject to actually wade in and find out for myself. But now you’ve made a claim to something I do know about. It’s not *exactly* totally bullshit but it is a massive over-exaggeration. I’ve now firmly updated in the direction that the same is true over in the other areas you claim are under “attack” by so-called “warriors”. Just a gigantic tempest in a tea pot by a bunch of people that either have an ulterior motive or get off on this sort of crap.
anon@gmail, I work in the same field. Not in SV, but at another office of a west-coast based tech company. So either our experiences are different, or I’m lying, or I’m exaggerating, or you’re lying, or you’re minimizing.
I know I’m not lying. You’re an anon@gmail; for all I know you’re just here to seed doubt.
@Jiro
Given that groups like tech (specifically in the bay area) are over represented in this community, it’s not very surprising that “consider a random human’s chance of being affected by SJW tactics” doesn’t reflect the conversation here.
@The Nybbler, what was your actual experience? Can you link to a comment where you discussed that? (Or write a new comment. 🙂
@Outis, I can’t speak in any detail because it concerns events inside my employer, and further concerns people besides myself. Which I realize puts me in the same “trust me” category as the anon… but then, the anon is an anon.
You got me! I was assigned this website by my squad leader in the SJW Disinformation and Entryism unit. And I would have gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for you meddling kids.
I mean, I guess Anon could’ve chosen a better approach than repeatedly calling people aggrieved by SJW paranoid and delusional, before actually stating their case, but we could do better than automatically accusing them of lying and gaslighting.
@Whatever
What would you suggest? The two choices I considered best were ignoring the anon on the basis of being an anon (and thus entirely without credibility), or responding as I did.
(To complicate things, I believe I recognize the anon’s style and it is someone — definitely an SJW — I know from elsewhere, and who likely knows who I am)
As someone who has spent a lot of time at several different universities:
The SJW thing is a university thing, yes, but bear in mind that there are tons of universities and the stories you hear about flare-ups are a selected sample of the worst cases.
In my experience the bulk of students care very little about social justice, and will occasionally pay lip service as expected or simply ignore it completely. A small subset is quite motivated – and generally earnest and well-intentioned – but typically struggles to overcome the apathy of the majority.
Also, it’s pretty clearly a cultural signifier for upper-class (mostly white) U.S. natives. Students from middle and working class backgrounds are often turned off by the sophistication-signalling aspects. International students are completely confused by it.
So aside from (perhaps) a handful of upper-class enclave campuses, I doubt that it’s a big problem even at universities. Consider all the campuses at which you didn’t hear anything about a social justice flare-up recently.
Mostly, I think it’s an internet thing now.
The anon is an anon. The Nybbler, on the other hand, is a name we can trust.
In all seriousness, if Scott’s going to allow people to post anonymously, I would prefer we don’t engage in preemptive strikes on people who choose to do so.
I basically agree with the general thrust of Anonymous‘s analysis. I don’t think SJWs are as numerous, powerful, or nefarious as they are often alleged to be here. You can find outrage stories all day long about their abuses. You can do the same for acts of violence and discrimination against women, against gays and lesbians, against the transgender, against racial minorities.
If all you consume are reports about the Brendan Eichs of the world, you will get a distorted picture. Just the same as if you spend all day looking at stories about the Eric Garners.
@Vox Imperatoris
You’ve discovered my campaign slogan!
Seriously, I’d consider a claim from “Vox Imperatoris” to be a lot more trustworthy than a random anon@gmail. You have a reputation here built up from your previous posts, and your claims can be referred back to in reference to future posts.
It’s probably true that SJWs are worst on the Internet. And at colleges. I work at a tech company (hence closely Internet-associated) which hires a lot of recent grads; it’s an adjacent space. Also one which has been specifically targeted by SJWs (Shanley Kane, Geek Feminism).
There are also some of us in fields that aren’t particularly SJ themselves but have clear career minefields due to that ideology.
For example I recently went to a talk on the contribution of neanderthal, denisovian and other as-yet undiscovered archaic hominids to modern human genetic variation. In the process of studying a particular locus the speaker found a potential explanation for the pattern of low birth weight followed by fast growth and early puberty observed in Africans. So this guy went from looking at a mouse model of a receptor to potentially being in the center of a racial controversy without any real warning.
Even as a minority himself he spoke in a noticeably circumspect way about it, and I don’t blame him. If it could happen to Watson there’s nobody in genetics whose name is big enough to survive that.
Now it’s not as though people are being ritualistically cast out on a daily basis or anything. Being caught in the SJ spotlight is a pretty low-probability threat even in a “problematic” field of study. But if it does happen your career is over and your name is mud.
@Dr Dealgood
That’s a disingenuous comparison. Watson wasn’t attacked for his research or how he presented it. By the time he got into trouble he hadn’t done any research in twenty or thirty years. I knew people that worked at Cold Spring Harbor in the late 90s, by that time he was already mostly shaking hands and raising money.
He got fired because he was an embarrassing old man shooting his mouth off about “the blacks”, not because he was an active researcher uncovering uncomfortable truths.
@The Nybbler
Of course I know who you are (and what you did last summer). Do you think my assignment here was just chance?
Feel free to ignore that one sentence, it doesn’t change the meaning much and I don’t feel like hashing out the Watson firing argument again.
But can you understand why someone in the field might reasonably think that SJ is a personal career hazard rather than just people being wrong on the internet? It’s hardly delusional.
@Dr Dealgood
You see the dilemma here, right? If you haven’t been thrown out, obviously the SJW threat is overblown. If you have, you must be really terrible and therefore the SJW threat is overblown.
@anon, it’s not like I just read a story or two on the internet, and immediately jumped to the conclusion. It took me a few years to realize that actually I have already seen a similar pattern somewhere. Then I looked at the checklist and was like: “Shit, how could I have not noticed this earlier?”
And mind you, most people don’t use this checklist (or even know that it exists), so it’s not like they have optimized their stories for this purpose. And vice versa, the checklist is too old to be suspected that it was created specifically to accuse SJWs.
Most people, when they talk about cults, focus on the group beliefs. While the approach I use is to treat the beliefs mostly as a red herring, and focus on the details of how the group behaves. For example, if someone believes that the world was created by a Big Pony, I don’t care about that. They will get my attention when I find out that e.g. the ponyists are required to avoid reading non-ponyist literature, or that they are punished for talking about negative experience with ponies; because “controlling information flow” and “erasing personal experience contrary to the doctrine” appear on my checklist, while “ponies” don’t.
You suggest that the information I got is exaggerated. I assume that it is not completely fabricated, so that somewhere exists the original, non-exaggerated version. It would be nice to hear it, because I usually only get banned from various discussions; and if I get an answer, it is usually something like “only a bad person would ask about this”.
Your suggestion sounds somewhat analogical to a Christian suggestion that atheists are sinful or guided by Satan, or a Scientologist suggestion that the critics of the church are suppresive people trying to hide their crimes. It could be true, but I would still like some parts addressed factually.
If I am wrong about something specific, feel free to correct me. Maybe I am wrong about censorship, and most SJWs actually promote free speech for everyone. Maybe I am wrong about microaggressions, and most SJWs actually focus on huge topics such as treatment of women in Islamic countries or treatment of gays in Africa. Maybe I am wrong about call-out culture, and most SJWs actually focus on being the change they want to see in the world. Maybe the assumptions of gender studies are skeptically questioned at universities, and they are supported by methodologically solid research. Maybe the definitions of words like “sexism” and “racism” (to mean “…unless a group we support is doing it”) is actually the standard usage. Maybe it is actually encouraged among SJWs to talk about personal experience that contradicts the doctrine, e.g. about domestic violence against men; maybe Erin Pizzey is a fictional character who never existed. Maybe when people talk about political issues, they are never dismissed just because they are male, or white, or cis. I could be wrong about many specific things. I could be even wrong about everything; but even in that case, please point out the specific things where I am wrong.
In many parts of the U.S., you may never meet a SJW face-to-face, and their tactics would have no effect. But SSC posters are disproportionately likely to live in the liberal urban areas where SJWs are powerful enough to get people fired.
In the tech industry, I think there were two cases in particular that galvanized a lot of people around the threat of SJWs.
The first instance was the effective firing of Brendan Eich from Mozilla. Despite his unquestionable technical credentials (creator of JavaScript!), despite a long and successful history at executive roles in Mozilla, despite never having personally committed any act of discrimination, he was driven from his job by an Internet-based mob not only because of his political views, but for a political view that was well within the Overton Window at the time. (Proposition 8 passed, after all.) This was a sign that any sufficiently prominent individual who disagreed with the SJWs about any controversial issue would be fair game, including in roles that were traditionally not considered to be political footballs.
The other major incident was Adria Richards’ antics at PyCon 2013. Richards overheard two developers making a joke regarding the terms “forking” and “dongles”, and immediately took to Twitter, seeking to get them fired. And they were indeed fired. This reinforced the belief that no one is safe, that an innocuous joke at a conference can lose you your job if a SJW with a sufficient number of Twitter followers wills it to be so.
There have been more incidents than that. For me it was Ben Noordhuis being hounded out of Node.JS for being insufficiently receptive to pronoun-bitching. I can easily imagine myself as a caretaker of a repository getting a frivolous pull request, rejecting it, and then whoops it turns out the requestor is on the Right Side Of History.
In the tech industry, I think there were two cases in particular that galvanized a lot of people around the threat of SJWs.
The first instance was the effective firing of Brendan Eich from Mozilla.
Oh, darling, to be so young! But truly, I was born in *St Petersburg.*
(The celebrated Soviet actress was giving an interview to a subversive tool of the oppression of the people (ie, a Western journalist.) The reporter asks the aged star about her early life, where was she born, etc.
“Well, I was born in St Petersburg -”
At which point her political handler leans in and growls, “She means, she was born in Leningrad.”
The grand old dame pats the handler on the arm and gives him her best smile. “Oh, darling! To be so young!” Then she leans in conspiratorially to the reporter. “But truly, my dear, I was born in St Petersburg.”)
The SJWs were around, causing trouble, making people miserable, and ruining (a few) lives long before Eich. Pretending that their actions are justified by their goals or by the sins of others is among the earliest of mistakes. Another is to assume that they are of no great moment, and will soon go away.
I think in that post “first” meant “most significant”, not first in time. The PyCon incident was actually earlier.
And here’s what nobody mentions about PyCon: Richards also lost her job. The two programmers she accused got new jobs in short order, while she was still unemployed months later. Not really the best example for the anti-SJ crowd.
That may be nicer if you have a revenge fantasy but otherwise it doesn’t do you much good. It’s the nonviolent equivalent of a suicide bomber–they do damage to you and take themselves out in the process. It’s still frightening, because you care more about the damage to yourself than you care that they’re taking damage too.
Donglegate, Eich, the draconian “codes of conduct” the SJWs first got imposed on conferences and then on open source projects, the “meritocracy” rug issue at GitHub, the node.js pronoun issue, Yarvin’s first ejection (from Strangeloop), the Opal/Coralina Emkhe incident, the even-worse-than-before TODO Open Code of Conduct which explicitly denies recourse to those complaining about “reverse” -isms, Zuckerberg’s banning of objections to Black Lives Matter, Yarvin at Lambdaconf.
Did I miss anything? Oh, yeah, aside from the constant yammering of the tech press about “brogrammers” (it was a hoax), the “myth” of meritocracy (we really owe everything to our whiteness, you see), and how white male techies are horrible people and “nerd culture must die” (you want to get ants? That’s how you get ants). But I could ignore the tech press if too many people within the industry didn’t agree with them.
There was also the C Plus Equality incident – relatively harmless in itself, but it helped make clear the extent to which a lot of supposedly neutral service providers had actually fallen to the Blight.
As a data point, I’m seeing them in Brazil. Only in colleges and on the internet, and they have little power compared to the US, but they are growing. Easy enough to ignore five years ago (in colleges and on the internet), not so much now.
I see a bunch of minor shit that people like to blow way out of proportion on the internet. I’ve had no problems at work or at conferences.
It’s a big industry, two guys told a bad joke and got fired. That sucks, but it’s hardly reasonable for you guys to be so hysterical about it for literally years. As for Eich — CEO, of a non-profit no less, is the chief representative of an organization that’s asking people to open their wallets and donate time. It isn’t an engineering position.
Unfortunately I’ve seen this kind of thing before. Whether it was open source evangelism that painted Microsoft as basically Nazis or Voices at the Hellmouth, there’s a certain type of grandiose personality that goes with our industry. They can’t ever be happy unless they are noble underdogs in some grand crusade.
@Anon – “I work in tech in SV and I’m a white, straight man. ”
I work in a small game studio. I have had an actual run-in with one SJW in real life, and that one was enough that I now self-censor all opinions with anyone but a handful of friends or reasonably-anon forums like this one. My boss, while not an SJW himself, is broadly sympathetic to their claims. If anything I’ve posted here got internet famous, I am not confident I would keep my job. The last place I worked would have fired me even faster. Do my concerns seem unreasonable to you?
You have been given a lot more examples than a single incident involving two guys.
It does reach out beyond the internet sometimes. Here in Australia, SJ is currently lobbying the government for internet hate speech laws, requiring ISPs to block sites that allow racist or misogynist content. (As defined by them, of course.) The ones that I know personally were campaigners against internet censorship in the 90’s. Now, they refer to freedom of speech as, “That failed American experiment,” and “Not appropriate in a diverse society.” Since they’re on the right side of history, they know that censorship can’t be used against them, it can only hurt racist white males. And since they’re now senior academics, they are getting their meetings with ministers and staffers.
On a more personal level, even though I kept my social media feed down to people I’d personally met, I was still getting flooded with the SJ outrage du jour articles. I have to manage my mental illness and control my emotions, SJ clickbait seems designed to cause uncontrolled emotional outbursts. Asking people to back off got me torrents of abuse for supporting whatever they were outraged about. I’ve had to socially isolate myself before I ended up suicidal again.
And even when I try to control my exposure, it doesn’t always work. At a party before Christmas, I made the mistake of mentioning that someone’s dog had snapped at a kid. “Not all dogs!” “He’s just a canine rights activist fighting for his right to hump legs!” “It’s about ethics in dog bite journalism!” And the discussion turned into half an hour of ranting about how those evil white males will destroy the world if SJ doesn’t stop them. Anon, if you think the SSC comentariat is being paranoid, you haven’t listened to a bunch of half drunk SJWs convincing each other that they’re literally the only thing keeping the internet hordes from destroying human civilisation.
@Jiro
Aside from the people that got fired, which are legitimate but very rare, you have bunch of “incidents” that barely impacted anyone and are most notable for the insane obsession you all have with them.
OpalGate 2015, never forget!!!!!!
@Viliam
It’s not a cult above all because, except perhaps at college, there is no social isolation. There’s also no central authority and no ritual gatherings where the message can be reinforced. The primary way of receiving message reinforcement is by going online and seeking it out (which by the way the obsessives on SSC seem to do more than their fair share of). There isn’t even any self identification, with “SJW” being a slur conjured up by this crowd, which in turn means there’s no sense of the elect or holding apart.
Your thesis makes no sense. You might as well say that being a libertarian is a cult.
@FacelessCraven
I don’t know anyone that works in the gaming industry, much less the small studio gaming industry. I also don’t know what exactly the opinions you expressed here that you are worried about, are you en arr ex?
So I can’t say whether you should be worried or not. But given the wild exaggerations people are making about the SV tech world as compared to what I see on the ground, I’m inclined towards the conclusion that your fears are somewhat unreasonable. Could be wrong, but that’s my inclination.
Anonymous, you can’t just say “aside from the people who got fired” and then brush everything else off. Nobody would have any reason to care about SJ codes of conduct or any of that other stuff except that these are the sorts of things which can now lead to you being fired.
Firings are rare but they’re also a pretty big deal, especially since in these cases they also come with accusations of -isms and -phobias which act as an obstacle to future employment. You don’t actually have to fire all that many people for the rest to fall into line.
Dans ce pays-ci, il est bon de virer de temps en temps un programmeur pour encourager les autres
As already discussed the dongle guys quickly got new jobs. As did Brandon Eich for that matter. There were no hangings.
Seriously, this is supposed to be a rationalist website. Start putting some numbers to these risks. Compare them to, I don’t know, dying when the big one hits California or getting hit by lighting or eaten by sharks. Your “everyone is to terrified and self polices and that’s why there are so few incidents” is exactly the type of epicycle conspiracy theorists create. Get a grip.
If I was trying to stop someone from being defensive about thinking that they would be fired for their opinions, the worst possible thing to say is “oh, are you a arbernpgvbanel”?
In fact, it seems calculated to exactly terrorize him, by reminding him that he can be pushed into the black hole.
As for Richards, she doesn’t deserve what happened to her. But while the men involved have apologized and said that no one deserves what happened to her, she has refused to acknowledge her own part in the affair. She thinks her behavior was perfect and everyone else was wrong.
(See http://www.esquire.co.uk/culture/news/a7933/exclusive-extract-from-jon-ronson-book-so-youve-been-publicly-shamed/ ) She thinks Hank is to blame for her firing because he let people know he’d been fired, but she isn’t to blame for getting him fired by trying to publicly shame him.
Based on her website, she also is apparently trying to not get another job as an engineer, but to get a job as an advocate.
ETA: ” As did Brandon Eich for that matter.” No, he has not. As of a year ago he was still unemployed. He isn’t some millionaire from Mozilla, either. He needs a job like the result of us schlubs.
ETA ETA: Eich is currently employed, but, as he said in the comment section here at SSC, he was going quite some time without one. He did not, at all, “quickly” get a new job.
There’s two separate issues here, they just happen to overlap on SSC.
One is the size, scope, and power of the so-called SJW that are allegedly lurking around every corner looking to punish anyone that doesn’t exactly toe the “PC” line.
The other is a debate over a fairly radical view of open discourse that holds that no one is allowed to refuse to associate with someone else because of his expressed views no matter how loathsome. Or maybe they are allowed to but not talk about it. All the people that disagree with this latter position are not SJW. In fact, it amounts to most people though what exactly they’d find loathsome differs from person to person.
Re: Eich
https://www.brave.com/about.html#team
“I’ve had no problems at work or at conferences. ”
Have you been saying things at work or conferences that might make you a likely target for SJWs? If not, your failure to be attacked isn’t evidence either way.
I cannot resist:
“The skipper called to the tall taffrail: — “And what is that to me?
Did ever you hear of a Yankee brig that rifled a Seventy-three?”
@Anon – “Your “everyone is too terrified and self polices and that’s why there are so few incidents” is exactly the type of epicycle conspiracy theorists create. Get a grip.”
I would not describe myself as “terrified”, but I consider Social Justice callouts to be the largest and most likely threat to my career, and consequently self-censor fairly rigorously. I have encountered a number of others here and elsewhere who do likewise, again based on personal experience rather than internet rumors. Encountering someone who is legitimately willing and even eager to harm you because you disagree with their ideology is a formative experience.
“He got fired because he was an embarrassing old man shooting his mouth off about “the blacks”, not because he was an active researcher uncovering uncomfortable truths.”
And I’m a terminally frustrated misogynist who couldn’t keep his toxic opinions to himself, or a racist asshole who just can’t stop running his stupid mouth, etc etc. I’m actually not familiar with Crick’s story. I do know that I have lost all faith in society’s ability to fairly adjudicate which opinions are allowed and which are forbidden.
“The primary way of receiving message reinforcement is by going online and seeking it out (which by the way the obsessives on SSC seem to do more than their fair share of).”
I more or less live online; I work remotely, and the large majority of my social interaction happens on various forums. I definately did not “seek out” the community sites involved in the late gaming unpleasantness; they were the websites I’d been spending most of my time for the last several years. They are also the places I’m probably going to have to go to promote the personal projects that are my long-term goals.
I agree that outrage is addictive and people get hooked. But respectfully, there is an actual problem here that some of us are trying to figure out what to do about.
“There’s also no central authority and no ritual gatherings where the message can be reinforced.”
I don’t think I’m the only one for whom internet communities are about the only community we’ve got. Tumblr is a hell of a thing.
Both you and norm paint these sorts of events as isolated incidents, but I am way less interested in the events themselves than in the reaction to them. Harassment is a thing that happens on the internet, and I’m pretty pessimistic about whether it’s a problem that can ever be solved. On the other hand, the idea that harassment/”social consequences” is a good thing that should be encouraged is what worries me, and what I’m interested in fighting.
“I also don’t know what exactly the opinions you expressed here that you are worried about, are you en arr ex?”
Does it matter? Should death eaters be no-platformed and/or fired when identified? Should we be working to identify them so we can no-platform/fire them faster?
In point of fact, no, I’m not a neo traction fairy. I like guns, think “privilege” is a transparent fiction clung to for its political expediency, and believe that the current iteration of feminism is crazy enough that it’s probably a net-negative. Given the apparent ubiquity of the “feminism is just basic human decency” meme, I think that last one alone might be enough to screw me if someone decided to frame it uncharitably and at sufficient volume.
You’ve pointed out repeatedly that you see no threat. Is that because everyone around you is quite tolerant, or is that because you don’t actually have any substantive disagreement with the majority position?
“The other is a debate over a fairly radical view of open discourse that holds that no one is allowed to refuse to associate with someone else because of his expressed views no matter how loathsome.”
Say rather that we have lately learned how surprisingly easy it is to frame people and their views as “loathsome” regardless of the facts, that this is being exploited by the unethical or overly-zealous for personal or political advantage, and that we need a counter or the problem is likely to get worse. Your implicit claim that there’s nothing to worry about because those people totally deserved it is completely missing the point.
“All the people that disagree with this latter position are not SJW.”
Indeed, but Social Justice is heavily in favor of the no-platform/”social consequences” strategy, so there’s a hell of a correlation.
“In fact, it amounts to most people though what exactly they’d find loathsome differs from person to person.”
True. For instance, I find the idea that the bounds of acceptable speech are too wide and should be narrowed drastically via a coordinated campaign of “social consequences” is a thoroughly loathsome idea. I’m not sure eliminating this idea through a coordinated campaign of social consequences is a good idea, but it is a tempting one.
“@Anon – “Your “everyone is too terrified and self polices and that’s why there are so few incidents” is exactly the type of epicycle conspiracy theorists create. Get a grip.”
I would not describe myself as “terrified”, but I consider Social Justice callouts to be the largest and most likely threat to my career, and consequently self-censor fairly rigorously. I have encountered a number of others here and elsewhere who do likewise, again based on personal experience rather than internet rumors. Encountering someone who is legitimately willing and even eager to harm you because you disagree with their ideology is a formative experience.
“He got fired because he was an embarrassing old man shooting his mouth off about “the blacks”, not because he was an active researcher uncovering uncomfortable truths.”
And I’m a terminally frustrated misogynist who couldn’t keep his toxic opinions to himself, or a racist asshole who just can’t stop running his stupid mouth, etc etc. I’m actually not familiar with Crick’s story. I do know that I have lost all faith in society’s ability to fairly adjudicate which opinions are allowed and which are forbidden.
“The primary way of receiving message reinforcement is by going online and seeking it out (which by the way the obsessives on SSC seem to do more than their fair share of).”
I more or less live online; I work remotely, and the large majority of my social interaction happens on various forums. I definately did not “seek out” the community sites involved in the late gaming unpleasantness; they were the websites I’d been spending most of my time for the last several years. They are also the places I’m probably going to have to go to promote the personal projects that are my long-term goals.
I agree that outrage is addictive and people get hooked. But respectfully, there is an actual problem here that some of us are trying to figure out what to do about.
“There’s also no central authority and no ritual gatherings where the message can be reinforced.”
I don’t think I’m the only one for whom internet communities are about the only community we’ve got. Tumblr is a hell of a thing.
Both you and norm paint these sorts of events as isolated incidents, but I am way less interested in the events themselves than in the reaction to them. Harassment is a thing that happens on the internet, and I’m pretty pessimistic about whether it’s a problem that can ever be solved. On the other hand, the idea that harassment/”social consequences” is a good thing that should be encouraged is what worries me, and what I’m interested in fighting.
“I also don’t know what exactly the opinions you expressed here that you are worried about, are you en arr ex?”
Does it matter? Should death eaters be no-platformed and/or fired when identified? Should we be working to identify them so we can no-platform/fire them faster?
In point of fact, no, I’m not a neo traction fairy. I like guns, think “privilege” is a transparent fiction clung to for its political expediency, and believe that the current iteration of feminism is crazy enough that it’s probably a net-negative. Given the apparent ubiquity of the “feminism is just basic human decency” meme, I think that last one alone might be enough to screw me if someone decided to frame it uncharitably and at sufficient volume.
You’ve pointed out repeatedly that you see no threat. Is that because everyone around you is quite tolerant, or is that because you don’t actually have any substantive disagreement with the majority position?
“The other is a debate over a fairly radical view of open discourse that holds that no one is allowed to refuse to associate with someone else because of his expressed views no matter how loathsome.”
Say rather that we have lately learned how surprisingly easy it is to frame people and their views as “loathsome” regardless of the facts, that this is being exploited by the unethical or overly-zealous for personal or political advantage, and that we need a counter or the problem is likely to get worse. Your implicit claim that there’s nothing to worry about because those people totally deserved it is completely missing the point.
“All the people that disagree with this latter position are not SJW.”
Indeed, but Social Justice is heavily in favor of the no-platform/”social consequences” strategy, so there’s a hell of a correlation.
“In fact, it amounts to most people though what exactly they’d find loathsome differs from person to person.”
True. For instance, I find the idea that the bounds of acceptable speech are too wide and should be narrowed drastically via a coordinated campaign of “social consequences” is a thoroughly loathsome idea. I’m not sure eliminating this idea through a coordinated campaign of social consequences is a good idea, but it is a tempting one.
“I’m inclined towards the conclusion that your fears are somewhat unreasonable. Could be wrong, but that’s my inclination.”
For what it’s worth, I appreciate you taking the time to argue your side side of it.
[EDIT] – just barely avoided losing this entire post to the wordfilter. Posting here for two years, and that’s the second time I’ve had a whole post eaten in the last week or two. Grah.
(and nothing of value was lost.)
I do feel that Gmail Anon has a point; the ratio of speech to consequences for speech is hugely weighted towards the first, in the general case.
On the other hand, there are also a lot of people on Team SJW who are working digiliently to change this ratio. It’s not paranoia when they really are out to get you, and are cheerfully admitting this fact. But it might be paranoia to think that because they want to hurt you, they can.
But again, there definitely are specific fora where expressing certain topics and opinions will drop a massive storm of backlash and outrage on your head, for any conceivable position. And given that, it doesn’t seem reasonable to describe Team SJW as taking over when you can, e.g., go to 90% of North Carolina geographically and find strong support for HB2.
I think it’s important to be specific. Faceless Craven tends to speak about the attitudes and outlooks he sees specifically in the online gaming and game development industry, which is specifically in a giant multi-year culture-war dust-up. It is eminently reasonable for him to fear the consequences of culture-war-based political controversy, because even without him telling us stuff, it’s really easy to find a lot of back-and-forth in his specific space. I don’t think that some of the threats and attitudes he points out as affecting him are universal problems, but I also don’t see him claiming that they are universal problems.
What I do see is people saying, metaphorically, “Street crime? Poppycock! I went strolling down the streets of my suburb and didn’t see a thing, crime rates are dropping across the board, and most people never experience a violent crime in the first place!”, and ignoring that the person is posting from, e.g., Baltimore.
@ Faceless
[EDIT] – just barely avoided losing this entire post to the wordfilter.
I always everywhere do Ctl-A, C before Post. If it’s something I’ve really worked on, I detour to some file open on my own drive and do Ctl-Paste before doing Post. Glitches happen, be prepared; it just takes finger habit.
Btw, how do you know when it was the filter that ate a post?
@FacelessCraven
Either I wasn’t clear or you disagree about the two separate issues. On the chance that it was the former I’ll try again.
IF you have a blog wherein you opine that rape is a nonsense concept because women are evolutionary programmed to want bad boy genes and so deep down they really love it, but just won’t admit it and oh by the way we should bring back slavery because black people are only fit to be slaves THEN you have every reason to fear you will lose your job / be shunned if it comes out that those are your views. Same thing if you like to go around saying “gas the Jews, race war now”. However, I don’t think those reasonable fears have anything to do with the so-called SJW warriors. The set of all Americans that think you should lose your job / not be invited to conferences is at least half and probably much higher. It includes grandmothers in their 70s that don’t have any social media accounts and if they have any association at all with “social justice” think it is has something to do with left wing priests in Latin America.
It may well be that you and others came to the position of radical open discourse because of fears of SJW, but that is not at all the same thing as saying that anyone that isn’t convinced is a SJW.
Now on the other hand, IF you sometimes make jokes in public about forking repos and big dongles or espouse mainstream Republican opinions THEN at least as to the mainstream SV tech world you don’t have much to worry about. Of course it is possible you will suffer major adverse consequences — hence the examples that people keep on harping on — but I believe the risk is very low. This is my point about the fears of so-called SJW being overblown. The climate of extreme fear of saying anything that wouldn’t go over well in a senior seminar in feminist studies at Oberlin just doesn’t match what I’m seeing at all. In fact, there is still outright, old school, sexual harassment going on in a lot of places. Some of the companies that have gone overboard are those that had big scandals of that nature.
So again, I see two separate issues: 1) we don’t have radical open discourse, you can be fired / shunned for what you say online or away from work but 2) the window of acceptable things to say is generally pretty broad and not dictated by the so called SJW, the size and influence of which is IMO/E overblown — at least as to SV tech world, and I suspect more broadly.
This one just came in: http://deadline.com/2016/04/curt-schilling-fired-espn-anti-transgender-1201741272/
That one doesn’t bug me. If your job is to be a public mouthpiece, you and your words are under greater scrutiny.
There’s almost certainly more to that story. Judging from Schilling’s reputation, I find it likely that people at ESPN have been wanting to get rid of him for a long time and this was just a handy opportunity to get social justice street cred.
This is a joke, right?
That is more than a little interesting.
I think SJW isn’t easily recognized as a cult because it doesn’t physically isolate its members, it doesn’t (so far as I know) have a formal hierarchy, and it isn’t a money suck.
I agree on all three points. SJWs are more… distributed… more internet-based. The only place where they meet physically in large numbers seems to be a few universities. There seem to be a few self-appointed leaders who sometimes cooperate and sometimes stab each other in the back, and then a mass of followers. There is a tradition of donating money on Patreon, but it seems completely voluntary, and I haven’t heard about people getting ruined by donating too much to SJW causes, or blackmailed to donate a specific amount.
However — I apologize if this sounds like a completely general counterargument — most cults have something unique about them. For example, Jehovah Wittnesses are proud about not having a formal hierarchy; although when you dig deeper, they actually have one, they only believe that it is sufficiently informal so it doesn’t count. Scientologists believe that they are science-based and rational; and they would enjoy playing lawyers over a dictionary definition to prove that they are not a cult. Most multi-level-marketing cults would insist there is nothing cultish about them, and also that they are completely different from each other because of some technical detail about how the money is transferred within the pyramid scheme. But you don’t have to match all requirements 100% to achieve the cultish group dynamic.
SJWs do have a norm of socially isolating themselves from the unbelievers (“if you think X, or don’t think Y, you are a horrible person, please unfriend me”). Their blocklists are similar in purpose to Scieno Sitter. Despite a lack of hierarchy, you can make a guess about who would win in an internet fight. And some of them make quite a profit from being SJWs. — But I agree that in a cult I would expect more of this, and I would expect to have it more formalized.
My point isn’t that SJWs are a typical member of the cult cluster. Just that they are within it.
I didn’t say SJW isn’t a cult– now that you point it out, you’ve got a very good point. After I’d spent a while reading SJW material, I started referring to myself as a former native speaker of English. I couldn’t take metaphors nearly as lightly as I used to.
I said that SJW isn’t easily recognized as cult, and I do think it’s fairly far from the central examples of cults.
Oh, was I agreeing in a way that made it sound like I disagree? You made a great meta-point that in addition to things that make SJWs similar to cults, it is also important to mention things that make them different. The conclusion shouldn’t be made by excluding inconvenient info, but by processing everything. (“Notebook of rationality“, arguments as soldiers, etc.)
I tried to say that I find the “isn’t a money suck” part relatively more persuasive than the “doesn’t physically isolate its members” part. (And the “formal hierarchy” is somewhere in between.)
I’m sorry Viliam but does this cult have a leadership or liturgy?
Leadership yes, although without formal structure. Liturgy is for religious cults.
There are SJWs so powerful that other SJWs know that publicly disagreeing with them could easily get them “disfellowshipped” (i.e. publicly labeled as “right-wing”, blocked by most SJWs on social networks, ostracized and harassed in private life). But who exactly is your biggest threat, that depends on where you are. If you are a university student, the most dangerous predators are your SJW professors and student leaders. If you are in the game industry, you better avoid crossing the path of ZQ. In “Atheist+” circles it is someone else again.
With sufficient skills, you can become a leader, too. You need some charisma and/or power to gain your local followers, and the existing SJW leaders have to decide that it is better for them to cooperate with you than to attack you. As a beginner you should show proper respect to the existing leaders, write blogs or give speeches about their virtue, attack the targets they attack, and donate to them on Patreon. With some luck you get to the inner ring, and then you just flow with the current: preach what everyone else preaches, and denounce what everyone else denounces; taking care about your own visibility. Then the average people start getting afraid of you, start posting articles about your virtue, and start donating to your Patreon.
(Essentially, do what “Andrew Cord” is trying to do, only be less nerdy and have much better social skills.)
Joanna Russ wrote “Power and Helplessness in the Women’s Movement” sometime before 1985, and I think it will be of interest because it sheds light on feminism at the time, power dynamics when it’s not allowable to want power (yes, Moldbug fans should read this), and possibly it offers some clues about what’s going on in SJ now.
“With great power comes great responsibility”, and if the responsibility is cranked up too high, the safest thing is to claim to have no power. I believe that’s part of what’s going on with SJ.
There’s a bit in Ayn Rand to the effect that if what is needed for life is condemned, people will embrace actual evils. (I bet someone here knows the quote.) If healthy self-assertion and leadership aren’t permitted, then people find it much harder to get things done.
I feel like this has too many implications for me to chase right now, but I’ll probably write more later. I do recommend the Russ essay.
Nancy –
Adding that to my reading list. Sounds interesting, thanks for the recommendation.
^ Likewise and thank you
@ Nancy Lebovitz –
A third thanks for the pointer to the Russ essay.
I note, with some interest, how much Russ talks about feelings and the emotional reaction people have to events.
One of the things that threw me out of feminism – and further and further away from progressive liberation theology – was an acceptance of my own power to hurt other people and the need to accept other’s criticism of my (ab)use of that power (and/or my failure to help other people when I could.) In these cases, power was meant as something more concrete than feelings and emotional impact.
Others that I have spoken with have identified a pair of conflicting world views – or, more accurately, a series of conflicting world views.
One might assume that work has NOTHING to do with success, or that work has EVERYTHING to do with success. People who believe the second, when faced with lack of success, will try harder. Those who believe the first, will be more comforted. Both are NOT TRUE, and both are useful to different populations.
Whether one is more useful to the human population as a whole, well, the data is still out on that.
@Nancy Lebovitz:
Yet another thanks for the link to the Russ essay. The following sentence from it jumped out at me:
I can’t help thinking it’s applicable in another context, to both sides….
It probably isn’t a coincidence that SJ recruits mainly on college campuses, where people come freshly pre-isolated from their families etc, and on the internet, where some people try to build entire social lives disconnected from physical geography.
But now you’ve got me worried about what SJ would look like if it could command the monetary wealth of its adherents. Well, except for the bit where so many of them are college students who don’t really have money.
The more interesting question might be “What happens when someone tries to monetize SJ?”. Now, that’s memetic warfare for you.
SJW should have some resistance to monetization since they don’t trust capitalism. On the other hand, there are strong incentives for people to try to monetize things.
Capitalism can monetize anything, including anti-capitalism
http://rlv.zcache.co.uk/death_to_capitalism_anarchy_is_the_answer_t_shirt-ra64ac7b817344871a0bb8e540e37b268_jyn7m_324.jpg
Depends what you mean by “monetize.” There are no analogies to mega churches, but there are multiple professional activists who find themselves via Patreon or other monetization platforms, and there are plenty of artists who market by appealing to social justice community signaling in much the same way Christian rock bands do.
And there are aplenty of celebrities who (often incredibly hypocritically) monetize social justice as part of their image. I’d put Taylor Swift in the “has monetized social justice” category, at least to a degree.
Swift was rich before she wrote a song, and has been singing for a decade- she is basically good for money and fame.
What if someone tried to monetize rightwing politics? Then we’d have problems…
Well, there was this recently
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1968200734/wave-goodbye-to-cyberbullies-and-trolls-socialauto/description
http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/04/14/be-careful-what-you-tweet-social-autopsy-project-lifting-the-masks-on-social-media-accounts-linking-users-to-their-employers/
College students, especially freshmen, are the best targets for recruitment, ever. Many of them are away from their families for the first time, and need a new social group to belong. A bit of “love bombing” and you have them.
Some cults find ways to extract money from students. At the beginning, the students can try extracting money from their parents by lying that it’s related to their study; later they can threaten to “disconnect” from a family that doesn’t support their group. But as far as I know, SJWs don’t do anything like this, and the donations to the SJW celebrities are voluntary. (Maybe sometimes based on disinformation, but still voluntary.)
If they would try extracting money forcefully, that would probably turn against them quickly (because that would be an argument that everyone understands). Also, without a formal hierarchy, there would be competing interests; leader X would sabotage leader Y’s attempts to extract more money and vice versa (but with voluntary donations, some people may donate to both).
Oh, good! Maybe you can settle one of the recurring arguments we have around here. Is the rationalist community a cult? I’m gonna go with “no”, but it seems to be a favorite of critics, so…
Soon.
The rationalist community is not a cult (yet; growth mindset!)
Favorite answer so far.
Following this checklist:
1) Are rationalists suggested to avoid all non-rationalist information and communication? I don’t think so.
2) I admit this is the point I understand the least. Does the rationalist group manipulate its members, so they experience things that make them update (based on the implicit assumption that the experience wasn’t manipulated) that the leader has abilities or knowledge “over 9000”? I don’t know; maybe something suspicious happens in CFAR minicamps, but not to the average member.
3) Is the world perceived as black and white, and are the members constantly shamed to become perfect? Considering how the rules are constantly violated, and people on LW talk openly about the website being mostly for procrastination, I’ll say no.
4) Are members required to confess their sins against rationality? I am not aware of that.
5) Are teachings of the group considered an undisputable truth above all criticism, and is group considered the only source of the truth? Considering all the debates about many-world interpretation, it’s far from settled. We admit taking knowledge from external sources such as Kahneman. On the other hand, some things are considered settled, so maybe 0.25 points here.
6) Is there a special jargon full of thought-terminating clichés? This is frequent criticism, so let’s make it 0.75 points.
7) Are members’ personal experiences ignored when they contradict the teachings of the group? Uhm, not sure what kind of experiences we talk about. I guess theists could get offended that LW ignores their spiritual experience, so let’s make it 0.25 points.
8) Is the world outside the group considered unenlightened, and only worthy as potential recruits? Depends; LW respects many scientists, but also complains about the sanity waterline. Maybe 0.5 points again.
Together, it’s 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0.25 + 0.75 + 0.25 + 0.5 = 1.75 points out of 8. (Plus or minus my personal judgement.) More than zero, but I believe that we are on the safe side. To provide more context, it is a checklist for “though reform”, and LW is explicitly about how to change one’s mind, so a value greater than zero is expected.
I tried to weigh against LW when in doubt, so the result is probably exaggerated. If it doesn’t feel so (for example, I never assigned a value of 1, while I used 0 liberally), think about how far does the scale go in typical cults.
Also, what jaimeastorga2000 said. Just because the community isn’t a cult in 2016, it doesn’t mean it couldn’t become one in 2026. It’s the behavior that determines the answer, and the behavior can change.
I’d give full credit for 6 and 8, and half credit for
I’d give full credit for 6 and 8, and half credit for 5 and 7.
ETA: Well, that was interesting. I can’t seem to delete the partial, even though I’m inside the edit window.
6 — okay.
8 — I believe the rationalist community is quite open to the standard science (well, besides criticizing its current failures with replications).
5 — I would like to see a cult with so many members getting contrarian creds for disagreeing with almost everything.
Well, the meta point is that the debate becomes significantly more rational when we debate specific issues, instead of just trying to resolve the whole question of cultishness by a big authoritative “yes” or “no”.
No matter where you are, always say it’s the least cultish community in the whole damn world.
This seems to conflict with other advice I’ve been given in the past:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vb5-LLQ3FjY
Cult? Maybe.
I think a more fitting adjective for SJWs that they’re authoritarian. That’s definitely something they have in common with cults, and is (at least IMO) a significantly less pejorative descriptor.
Instead of calling them SJWs (again, a pejorative that I first read on alt-right blogs) I’ve begun calling them the “Authoritarian Left”. Free speech, for example, is something that authoritarians (whether left or right) always want to control in a manner that suits their agenda. Also for authoritarians, there are protected classes (i.e., the class with authority) and the process of protecting this class always results in the devaluing of some other class.
All cults are authoritarian groups, but not all authoritarian groups are cults.
“Authoritarian” and “cult” both have advantages– “cult” implies a kind of structure that just isn’t there, but it’s good about the emotional effects. “Authoritarian” is good about the demands, but doesn’t convey the emotional stickiness.
I vote for “an authoritarian left” rather than “the authoritarian left” since there are more explicitly authoritarian communist countries which don’t resemble SJ.
I know people who identify as Social Justice Warriors, so I’ll use the phrase as descriptive rather than as viewing it as an insult.
” Both emphasize this doesn’t mean that global warming has stopped or was never real, only that it seems to be slower now than it was before. Leading theory – complicated ocean cycles working in our favor now may work against us in the next few decades, and we should still be careful.”
Not really. Actually, the good money may be on global warming being faster than previously thought. But for that brief period of time (the “hiatus”) it was slower, briefly.
Any interesting interstellar drive is indistinguishable from a weapon of mass destruction.
Vox has an article on the Death Eaters.
http://www.vox.com/2016/4/18/11434098/alt-right-explained
Don’t you love it when an article quotes someone out of context and gives you a link so you can easily tell they are quoting the original source out of context?
The article claims that a prominent NR “complained” that Trump wouldn’t take over. But if you read the original source, he says that he’s not for or against Trump because Trump isn’t going to take over. In other words, he’s really saying that Trump would only be important if he were to take over, but the Vox article is trying to spin this as thinking it would be good for Trump to take over.
Wouldn’t it? It seems straightforward. If Trump were the kind of man who took over, then he’d be a good thing. Since he’s not, he’s meh.
“Meh” isn’t the opposite of “good thing”. “Meh” is the opposite of “good or bad thing”.
The in-context quote says that if Trump were the kind of man who took over, he’d be a good or bad thing.
While “I want someone to take over.” does imply “I want Trump to take over.”, the second statement has the implication that it is specifically Trump that you want to take over, not just that he is just one member of a class of people you want to take over. So while the second statement is factually true, it is still disingenuous.
What? No, it doesn’t imply that.
“I want anyone to take over” does imply that, but he clearly doesn’t want anyone to take over in that sense (that is, the set of people he wants to take over is not “anyone”).
God calling down from the heavens and placing the Imperial Crown of America on the head of a random American – anyone – would be a superior outcome to keeping the ongoing ritualized power struggle that’s been in place for the last 200 years.
As far as guides to the alt-right go, I prefer Milo’s article over at Breitbart.
http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/03/29/an-establishment-conservatives-guide-to-the-alt-right/
oh man, the picture on that one!
wite privlej wasnt on teh geer list sarjent pepe!
Ow. That was almost physically painful to read.
I liked Milo&Alum’s article for presenting a different view to… just about everyone else outside the alt right but I think they soft balled it.
That said, their thesis that the alt-right spells the death of the current Republican coalition is interesting, but again I think they’re overplaying the importance of Moldbug style thinking – which seems to be play a small, if any part, in the Trump phenomenon. How important channers and similar netizens are to Trump; and how connected the netizens are to Moldbug style thinking is beyond my area of expertise.
Still. That picture of Pepe as the ghost of Christmas Future, I want it framed in fancy art galleries. It’s amazing.
Agreed on all counts.
Why do people insist on confusing Lean On The Action Berries and the Alt-R? They have literally nothing in common.
Alt-Right doesn’t mean anything anymore (I’m told it meant something back in the day), the only thing these groups have in common is that they disagree with Lefties in the internet, they might as well call them Social Injustice Warriors.
On the brigth side, the article cites Scott as a source (yay ingroup!).
Alt-Right is anyone who can quote a Charles Murray book approvingly (That isn’t Coming Apart)
I found “By the People” pretty uncompelling, actually. It makes me think we might have too much workplace regulation, but I don’t see that as the same as vigorous repression on a daily basis.
And if you don’t tackle entitlements, what’s the point?
I think Murray’s book are great and I find the idea of being lumped in with the alt right revolting. The alt right is just politicized 4chan. It’s nothing I want to be a part of.
That’s great and all, but you’re not the one setting the terms.
Neither are we, mind you. We’re just speculating as to what they might be.
“Social injustice warriors” is hilarious, thanks!
I was seriously thinking of referring to a few of the subgroups as “formal justice warriors” or “classic justice warriors.”
I like “formal justice warriors”. Less mean-spirited, conveys the position in ideology-space more accurately, but still clearly uncomplimentary.
Works better as a label for the Death Eaters than the alt-right at large, though.
I think that by “literally” you mean “figuratively” and that you are wrong even then. The Death Eaters and the Alt-Right have plenty of things in common, starting with their right-wing affiliation just like WHTA says. Neither of them are particularly prevalent among the general public, and they are both far from the levers of power. I think they both spring from the same fount – heresy against the prevailing progressive ideology. It’s just that the Death Eaters are the result of that heresy taking root among the intellectual elites, and the broader Alt-Right is the result of it among the common people.
Two sides of the same coin.
The real difference is that in theory Death Eaters are anti-populism and mass movement, whereas the alt-right favor mass mobilization and traditional politicking.
Incidentally, this is why the alt-right are far more dangerous than the Death Eaters. The grouping “alt-right” also gets more dangerous the broader it gets (recently assisted by Breitbart’s whitewashing of the far-right; thanks Milo), since this creates a coalition in which liberal conservatives swim along with fascists against a common enemy, making it harder to isolate the far-right types. The reason it can be broadened so far in the first place is because it started with populism in mind. Previously, the ethno-nationalists were walled off from the rest of the right, but in the rush to combat social justice, a dangerous ambiguity has been allowed about liberal principles. It’s just memes! They’re the new hippies!
>Incidentally, this is why the alt-right are far more dangerous than the Death Eaters.
I’m sure the Death Eaters are delighted that you think so.
How is this any different than the anti-Communist coalition during the Cold War? That coalition included everything from mainstream social-democratic liberals to centrists to standard Red State conservatives to John Birchers and libertarians (the closest predecessors of today’s Alt-Right, IMO) all the way to authoritarian dictators and outright fascists. Yet we still muddled through without surrendering to fascism. Historically, neither fascists nor Communists generally take over a society unless there are no credible mainstream alternatives. Therefore, if you’re worried about preventing the rise of fascism, the solution isn’t to beat up alleged fascists in the street or even to ‘no-platform’ them, but to deal with the conditions that makes them seem like a credible alternative to liberal social democracy.
Why is an anti-SJW coalition forming? I think a lot of people instinctively realize that SJWs are totalitarians at heart. They don’t yet have the power to murder millions as the Communists did, but there is absolutely no doubt they would if they could. The personality type is no different than Mao’s Red Guards, or the extremist sans-culottes of the French Revolution, or the Spanish Inquisitors.
@JDG1980
“That coalition included everything from mainstream social-democratic liberals to centrists to standard Red State conservatives to John Birchers and libertarians (the closest predecessors of today’s Alt-Right, IMO) all the way to authoritarian dictators and outright fascists.”
Ah, but the authoritarian dictators and para-fascists were mostly in non-Western countries. Except places like Spain and Greece, but in the Spanish case the actual fascists and natsocs were marginalized by some clever maneuvering by Franco, and in most of the other cases we kept a lid on the ethno-nationalist elements. Most of the third world right wing dictatorships were more authoritarian right associated with CIA propped up juntas rather than ethno-nationalist populists.
In the West, there was an attendant Brown Scare to go along with the Red Scare, and there simply weren’t the conditions to make populist ethno-nationalism an electoral force (except maybe in the 70s for the UK) until now. We are coming back around to Nazism due to a historical default of the left on the migrant crisis as well as issues of race in which they have failed to stick to the liberal principle of equality before the law. The alt-right is the internet side of something that is happening electorally, with coalitions forming to block out hard right parties in France and Sweden. Ideally, we’d be coming back around to civic nationalism, but we’ve spent so much time conflating different kinds of nationalism with the Nazis that when the status quo falters that is exactly who people turn to for answers. The left has cried wolf for so long – and yes, they deserve some blame for that – but now the wolves are actually here, and we should do something about them.
“Therefore, if you’re worried about preventing the rise of fascism, the solution isn’t to beat up alleged fascists in the street or even to ‘no-platform’ them, but to deal with the conditions that makes them seem like a credible alternative to liberal social democracy.”
I never said we should “no platform” them, but we should openly express our burning contempt for them, and make pains to distinguish civic nationalism and control of borders from digusting ethno-jihadist projects that come bundled with a desire to destroy enlightenment achievements as surely as any Islamist.
The left has tried to bunch these two things together because it’s convenient for them, but if the era of cultural relativism is over, then what comes next is a battle between different visions of the nation-state; will the West consist of nation-states that believe in the liberal tradition and the proposition nation, or will it consist of nation-states that define nation by how “Aryan” you are, and pull liberalism and all its well grounded principles out by the root to be thrown in the dustbin?
Of course, we need to argue against this and present a case for why liberalism is good, but I am not an idealist. I’m a materialist, and I believe that liberalism is not a set of natural rights, but an aspirational project that invokes positive feedback loops. What this means is that liberalism should be prepared to defend itself, both at its borders, and within.
Yes, the fascists and national-socialists and “national-libertarians” deserve free speech, but they do not deserve our endorsement. What they deserve is a warning: if you start the fire, it will burn you. If the ethno-nationalist contingent actually start to take over, whether they are beating people in the streets, or whether they come in suits and ties to win votes, if they attempt to enact their vision for society, they must be resisted with all means necessary, including violence. Violence must be on the table somewhere, not for speech, but as a defense against the violence they are busy now planning. Their plans for violence are quite real, and deserve a theoretical counter-point.
“Why is an anti-SJW coalition forming? I think a lot of people instinctively realize that SJWs are totalitarians at heart. They don’t yet have the power to murder millions as the Communists did, but there is absolutely no doubt they would if they could. The personality type is no different than Mao’s Red Guards, or the extremist sans-culottes of the French Revolution, or the Spanish Inquisitors.”
And the people I’m talking about are really no different from the Nazis. The great mistake of our times would be to believe that the people with frog avatars on twitter are joking. Though you may laugh at his gleeful flaunting of taboo, Nazi pepe is quite serious about his feelings on the Jews.
We are now in an era where taiwanese shitposting boards can have a major influence on youth culture, and therefore the future of politics, as absurd as it sounds. Much of the impetus for the alt-right, owes its genesis to chan culture which was always steeped in “ironic” racism. Without /pol/ you don’t get TRS, and MPC, and without any of those you don’t see Schlomo memes starting to creep slowly into every politics video on Youtube. Perhaps without them, internet Nazism would have been for the oldies on StrmFrnt. (Incidentally, a large number of key figures in the modern social justice movement were prominent posters on somethingawful back in the day, the site that in part led to 4chan).
Recently, Breitbart came out with an article trying to aryanwash the whole thing after the Tay incident made major news networks. Apparently, the “dank memers” (Jesus) are just messing around when they say they want to gas the Jews constantly day in day out, whereas only the nasty humorless “1488ers” are for real, and there’s not many of those, so its okay.
Only everyone else knows that the “1488ers” and the “dank memers” are the exact same people. They don’t promulgate Nazism with long and dry pamphlets, they promulgate it by using the power of subversive humor. If you actually visit their sites, you can see widespread acceptance of the idea that this is how Nazism will become popular again, not wrapped in the flag holding a cross, but wrapped in a blanket holding chicken tendies, and for whatever reason this crazy strategy is working. Everyone who has any connection to the grassroots groundswell of avant garde internet rightism knows this. There is a three pronged (and almost certainly uncoordinated) attack; intellectual blogposts for the sophisticated, internet memes for the young, and new alternate politicians like Donald Trump for the normies. And those memes have the power to move the Overton Window, meaning that in say, 10 years, ethno-nationalism could become mainstream purely via osmosis. The ground environment is right for it.
Take racist memes seriously. Maybe Ramzy Paul is right when he says the alt-right are the new hippies, but that’s what scares me.
[CW: This whole response is a discussion of rude and taboo humor, particularly about racism. I am linking to a couple examples that are pretty undeniably rude, insensitive, or offensive.]
@TD – “Only everyone else knows that the “1488ers” and the “dank memers” are the exact same people.”
I really think you are wrong about this. While I can certainly believe that some of the people being shockingly racist on the chans are actually invested in racism, and some fraction of that set are intentionally hoping the memes work as propaganda, I am highly confident that the number of people in it for the propaganda is several orders of magnitude smaller than the people in it for the transgressiveness. I can point to their attacks on Hal Turner that spilled over into skirmishing with Strmfrnt to support that. What other than the memes themselves, are there actions you can point to in support of your conclusion?
“Without /pol/ you don’t get TRS, and MPC, and without any of those you don’t see Schlomo memes starting to creep slowly into every politics video on Youtube.”
The last “schlomo meme” I’ve seen on youtube was in a World of Tanks player’s compilation reel: [CW: A wide variety of very rude things, starting with the title]. (the meme in question starts around 0:25 in, if you care to check.) I’m fairly sure the player who made it is himself jewish.
Taboo humor is extra-hilarious, and to the degree that they can avoid crippling consequences for it a large percentage of people are going to enjoy it as much as they can, particularly when there is no concrete, serious harm obviously resulting. Correct me if I’m wrong, but our society is safer than it ever has been, and a good chunk of the racial conflict is over microaggressions as opposed to people murdering each other in the street. How confident are you that the refusal to take racism seriously is a worse approach than the default of taking it super-seriously?
I am not confident that taboo humor is actually a good thing; it tends to not be very nice, just for starters. I am pretty confident that doubling down on the taboo is probably not going to help.
“And those memes have the power to move the Overton Window, meaning that in say, 10 years, ethno-nationalism could become mainstream purely via osmosis. ”
I agree that transgressive humor has the power to move the overton window, but I do not think it moves in the direction you do. I think you are mistaking a rejection of dogmatic political correctness for an embrace of its opposite. Again, given that this has been going on for a decade or more, shouldn’t we be seeing some measurable real-world harm by now? And no, I don’t think Trump’s candidacy itself is sufficient evidence.
@FacelessCraven
“I really think you are wrong about this. While I can certainly believe that some of the people being shockingly racist on the chans are actually invested in racism, and some fraction of that set are intentionally hoping the memes work as propaganda, I am highly confident that the number of people in it for the propaganda is several orders of magnitude smaller than the people in it for the transgressiveness. I can point to their attacks on Hal Turner that spilled over into skirmishing with Strmfrnt to support that.”
That was back in 2007-8. Anonymous, the activist group would eventually split off from 4chan and do its own thing too. The center of gravity was different back then. The doin it for the lulz longcat is long era is well over, but the same approach to humor has been transferred to other topics.
The casual and sporadic ironic racism found on /b/ back then hadn’t transmogrified into widespread nationalist advocacy at that point. /n/ was still a small board, but the seed was growing. Eventually, the news board started to turn right wing and nationalist, so m00t shut it down. With various shenanigans in-between, the board eventually came back as /new/, before being shut down for similar reasons. Finally, in October of 2011, /pol/ was made and has existed ever since (and spread to alternate chans due to Ants). Considering that 2012 was when Anta Srksssn started proposing TrpsvsWmn, and also the year that the AthsmPls stuff went down, this is important. There was a pre-ants building up of social justice hullabaloos on the internet, and the /pol/ board exploded in size perhaps in response (many forget that Ants was not only a /v/ project, but was initially heavily assisted by /pol/, but that’s largely forgotten as things spread to reddit, youtube, and twitter).
Around this time, various right wing blogging sources began to become more popular, and Death Eaterism, which owes its principal source to Mldbgg back in 2007 also went through an explosion in terms of number of blogs (Death Eaterism would largely die down and be replaced by the alt-right, due to inter-fighting, and alt-right people actively trying to break them up, or replace them with white nationalism, such as in the case wev aurnhmr trolling of mchl assnmv) before being outcompeted in 2013-2015 by what would later become known as the alt-right.
I spent a lot of time watching these blogs appear and evolve over time. TRS, which started with some Death Eater influence, gradually due to feedback from the comment section became /pol/ 2.0, and was largely responsible for popularizing the “cuckservative” meme on twitter. They organized extensive daily raids of the comment sections of mainstream conservative news outlets like NRO. Sites like Dly Strmr have also seen steadily increasing traffic over time.
I don’t think it can be denied that white nationalism is more popular on the internet than it was back in the midlate-2000s. I think chan style memes have been involved in spreading it. You are far more likely to see green frogs wearing SS caps on the internet today than you ever were.
“The last “schlomo meme” I’ve seen on youtube was in a World of Tanks player’s compilation reel: [CW: A wide variety of very rude things, starting with the title]. (the meme in question starts around 0:25 in, if you care to check.) I’m fairly sure the player who made it is himself jewish.”
That’s the cloaking effect! I possess a crude and dark enough sense of humor to find it very funny, but I think osmosis will pay its toll on discourse. Good memes have a point. People can use the memes because they are funny, but I don’t see how this can’t be priming people to take dangerous forms of racism less seriously.
Donald Trump putting Bernie Sanders into a gas chamber is a funny meme because it parodies the sort of hysterical approach on the left towards even marginally civic nationalist politicians. The thing is, Donald Trump putting Bernie Sanders into a gas chamber can also be funny because you think the holocaust itself was funny. Fuck. I’m smiling as I’m typing this, and just for the record here: I think the holocaust was a horrible human tragedy.
The danger is that when someone 16 years old today thinks of the holocaust, they don’t think of the horrors of ethnic genocide and piles of real dead bodies that were once human beings with lives and feelings, they instead think of a grinning cartoon goblin crying “oy vey goyim muh six million”.
If images and memes mocking the idea of the holocaust become more ubiquitous than memes associated with the horror and sadness of genocide, then you’ve got problems.
It’s getting harder and harder for me to find a video on something like the refugee crisis and NOT see accounts named things like Schlomo Sheklebergstein III telling us what the real problem is. It’s even creeping into unrelated videos. It was in a containment zone before, but someone found a way to market it, and here we are.
Donald Trump himself isn’t an antisemite, but it’s hard to find a Youtube vid (so we aren’t talking fringe here), without comments implying that he’ll do something about them. There seems to be a lot of people out there who really believe that Donald Trump is just pretending to like Jews until he can take over.
“Taboo humor is extra-hilarious, and to the degree that they can avoid crippling consequences for it a large percentage of people are going to enjoy it as much as they can, particularly when there is no concrete, serious harm obviously resulting. Correct me if I’m wrong, but our society is safer than it ever has been, and a good chunk of the racial conflict is over microaggressions as opposed to people murdering each other in the street. How confident are you that the refusal to take racism seriously is a worse approach than the default of taking it super-seriously?”
Are you American? I live in the UK, and Europe looks like its going from bad to worse to me. Frankly, I can see the seeds of a civil war brewing. From the financial crisis and now into the migration crisis. It’s not just about microaggressions and triggering and so on. The internet battleground is providing context to serious geopolitical issues, and the memes are acting as a lubricant for that process.
“Again, given that this has been going on for a decade or more, shouldn’t we be seeing some measurable real-world harm by now? And no, I don’t think Trump’s candidacy itself is sufficient evidence.”
I would say that it hasn’t been going on for a decade or more. Not this phase of it. There was a critical turning point in 2012. I can’t say for sure what it was, maybe a confluence of things, but it seems like it’s picking up speed now. Barack Obama got re-elected meaning that rebelliousness was oriented to the right (whereas under Bush it was to the left, which may explain earlier 4chan), all the social justice stuff happened online (TrpsVsWmn, Athsm Plss, and others), leading up to Ants in August 2014, which finally broke through into the mainstream media (thereafter creating an accelerating feedback loop). I start hearing hand me down versions of what happened about from casual acquaintances in their 40s, and its all about harassment. Then Ants was named as a problem by burgeoning world leaders like Justin Trudeau, showing that it was no longer a fringe thing. In 2015, the migrant crisis started due to the conflict in Syria, the attending issue of ISIS, and the wrecked border control of post-Gadaffi Libya (no Vox; it was a bad idea), leading to a further acceleration towards inevitable doom. The internet responded, and all the threads which seem to lead back to /pol/ began to coalesce into this alt-right thing.
Political polarization may not be harm, but it’s more suggestive that future harm may be in the cards than what the internet looked like back in 2000-2011. Was I on the wrong websites back then, or are things really worse now? I’m going to bank on the fact that it’s worse, because all the forums I was on, in some cases long standing, tore themselves apart since 2012 over this, whatever you want to call it. Something is happening.
Obligatory Yeats:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Well, I don’t know about you, but I do find the Holocaust to be heilarious.
(Chopped out this block for convenience, but other parts of your and other people’s comments illustrate more-or-less the same point.)
The thing about all of this that is really surreal, to the point of Moldbuggery, is the idea that the real danger of e.g. radical Islamists actually killing and raping without consequence is that the wrong party will get elected as a consequence. Your so-called civic nationalists and liberal democrats rarely if ever describe the groups actually committing large-scale attacks as “wolves” or suggest that they must be resisted with violence if necessary; that fear and contempt is reserved exclusively for the parties actually trying to oppose them.
It sounds as though protecting your fellow countrymen is, at best, a distasteful necessity to prevent domestic enemies from getting the credit for doing so. And in any event the real people being harmed today is apparently nothing compared to the risk of electing a Marine Le Pen or even a Donald Trump.
The more I’ve noticed this attitude the further right it has pushed me. If your ideology will only defend the nation reluctantly and after dozens of high-profile attacks, what the hell good is it? This supposed alternative to fascism is so unappealing that it actually makes blood and soil ethno-nationalism look better by comparison! At least they show some sign of actually caring about whether their own people live or die.
Thanks for the extra-substantial comment, TD. It’s the 21st century — outrageous memes are in, dry pamphlets are out. Even the Russian government produces a fantastic jumble of hilariously over-the-top stories instead of The One Officially Approved Truth.
The real danger is that too many people will actually believe that they have to choose between two terrible options, the way other people in the early 20th century chose between communism and fascism.
This. I personally don’t feel pushed towards any specific place, merely disgusted by people who put their crazy signalling games above everything. But I completely understand how it can feel to others.
It’s all just a runaway signalling game; people competing to appear “holier than thou” by reverting stupidity. I assume that most politically correct people don’t actually enjoy the idea of e.g. immigrants raping local women. But the whole chain of thought goes like this: “A racist would say something bad about immigrants even if they would behave perfectly peacefully. Now, if the immigrants do something bad, even a non-racist would complain, but the racist would still complain with higher probability. And because signalling that I am not a racist has the highest priority, I must refrain from complaining. Actually, I must do the opposite of complaining: I must attack those who complain, and invent however insane explanation for why this all was not the rapists’ fault, but some unrelated white men should be blamed. Then everyone will see how pure is my mind.”
And at this point I just want to scream at them: “Fuck you for making your saintly image more important than the suffering of your neighbors.” But of course, they would just smile and call me an uneducated racist, because I didn’t play their game.
I wish I had a solution, but this is a more general problem: how to make it so that people optimizing for signalling games don’t win over people optimizing for the original goals.
@Anonymous
“Your so-called civic nationalists and liberal democrats rarely if ever describe the groups actually committing large-scale attacks as “wolves” or suggest that they must be resisted with violence if necessary; that fear and contempt is reserved exclusively for the parties actually trying to oppose them.”
No civic nationalists are even in power (yet), at least in North Western Europe. My contempt isn’t reserved for people who oppose Islamists; the main reason I oppose mass third world immigration is because radical Islam isn’t particularly radical in many parts of the Middle East and East Sub-Saharan Africa. What passes for extreme here is the norm there.
I think states should be allowed to turn people away for any reasons they want. However, there is a big difference between doing that and jettisoning liberalism (in its broad international historical sense, not the narrow US one). Therefore, I oppose third world migration because I want to protect liberalism.
There’s no exclusivity to it. I pretty consistently shit on Islam online. The thing is; Nazis enforcing an illiberal law is the same to me as Islamists doing it. So, I pretty consistently oppose both. If things get worse, Shariah patrols begin, and the rule of law collapses, then the same threat of violence is on the table as regards Islamic extremists, as is on the table for the false solution of ethno-nationalism.
The only difference is that ethno-nationalism is within my circles, so I can make those appeals directly. It’s a warning ahead of time. The red line (or Schelling Fence if you want to be a la di da rationalist about it) needs to be very very clear ahead of time.
“It sounds as though protecting your fellow countrymen is, at best, a distasteful necessity to prevent domestic enemies from getting the credit for doing so. And in any event the real people being harmed today is apparently nothing compared to the risk of electing a Marine Le Pen or even a Donald Trump.”
Neither of these two are ethno-nationalists. They are what I would call civic nationalists (though not in the liberal way I would prefer). Marine Le Pen is slightly more suspect in that her father was an ethno-nationalist, but she kicked him out of the party and made extensive overhauls.
What I’m worried about are not characters like Donald Trump (who I like more than Hillary), or Nigel Farage, but certain supporters who swim among the fish to promulgate ethnic-nationalism and traditionalism (the two are rarely seen apart from one another).
This is a very complex problem. There’s no point even resisting Islamists if you want to forge something that looks like “white Islam”, or if you want to throw away all of the achievements of Western liberalism, just because progressive liberals are wrong on borders. Babies and bathwater.
In many ways, characters like Trump are the alternative to fascism, but there are two ways this can go wrong:
1: They fail to change the status quo
Or
2: The pressure created by these candidates succeeds in changing the status quo, but we overshoot into fascism
Trump is not by any means a fascist or a nazi or anything like that, but a lot of his more vocal supporters are, and their meme power isn’t being countered by an alternative. I believe that 1 is a given at this point. Europe must change or risk civil war, so the real risk coming down the line then is number 2. If the center of ground changes to civic nationalism, then I want to defend that position.
“This supposed alternative to fascism is so unappealing that it actually makes blood and soil ethno-nationalism look better by comparison! At least they show some sign of actually caring about whether their own people live or die.”
I do care about that. It’s just that my own people aren’t “whites who live in a non-degenerate way”, my own people are “believers in enlightenment values of any color”.
You’ve sorely misread my post (I know it was pretty tl;dr). I’m not saying that I side with the establishment. What I’m saying is that the failure of the establishment is pretty much a given at this point. Cosmopolitan cultural-relativism is done. It’s bleeding to death as we speak.
Therefore, if the failure of the establishment is a given as I believe it is, then what remains is what must replace it. The dichotomy presented to us is that since conventional liberalism is dead or dying, the answer must be rahowa 1488. It is this dichotomy I violently reject.
The answer is quite simple; liberalism with borders. Philosophically; a materialist liberalism that preserves the conditions for a liberal society, stripped of all natural rights garbage.
Why should it be anything else?
Why should we deport people based on their race?
Why oppose the Jews as the ultimate bogeyman?
Why should we build a totalitarian state based on pre-enlightenment values of absolutism?
Why should we take away women’s rights?
Why should we take away gay rights?
Why should we enforce a state religion?
Why take away everything that makes the West special and different from everywhere else?
It’s the strangest thing. The most bizarre contradiction. The establishment is comprised of liberals (both progressive and conservative) who don’t care about defending liberalism, let alone from Islam, and the nationalist grassroots – or at least the loudest segment of it – is comprised of people whose vision for society differs from Islam only in that its sense of asabiyah is based on race. Any difference of degree in how much more Islam oppresses women and sexual minorities seems to me to be the difference between eating my own puke and eating dogshit. I’d really really really rather do neither, thanks.
@Nita
“Thanks for the extra-substantial comment, TD.”
Is that sarcasm? Sorry, it just happens. I try to work on not being so verbose, but I’m not good at compressing lots of ideas into a few paragraphs, unfortunately.
@TD: I’m formulating a response to what you posted below in response to my comment, but a bunch of stuff here is relevant. I’ll start a new tree.
@TD – “Is that sarcasm?”
Substantive as in packed with useful information, if I’m not mistaken. I took it as genuine praise, and would like to second it. Very good post, thank you for taking the time to put it together.
The Dutch freedom party contributed to a government coalition for a few years, so that happened. It very much looked like your dreaded situation of the status quo not changing.
Aside from that, the current Hungarian, Polish and Croatian governments are all various shades of this, with the Croatians especially having a number of fascist-sympathising officials. Still, you’d be right to point out this isn’t northwestern Europe.
This may just be auto-snark, but I don’t think the current batch of SJWs are especially murderous– considering how bad-tempered many of them are, they’re surprisingly non-violent.
The successors to the current batch could be a great deal worse because the ideology has no brakes. The current batch might be the first against the wall, or almost the first, when the revolution comes.
TD, thanks for the level of detail.
It occurs to me that the purpose of both SJ and ordinary norms of decency is to keep those people from coordinating.
@Nancy Lebovitz:
Stereotypically, a lot of left-wing activists of a certain variety are middle-class, university educated, etc. From a background, that is, where serious violence is highly unusual, especially serious violence from people you don’t know.
This may influence how they understand “violence” – verbal abuse is violence, disagreement is violence, ignoring stuff is violence, etc. Their weapons are based heavily around things like getting people fired.
Similarly, my hunch is that a lot of the internet right-wing types, call them what you want, are from a similar background. Neither the “safe space” crowd nor the “racist frog meme” crowd seem to be actually going out and stomping on people.
You say about the left-wing activist types that the ideology has no brakes, and I’m liable to think this is equally true of a lot of their right-wing counterparts. Perhaps the lack of brakes is due to a lack of appreciation, for reasons above, that violence is “real”, and a lack of understanding of their own potential power (the idea that the oppressed can’t really hurt their oppressors on the one hand, the belief that jokes about ovens and helicopter rides are just hilarious on the other).
When the authoritarians and totalitarians of the past used violent imagery and so forth, they knew full well what the possible outcome was, and what they were doing. Perhaps the potential authoritarians and totalitarians of the future, or their precursors, use violent rhetoric, it is at least in part because they don’t?
As I understand it, insults and exclusion are handled by the same part of the brain that handles physical pain. I’ve read accounts by people who say they would have rather been hit by their parents than subjected to hours of hostile ranting. In other words, the SJWs are overdoing it, but they’re not entirely wrong, either.
I write more about the SJWs because I find their more intelligent writing much more tolerable than all but the most moderate right-wing stuff. I appreciate it when someone I can stand reports about the right.
Possibly related: http://www.issendai.com/psychology/narcissism/narcissists-online.html
I find that bloggers who strike me as much too rambling are more likely to be on the right.
@ TD
What? No, not at all 🙁 I said “thank you” because I liked your comment, and thought that saying it might result in more interesting content being written (either by you or by other people).
I don’t think I’ve ever ‘thanked’ someone for a comment sarcastically.
@ FacelessCraven
Yay, you got it. Unfortunately, your comments will get no praise from me, as high-quality regulars are traditionally taken for granted.
Edit:
@ dndnrsn
I think the “smarmy asshole” formulation was mine. Personally, I don’t mind overly jocular tone, but Yarvin’s attitude seems like a mixture of shameless pandering, baseless condescension and barely masked contempt (in various proportions, depending on who he’s talking to).
@Nancy Lebovitz:
So, your objection to the DE, alt-right, etc types is at least in part an aesthetic thing, a reaction to tendencies in their writing?
In the last OT you described Yarvin/Moldbug as a “smarmy asshole”. I’m guessing that what you mean is that a lot of his writing has this trying-too-hard-to-be-jocular tone. His defences of his position on Medium are sort of written in this “aren’t-we-all-buddies” style that’s kind of irritating. That, combined with the excruciating length, and the (as you put it) rambling, makes him kind of obnoxious to read.
Is this what you mean?
@dndnrsn and Nancy, European antifa can get pretty rowdy, in a baseball bats and bike chains sort of way. I don’t know about the right, but there’s a gif circulating on Tumblr of some dude with a Celtic cross on his jacket and a high-and-tight cold-cocking a bearded pro-immigration type with an air of practiced familiarity. It’s at a big public event in, I think, Poland.
@Psmith:
But the antifa, as with their natural enemies the neo-Nazis, are a decades-old, pre-internet thing. The social justice whatever-you-want-to-call-’ems and the alt-right, etc, types are a modern, internet thing.
You’ll see SJ types approvingly reblogging stuff about antifas getting in rumbles with racist skinheads, but usually next to a whole bunch of other stuff that highly suggests they themselves are not the sort to get into street battles.
That’s true, but I’m not sure it has to do with the ideology so much as the fact that Internet commentary is inherently likely to come from people who spend their free time posting on the Internet. Some of the biggest fans of SJ I know in real life are activists on the Occupy-to-black-bloc spectrum — but their Internet activism is generally limited to sharing press-release material and occasionally lamenting capitalism on Facebook.
@Nornagest:
Yeah, that’s true.
I didn’t refer to Moldbug as a “smarmy asshole”. I don’t feel an obligation to track down who did.
I think of a lot of what I’ve read of Moldbug as just too much work for too little insight, combined with him showing so much contempt for ordinary people that I don’t trust that he’s got enough good will to invent a society which is good to live in.
From my point of view, he doesn’t have as bad a case of rambling as Vox Day, Hoyt, Torgerson, or Scott Adams or (on the left somewhat) David Brin.
Anecdata time: I attended college in the early 2000s, at an elite institution that had newly appointed its first African-American woman president. A few years into her term, there was an editorial in the student paper by a member of an antifa group (or American equivalent), claiming that our president ought to be opposed, as she was part of a “rainbow coalition of white supremacy.”
This was roundly mocked by just about everyone who read it at the time, on a campus where “PC culture” was generally the dominant mode. Nowadays I see more and more rhetoric adopting the broader sense of “white supremacy” and feel like the antifa would fit right in.
There is no American equivalent.
I didn’t want to name names, but it was ARA. If there is no American equivalent, what are they?
@ BBA
first African-American woman president. A few years into her term, there was an editorial in the student paper by a member of an antifa group (or American equivalent), claiming that our president ought to be opposed, as she was part of a “rainbow coalition of white supremacy.”
I’m not familiar with any of those terms as used here, but the more intersectional an appointee is , the less I trust her to be anything other than several tokens for the price of one.
(I came late to the thread, sorry if I’m rehashing things that were already discussed by now.)
@TD:
I think what makes the Schlomo memes viable is the fact that the exact same rhetoric is now employed, with full social acceptance, against whites in general. The evil Jewish bankers are parasites on Germany; the evil white old man bankers are parasites on America. Hollywood is too Jewish; Hollywood is too white. Intellectuals are too Jewish; intellectuals are too white.
Not only is the form of the argument exactly the same, but often it is applied to the same factual circumstances, and even to the same actual people! Why is it unspeakable when applied to Jews, but meritorious when applied to whites? Because the Holocaust? That’s just not convincing to young people. Perhaps it shouldn’t be convincing; one would hope that the lesson we learned from that horror was to avoid dehumanizing people, rather than to exclude the specific group that was victimized that time.
If we want to combat the new antisemitism, we have to attack the form of the argument. We have to be consistent. We cannot tell people “this is ok when they do it to you, but horrible when you do it to others”: it’s not a compelling argument even on the rational level, let alone on the emotional level.
Yet too many refuse to do that. You see an article complaining about how too many of the 100 biggest political donors are white, and it proves that evil old white men control America from the shadows. But if you visit /pol/, someone has looked up those 100 people or families on Wikipedia, and a huge number of them are not just white, but also Jewish. The overrepresentation of Jews in that sample is even larger than the overrepresentation of whites. By the article’s own logic, does that prove that old Jewish men control America from the shadows? Then /pol/ looks at who wrote the article, and it turns out that they’re Jewish too.
At that point, they’re going to claim that it’s all part of some overarching Jewish conspiracy, and you’re going to show them that they’re idiots and there is no such thing. But it doesn’t matter: the battle is already lost.
The problem is that /pol/ feeds right off the new anti-liberalism (post-liberalism?) of the left. If you want to destroy it, all you have to do is bring some life back into the old values of classical liberalism.
TD, I just wanted to thank you for your comments here. They mirror my own impressions/observations of the last few years exactly, as well as echoing my own yearning for a classical liberal alternative. It’s just a shame that we don’t currently have a great banner to rally under. Winter is coming, etc.
@Nita
“What? No, not at all ? I said “thank you” because I liked your comment, and thought that saying it might result in more interesting content being written (either by you or by other people).”
I’m not used to being thanked, that’s all, but thanks.
Very well said Outis
@houseboatonstyx: True, but that can be a substantial asset for someone whose job is mainly politics and fundraising, like a university president.
But my main point was that this radical’s definition of “white supremacy” as the whole system of structural racism was basically unknown to most university students as late as a decade ago. Even in a center of liberalism and racial justice most people thought it was absurd to call an African-American person a white supremacist. Now it’s pretty much a cornerstone of internet/campus social justice that anyone who isn’t sufficiently “woke” is complicit in white supremacy, regardless of their race.
How many political ideologies, of any stripe, really take root among the common people?
In the 2012 US election, just under 55% of people voted – so that’s 45% of people didn’t vote. While there are people who refuse to vote on principle, and people who are kept from voting, most people who don’t vote simply don’t care enough.
Beyond showing up and checking a box, actually being involved in politics in just about any way – being a member of a party, arguing on the internet even – suggests a greater-than-normal interest in politics.
And, people of common intelligence don’t start political movements, or really contribute in any way other than provide warm bodies.
I did not mean ‘common people’ as a grouping of the unintelligent. I meant it in opposition to ‘intellectuals’. You have to be minimally smart to be an intellectual, but that’s hardly sufficient.
You are, of course, right that people of common intelligence don’t start much of anything. Using Moldbug’s terminology, my argument is:
Brahmin + heresy = Death Eater.
Vaisya + heresy = Alt-Righter.
(Optimates are extinct, Dalits and Helots irrevelant.)
OK. It’s complicated, though, by the fact that, given we don’t know who’s a dog on the internet, we can’t really talk about the demographics of either group.
Additionally, the terms are poorly-defined, especially Alt-Right. What’s the central example of an Alt-Right site, or someone on the Alt-Right?
The Death Eaters and the types who are getting called Alt-Right now seem to have something in common that they don’t with, say, old-school neo-Nazis, and bear more resemblance to but are still apart from the Jared Taylor-style WNs (the ones who can get jobs without keeping their sleeves rolled down).
I was thinking of it as alt-right as a generic umbrella under which falls the Death Eaters, some of the PUA types (eg, Heartiste definitely is), the Jack Donovan Manly Men crew, and the pseudo-ironic Nazis, but evidently that’s not how people are using the term. Still, what all of these groups have in common is that it’s hard to imagine them existing without the internet.
4chan
I just Googled this guy, and now I have an almost overwhelming urge to make fun of him.
@dndnrsn
“What’s the central example of an Alt-Right site?”
/pol/ boards (4chan,8chan, and others), ThRghtStf, MyPstCrr, DlyStrmr, alternative right, and rdx spring to mind, as well as some loose and vast agglomeration of twitter users and Youtube channels.
Alt-Right (imo) essentially means “the populist nationalism orientated right wing outside of the mainstream consensus”, so it’s broad enough to cover both hardcore neo-nazis and non-mainstream conservatives in favor of some kind of nationalism.
It’s definitely an umbrella term, but I would say that the nazi elements have the loudest voices.
“Still, what all of these groups have in common is that it’s hard to imagine them existing without the internet.”
True, but is Donald Trump an alt-right candidate? He’s certainly breaking with the mainstream conservatives on immigration and providing an alternative, and that alternative is orientated towards populist civic-nationalism. Though that raises the question whether Donald Trump could have existed without the internet. Can anything exist without the internet anymore? Arg!
Bernie Sanders says that Open Borders is “a Koch brothers idea”. Is he a nationalist? Is there a nationalist left?
@Outis
One could describe him as a national socialist (although that would be a bit of a silly thing to do). I would say that in general, left-nationalism just means left-populism (the nationalism is a consequence of a populist approach to getting elected) but Sanders seems a bit different. I am not an American though, so my analysis may not be too accurate.
So, uh, I know I shouldn’t, but I really need to go on a libertarian rant here. The prison phone system is a national disgrace. The problem is that the government has instituted actively harmful regulations that allow well-connected and politically powerful rent-seekers to profit at the expense of less-well-connected and less-politically-powerful prisoners. Clearly the solution to this problem is to
get rid of the actively harmful regulationsADD A NEW SET OF REGULATIONS TO (imperfectly and at some cost) COUNTER THE HARM CAUSED BY THE FIRST SET. If anyone suggests that it would be better to have a free market in providing phone service to prisoners, rather than have a government-enforced monopoly engaged in constant battle with the government over how much it gets to exploit its government-granted monopoly status, they must be in the pay of Big Prison!The Non-Libertarian FAQ says:
But, if anything, I’d say the reverse situation is much more representative of reality. There’s a path that looks something like this:
1. There is a lightly-regulated market. It is good at ruthless economic efficiency and enthusiastic customer service and all the things markets are good at, but not so great at safety considerations and preparing for Black Swan events and all the things markets are bad at.
2. The government steps in to ‘fix’ these ‘market failures’, by adding regulations that forbid people from doing whatever caused the last high-profile problem in the market.
3. These regulations sorta-kinda-fix that problem, but at the cost of causing (more, larger) problems elsewhere in the market.
4. GOTO 2.
Is this overly paranoid? Maybe. But this does seem to be a frequently-recurring pattern. When US pharmaceutical regulations send the price of rarely-used drugs through the roof by driving competitors out of the market, the fix I’ve seen most commonly proposed is ‘leave the existing regulations the same, but pass extra laws forbidding drug companies from charging ‘exploitative’ prices.’ When US tax laws drive companies overseas by charging the same company wildly different tax rates depending on whether it is headquartered in the US or in Ireland, the actually implemented fix is to ‘leave the existing regulations the same, but pass extra laws specifically forbidding ‘exploitative’ mergers.’
Anyway. Rant over. Sorry about that.
Wait, so what’s the libertarian solution to the prison phone problem?
There isn’t one – unless one considers anti-monopolistic government regulation to be “libertarian”.
A lot of the time “libertarian” is synonymous with “anarcho-capitalism”, but it shouldn’t have to be this way. I think it’s because minarchism is taken to be a reluctant concession, rather than an enthusiastic endorsement of a minimal state, and anarcho-capitalism is taken to be the most logically consistent endpoint after you ask “if the market can do 99% of things better than the state, why is that 1% so necessary?”.
But minarchism is still a libertarian position. If you suppose a nightwatchmen state, and then you say “also, as well as gathering taxes for a national defense and police force, the state should split up monopolistic corporations” have you at that point suddenly left libertarianism? Yet, if all a state did was those things, the role of the state would be vastly limited and shrunk in scope compared to today. Libertarianism is a moving target.
If you apply a libertarian critique of inefficient big government to all large organizations, you can even manufacture a reason for taking action against monopolies. I’d like to consider this the fusion of libertarianism and distributism (distributarianism?)
(There’s always libertarian socialism, but then you are leaving the realm of private property entirely).
The libertarian solution to the prison phone problem is to permit prisoners to have cell phones, just like other people.
“Why call ’em cell phones if you can’t use them in cells?”
Maybe that’s why they’re called mobile phones in Europe (and “Handy” in German speaking countries which is a basically a misunderstanding of an English word that caught up) :))
By the way – another weird name for an everyday object is the Czech word “mikina” which means sweatshirt and is derived from “Mickey Mouse”.
I thought the libertarian solution would be to not have prisons.
That’s the Anarchist solution not the Libertarian one.
“That’s the Anarchist solution not the Libertarian one.”
It’s neither. One can imagine a stateless society in which some rights violations got punished by imprisonment, or a libertarian minarchy ditto. Or one of either that didn’t use imprisonment.
A stateless society wouldn’t have laws to violate in the first place. That’s what distinguishes Libertarians from Anarchists.
“A stateless society wouldn’t have laws to violate in the first place.”
It would not have government laws. It would have rules about how people could or could not interact, and private (and probably decentralized) mechanisms for enforcing them.
I can point you at either real world examples or an explanation of how such a system might work in a society more like ours, if you wish.
Given that prisoners collectively use a phone system provided and paid for by the prison and for legit reasons aren’t allowed their own phones or in many cases the money to buy them, what would a free market in prison phones look like? How is this not like suggesting a free market in prison food?
They don’t use a system provided and paid for by the prison; that *is* what a free market would look like. They pay out of the very limited amount of money they have for permission to use a system provided by the prison.
Giving out a dozen individual-prisoner-specific (so untradeable) one-minute-of-phone-call tokens with each breakfast would be a fine solution; once the system is effectively free at point of use, the incentives for the prison-runners to procure it as cheaply as possible line up correctly.
On the whole I’d rather allow the prisoners cellphones and have the prison run a single cell site which records both sides of all conversations and every packet of data passed through it.
You could have a “free-er” market, right? Let phone companies demonstrate that they comply with whatever security regulations the prison requires, then compete for business at the prisoner level.
Regarding security – college student unions and airports seem to have benefitted from some competition (under tight security in the case of airports), I don’t think it’s necessarily false that prisons couldn’t benefit.
The other day my car was wasn’t working right, so I – get this! – fixed it, instead of throwing it away and walking everywhere, instead
People speak a lot of about “status” these days, but the definitions are murky. Does anyone know of any good academic review of the concept?
When did people start to talk about status this and status that? Who did? Economists? Sociologists? Anthropologists?
I can’t point you at any academic works, but as far as I can tell, the term in its current internet usage originated from
Impro, by Keith Johnstone.
Anyone have any other point-of-origin references?
This is quite unexpected. I’ll take a look, thanks.
Robert Liguori is right about Impro being the origin of the concept as used among the Overcoming Bias and LessWrong crowd. But I onced asked your precise question on LW and it was helpfully pointed out that social scientists talk about status under the names of “prestige” and “dominance” (which are different kinds of status).
If those search results are anything to go by, they also talk about status — as a superset of prestige and dominance.
Yes, I didn’t mean to suggest they don’t use the term “status” at all. They just tend to be more explicit about the subdivision into different kinds of status.
My guess: “dominance” is the aspect of status shaped by natural selection, “prestige” is the aspect of status shaped by sexual selection.
Those are the same thing, at least in the animal kingdom.
@ Viliam and Anon
I don’t even know what to say, to either of you. OK, let’s fall back on the classics:
1. What makes you think that?
2. What would evidence against your hypothesis look like?
My hypothesis suggests that whatever social scientists call “dominance” would apply across species (at least among primates), while whatever social scientists call “prestige” would be quite specific for Homo Sapiens.
For example, if you would list top 5 typical ways each of these two categories manifests in humans, and then you would give the list to someone who studies apes, for the “dominance” list they would say “yeah, this is what high-status apes do, too”, while the things from the “prestige” list would either not apply to non-humans, or you would have to find an analogy, and probably find out that for the ape this specific thing is relatively less important than for a human.
So the evidence against my hypothesis would be to find it the other way round, or to have no such obvious difference among the lists.
I don’t know whether this is relevant, but when I hear about dominance, I keep contemplating the fact that football players are controlled by people who are much less physically dangerous.
> Your understanding is surface level and idiotic.
Someone here is showing a lack of understanding, anyway.
I thought it was good to let the anon experiment run for a while and see how it played out over a few weeks. Minuses much more noticeable than the pluses, I’m afraid.
@ Viliam
Um, wait. Your original hypothesis was about natural selection and sexual selection. Do you think sexual selection is specific to Homo sapiens?
Anyway, here’s an example of social status. A family group of African elephants is led by a so-called ‘matriarch’, who is usually but not always the oldest female. Other family members defer to her decisions (when and where to go, how to react to the presence of lions etc.), and older matriarchs seem to make better decisions. Do you think elephants follow their leader because they fear her (dominance) or for some other reason (prestige)? Is this arrangement shaped by natural or sexual selection?
You are equivocating on “controlled”. In this context, saying that a football player is controlled by a less physically dangerous person means that he obeys football-related orders from that person.
The fact that the law forces him to obey *other* orders is irrelevant to whether the law forces him to obey the orders in question. If the owner tells him to throw the ball somewhere and he refuses, the owner can fire him and tell him to get off the property, but he can still refuse to throw that ball, and if he refuses, the law won’t make him do it.
@ Jiro:
The sort of “control” exercised by a referee or the owner over an individual player is identical to that exercised by the police or a political leader over an individual citizen.
A player can refuse to throw the ball and you can refuse to obey the law.
If a policeman tells you to do something within his area of influence and you refuse, he has a special right to use force against you that would not otherwise be permitted. If a football team owner tells you as a player to do something within his area of influence and you refuse, he does not. He can fire you and keep you off his land, but that’s something he’s allowed to do whether you disobey him or not; furthermore, if he does that and you still don’t obey the original order, he’s stuck with you not obeying.
The anon tried to confuse matters by pointing out that the football team owner can use government force to get a player to obey the keep-off-my-land order. But that’s a separate order from the original one.
And where exactly does that “right” come from? and what makes it so “special”? From my PoV that’s the part that smells like equivocation.
Weber was talking about status (literally– it’s the same word in German) by World War I, so sociologists, probably. Contemporary usage seems to be a weird hybrid of the concept popularized by Weber and dominance as understood by ethologists, so maybe Schjelderup-Ebbe and Konrad Lorenz deserve some credit too.
Thanks.
Was Weber mentioning status as an obvious concept, or did he actually define it at length somewhere?
It’s weird that we have papers On Bullshit but nobody bothered to make a proper review of Status. There’s an academic chance for PhDs out there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Bourdieu
Relevant to Tribes / Outgroup / Belgium Discussion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JREkqCvLzSo
From the movie Bernie (Richard Linklater director of A Scanner Darkly and Boyhood) a man being interviewed explains the five subdivisions of Texas. (I have heard it is twice as funny if you are actually from Texas)
I will also vouch for the movie.
Suppose someone invited you to an adventure that you had to keep secret, and it turned out to be really cool….
The semi-sad story of how it worked out in the real world.
Also, didn’t anyone think “Gee, that white oak slide looks kind of expensive, where is the money coming from?”?
There’s the seed of a pretty good novel here.
(Also reminds me of “The Game”, the 1997 Fincher film.)
There was also a GK Chesterton short story based on a smaller version of the concept.
I’m mostly interested in the question of how people could have that much fun without it taking so much money.
Good question. I guess you’d have to ask whether the people involved are looking mainly for a secret social club, or for a real-life adventure game.
I think you could easily make the former self-financing, but you’d have a lot of trouble funding the latter without a large up-front price tag or sketchy multi-level buy-in schemes: every puzzle piece can be modeled as a transaction, and the money for that has to come from somewhere.
I’ve often toyed with the idea of setting up two secret societies, each with the sole goal of infiltrating the other. Also, you could try joining a traditional secret society (the Freemasons or similar).
In Worm, while the Undersiders (other than Tattletale) were in the dark as to who the mysterious boss funding their operations was, they mostly avoided asking embarrassing questions that would “look a gift horse in the mouth”.
Vox’s Libya article is terrible. As far as I can tell, the position is (1) although the rebels had basically lost by the time the US/British/French coalition intervened, and although Quadaffi had publically stated he would not seek reprisals on anyone who fled Benghazi or sheltered in place without weapons, it’s possible that he would suddenly start killing 2 or 3 orders of magnitude more people than he had killed before; (2) although the current situation is undeniably awful, it’s possible that it will eventually get better — therefore, it’s at least not metaphysically impossible that we have improved things.
Justification then:
http://reason.com/archives/2011/04/04/obamas-war-of-choice
Current situation:
https://www.hrw.org/news/2015/09/29/un-human-rights-council-human-rights-situation-libya
Now it’s possible Vox is right, but the same logic seems to apply to every other military action in the world. If our standard is “it’s not impossible that things would have been worse if we didn’t drop those bombs,” shouldn’t we look at W a lot more compassionately?
I wouldn’t normally plug my blog here, but some commentors had expressed interest, so I’d like to let them know that I’ve posted a threshing of the spring anime season: https://suntzuanime.wordpress.com/2016/04/19/threshing-spring-2016/
Glad to see it! I’d begun to worry you had given up blogging these!
most excellent! Enjoyed these greatly, and considering to picking one or two up for my semi-annual attempt to enjoy anime again.
I think it would be even more effectively altruist if you did a post about the anime that survived after three or four episodes. Ideally, narrow it down to one or zero anime to watch per season.
The only EA that the Sun Tzu Anime blog endorses is Excellent Anime.
@TD: You wrote, in two separate posts:
The illustrations in future histories are going to be weird.
This is something I’ve been thinking about – the self-described “traditionalists” tend to be among those most opposed to Muslim immigration, but the worst fears of those opposed to such immigration look quite similar to the traditionalists’ dream society. A “traditional” Christian society looks more like a “traditional” Muslim society, and vice versa, than either looks to a modern Western society. Even the far-right who are less traditionalist still tend to be, by any reasonable standard, very hostile to things like LGBT rights, feminism, etc.
You are right that there is a weird contradiction: in the one corner, you have socially very left-wing people advocating immigration policy that has the potential to make society considerably more conservative and more hostile to people like them; in the other you have socially very right-wing people proclaiming that they are defending their societies (which they tend to define on ethnic grounds), but simultaneously condemning those societies as degenerate (eg, the combination of mocking “SWPLs” and bemoaning the rising rates of illegitimacy, etc among the white working class).
(W/R/T my question as to what “alt-right” is)
But the examples you give are all offshoots of a particular corner of the internet. “Old-fashioned” neo-Nazis, KKK, their equivalents in Europe, etc are nowhere to be found – they’re dinosaurs who probably wouldn’t know a dank meme if one bit them in the ass, and who accomplish little more than the occasional hate crime where they outnumber the victim(s) considerably, getting beaten up by antifa who outnumber them considerably, or being protected from antifas by the police (who represent the state the neo-Nazis detest). The “WN in a suit and tie” types like Jared Taylor are influences, but are not the direct progenitors.
Going by what you are saying, it is possible to view the whole “internet culture war” as a bizarre civil war between elements originating on one or two internet forums about a decade ago. Which is a weird thought.
He’s a fairly garden-variety right-wing populist, but the alt-right seems to have latched on to him in the same way that people in the US who were quite left-wing latched on to Obama in 2008: they’ve projected what they want onto him. Consider how many (by American standards) almost-far-left university students were dismayed when Obama turned out to be a centrist Democrat.
Trump’s candidacy would probably not have flourished without the internet, because he would have gotten a lot less free publicity.
Also: it says something that a Republican with, for the Republican party, centrist positions on most things other than immigration (and, evidently, his views on immigration have considerable support – just not from the mainstream Republican leadership) is viewed as being extremely right wing – but the fascists were not across the board extremely right wing. The Italian Fascists and the NSDAP both advocated policies that could be considered “socialist” but they substituted other struggles for class struggle: for the Italians, national, for the Germans, national/racial. If anything, that Trump is not on the right wing of the Republican party in most things makes him more like a fascist.
It’s not a contradiction unless you insist on viewing people as interchangeable.
If the West is decadent, that’s bad news for westerners and good news for our enemies. If Islam is vital, that’s good news for for muslims and bad news for their enemies. In a struggle your enemy’s weakness is your strength and their strength is your weakness.
It is more a contradiction on parts of the left: it was very weird seeing how a lot of left-wingers responded to the Cologne attacks, for instance.
However, regarding the (far) right-wing part of this equation – surely defending something requires that it be worth defending? Additionally, the argument can be made that what TD means when he says “liberalism” is and has been a strong element of some European cultures – at least, NW Euro ones – for quite some time now. Hell, I think Nick Land makes this point, even.
Why not just get on board with Mark Steyn? As he puts it:
>surely defending something requires that it be worth defending?
Just because I think my car needs to be fixed doesn’t mean I’m OK with it being stolen.
There is some point where it’s not your car anymore.
Aren’t there examples of right-wing protestors in Europe bringing the message “protect our women from the foreigners” and local feminists seeing that and responding “we’re not your women”?
No matter how much they think they can/should, feminists really, really, really have no right to vouch for women other than themselves.
Because Mark Steyn is, by his own words, either an idiot or one hell of a callous bastard.
An actual Islamist take over in the US would necessarily involve the same sort of atrocities that the Yazidis and Coptic Christians have become all too familiar with. People you know, including members of your own family, would be killed plundered enslaved and/or violated both during the initial conquest and periodically afterwards as part of the Jizya.
Besides, even in the best case scenario where you can just fly a green flag over your neighborhood and have the Ghazis pass over you, your people will still cease to exist soon enough. A very insular people might avoid intermixing completely but even then there would be clear marks of the occupation in their genomes detectable centuries later.
This is the white nationalist motte-and-bailey.
Bailey: “Muslim immigration will erase the white race, by means of creating a caliphate that murders white people.” Uncontroversially bad—but also not very plausible.
Motte: “Muslim immigration will erase the white race, by means of interbreeding.” More plausible—but not very bad, if it’s bad at all.
Motte: “Muslim immigration will erase the white race, by means of interbreeding.” More plausible—but not very bad, if it’s bad at all.
Depends on how it is accomplished. If by means of an enforced patriarchy, in which the father absolutely determines the religious status and upbringing of his children, and if Muslim men are allowed to marry Christian(*) women but Christian men are prohibited from marrying Muslim women, I’m seeing several objectionable aspects of that before we even get to the nigh-genocidal extinction of Christianity at the end. And this strikes me as a quite plausible relationship between Islam and Christianity, on account of history.
* White atheists would be well advised, in this hypothetical, to let their Muslim neighbors quietly go on believing that all white people are Christians until proven otherwise.
Steyn was, within context, being facetious, and raising the first part of the parallel I was making: that it’s more than a little bit counterintuitive that those who have the most to lose in some hypothetical right-wing-dystopian-fantasy “Muslims take over” scenario, are often the loudest voices in favour of Muslim immigration/against those against Muslim immigration.
Steyn’s remark is true, in the sense that a heterosexual traditionalist Christian man can expect to feel much less oppression under a Muslim theocracy than a feminist or a gay or lesbian person.
That doesn’t mean the traditionalist Christian would prefer it to the status quo.
The “white race” is a red herring, unless you think traditionalist Christians are largely white nationalists.
Motte: “Muslim immigration will erase the white race, by means of interbreeding.” More plausible—but not very bad, if it’s bad at all.
Somehow I’m reminded of the lukewarmist position on AGW.
Ok, I’ve completely lost the thread at this point.
If people are genuinely having difficulty distinguishing Christianity from white nationalism and crude barracks humor from honest-to-Adolf Nazism it’s time to call it a day.
The interaction of Muslim patriarchialism with the British legal system is pretty clear; if a Muslim father and an agnostic mother divorce, the mother gets the kids, and the fact that the father has asserted he has a religious right to the kids means the mother also gets an injunction that the father doesn’t get access to the kids’ passports. The father wants the kids circumcised; the mother doesn’t; the court declares that the kids get to decide and that this decision must be made at a point that the kids decide the consequences. http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Fam/2016/849.html
>This is something I’ve been thinking about – the self-described “traditionalists” tend to be among those most opposed to Muslim immigration, but the worst fears of those opposed to such immigration look quite similar to the traditionalists’ dream society. A “traditional” Christian society looks more like a “traditional” Muslim society, and vice versa, than either looks to a modern Western society. Even the far-right who are less traditionalist still tend to be, by any reasonable standard, very hostile to things like LGBT rights, feminism, etc.
The Ideology Is Not The Movement
I don’t buy that.
The left generally has ideology which favors the Third World and the oppressed. Muslims are considered oppressed; favoring them helps alleviate their oppression. Therefore, a society with lots of Muslims in it does look closer to the left’s dream society–it has less oppression in it.
And I don’t think you even need to go that far in the context of Mexican immigration. Mexican immigrants (and people living near them, whose votes count more because of the presence of the Mexicans, due to Evenwel v. Abbott) vote for Democrats and for more social programs. It is true that Mexicans are also likely to be conservative in other ways, but there are clear ways in which more Mexican immigrants would produce a society more to the liking of the left.
That explains why the left likes them, but not why the right does not.
That explains why the left likes them, but not why the right does not.
The right has different ideas about oppression and thinks that Muslims would bring more of it (terrorism, for instance).
This kind of assumes that there’s an inability to realize that the oppressed are capable of oppressing others in turn, though.
Isn’t that somewhat obvious? The Catholic church and Daesh, say, agree on lots of things as well. They’re both theocratic institutions, they are both in favor of more traditional gender roles, such societies in general, aren’t especially fond of gays, abortion, atheism, contraception, what have you. Does that mean they get along on a grand scale?
A few points, mostly in reply to TD but thanks for starting the new tree
1) I don’t think the 1488s and the dank memers are the same group. You’ve got real neo-Nazis hiding among the dank memers (some of them rather obvious) but most of them just seem to be enjoying the transgressive humor. And the thing about transgressive humor is the more the “serious” people try to clamp down on it, the more enjoyable it becomes.
2) We’re so far from some sort of white nationalism now that worrying about them first and foremost seems odd. We’re at the point where the mainstream political response to an attack by Islamic terrorists is to call for a crackdown on “Islamophobia”. This is perverse. And it’s a large part of what’s giving the white nationalists popularity, as others have pointed out. If “good” has entered you into a suicide pact, “evil” starts looking like a viable option. Relativism is not dead; it’s still in charge. It’s certainly going to die one way or another, but I’d prefer that not be through Islamists taking over in fact if not in name, which at this point seems a LOT more likely than white nationalists doing so.
3) Some of the apparent neo-Nazi support for Trump, particularly online, is likely orchestrated by his opponents.
4) Traditionalism can be found without ethnic-nationalism, though not so much online. This is the domain of the paleoconservative. But they aren’t _that_ traditional compared to traditional Islam. Perhaps a few groups like the Hassidim or the Amish are as traditional, but they’d be obvious targets under an Islamic theocracy. The guy whose idea of traditional is working a blue collar job while his wife stays home (or perhaps works as a secretary or teacher or other ‘traditional’ feminine profession) and raises his 2.7 kids in a house with a white picket fence and goes to church on Sunday after which he has a barbeque (probably featuring pork) with his traditional neighbors… well, he’s out of step with modern society, but not nearly as out of step as he would be with Islam.
1) OK, what do you mean by “neo-Nazi”? When I think “neo-Nazi”, I think neo-Nazi skinhead – they’re the 1488 crowd; the actual NSDAP didn’t use sooper clevr number codes or cover themselves in tattoos. Some of the green frog Nazi crowd are closer to historical Nazis than the neo-Nazis are.
2. It’s publicly unacceptable, that much is true, and it hardly has a big share of the opinion pie, polite or otherwise. But things can change really quickly.
3. But it seems to have done little to turn off potential supporters. The things that would lose Trump the nomination are mostly due to his own character flaws, and the things that would lose him the general are mostly demographic.
4. Online? What about the whole “women-in-wheat-fields-spells-Europe-with-a-V” shtick?
To qualify as a neo-Nazi you have to at least have hatred or contempt for Jews, to the point of seeing Jews as less than human. That’s the big thing separating Nazism from the various other totalitarian ideologies, and so I find it to be an essential feature. You have to also desire to bring some sort of authoritarian or totalitarian system where this view would be realized; just being a cranky anti-Semite idiot doesn’t qualify you. Maybe there are other qualifications.
Snazzy uniforms. No way you can be a Nazi in a flame shirt, shorts and fedora.
Re: #2
This is the basis of my opposition to the left. FFS, I’m pro legalizing damned near everything, from prostitution to hard drugs. I’m an atheist, a scientist, resolutely opposed to religious dogma and dedicated to the negative rack of personal and political freedoms. I uphold the ideal of perfectly equal treatment under the law for people of every race, sex and sexual orientation. In any sane society, I’d be pretty far left.
But I can’t be. I have to be a on the right, because I don’t actively want to import muslim terrorists on taxpayer’s dime to murder my fellow citizens, then blame the victims for being insufficiently solicitous of psychotic religious fanatics. If this be the far right, if this be racism, if this be nazism, then that’s what I’ll be. I don’t care that much about the labels. I care about the principles.
“a barbeque (probably featuring pork) with his traditional neighbors… well, he’s out of step with modern society, but not nearly as out of step as he would be with Islam.”
Islamic law does not forbid Christians from eating pork or drinking wine.
“Islamic law does not forbid Christians from eating pork or drinking wine.”
I know that, and you know that, but does the Committee for Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice know that? It doesn’t matter whether said committee and their religious police are actually “traditionalist Islam” as defined by Islamic law; my red-tribe traditional Christian is worried about what might actually happen, not what Islamic law says.
No, but it also doesn’t forbid muslims killing christians any time they damned well please. Especially if someone can accuse them of doing something “blasphemous”.
And, as has been noted elsewhere, religion in book and religion in practice can vary tremendously.
From my experience, christians serve a role in muslim communities much like that of jews in medieval europe. They provide services muslims are prohibited from providing themselves (loans and alcohol mostly), and are murdered en masse any time the local leadership needs to distract from some scandal. Everyone loves a good christian-burning!
s/especially/only
And more generally, dial it back a bit. As you note, the practice of religion varies tremendously, and most people here can recognize the brand of BS that comes with painting the worst abuses of Islam as the textually-sanctioned norm. In most parts of the world, a Muslim who kills a Christian on the basis of nothing more than his damned pleasure and a bare accusation of blasphemy, is going to jail. Very likely for life and/or less than a year.
I suspect you actually have zero “experience” with Muslim communities (or are using “experience”, “Muslim communities” or “Christian burning” in a non-standard fashion).
“No, but it also doesn’t forbid muslims killing christians any time they damned well please. ”
“It” being religious law.
You are mistaken. Killing a member of the tolerated religions is murder, just like killing a Muslim. The results are not identical, with the details depending on which school of law you follow. Typically the diya is less than for killing a Muslim, but still substantial.
What actual Muslims do may, as you suggest, not fit the rules of fiqh, but your comment was about the law.
@Sweeney, be as suspicious as you like. I’m a quarter Lebanese, much of my extended family is Arab and Muslim. I lived in the middle East for about three years. I was there for the religious cleansing of Baghdad, where a community of around eighty thousand was reduced to about ten. Not ten thousand, ten. I have personally bagged the burned bodies. So you stay suspicious, and I’ll stay in reality.
@Sastan
That sounds awful, and I uncast my aspersions on you (although they remain fully cast on other commenters). However, Iraq contains only a couple of percent of the world’s Muslims, and only a few of those burn Christians. Furthermore, there is approximately zero intersection between the set of Christian-burners and the set of Muslims SSC readers are likely to interact with, so I think it is very misleading to refer to “Muslim communities” as murdering Christians, without quantification.
@sweeneyrod et al:
I was going to write my own rather long reply, but after Sastan’s much of what I would have said feels redundant. There is one additional thing that I think needs to be pointed out though.
The hard-core Wahhabis who engage in things like honor killings and the occasional lynch mob may be on the edges, but they are not outside the Overton window. Saying …there is approximately zero intersection between the set of Christian-burners and the set of Muslims SSC readers are likely to interact with. Tells us much more about SSC than it does about Islam as it is currently practiced in a large part of the world.
There seems to be a tendency among SSC readers to forget that we are the weird ones here.
@hlynkacg
I was working under the assumption that discussions about Muslims were about politics, how we and our governments should behave regarding Muslims, discussing questions such as “Should our countries accept Muslim refugees?”. For these questions, the relevant Muslims are the ones that SSC readers are likely to interact with. Discussing another set of Muslims is like bringing up the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association in a discussion about English Catholic schools — irrelevant and potentially misleading.
The relevant Muslims are the ones who would come in through the refugee process (and their descendants), not the ones SSC readers would interact with. I would expect the average SSC reader to have next to no interaction with this group.
@sweeneyrod
As Jaskologist says, the relevant Muslims are the ones that we are debating whether or not to let in.
By your own analogy, secularized western (rationalist-adjacent) Muslims are not representative of Middle Eastern refugees and introducing them to the discussion is, at best, missing the point and at worst muddying the waters.
@Hlynkacg
I think we disagree on what Muslim refugees are likely to be like. My sample size of one suggests “much more intelligent and liberal than the median citizen of my country”.
The problem is that the muslims we are likely to come in contact with are middle-class, well-educated, and westernized. But also completely unrepresentative of their average countryman.
This is a mistake that they themselves make all the time.
In the Iranian Revolution, the bourgeoise joined forces with the Islamists because they thought they would be in charge; instead they got shafted.
In the “Arab Spring”, they wanted to overthrow semi-secular dictators and have a democracy, only to find out that most people in their country voted for the Islamists.
In Syria, the westernized bourgeoise supported the rebellion and we believed them, but then they were completely drowned out by the islamists, to the point that when the CIA wanted to arm a brigade of “democratic” fighters, they found maybe five of them. Now Syria is full of ISIS and the “moderate” faction is Al Quaeda.
Even in Turkey, it’s been one century since Ataturk forced it to Westernize, and if you asked any Turk you were likely to meet in the West, they’d swear up and down that they were European and wanted to join the EU. But as soon as the army stopped intervening in politics and banning non-secular parties, what happened? They voted in a near-Islamist government, which is now trying to turn into a dictatorship.
The Westernized bourgeoise in the Middle East are very nice people, perfectly capable of integrating into Europe or America, and completely irrelevant if you want to understand anything about their countries.
@Outis
Pretty much exactly right. It’s sort of like how Bill Maher once said that there are enough Well-educated, secular liberals (read: Blue-triber describing his own tribe) in the USA to fill one or two european countries, it’s just that they’re surrounded by twice as many dumb theocratic racist americans (blue-triber description of the Red-tribe). There are maybe 20 or 30 million people in the arab world who could integrate into america or europe almost without a hitch (and until now this is the only type of arab most americans have encountered in their own country, though europeans aren’t so lucky), but they’re surrounded by probably 200 million religious conservatives and maybe 50-100 million who could fairly be described as islamists or jihadists.
@ sweeneyrod
I could go on for another paragraph or two but I think Outis & Duckofdeath pretty much nailed it.
It’s not perverse when the overreaction to terrorism is indeed the bigger threat than the terrorism itself. (I mean, it is perverse, but the perversity is on the part of the overreactors, not those condemning them.)
By far the greater harm done to me as a result of 9/11 has been at the hands of the US government than at the hands of Bin Laden. If the government had just shrugged, dropped a few bombs on Afghanistan, and put a big bounty on Osama, then it would frankly have been pretty minor.
But no, they have to start two huge nation-building efforts, lay down a huge amount of new financial (!!) regulation, start spying on everyone, and make air travel considerably more inconvenient and hassling.
And it’s the same way in Europe: a couple of terrorist incidents, and it’s time to close the borders and vote in ethno-nationalists! Thus inflicting a far greater harm than the terrorists themselves would have been able to.
“How many people have to die before we wake up and stop Muslim immigration?” I don’t know, but it’s a lot fucking more. It’s simply a question of “seen and unseen”. Some Muslim killing a bunch of people is what is seen. The actual benefits provided by the vast majority of peaceful, civilized Muslims are unseen.
What should we do to stop Islamist terrorism? Frankly, I think “not that much”, because it’s not that big of a problem. But if we’re going to overreact to Islamist terrorism, how about we go over there and drop nukes on ISIS and Iran? Make the governments promoting Islamist terrorism surrender unconditionally (or obliterate them), and then threaten to give the same treatment to any new ones that spring up. Do I think would be worth the cost in money and innocent human lives? Not really.
Yet I’m a hell of a lot more in favor of that than of restricting our own freedoms, including the freedom to associate with and employ foreigners. And hell, the vast majority of the immigration restrictions have no logical connection whatsoever to Muslim terrorism anyway. “Muslims are raping and killing everybody; therefore, let’s throw out the Mexicans!” That doesn’t even make sense!
This reminds me of how my mother is always going on about how the political situation nowadays is so scary and dangerous what with ISIS and North Korea, etc. etc.
I say to her “…didn’t you live through the Cuban Missile Crisis and Vietnam War?” This does not convince her, somehow, that we are not living in an age of unusual geopolitical danger and unrest (when really, quite the opposite is true–but we get more reporting on it now).
More like misreaction. Overreaction implies that it is broadly the correct way to deal with things, but taken too far.
Want to remove islamic terrorism from Europe? Forbid muslims to live and travel there. This will be throwing the baby with the bathwater, sure, will have wide-ranging economic consequences, yes, but it will solve the problem of islamic terrorism at home. That’s, arguably, overreaction.
The actual response undertaken by the US, at least, is blaming entities who had nothing to do with the attacks, destroying stability and actually making the problem it purported to solve worse.
He said “Islamophobia,” not the general War on Terror. The people who rail against “Islamophobia” haven’t opposed “nation-building” and internal spying for nearly 8 years now (indeed, the original Iraq invasion was explicitly Islamophilic, premised as it was on the idea that Muslims were being held back by repressive governments and would do much better if they could elect their leaders).
By what metric is Muslim terrorism negligible, but Islamophobia a grave threat that must be combatted?
To the extent that irrationally excessive fear of Muslim terrorism encourages people to e.g. close the borders of Europe to refugees and elect nationalist politicians who will “do something” about it, it’s a far bigger threat than Muslim terrorism.
I’m not defending the idea that “Islam is a religion of peace”. Islam is a horrible religion that, when people follow it consistently, causes them to do horrible things. But then so is Christianity. The question is to what extent people are going to follow it consistently. The problem is not that people don’t consider Islam a wonderful thing. The problem is that people vastly exaggerate the degree to which the average Muslim immigrant is going to be motivated by it to carry out attacks. As a result they advocate measures that would be justified by the facts they imagine, but which are not justified by the facts in reality.
That’s not to say I don’t think Muslim terrorism is a problem at all. And I don’t think the program of the left about what to do about it—more welfare, more multiculturalism—is correct. But neither do I think the plan of the conservative right is correct.
As for nation-building in Iraq being “Islamophilic”, sure, to some extent. That is, it was motivated by delusionally high estimates of Iraqi people’s ability and willingness to spontaneously form a liberal democracy. However, I also oppose the fatalistic idea of “these people can’t be civilized; that’s just how they are”. The biggest problem with the nation-building was that they reversed the order of the goals: “let’s build a democracy and then expect it to turn out liberal”, versus a more rational policy of “let’s set up liberal institutions and then gradually bring in democracy”.
If it had been done with the kind of mentality the US displayed in regard to post-Imperial Japan, I think it could have gone better. But that would also have been far more costly on the part of the US—and I doubt it would really have been worth it. And of course basically colonizing Iraq goes totally against the progressive (but also conservative, see nationalism!) idea of the self-determination of nations being the highest goal.
But I digress. While to some extent excessively high estimates of Iraqis played a role in the invasion, I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that it was motivated and supported in large part—if not “Islamophobia”—then an excessive fear of the danger posed by Islamist terrorism. Obviously, Iraq had played not part in caussing 9/11. But do you deny that 9/11 played a major role in increasing American support for intervention in the Middle East and in Iraq in particular? Because I certainly think it did.
And if so, then the reaction to the terrorism was the greater problem than the terrorism. Whether the reaction is specifically “Islamophobia” or something more broad like “Arabophobia” or “terrorismphobia” is not really something that excessively concerns me.
That’s a strange thing to claim.
A consistent paleoislamic interpretation yields a jihadi, someone who wishes to conquer all of the Earth for the glory of Allah, by whatever means, including otherwise immoral ones – including direct force of arms, genocide and deceitful infiltration.
A consistent paleochristian interpretation yields a celibate, pacifist, martyr-candidate missionary, who goes around the world spreading the word and trying to convince others to do the same.
@ Anonymous:
Until the Christian realizes that doesn’t work to bring about conformity to orthodox religious belief.
Now, if you want to argue that St. Augustine is not being consistent with Christianity here, fine. But then the liberal Muslims argue that the jihadists are being inconsistent with Islam.
In fact, they are contradictory creeds; you can find arguments in them to support either peace or violence. The problem is that the arguments for the necessity of employing coercion to bring about the coercion of “obstinate” heretics to orthodoxy are very strong and convinced the leading scholars of Christianity for at least a thousand years.
It’s not that St. Augustine is not consistent (I believe he is; there is more than one consistent interpretation of Christianity – but there is dogmatically only one correct interpretation), but that he is not paleo. By Augustine’s time, Christianity had ventured far ahead, in theological and practical terms, of the early Followers of the Way.
@ Anonymous:
Fair enough.
But Luther and Calvin, or for that matter the Anabaptists of Münster, considered themselves to be returning to “paleo-Christianity”.
And their idea was eventually we’ll all live in peace and harmony. But first we’ve to got to build up the military power to resist the depredations of the Papists. Then we’ll bring the light of truth to everyone. Once we’re in charge, everything will be fine.
You can make a case (and it’s not a terrible case) that absolute non-violence is the only true “paleo-Christian” policy. But it’s not a very effective policy. And it doesn’t take much to go from throwing money-changers out of the temple and “Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword,” to: we should use force to throw the sellers of indulgences out of the “temple”.
@Vox, there is a huge difference in the level and amount of violence sanctioned or directly practiced by Jesus and by Muhammad, according to both history and to the scriptures held as sacred by the Christians and Muslims, respectively. I know it would be more convenient for the argument you’re making if it weren’t so, but it really is. It’s not even a situation where you can sort of bend the truth a little to make it fit. If you insist, you’re just going to damage your own argument.
I think it makes more sense to say that it doesn’t matter what Islam truly says; as long as people who call themselves Muslims can live a peaceful version of Islam, no matter how bastardized, that’s ok with us. And if letting them be watered-down Muslims is an easier path to peace than convincing them not to be Muslims any more, so be it. For completely self-serving reasons.
“Vox, there is a huge difference in the level and amount of violence sanctioned or directly practiced by Jesus and by Muhammad, according to both history and to the scriptures held as sacred by the Christians and Muslims, respectively.”
Vox is aware of that. The problem is that you can have faith x say “kill the unbeliever” 40 times and faith y say “kill the unbeliever” once and get both interpreted as “kill the unbeliever” (yes, I’m aware the New Testament doesn’t say that; it is an example of how severity in the text doesn’t have a 1-1 correlation even with literalism).
The problem for Islam is it does in fact talk a lot about conquering others. The upside of this is it also has set limits on said conquest.
The problem for Christianity is it doesn’t talk about how to run a society at all. You can do logical extrapolation, turn to the Old Testament or attempt to run a commune. Historically people have tried 1 and 2.
It is a bit like the complaint about Marxism- sure it doesn’t demand gulags, but there isn’t really any other way to deal with the flood of individuals engaging in 1st degree yardsale.
Skinner:
I’d call that a feature.
Why not both?
“Going by what you are saying, it is possible to view the whole “internet culture war” as a bizarre civil war between elements originating on one or two internet forums about a decade ago.”
Somethingawful Vs 4chan?
The funny thing is that they were much more like each other in the beginning. Somethingawful and 4chan largely diverged on purpose through rivalry.
There’s also a parallel in that 4chan has generated nationalist ideology via ironic racism. In the case of somethingawful, the subforum laissez faire was taken over by jokers making up ever more extreme left wing philosophies like “Maoism Third Worldism” (not to be confused with Mao’s third world theory), which states that only third worlders are proletarian, and nowadays has sincere advocates (see Jason Unruhe). Eventually the memes became real, and the sub-forum became populated by proto-SJWs.
The first time as tragedy, the second time as farce?
Yeah, Something Awful vs. 4Chan is like a textbook example of Robber’s Cave style phylogenesis. I hung out with goons back in 2002-4, and was casually acquainted with a bunch of channers; at the time, practically none of the distinctions we see now had evolved. They both had anti-authoritarian, centrist to center-left politics with a few libertarians, typical of the Internet at the time. Edgy jokes about race and gender but no real malice. No particular opinions on social justice, but rabidly anti-censorship. Lots of memes, with both accusing the other of ripping off their style (probably both were right). Full of anime perverts.
4Chan was always a little cruder, thanks to its looser moderation, and contempt was always part of SA’s culture. But at the time the difference really wasn’t that dramatic. Over the next few years, though, SA slowly developed an image of itself as… not exactly clean-cut, but aloof, progressive, well-informed, sophisticated. Snobby, even. The SJW takeover in the early 2010s looked pretty sudden from the outside, but the culture had been evolving toward it for a while.
Similar changes happened to 4Chan, but in other directions.
Funny, I was only vaguely aware of goon culture but I feel like the same cultural changes happened to the webcomic community while they were happening at SA. I wonder if it was spillover from the goons or parallel development.
I’d be interested in an overview of what you think happened to the webcomic community. I’m a webcomic fan, but I don’t pay attention to any community dynamics, so I’d be interested to learn.
Maybe it wasn’t all webcomics, just the ones I read regularly. There wasn’t a sudden break or anything (except with Sinfest) and some of it is the natural dynamics of people joining and leaving…but it feels like 10-15 years ago the popular webcomics were smugly apolitical and the fan community had a decent mix of liberals and conservatives, Christians and atheists, etc. Gradually comics started getting more and more explicitly political, with the forums/comment sections becoming an echo chamber for social justice leftism, and that reinforced itself.
I’m thinking specifically about Shortpacked going from an affectionate parody of the toy industry to being mainly about calling out misogyny/racism/anti-LGBT attitudes in media. Clearly some people enjoyed that stuff but I just found it tiresome – yes, it’s a cruel world full of cruel people, how many times do you need to say it? This affected me because I was a big fan of the strip and its predecessor. In fact the IW/SP fan community was my online “home” for years, and seeing storytelling and humor give way to ranting and outrage hurt.
I think there’s an argument for it happening in the broader webcomic community. The popular early webcomics were (fucking awful, but also) generally apolitical, and often also one or more of: dadaist, profane, erotic, and incredibly nerdy. (Sexy Losers, for example, was all of the above.) As the medium matured, politics crept in, and the rest of that stuff crept out or was banished to niche corners, with a couple of dinosaurs grandfathered in.
You could see a capsule version of the process in Dresden Codak, which has been around long enough to cover the whole arc. Its early comics were almost like XKCD or SMBC, except more adventure-oriented and less comedy. Later it got much more plot-heavy and less referential. While the comic itself was still fairly independent of politics at the time I stopped reading it, the Aaron Diaz brand as a whole grew a lot more oriented towards feminist and leftist cultural criticism, with his strongfemaleprotagonist held up as a model.
(Now, said protagonist was and is blatantly fantasy-driven and often half-naked, but, as the meme says, that’s none of my business.)
WRT SA, though, I think it’s just parallel evolution. The whole Internet’s gotten more politicized, and I don’t see SA’s specific brand of elitism in more comics than I’d expect to.
The first explicitly political webcomic I remember was Sore Thumbs. It was extraordinarily awful, and pretty much everyone savaged it viciously. But what strikes me now in retrospect is just how much of the criticism was from a proudly apolitical perspective. “He cares about politics, and puts his views in his comics – how dumb is that?”
Nowadays of course you’re more likely to be savaged for not wearing your politics on your sleeve.
@Nornagest: Sexy Losers was not awful, though. And what about Sluggy Freelance?
I think Sluggy qualified as dada, at least. And it… well, it wasn’t good, but I feel like I should qualify that. Comics of that era often look a lot worse in hindsight than they felt like at the time. Sluggy’s storytelling was practically nothing but rough edges, and the art wasn’t so hot either, but when all you’ve ever known is newspaper comics it was like opening a whole new world. In 1997, just being a comic that didn’t appear on the same page as Family Circus and wasn’t beholden to every busybody with a newspaper subscription covered a multitude of sins.
It’s just that that didn’t last.
I used to have a trawl of 20-30 comics and the websnark. If you don’t know who the websnark was, you don’t know the early-mid 2000s webcomic community (I am only half joking). I only follow 10ish today. I think two factors are at play.
1: Artists generally lean totalitarian-left as it is. Progressive (regressive) thought is the strand du jour of totalitarian-leftism.
2: Market forces. The vast vast majority of webcomics are offered for free. Ad revenue is typically not enough to sustain the effort. As micopayments failed to take hold and ad revenue collapsed, an artist typically has to sell merchandise in order to make a living. This encourages narrower, stronger fan bases vs widespread general appeal. The near fanaticism that progressivism breeds is fertile ground for such a business model.
I would also note that a watershed moment appears to be coming in this regard. Some formerly apolitical webcomics are only stopping just short of explicit bigotry, with plenty of implicit bigotry. (I’m looking at you Jeph Jacques, David Willis, and John Rosenberg) I wouldn’t be surprised if this mirrors the current state of progressive thought in general.
I noticed this about QC. At least the other Scott A recognizes all his Trump talk is terrible for Dilbert, but, at this point, he’s got “fuck you money,” as he says. Not sure if that applies to Jeph.
Let me chime.in as someone on the left, who still follows webcomics but doesn’t participate in the community much.
From my own experience I’ve certainly noticed a trend for webcomics authors to be more sensitive and aware, though this is in line with broader social moments (i.e. Jeph Jacques of QC who made some dumb transphobic jokes early in the strip’s run has a major and well-executed plot arc with a trns character.) But I haven’t noticed political themes coming to dominate in most of the webcomics that I read (except Strong Female Protagonist which pretty much gives away the game.)
@Nomagest – Dresden Codak is amazing and I will fight you. It didn’t “become” plot-dominated. The first page of the whole strip is the beginning of the Hob arc, which while it indulges in silliness is extremely plot-driven. There’s one-offs in between the big arcs but it’s never been dominated by them.
Also I’ve found Kimiko to be an interesting and compelling protagonist. Similar in a lot of ways to the Harry of HPMOR. When you insultingly call someone a “strongfemaleprotagonist” I parse it to mean one of a few things:
-the character is female and made hyper competent for no apparent reason. Kimiko, though, has very clear canon reasons to be hyper-competent, in that she is the daughter of a famous scientist (… maybe) and totally obsessive in her chosen field. I defy you to say this is not a realistic background for a hyper-competent scientist/engineer.
-the character’s hyper-competence is intended to cover up a lack of any interesting personality. Not true, imo. Kimiko is arrogant and short-sighted about consequences frequently, but extremely driven by her long-term goals and vision of a better world. She’s compassionate and hates the stupidity and cruelty of the world. She mostly seems like an involuntary loner, wanting friendship but too obsessive or awkward to hang on to it. Like I said – similar in a lot of ways to Harry from HPMOR.
-Much more sexist parsing that I’m sure you don’t mean.
So I disagree in the strongest terms.
Jason K, it’s hilarious if the hard left comics can only be supported by selling merchandise.
um, what? Sure Willis is full of anti-Christian subtext, but a major storyline in DoA is a fictionalized version of his own deconversion from Christianity so that’s to be expected. I stopped reading QC a while ago, but don’t recall any bigotry there – if anything Jacques has become too cautious to not offend anyone and it’s ruined his ability to tell a story or make a joke. (I never read Rosenberg’s comics and can’t speak to him.)
Oh wow, mentioning David Willis/IW/Shortpacked really takes me back. I was in his circle of friends in the late Aughts and left because no one would stand up to his blooming Leftism. I didn’t think of it in political terms so much as the offense against reason of defending LGBT and Islam at the same time. I was on the path to Rationalism even then.
I was just reading a QC comic today where a robot character, after being insulted because she was a robot, told another character regarding discrimination that “You do not understand. You cannot, as a human. Therefore I do not believe you are qualified to judge”.
I thought it was a ridiculous thing to say as I think most people have been insulted on the basis on an immutable characteristic and the idea that humans can’t understand bigotry is so absurd as to defy belief. Usually the comic is pretty apolitical, so when SJW ideas are presented, they stick out like a sore thumb.
@Aaron: Dresden Codak is terrible. Nice art, but the writing is just revolting. Fite me IRL m8.
@Jason: I was aware of who the websnark was, but never read him.
I’m trying to remember the old comics that I read from back then. I remember Sluggy Freelance and Penny Arcade (still active, so they’re easy), Irritability (best comic), Sexy Losers (because it was mentioned), HorribleVille (though I only found this in archive form, so it may not count… and may not be that old in the first place), PBF (too new?).
There was also some terribly drawn comic by a Japanese scientist (had nothing to do with science, though), I forgot what it was called – this one was objectively bad.
There was more, but my memory is bad. Someone help me out. I track my webcomics with Piperka nowadays, but it wasn’t around back then.
Edit: I just remembered MegaTokyo. Oh man. And it’s still going! What’s going on with the buttons on that blouse?
I’m an atheist. I live in the bible belt and occasionally hear people say that people like me must be immoral and crap like that. Yet, the level of anti-christian bias was pissing me off. I stopped reading about a month ago, and at that time the only christian that wasn’t being made out to be an obstacle to overcome (the author stand-in exempted of course) was the one that was secretly transsexual, because of course, no transperson could be evil. There was not one straight male character in all of DoA that either wasn’t a joke or portrayed negatively. Toedad (evil), Blaine (evil), Walky (joke), Joe (joke/sexist), Mike (complete ass), and all of Joyce’s male relatives. In fact, you can pretty much draw a correlation between the level of masculine presentation and how evil the character is going to be.
It isn’t that he is too cautious to offend anyone, he is avoiding offending anyone on the progressive’s ‘protected’ list. For example: he gleefully pointed it out that he was going to annoy some people by rehashing an extremely cliche ‘man thinks a woman can’t be x’ trope a little while back. It was a dumb one-off that would have registered to me as just lazy if he hadn’t made a point of it.
Jon Rosenberg did Goats and later ‘Scenes from a Multiverse’. Goats made it through alright, but scenes from a multiverse decayed as he tried to monetize it. I stopped reading that one about 2 years ago (I think).
None of these authors have come right out and said ‘straight white men suck’ (to my recollection), else I would have called it explicit bias. I do notice who is allowed to be the villain or butt of the joke and who isn’t, and what personal struggles get the spotlight.
I wish I had known that going in. The only reason I kept reading Dumbing of Age as long as I did was because of Joyce; I found her joie de vivre and strong Christian morals appealing, and I was particularly interested in her relationship arc with Ethan. But then she converted from Christianity to Progressivism and broke up with Ethan, and I dropped the comic. Checked back after a while to find an arc about an evil, oppressive, gun-wielding Christian father whose lesbian daughter shilled college loans, and I decided that nothing of value was lost.
@Nancy Lebovitz
Yes. It is a variant of “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it”. Eating almost always trumps politics.
Let’s not leave out Order of the Stick‘s recent arc about vampirism acceptance.
EDIT: Kidding! Kidding! While the team (except for Belkar) does learn the lesson that just because someone’s a vampire doesn’t mean you can’t trust him or work with him, it turns out to be completely the wrong lesson (because vampire, duh).
And if you’re bored with the update speed, just do what I do: start reading again from Strip #0001. Pretty soon you’ll be at “Up a Level! Down a Level!” again….
Oh god they got to OOTS? I stopped reading a while ago because of the update speed and the fact that it was boring, but it was the first webcomic I read and I read it for quite some years. Sad to hear it got taken over with politics.
@Le Maistre Chat: I’m curious, what forum/IRC name did you use? (I hate linking my more ephemeral identity to my more long-standing one, so let’s make it hard for Google to find: I was “b*e*i*n” on IRC and the same plus “s*a*n*e” on forums. I still use the longer version in some contexts and I’d appreciate not posting it here where it can be found.)
@Jason: meh, all three of those artists are straight white men the last time I checked, and that kind of low-intensity self-hatred hardly counts as bigotry. If it starts reaching Sinfest levels you may be onto something.
@jaime: I don’t think Willis originally meant his deconversion to be Joyce’s story, at least when DoA first started. It’s just that as he drifted further left he could no longer write her sympathetically if she was still a Christian.
Haha no, Order of the Stick is great as always. The ‘vampirism acceptance’ comment has to be firmly embedded in cheek or it makes no sense.
@Alex
I think Argonomous intended that as a joke. The vampire turned out to have been evil all along and should have not been trusted per Belkar’s insistent recommendations.
I believe OOTS is supposed to be in its final arc and the pace of the story appears to be picking up a bit (though not the updates).
@BBA
So this wouldn’t have been okay if it was some other group they were being biased against? If the group membership of the speaker matters, isn’t that an inherently biased stance in and of itself?
My point isn’t that it is in-your-face, but that it has been building. I’ve noticed flare-ups in other places as well. The tenor is changing. This doesn’t come across as mild self-loathing, but brewing self-righteousness against ‘those people’.
I stopped reading Sinfest about 6 months into its feminist conversion, so I have no idea how far it has gone now.
I honestly have trouble seeing it as bigotry if the writer is directing it at a group including himself. Obnoxious, sure, but not bigoted. But then I freely admit to being a self-loathing straight white dude too.
Uncle Ruckus to the rescue! (NSFW)
I honestly have trouble seeing it as bigotry if the writer is directing it at a group including himself.
Scott addressed this himself. Go to https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/ and start reading at “my hunch”
@Yli and @Alex – thankfully OOTS has been mostly spared, but it’s definitely had its moments. See for example the super cringey comic where Haley and Bandanna sit around talking about “oh man I don’t know why I used to dress so revealing” and “time was I’d hurl some gendered insults at you, but I’ve moved past that phase”. Basically Burlew transparently injecting feminist preaching into his strip. The worst for me was in the most recently published book, in the commentary Burlew goes on about how the reason Tarquin gets angry when the gang foils his plans is because he’s a straight white male, and is used to getting his way. So he can’t tolerate that a group with a black man, a woman, and a genderqueer elf (his words, not mine) are daring to go against him. Which, honestly, I don’t think the writing in the comic supports that interpretation, but he is the author I guess. He then goes on to imply that if you don’t like that, then you’re one of The Enemy and just as bad. Standard SJW rhetoric, in other words.
I still read the comic, mostly out of a desire to see how it ends, but after that I have no desire to support the author financially any more. I read the comic (and, until the last book, read the generally-interesting author commentaries in the books) to be entertained, not preached at. So yeah, while the OOTS comic itself is mostly free of hamfisted social justice preaching, the author has definitely moved in that direction.
Nerd fight!
Don’t get me wrong, I like Kim, as a character; she’s an arrogant, messed-up protagonist that does the right things for the wrong reasons, and that’s a character type that’s always worked well for me. I do have some quibbles about her exact type of hypercompetence, which worked fine earlier in the comic but aged badly as it got more serious; but that’s a theme issue rather than a characterization issue.
But I don’t think Diaz is sending the message with her that he thinks he is. It is a fact that she drives a hell of a lot of fanservice throughout the comic. Now, in itself, fanservice is fine. But then Diaz goes on his Tumblr and condemns other writers for having their characters show a little skin, often in the exact circumstances and for the exact reasons that he does his. I don’t think he’s ever gone into detail about why he thinks he’s exempted, but, reading between the lines, I think it’s because Kim has that strong-female-protagonist characterization. Never mind that a lot of those other characters do too, nor that it’s not the kind of character that would have her posing for the imaginary camera on the regular.
You could compare her in a lot of ways to her fairly obvious spiritual predecessor, Motoko Kusanagi of Ghost in the Shell — who’s one of my favorite characters in sci-fi. The difference is that Kusanagi’s a more sexual character, and more importantly that Shirou Masamune is openly an enormous perv. Aaron Diaz is trying to have his cake and eat it too.
(The Hob arc isn’t the beginning of the comic, by the way, just the beginning of the current archives. There were thirty or so strips before it, all in joke-of-the-week format, but got cut from the archives sometime in the late 2000s for, uh, reasons. I seem to recall they’re still accessible with a little input abuse but I forget how.)
It seems to me that the rise of social justice in webcomics happened around the same time that Patreon funding started to overtake merch funding, but that might be a coincidence.
@Edward: I agree that in most cases, when a white person talks smack about “white people” (etc.), it can be assumed to mean “not me, those white people, the wrongthinking ones in the other tribe.”
The thing is, Willis has said a few times that he means to include himself. He considers himself inherently bigoted against PoCs/women/LGBT/etc. due to his repressive Christian upbringing and is trying to make his comics as diverse and “tolerant” as he can in order to compensate. And I think he’s being honest about this – he’s got a lot of mental issues to work through and his family was legitimately nuts (unless he’s making up stories about them, in which case he’s REALLY got issues).
I don’t know what to call that, but it isn’t just outgroup intolerance.
@ BBA says:
April 25, 2016 at 6:25 pm ~new~
@Edward: I agree that in most cases, when a white person talks smack about “white people” (etc.), it can be assumed to mean “not me, those white people, the wrongthinking ones in the other tribe.”
Really? He tells you he thinks he has “bad” characteristics because he’s still getting over “growing up part of the out group”, and you think that isn’t “outgroup intolerance”?
I’d say it’s the Platonic ideal of “outgroup intolerance”.
@BB Rodriguez says:
Yeah, I looked at that, and I thought “you’ve got people of multiple different species around, and you (the author) are still obsessing abotu skin color? WTF?”
Nornagest:
Other than the ones currently under “Singles” on the Archive page, going back to 2005? If there are more, I’d love to know. I really enjoyed the goofiness of the early strips, although I’m still eagerly devouring every update in the current mind-screw of a plotline.
One thing to keep in mind about SA back in 2002-2004 was that Kyanka (Lowtax) was one of the aggressively anti-political people you describe; to the point where he started locking threads that talked about current events in the “general discussion” forum (there was a sub-forum where people were supposed to talk about those).
And then he allowed an avowed Marxist to be the moderator of that Current Events forum, and things started getting weird (mostly because Kyanka’s style of forum management at the time was “whoever hangs out with me on IRC and is vaguely funny gets to be a mod, and I automatically process any ban requests a mod sends me”). At one point there were up to a dozen people a week being banned from the Current Events forum. This started to look bad for business–like, who’s gonna pay ten bucks to join a forum where you can be banned for not being Marxist?–and that’s when the “Probation” (temporary ban) was added as a forum feature.
SA has something called a “toxx,” which is basically a way of betting your account that some particular thing will (or won’t) happen. For example, someone posts, “Toxx for the Pirates winning the World Series.” If the Pirates do win the World Series, the poster gets bragging rights, but if not, he’s banned.
In the run-up to the 2008 election, everyone was toxxing for their favorite candidate, and when Obama won, everyone who toxxed for McCain to win – that is, most of the active conservative posters – was banned. Most of them didn’t bother to buy their accounts back, so Obama supporters were able to define which points of view were Good and which were Bad (and Ban-Worthy). Another cull happened in 2012, when Obama won again and all the Romney toxxers were banned.
I think these two events, more than anything else, were probably responsible for the takeover of SA – although they certainly happened within the context of the cultural trends you describe.
I’m not sure how much was due to rivalry so much as architecture.
If you get a bunch of SJ mods on SA, they can effectively put a $10 tax on saying something unPC. If you try the same thing on 4chan, everyone resets their modems and waits until the mods fall asleep.
That’s an interesting connection: Metafilter also requires a $5 registration fee, and it’s also quite left wing. I believe they have a history of banning people for being insufficiently on board with SJ as well?
LF didn’t invent MTW, although it might have had some role in popularizing it on the internet. I remember reading MIM Notes back in the early 00s, which I’m 95% sure explicitly referred to MTW by name, and am 100% sure had the same theories (superprofits, worker aristocrats, revolution not possible in imperialist west) and stylistic tics (“Amerikkka,” etc)
1. I think you exaggerate the relevant similarities. Many of the loudest anti-Islamic voices will happily argue that a traditionalist Christian society would be prosperous, peaceful, and happy, whereas a Muslim-dominated society wouldn’t. Consider for example the effects on human capital of generations of cousin marriage.
2. As anon said upthread, my gott, pure univershalisht ideology. Thinking that this is a contradiction makes sense if you believe that there’s some sort of universal happiness/prosperity/eudaimonia counter floating way out in the interstellar void, akin to the national debt clock, and that your goal is to maximize the number it displays, but it’s quite a different matter if you think that whites are an extended family and that their survival and prosperity ought to matter more to you than other people’s (or whatever race you happen to belong to.). Traditionalist whites vs traditionalist Arabs and North Africans is not a meaningful distinction for you (potential differences in peace, prosperity, and so on aside), but it is the meaningful distinction for adherents of the relevant ideologies.
True, and boy howdy is that ever something. Nydwracu has some mighty interesting remarks on this somewhere.
1. And the loudest Islamic voices undoubtedly think the opposite – from the outside, one conservative, patriarchal, repressive society looks quite like another when compared to a modern Western culture.
2. It’s not the strongest contradiction in the world, I will admit. But not all social conservatives are “Christianity only”, let alone “white only”. Christian social conservatives who are more anti-gay and anti-feminism than pro-Christian are still often less enthused about Muslim immigration than a lot of socially left wing people are. What interests me is that weird dysjunction, where people who would do very badly indeed were Muslim conservatives to gain a significant voice are more in favour of Muslim immigration.
I will cop to being more on the “deracinated rootless cosmopolitan degenerate” than the “blood and soil” side of things.
> people who would do very badly indeed were Muslim conservatives to gain a significant voice are more in favour of Muslim immigration.
Let this would-do-poorly group be ‘G’ (whichever group that is, more than one fits). Here’s how I would justify that as a ‘G’.
If they want to come here, it suggests that our system which is better about G really is better than theirs. That’s very affirming. Even if that’s not it, their kids will assimilate and be better about G – and in the mean time, they’ll be a tiny minority and so not a particular threat. ALSO, if they are worse about these things than others around them, it may repulse these people and make being mean to G less popular. Lastly, any G stuck in that culture should have the ability to get out.
Well, let’s see:
1: Their kids don’t assimilate. What appears to be happening is the opposite, they and their kids cause the children of assimilated Muslims to be more radical and less assimilated.
2: Tell it to the French. Esp. the ones no longer living in / near the Islamic Banlieues.
3: If they actually cared about the G people stuck in Islamic areas, they’d be rabid fans of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, rather than fighting to censor her / block her from speaking out in public.
Well, yes, that the collectivist-racist attitude that a great many people find absolutely repulsive.
But my objection to is not that it isn’t collectivist enough, and that our collectivism ought to envelop the whole human race. It’s precisely the opposite: it’s too collectivist, and we ought to be individualists instead.
When another white man claims to be my “brother” and that I owe something to him because we share the same “race” or “ethnicity”, that’s the height of presumption. You’re not my brother. I’m not your buddy, guy. You’re a stranger to whom I have no obligations, putting you on the same level as some Africans or Middle Easterners to whom I also have no obligations. And there’s no reason that the best of the “black race” should have any less value to me than the best of the “white race”, or why the worst of the white race should have any more value to me than the worst of the black race.
[Note: goddamn this senseless word filter! There’s something in the following quote that won’t go through, and I can’t figure out what it is. So I had to remove it, and will try again in a reply.]
As Ayn Rand put it:
And why does r[x]cism appeal to “l[x]sers” in particular?
Rand pointed out the problem with m[xx]ticulturalism:
What is the white n[x]tionalist response to this? “This can apply to us, too! We also need no reason to proclaim our culture superior except the fact that it happens to be ours.”
My revulsion toward this attitude consists precisely in the fact that it is un-W[x]stern; it runs completely contrary to the distinctive intellectual achievements of Enlightenment civilization.
Note: sorry for all the weird [x] formatting. I can’t figure out what the “taboo” word is. Is r[x]cism actually filtered here? That was the last one I tried, and it actually made it go through.
The taboo word is “r[xx]ctionary”. Apparently Scott didn’t consider anyone would use it as an adjective.
@ Jiro:
That can’t be it, though. Because [x]ed that one out as the very first change, and the post still didn’t go through.
It didn’t go through until I removed most of the instances of the word “racism”. That was the only change I made in the final iteration. But I left one in (by accident). And it’s in this post. So I don’t know what the hell’s going on.
Before the “racism” pass, I removed everything else that seemed even mildly connected to wrongthought.
Maybe it’s time for Scott to rethink the whole “tabooed words” idea… sure, it’s his site and if he wants to ban the word “rutabaga” or “antidisestablishmentarianism” he can, but having mysterious unknown word bans enforced by the software causes frustrations all around (especially for newbie users), and can hamper, obscure, or sidetrack legitimate discussions. Do these negatives outweigh the positives of sometimes halting, derailing, or discouraging the sorts of unproductive discussions that harm this forum (which it does accomplish sometimes)?
It’s not clear if this is a tabooed word problem, or a generic spam-problem. Multiple copies of some words might get the comment spam-trapped, even if a single word is not a problem. Just a theory.
Test: Racism. Racism. Racism. Racism. Racism.
EDIT: Doesn’t look like it.
On the plus side, your American College Student Simulator appears to be working perfectly.
Jaime: remove the “test” and that could be a handy tl;dr of a lot of your oeuvre.
Multi, do you want to know what a tl;dr of your output would look like?
“Fuck capitalism. Fuck capitalism. I think I’m a woman. Spare some change? Fuck capitalism.”
I think both of you ought to take it down a notch.
Whereas I think this is why popcorn was invented.
Is telling you two to get a room uncharitable? Unnecessary? Something else? I wanna do it anyway.
All of the above, but go ahead. People being mildly annoyed by others’ tests of weird censorship is all part of the fun for me.
It’s hot, that trumps the three rules in my mind.
So you disbelieve in outbreeding having a pacifying and pro-cooperation effect on populations? Or that the Jewish diamond merchants gained an advantage through their shared Judaism?
His statement is about his beliefs (things you think in your head), your questions are about facts (things that are true or not true in the world), and therefore completely irrelevant.
I believe that being a small tightly-knit ingroup doing something which doesn’t need to be done by many people reduces the cost of trust enforcement among the small group; but ‘white people in Western Europe’ or ‘liberal people in the Commonwealth’ are not a small tightly-knit ingroup.
Race != Culture.
Jewish diamond merchants had a lot more in common than genetics.
If someone says “I speak the same language as you, I follow the same social cues you do, I have ethics that fit me into your culture, I follow a tit for tat strategy in repeated social interactions. It’s a good idea to treat me well.” That is a convincing argument coming from someone of any race.
If someone says “We are more closely related than even race would suggest, as we both have great grandparents from the same Polish village. You don’t speak polish and I don’t speak English. You use tit for tat strategy in social interactions and try to avoid taking offense. I use a grim trigger strategy and have a touchy sense of honor. It’s a good idea for you to treat me well.” That’s not a convincing argument to me.
“Consider for example the effects on human capital of generations of cousin marriage.”
Interesting question. The obvious effect would be to reduce the frequency of lethal recessives by filtering them out. Do you have any reason to think there would be a large negative effect?
The Amish are pretty inbred, given their social system, and it shows up in some forms of birth defects, but their human capital seems to be fine–at least, they are successful as both farmers and small businesses.
Evidently not.
Anyway, the purging selection that you’re talking about is real and important on a population level but is naturally much stronger for lethal mutations rather than merely fitness reducing ones. There’s a big range between birth defect and death, one that widens the better our medicine gets.
Icelanders also seem rather inbred. In fact, I heard there is a database of family relationships on Iceland where a pair can look up how closely related they are and whether it is then a good idea to have children. In a country of 300 000 in the middle of an ocean, it is quite a big deal, I guess.
On the other hand, I was told by a genetics PhD. student (she specializes in animal breeding, but I guess human genetics is not all that different and she should know something about it anyway) that even being against first cousins having a relationship and above all having children is, as long as it does not happen in every generation, more a social taboo than something that would actually lead to bad genes in the population. I think that the problem of the Habsburgs was that they were thoroughly inbred for generations with little mixing with others.
Also (not 100% related, but interesting), it is remarkable that if you inbreed chickens for generations (this is actually what that PhD. student is doing, or rather she uses data from these inbreeding projects, the oldest one has been going on for about 100 years), always selecting for the most homogeneity of the genes, then you still see after all this time some heterogeneity which cannot be explained by mutations only. And it also happens in the parts of the genome which should not “do anything” so where the lack of heterogeneity should not severely affect the individual (so it is not that the other chickens would simply not survive). They don’t know why this is happening yet, though (also it is not clear whether something similar would hold for humans).
Inbreeding does not cause* bad genes. It merely causes bad combinations of genes. As soon as there is a single generation of outbreeding, the problems go away. Probably what the geneticist meant is that single generation of cousin marriage increases birth defects a little, but not catastrophically much. But genes cause more than birth defects, indeed, more than health. A single generation of cousin marriage decreases height by 1cm and IQ by 5 points.
* Inbreeding can change the distribution of genes by eliminating genes that are particularly bad when homozygous. It is usually good to get rid of such genes. But sometimes, like with the sickle cell gene, they are useful to keep around. Anyhow, the effect of inbreeding on the gene pool is small compared to its effect on the individuals.
Qualifying her evaluation with “as long as it does not happen in every generation” renders it meaningless.
Obviously, two first cousins having children is not going to have a significant effect on the population, since two people can only have so many children together. And obviously, the children of first cousins are not going to be as worse off as children of first cousins from grandparents who were themselves first cousins, by great grandparents who were themselves again first cousins…
The quantity to watch is runs of homozygosity.
Regarding linebreeding/inbreeding and the quality of offspring –
Inbreeding produces more uniform and predictable offspring. It is a useful tool for standardizing a population of offspring, so that improvements can be made systemically and rationally.
If (for example) a group of sheep has wool of varying length and softness, with each quality impacted by several genes, adding genetics of (say) long dark wool will have a variety of impacts. Some genes will interact to produce even shorter wool, while other produce longer more coarse wool. But a uniform group of ewes which have the same genes bred to the same ram will produce offspring that have largely the same sort of wool.
What is frequently missed in discussions of the usefulness of line/inbreeding is the absolute requirement to cull out suboptimal animals, and to also (frequently) cull out the parents of those suboptimal animals as well. Otherwise the average of the group as a whole doesn’t change much.
This need for culling makes breeding discussions for humans largely moot, on grounds of morality conflicting with efficiency. Barring either a shift to actual (ie, as attempted in Germany in the 1940s) or effective (parenting licenses and/or forced abortions) culling, talking about linebreeding humans is of little use.
“The obvious effect would be to reduce the frequency of lethal recessives by filtering them out. Do you have any reason to think there would be a large negative effect?”
“Large” is awfully subjective, but I will argue for “significant” anyway. It’s complicated, but the amount of effort that successful evolved species tend to put into relatively distant mating should suggest that it tends to be a pretty significant advantage.
Trying to talk about the long-term negative effects is tricky, partly because it is complicated and I am no expert, and partly because the effects can be pretty sensitive to details that people don’t usually nail down in their informal description of inbreeding communities (notably the rate at which genes are leaking into the inbred community from the outside), and partly because the effects can be pretty sensitive to details that are only imperfectly known by anyone today (like how much the long tail of many slightly deleterious genes contributes to the effect).
If the genes causing problems in inbreeding were sharply concentrated in a small number of lethal recessives, you could indeed enjoy the kind of sharp short term improvement you describe: after some generations, those lethally deleterious genes will be largely flushed out. But unfortunately although the notorious harmful recessives do tend to be very bad, there is no reason that total harm must be highly concentrated in a few notorious severely harmful traits instead of a long tail of cumulatively harmful traits (that not only you haven’t heard of, but that perhaps no one has identified yet). And it tends to take evolution by natural selection a long time to optimize combinations of large numbers of genes. (And while the process might be accelerated by natural selection on large effective breeding populations, inbreeding tends to reduce the effective breeding population at any given population.)
Deleterious alleles will naturally drift to low frequencies in any population with or without inbreeding. Inbreeding is harmful not because it propagates deleterious genes, but because it elides beneficial ones.
You are very poorly informed.
Well, yes. As I understand the ethnat position, they would say that looking at it “from the outside” is a fundamental mistake.
@Vox, yes, that’s a perfectly reasonable principled opposing view. Though I do have to wonder whether there’s really a difference between collectivism over all humans on one hand and individualism on the other, given agreement on the happen-so facts of human nature. (Also, Rand’s argument seems to rest on a denial of HBD, which doesn’t strike me as terribly convincing.).
@David Friedman
So Jayman and HBDchick have been arguing for a while that inbreeding at the level of generations of society-wide cousin marriage leads to increased levels of clannishness, and that this in turn leads to various negative social consequences. For example, they argue, highly clannish societies can expect to see more destructive long-running feuds, increased nepotism, difficulty saving (if you make a surplus, the appropriate thing to do is to give it all to needy members of the extended family), and so on. Also, more directly related to human capital, there’s the idea that manorialism and religious prohibitions on cousin marriage within the Hajnal Line selected for IQ and various kinds of prosociality.
This is probably a good place to start if you want to see what they’re getting at in their own words: https://jaymans.wordpress.com/2015/09/21/clannishness-the-series-zigzag-lightning-in-the-brain/
That is a very interesting point. (Inb4 this turns into another argument about the Amish and “Amish” gets filtered.). Ashkenazi Jews, too, now I think of it.
Ashkenazim are not inbred compared to other European groups. I doubt the Amish are much inbred either. They have high rates of specific diseases because of a founder effect at a bottleneck. If they were inbred, they would have a great diversity of problems instead.
Actually, the Amish are inbred, F=0.03, at least in Lancaster. I can’t find good numbers on Arabs. People often quote F=0.02 for Baghdad, but that is just looking at a single generation of cousin marriage and not the compounding effects. Iraq is on the high end for cousin marriage, but Baghdad is on the low end for Iraq and compounding will be less in an urban area.
Incorrect.
https://hbdchick.wordpress.com/2011/03/06/jewish-inbreeding/
Each member of each Jewish group (including Ashkenazi) is related to one another approximately as closely as a fourth or fifth cousin.
High relatedness is not synonymous with inbreeding. Razib Khan argues against claims of inbreeding here and here.
Coincidentally, fourth cousins have the highest fertility- any more or less relatedness reduces fertility.
That sounds like outgroup homogenity bias talking. “Traditionalist” American Christians usually have in mind something like an idealized version of 1950s US suburban society, which is quite a bit different from what “traditionalist” Muslims want (often a return to the glory days of the Caliphate, if not the time of Muhammad and his Companions). In some sense, both groups want to return to the “past”, but it’s a very different past they have in mind. 1950s America is far more similar to present-day America than to a medieval Islamic society.
I’m not sure the right-wing view is all that unusual or contradictory. Psychologically, there’s nothing out of the ordinary about championing one’s society or culture in the abstract while simultaneously issuing severe condemnations of its present-day state. We see this in, for instance, the Old Testament prophets, or Cato the Elder and other ancient Roman writers.
The left-wing view seems much more historically unusual.
>I’m not sure the right-wing view is all that unusual or contradictory. Psychologically, there’s nothing out of the ordinary about championing one’s society or culture in the abstract while simultaneously issuing severe condemnations of its present-day state.
I mean, the left does it too. Only applied to economic circumstances rather than social ones.
Look here (1, 2, 3).
I did not mean that neo-Nazis, etc, do not still exist. I meant that the “old school” types are not to be found among the examples he listed of stereotypical alt-right sites – the leather-jacket-and-Docs neo-Nazis, KKK, etc are not part of the alt-right, whereas the green frog Nazis are. I should have phrased that a bit better.
“green frog Nazis” is a nice turn of phrase
dndnrsn says: The illustrations in future histories are going to be weird.
They’ve been weird for a while
Didn’t we learn anything from the past anti-immigrant advocacy? Almost the exact same dire predictions were made at one time about shtetl Jews, who were after all extraordinarily insular and fiercely loyal to what seemed like a draconian rule set. Or the Chinese, who were thought to be so horribly exotic that they’d never adapt to our culture, so laws were passed to specifically exclude them.
I’m not an open-borders advocate. Of course there have to be limits.
Still, plentiful experience has shown that living in America changes people, maybe not instantly in the first generation, but certainly by the second and third. Growing up in a place like Los Angeles is fundamentally different than growing up in a place like Riyadh.
And maybe the Internet is narrowing geographic differences, but much more in the direction of making people in Riyadh more like people in Los Angeles than vice versa.
Still, plentiful experience has shown that living in America changes people, maybe not instantly in the first generation, but certainly by the second and third. Growing up in a place like Los Angeles is fundamentally different than growing up in a place like Riyadh.
The problem as I see it is that we have a very vocal group of people who are trying to counteract this effect.
I would argue that multi-culturalism is incompatible with liberal immigration. If you aren’t going to enforce cultural conformity, you must make doubly sure that the people you’re letting in have compatible values. The only alternative is to accept that Los Angeles will become more like Riyadh than vice versa.
The confounder problem is even more serious than that Discover blog post makes it out to be. Take the correlation between ice cream sales and drowning. Say you have measured your potential confounding variable (temperature) perfectly and control for it. You STILL have not eliminated confounds, because ice cream sales are actually a better measure of whether the day is good for swimming than temperature is. (Hot days where it is raining will tend to have lower ice cream sales and less swimming both). So you not only need to measure your confounder variable properly, you need to make sure you have completely controlled for all possible confounds. That is even harder to do than flawless measurement of a single confound!
In my experience it is very common for researchers to control for some confounds and claim that they have controlled for the full set. E.g. controlling for family background by including parental income, a highly imperfect measure of family background.
http://www.mcgilldaily.com/2014/11/everything-problematic/
A description of getting out of SJW– describes SJW as a cult (in passing, not detailed analysis of cults and how SJW matches that), and with an excellent takedown of SJW anti-intellectualism.
That strongly reminds me of some comment I saw on here from someone talking about how they’d been left feeling like dying for various minor sins such as reading books by white male authors.
It was, in fact, Nancy, if I remember rightly.
That was very good, thanks. Quite linkable.
Theranos: the collapse
Now I want to read “Theranos: the Ascension”. If, as is increasingly likely, Holmes and company never had a device that worked, how did they ever get to $9 billion in market cap to begin with? In particular, what were the direct investors thinking?
I don’t know, but a lot of startups have business plans that don’t actually have anything to do with their claimed inventions. Their business plan probably was: this is a highly regulated industry, hence concentrated and stagnant, ripe for all sorts of innovation that we’ll figure out later; and we can enter the industry this because of our highly connected board of directors. Indeed, they did convince Arizona to let them sell direct-to-consumer blood testing without a doctor’s involvement. I’m not sure where they were going with that, but it doesn’t seem to have much to do with miniaturization. I think that there was a third direction, too, but I forget what.
But VC investment in the closely-related pharmaceutical industry is hardly a new thing, and in that sphere everyone understood that “highly regulated industry” doesn’t mean that the first clever new guy makes billions with a bit of basement-laboratory tech that none of the stodgy old dinosaurs ever thought of. Rather, it means there is a substantial risk that the startup will go broke trying to satisfy the regulators the new product is safe and effective, and consequently new rounds of funding tend to be closely linked with e.g. clinical trials that buy down both the technical and the regulatory risk.
Yes, if there were clear regulatory hurdles, they would have been tied to funding. But such hurdles largely did not exist. Theranos has managed for more than a decade pretty much without talking to the FDA at all. It claimed that since it was not offering its device for sale, it did not have to show it to the FDA. No one seems to have disputed this, so score one for regulatory arbitrage, or at least bluffing. In particular, it could be very vague about when it was using ordinary tests, when it was using its own device, and when it was diluting pinpricks and running them on weirdly-calibrated ordinary devices; although obviously it can’t be doing the first on pinpricks. So there was potential to slowly modify its technology, rather than having discrete approved developments.
Again, the investors were probably not thinking about technology at all, but about innovation in business models. I have read articles claiming that Theranos was cheap because it was well-run. Maybe these were lies and it was actually just selling at a loss, but most of what I read about it had nothing to do with technology, even if every headline did. Or, maybe, it was cheap because it was badly-run, skimping on calibration. It is not clear to me that it was the pinpricks that were the problem, rather than the ordinary operation of ordinary machines.
I assume the direct investors were thinking something in the range between “it will be really cool if it works” and “I’ll be able to find someone who will think “It will be really cool if it works” “.
For what it’s worth, when Theranos was popular, I took a look at it to see whether I should be going goshwowoboyoboy with the crowd, and I couldn’t find enough reason to think the science was good to justify even that much support. I still have some hope left for turning turkey guts into gasolinie, but if it’s workable, it’s still going very slowly.
I’m not sure how much is that I’ve gotten dubious about claims of scientific and technical breakthroughs in general, or if I was on to something specific about this one.
There’s some discussion in the metafilter comments about how hoping to “change the world” rather than (I suppose) wanting to make a good medium-sized contribution leads to a lot of wasted effort.
Have a palate cleanser. Linus Torvalds explains that he’s an engineer trying to solve particular problems, not a visionary.
Isn’t that obvious?
“Men and women are truly equal; this is the best start up headed by a woman I’ve ever heard of; therefore, this will be bigger than Apple”
or the more cynical:
“Sure, throw the cute blonde chick a few bucks of other people’s money – she’ll likely get some kind of government contracts and if not, well, we can talk about our diversity and inclusiveness in this quarter’s report – never hurts to have a few of those chits in your pocket for a rainy day”
another cynical view:
“Suckers want so badly for there to be a woman who creates a tech company that they’ll buy into this nonsense for long enough for me to cash out”
Say what you want about treating progressivism as transparently nonsensical – it sure makes good predictions.
Why do you think that’s the only motivation rather than one of several?
The minute you have a back-up plan, you’ve admitted you’re not going to succeed.” – Theranos CEO and founder Elizabeth Holmes
Oh god.
Success is not the result of spontaneous combustion, you have to set yourself on fire.
– Theranos CEO and founder Elizabeth Holmes
Agronomous said,
I’m not completely convinced it’s a good idea, but here’s a first draft anyway.
I get that it’s an unavoidable warning, but including anon@gmail in the FAQ is going to end up giving people ideas. Or really just the one idea.
Also, flame war enthusiasts sound like historical re-enactment, but with napalm. Which would probably be *awesome*.
I know, right? I tried to phrase it in the least inviting way, but deliberately concealing things would defeat the whole purpose of having an FAQ (which is, to reduce the knowledge gap between newbies and old-timers).
Is “flame war enthusiasts” an awkward way to put it? English is not my first language, so corrections are welcome.
I’d argue that conjuring images of Redcoats advancing across a field behind lines of flamethrowers makes this the very best way to put it, but then, English is also just that one language for me as well.
Flame war enthusiasts is a fine way to put it.
Your English is very good, certainly not in special need of correction. (I envied your parody of Moldbug. I hope you at least had to sweat over that a little.)
In my usenet days, I spent some time on a history newsgroup which regularly re-enacted the war of 1812 in the form of a flame war between the Americans and Canadians over who won the original.
Why do people keep attributing the “anon” user to “@gmail”? There’s nothing that I can see that lets me know what email service they may be using.
a) Because it was specifically stated in a previous thread by one of these anon; and
b) Because it’s possible to test. Gravatar generates its avatar pattern based on email address.
^ To illustrate
This reminds me of an account that used to be on the Ars forums named “thepasswordispassword.” For a while, the password to that account was exactly what one would predict based on the username, basically creating a shared account that anyone could use to post anonymously. This didn’t last long until someone changed the password to that account.
“This fall, I’m going to the Killfiling Fields, where I’ll suit up in asbestos armor to take part in the Society for Creative Argument’s live staging of the USENET Battle of Eternal September …”
Something in that page seems to be loading a script that brings my Firefox browser to its knees, and I eventually have to abort it without ever seeing the content of the page.
If you want to someone else to run javascript for you, use archive.is.
(socrates.io works fine in my firefox)
SSC Features: Hiding, Reporting, Scott Alexander.
When saying something untrue and unnecessary, try to go for unkind as well, lest you get your comment reported.
This looks pretty good, should tell Scott to put it somewhere visible.
Those are not exclusive ORs! Actually, good point, thanks.
Any suggestions for alternative phrasing?
Tis but a jest, the wording is perfectly fine.
How disappointing. Come on, people. I want 30% feedback here, not back pats and reassurance!
Well, there’s a distinct lack of references to cactus people, could also add an animal sidekick, and a bestiary, bestiaries are in right now.
I mean, mate, it’s a FAQ to a comment section, not a NaNoWriMo submission: This is how the interface works, these are the rules, there’s not a lot to improve…
I guess you could mention that being an anon has you on a tighter leash, and can get you a fast track ban… and the cactus people references, you can’t not have that.
Eating Disorders among Women in the UAE.
A voxsplainer near and dear to SSC hearts:
The smug style in American liberalism
On point, mostly. Would be a stronger article without the occasional dark hints about who the real enemy is: malicious oligarchical puppet-masters are as much a part of this narrative as dumb hicks are, and you can’t really have the one without the other. But I suppose it wouldn’t be a Vox article without them.
Agreed on all points
Huh. I often read in Vox (and lots of other places, not just from liberals) about how wonderful free trade is, how industrializing the Third World is bringing them out of crippling poverty, how to stay relevant Americans need to retrain themselves, learn to code, move to where the jobs are, like that’s an easy cure that can work for everyone…
I have met the enemy and he is us.
That strikes me as more of an Atlantic perspective, and I’m actually somewhat sympathetic to it (with caveats). I associate Vox with a kind of soft-protectionist attitude, but one where all the emphasis is placed on how industry (led by said oligarchs) exploits third-world workers with e.g. low wages and dangerous working conditions. Domestic jobs are more of a footnote, although automation seems to be picking up steam as a topic.
I’m just going to assume there’s no consensus on Vox regarding that, because on the one side, I have seen a few articles like you claim, but also plenty regarding the evil elites.
Once again, it would be useful to make the distinction between liberals and leftists.
Good article, although it could have afforded to hit the points about the collapse of organized labor and smugness-as-classism a bit harder.
Especially if you’re from a blue-collar background yourself the use of class markers is really very blatant. It would be an interesting exercise to “fnord” a typical piece about, say, the Trump campaign and see what percentage of the wordcount was spent on admonishing the working class. In a way it actually gets worse with criticism of conservative intellectuals: you actually hear people saying things like “Cornell isn’t a real Ivy” and the like that wouldn’t sound out of place in a yacht club.
I’m far from the first one to point this out but the way the word ‘privilege’ has changed in meaning is very telling. People who are privileged, in the old sense of being born into affluent and influential families, are largely the same ones pushing for the lower classes to “check their privilege” regularly.
I have never actually heard a person saying “Cornell isn’t a real Ivy” or anything like it. As usual, the description of “smug liberals” doesn’t resemble any liberals I’ve actually met (and I know many, including some who even went to Ivies).
Usually goes without saying.
The people I know who went to Cornell are hyper-liberal, so I’m also surprised at some attempt to lower their status.
Well what’cha know.
I’ve heard it, heck I might have even said it at one point or another. But I don’t see what it has to do conservative intellectuals or ideology or even class really. The context I associate it with is early twenty-something status dick-waiving. E.g. “John got into Cornell? Pfft, that’s not even a real Ivy.”
The article heavily implies that the main (or, perhaps, only) problem with the “Right Facts” (such as “Republicans have smaller brains” or whatever) is that liberals have embraced them as shibboleths to use against conservatives. If this is true, then, logically speaking, we should either completely reject facts altogether in political discussions; or perhaps strive to believe in up to 50% of facts from our ideological opponents.
I, on the other hand, am of the opinion that facts possess some other quality that makes them “Right” or “Wrong”. I even have a guess as to what that quality might be…
I think I’d actually expect any “fact” that gets picked up as a shibboleth to be well under 50% likely to be true, because the easier it is to argue for something without getting tribal sentiment involved, the less useful it becomes as a signal of that tribal sentiment. We’d only expect to see 50/50 in the case of uncorrelated binary choices, which most of the article’s Right Facts aren’t; even X > Y type stuff like “Republicans have smaller brains” is better modeled as a ternary between X>Y/Y>X/equal or irrelevant.
More to the point…
Uncontroversial facts are useless as shibboleth’s because everybody agrees on them. The whole point of a shibboleth is that it helps distinguish one group from another.
He hints later on that maybe those Right Facts aren’t so true after all
Me, I despair of any study telling me anything accurate these days.
That’s pretty much the same as saying, “human nature is unknowable”. In the past, such statements have been applied to life (turned out to be knowable), the motion of the stars (knowable; also, not all of them are stars), lightning (knowable), and lots of other things. Mystery has a poor performance record.
No, it’s the same as saying that scientific studies of psychology are very unreliable these days.
I don’t think you understand his comment correctly. In the context of the conversation in the last few posts of the amount of flaws found across psychology studies, I doubt it’s a “human behavior is majestic and mysterious and beyond our comprehension”, as opposed to just “beware of citing studies on things like intelligence with such confidence”
Many political disagreements are about values, not facts. Even if everyone agreed on the underlying empirical reality, they would still choose to respond to that reality in different ways.
For example, if a policy makes your countrymen on average worse off but the world as a whole better off, whether you support that policy will depend on whether you’re a nationalist or a cosmopolitan. If a policy slightly reduces GDP but also substantially reduces inequality, whether you support that policy will depend on whether you place a higher value on equality or on GDP maximization. Of course, in actual politics, people often pretend that no trade-offs are needed, and this is where you get into people fudging the facts to support their political views. But even if they didn’t do that, the underlying disagreements would persist, because they’re based on different utility functions.
It’s an interesting article, but I don’t see any evidence that the author has considered the possibility that liberalism (in his sense) might be wrong, that the policies that they think help might hurt. He is concerned that the liberals haven’t sat down to dinner with people on food stamps. Does he worry that they haven’t sat down to dinner, or had a civil conversation, with people who believe that the minimum wage hurts poor people? Don’t realize that there are intelligent, educated, decent people who disagree with them–and him?
Judging by this other article of his, he does, but he’s not quite ready to accept that he might be wrong.
You can criticize the left without joining the right, you know. Otherwise Freddie deBoer is somehow a conservative (which some have actually accused him of). Speaking of whom…
Well, obviously, but what I mean is not about what his views are, but rather how he approaches the views of the guys he interacts with.
That article is about an MRA, though. Most of us liberals hold MRAs to be utterly contemptible and devoid of any merit, on the level of child rapists and people who speak in the theater. It’s a wonder he was willing to sit down with him at all.
And no, not all conservatives are treated with the same level of contempt. Megan McArdle is friends with much of the Vox crowd, for one.
Well, first of all, rusrs? Second, again, it’s not about how he treated the individual, in fact, I’d say he did quite fine, save for the bargain bin cold reading. It’s about how, every time he might draw a parallel between the beliefs of his interlocutors and one of his own (or his ingroups), he immediately backtracks “except they’re obviously wrong, and we’re obviously correct”.
Dead serious. For liberals who’ve heard of MRAs, the immediate mental association is with Elliot Rodger – hell, the article even starts out talking about Rodger (and the Ants) before even saying it’s about the author’s meeting with an MRA. And if you’re dealing with a tiny movement that’s vehemently opposed to one of your core ideals, doesn’t have much in the range of positive accomplishments, but did produce a mass shooting, you’re going to be predisposed to dismiss pretty much everything they say out of hand.
It’s like talking about communism around here – it inevitably leads to the gulag, so you have to denounce anything resembling it at every turn, no matter how nice and reasonable Dr. Chomsky sounded at dinner.
My point: MRAs are a tiny fringe within the right, and refusing to engage with them is not a sign of general refusal to engage with ideas outside the left-wing bubble.
Oh, you mean it in the generally expected reaction! OK then, makes sense.
Except that once you’ve come up with one small group which you can refuse to engage with, it’s tempting to stick as many people as you can in that group just so you can dismiss them. Which has indeed happened with MRAs; the ants aren’t, in general, MRAs, but often get lumped in there. (for that matter, the MRAs aren’t monolithic; there’s a difference between the MGTOWs and the bitter divorcees, for instance)
“And if you’re dealing with a tiny movement that’s vehemently opposed to one of your core ideals, doesn’t have much in the range of positive accomplishments, but did produce a mass shooting, you’re going to be predisposed to dismiss pretty much everything they say out of hand.”
I’m pretty sure Elliot Rogers isn’t a MRA. He was a member of PUAHate. Hating Pick Up Artists has nothing to do with MRAs.
To make a gratuitous Python reference: the Judean People’s Front and the People’s Front of Judea may disagree on almost everything and hate each other’s guts, but the Romans don’t care.
MRA is a political movement. Anti-pickup artists are people who don’t like pickup artists. They have as much in common as the Communist Party has to people opposed to modern art.
Everyone who wrongthinks is one of Them?
Since when did that matter an ounce?
The guy who killed two women and four men is an MRA via the transitive property of the SJWs saying so over and over and over and over and over and over and over.
Look, these are all groups of men who hate women. If you can’t see how, from a feminist perspective, they all appear to be at least adjacent to each other (if not facets of a single big phenomenon), I’m really not sure how to explain it to you.
I’m not sure how people who hate pickup artists translates into people who hate women. I’m pretty sure there are feminists who hate pickup artists for being demeaning to women.
They’re all enemies of feminism, so outgroup homogeneity bias alone suffices. Just because something’s understandable doesn’t make it right, of course, but it who’s saying it is? That feminism is insane and awful should not be a surprising perspective around here.
Wait, that’s the same author?
He complains about “smug liberalism”, but then he has this whole article written consistently in the tone of “look at this fascinating savage I found in the jungle!”
Self-awareness is not a common trait.
I don’t actually see the problem with that take. It’s surprisingly more compassionate, if somewhat dismissive, of the anti-feminist coalition.
Certainly better than the normal “all MRA are evil misogynists!” approach.
The dude in the article sounds not so different than myself. Though I would never live in River North. I need a family, so I’m in the suburbs, obviously.
@ David Friedman
He is concerned that the liberals haven’t sat down to dinner with people on food stamps. Does he worry that they haven’t sat down to dinner, or had a civil conversation, with people who believe that the minimum wage hurts poor people?
Perhaps we should find some poor (or till recently poor) people who are feeling the effects of a recent rise in the minimum wage — some people benefiting (getting the higher wage), some apparently damaged (laid off). Let them hash it out somewhat, then invite some comfortable liberals and conservatives to listen.
The pool would have some people obviously benefited with their larger paycheck — and some laid off, now with food stamps, unemployment payments, and leisure for looking for a better job (or getting trained for one), starting some self-employment project, living frugally with more family time, etc.
Are you familiar with What is Seen and What is Not Seen? The trouble with your project is that most of the winners and losers are not easily seen.
Those who receive the higher wage are only allegedly benefitting – it is not clear that the higher wage helps them. A standard finding in economics is that when you fix any one term in a contract it makes both parties to that contract worse off. They could have negotiated that specific value for that one term before you passed the law; the fact that they didn’t suggests it’s not what either party really wanted.
A job is a bundle of many kinds of benefits to both parties. In addition to salary, the employer might be providing other benefits such as: Free on-the-job training. A reasonably secure job (low chance of being fired). A friendly work environment. A clean and well-lit work environment. An entertaining (non-boring) work environment. A relatively low-stress (due to adequate staffing) work environment. Health and/or retirement benefits. Substantial available work hours. Substantial possible overtime. Flexible scheduling. Free or subsidized uniforms. Subsidized transportation. Free meals or snacks. Opportunities for promotion.
When you force the company to pay more than the previous market rate in pure salary, the simplest way to stay in business is just to cut some of that other stuff which the employee valued more than it cost the employer. Depending on what is cut and how much the employee wanted it, the new rate might make those who “get a raise” better off, worse off, or leave them just the same as before.
But it’s actually worse than that because when you raise the minimum wage by a lot, the people who get the new job aren’t the same people who would have gotten the old job. Suppose the minimum wage triples from $10/hour to $30/hour. At the old price, high-school dropouts can be profitable employees. At the new price, the employer might be more selective and only hire pre-trained college graduates with good test scores and references. In which case high-school dropouts are hugely harmed – they can’t get an entry-level job any more. And you might think the benefit to the new people who get paid $30/hour offsets this…but it doesn’t. A naive view says there should be $20/hour of benefit from the law but a nuanced view notices that the college graduates who take the job now had other high-paying job prospects; the value of this job to them is the difference between it and the next-best alternative.
So people who would have been making $10/hour lose that job option, while people who were making $25/hour switch industries to get paid $30.
But hey, at least we can find the people who were laid off and at least those people get unemployment, right? Nope, because the real hit is a matter of jobs that are never created or are lost via attrition.
The jobs that never get created in the first place (because high wages made the venture unprofitable) are part of What Is Not Seen. They exist in a statistical sense and can be talked about, but you can’t attach specific names to them.
This is bit like a religious conservative commenting on an article by an Atheist about the persistence of religious belief and whether smug Atheism (which really exists) is counter-productive, and objecting “I don’t see any evidence that author has considered that Atheism might be wrong, that there really is a omnipresent God. Doesn’t he worry that many atheists haven’t sat down to dinner with preachers who believe all sinners will be doomed to eternal damnation? Doesn’t the author realize that many intelligent, educated, decent people are deeply religious and have a strong faith in a Supreme Being?”
That is, it’s often rather unfruitful to the thesis of an article by an X about X-ism, for a non-X to complain the article doesn’t take into account that non-X might be completely right and X completely wrong.
That doesn’t work because the atheist is making factual claims that are independent of people.
If the atheist said “religion makes people miserable”, asking if the atheist talked to any non-miserable religious people would be appropriate, especially if the atheist already claimed that he talked to a lot of miserable religious people.
The goal of the article was to convince a subset of liberals to be less obnoxious. If David had his wish and the author magically converted to his way of thinking, then the author would lose all credibility in making the case he did. When an ideologically opponent claims you are being obnoxious it is easy enough to dismiss. Not quite as easy from someone that agree with you on the object level.
If you want to read conversion testimony there’s plenty of that. It seems petty to complain that this isn’t it.
I’m not arguing for conversion. I’m arguing for intellectual modesty–recognizing that he might be wrong, that there might be, probably are, some reasonable arguments against his beliefs.
My point isn’t that most liberals are wrong, although of course I think they are. It is that most of them are intellectually arrogant and strikingly ignorant of the views and arguments of their opponents. That fact fits into the point the article is making, but I don’t see any evidence in the article that it has occurred to him.
@Jiro – one can always argue, snarkily or charitably, that factual claims have not been more widely believed because those claims are actually wrong. And thus, the person asserting them should always be considering that possible explanation (being wrong), in all contexts and in every article related to those claims.
@David Friedman – again, the point is that sort of “intellectual modesty” is not relevant to the kind of article the author is writing. That is, inversely,should all articles about strategies for group X written by a group X member necessarily have (long?) sections considering that X’s beliefs could all be mistaken and anti-X are correct? It seems like that’s an algorithm which could be run to criticize almost all group-member articles about intra-group subjects. As in, once more, an Atheist argues to other Atheists “Smug Atheism is counter-productive. It leads to Atheists just making fun of God-believers as stupid, which annoys them, doesn’t engage in necessary alliance politics connecting to e.g. birth control and LGBT rights”. Preacher runs the algorithm: “My point isn’t that Atheists are wrong, although of course I think so. It is that most of them are intellectually arrogant and strikingly ignorant of the views and arguments of their God-fearing opponents. I don’t see any evidence in the article that it has occurred to him.”. That is, “intellectually arrogant” meaning the Atheists are not humble over the possible existence of God. But that’s not relevant to article’s in-group argument.
” That is, inversely,should all articles about strategies for group X written by a group X member necessarily have (long?) sections considering that X’s beliefs could all be mistaken and anti-X are correct? ”
No. They should all reflect recognition of the possibility that some or all of X’s beliefs might be mistaken or, if not mistaken, sufficiently dubious so that reasonable people might doubt them.
Unless it isn’t true, which is rarely the case in political arguments.
An atheist explaining the existence of religious people should make it clear that he is allowing for the possibility that some of them may have good reasons for believing in God, whether or not the conclusion is correct.
I really think anon@gmail should be banned completely. The fact of its existence adds nothing but the opportunity for people with chips on their shoulders to insult people. Which is not to say there have been no polite, constructive comments posted under that name, but that the former is, overwhelmingly, what it’s been used for thus far, for reasons which, to SSC readers (who are interested in amateur sociology), should be obvious.
I’m not claiming to be a saint: if I could only post here under an anon handle indistinguishable from any other I would be more snarky, I’m sure, too.
Plus, if you’re going to be civil, I still don’t see why you can’t just be anonymous in the usual way.
The main problem with the anon handle is that it gets very confusing when you’re trying to reply to “Anonymous, no not you Anonymous the other Anonymous, no not you other Anonymous, the other other Anonymous” and then you basically end up going “green gravatar anon, blue gravatar anon etc.” so why not have them as Blue, Green, etc names in the first place?
On the general anon issue …
It’s useful for people to be able to separate their online persona from their realspace persona if they want to, since that lets them express unpopular opinions without being exposed to realspace retaliation. But it would be nice if the online persona on a site stayed the same, so that commenters would be constrained by online reputation. Unfortunately, I don’t see any way of enforcing that.
And I don’t see any point to having a name shared by multiple posters, the way “anonymous” currently is. That just leads to confusion. But perhaps I’m missing something.
Ironically, considering the content of many anon@gmail comments, it illustrates perfectly “the tragedy of the commons.”
If we think of anon@gmail as a comment “space,” which, unlike others, is available for anyone to use, then we see that the incentive to put anything of value there is much diminished, while the incentive to dump one’s “garbage” there is much increased.
Maybe anon@gmail should show up slightly greyed out. Or the JavaScript front-end could give people the option to just make them all disappear.
“Maybe anon@gmail should show up slightly greyed out. Or the JavaScript front-end could give people the option to just make them all disappear.”
But what is the actual advantage of allowing it in the first place that Scott should take special steps to accommodate it? If it were like, “on the one hand, it lends itself to abuse, but on the other, it fulfills useful function x,” I could maybe see doing that.
But what useful function does it serve? It doesn’t make it any easier or harder to connect to a real life person; it only makes it harder to connect one SSC post to another. Since, for the reasons I stated, there is an incentive for such posts to be of lower quality than otherwise, why maintain this public “dumping ground” at all?
@onyomi:
When Scott does something we don’t understand the reasoning behind, it’s traditional to ascribe it to “something something Commie Tumblr Friends.”
(BTW, am I the only one who thinks of Happy Tree Friends when he hears that phrase?)
I suspect that if you are an Xist making a criticism about how other Xists behave in a way that is counterproductive to X, you need to clearly proclaim your own dedication to X, otherwise the Xists you are trying to persuade might see you as a !X traitor.
Do you write your every article with a caveat “You know, I might be wrong about everything I believe?” Furthermore, isn’t it obvious he believes that “there are intelligent, educated, decent people who disagree with them” from the part that explicitly discusses “that the average Republican is better educated and has a higher IQ than the average Democrat. That for every overpowered study finding superior liberal open-mindedness and intellect and knowledge, there is one to suggest that Republicans have the better of these qualities.”
I try to write in a way that does not make it sound as though I am a hundred percent certain that all of my beliefs are correct. In my first book, for example, I explored ways in which the stateless system I was advocating might fail, leaving us worse off than we now are. In the current third edition I expand that discussion and also have a chapter on ways in which that system would fail to produce the optimal legal rules.
One important intellectual skill that I don’t think the current educational system does a good job of teaching is evaluating sources of information on internal evidence, deciding whether to believe what a book, article, or web page is telling you. One way of doing that is by whether the author appears to see potential weaknesses in his own position.
But writing a book about a proposed different way to completely organize society, which has basically never been tried before (excepting dubious claims regarding ancient Iceland and the like), is a different genre than a group member writing to an intended audience of other group members about perceived errors of group strategy. To expect the latter kind of article to go into detail that maybe the group is factually wrong, seems to me unreasonable, and a way to make a reflexive criticism. It’s almost a trap. That is, either an article self-criticizes the group, or you say the group is flawed for not doing more self-criticism.
“To expect the latter kind of article to go into detail that maybe the group is factually wrong”
Where does the “go into detail” come from? I expect the author to write in a way that make it clear that he realizes that they might be wrong and that, whether or not they are wrong, people might have good reasons to disagree with them. I don’t think this author does.
I would say you just restated “go into detail” – “realizes that they might be wrong … good reasons to disagree with them”. To make this a general requirement of overall group beliefs, of every article about group strategy, that the group’s ideas might be wrong, is to almost create the trap I outlined – either self-criticize all the time, or be criticized for not self-criticizing all the time.
This article was good at putting into words why, even though I often vote Democratic, I often want to see those same people lose.
Finally got around to reading this. I’ve noticed this trend since the beginning of the Obama presidency because of one particular, consistent rhetorical move: every time anyone asked Obama “why do you think opposition to ACA remains high?” or, later, “how would you grade your presidency thus far? Any thing you could do better?” etc. etc.
His response was always “I think we need to work harder at explaining our views to people.” “I could have spent more time explaining. It’s not enough just to do good things. We’ve got to explain to people why they’re good.” The implication and underlying conviction seems to be: “nobody who is well-informed disagrees with me.”
But what would a politician reasonably reply to such a question? It’s like the job interview query “What is your biggest weakness?” The reply to that is “I’m a perfectionist”, not anything like “I waste too much time writing comments on blogs”.
I’ll admit that it’s the sort of question which doesn’t pay to answer honestly, which is part of why politics is so awful (because honest, serious, thoughtful answers aren’t rewarded), but I don’t remember hearing this particular answer until the Obama presidency. Maybe someone else can point me to how Bush, Clinton, Reagan, or someone else answered the same question (maybe they did the same thing; I just don’t remember hearing it till Obama)?
Strategically, it was not a bad move for Obama; but part of the reason why may be precisely the phenomenon described in his article: because he was talking to his base who already believed that the only logical answer to the question “why oppose liberal policies?” is “because you’re ill-informed.”
In fact, we might say this is the other side of Bush’s “they underestimated me” coin: if the author’s basic thesis (that liberals over the past couple of decades have shifted from believing their opponents are wrong to believing their opponents are confused or stupid, arguably the only reasonable way to resolve the cognitive dissonance created by the labor classes you thought you were representing not liking you) is correct, then we’d expect the following:
Liberal politicians heavily imply (and perhaps really believe) that blue collar rural types would like their policies if they weren’t so stupid and ill-informed (here you can still blame Fox News, etc.); conservative politicians imply (and perhaps really believe) that the liberal politicians disdain and look down upon the blue collar rural types. And that, of course, is exactly what we see: with Bush, with Obama, and now, the most successful of the new crop, including Clinton, Trump, and Cruz.
I Googled “Bush regrets” and got this, but I’d be happier if it was a source other than the Guardian.
Judging from the left-wing blogs I read, his base believes opposition to liberal policies is mostly due to racism – which is an even worse answer to for him to give in an interview.
Well, a politician could say something along the lines of “I regret even trying to compromise with the other side because they are so wrong it’s not even worth an attempt to deal with them”. Or “I’m sorry I didn’t pound the rubble of the war I started”. That is, not being even more partisan. But really, an idea that liberals should be willing to grant conservatives might be correct at every turn, when conservatives rarely if ever grant such charity, seems like a recipe for political disaster. How many conservatives ever say “Perhaps war is not the answer, perhaps taxes on the rich are too low, perhaps the social safety net should be stronger, …” etc.?
“an idea that liberals should be willing to grant conservatives might be correct at every turn, when conservatives rarely if ever grant such charity, seems like a recipe for political disaster.”
I would agree with you. I’m not saying it’s a good political strategy. That’s one of the problems with politics: it doesn’t pay to be nuanced. I think it was Steven Kaas who tweeted something like: “if we admit 2+2=4, then next they’ll insist it’s 5, so we better just make a firm stand at 3.”
*I should add, however, that I don’t think this is ultimately about standing or ceding ground; it’s instead about what seems to be a growing tendency toward “Bulverism,” especially on the left: that is, instead of engaging with the opponent’s arguments directly, you beg the question and start psychologizing or otherwise trying to explain why the opponent keeps getting it wrong.
Re. “Bush regrets”: it will be interesting to see what Obama says after December of this year.
Reminds me of the oft-repeated “we need to have a national conversation about guns/healthcare/immigration”.
A “conversation” like that brings to mind Michael Moriarty’s parting shot to Janet Reno:
“The next time you call me to a meeting where only one side gets to ask the questions, send a subpoena.”
(Proving the shade of the Hollywood blacklist still operates, Moriarty’s career pretty much ended at that point; he hasn’t had a decent part since)
Oh yes, I think that “national conversation” thing is definitely a symptom of the same general tendency: if you haven’t yet come around to our way of thinking that just means we need to talk to you some more.
Is this really such a surprising phenomenon? It’s about as old as Western philosophy is; Socrates himself argued that all evil ultimately stemmed from ignorance. It’s condescending, sure, but it’s nothing new under the sun as far as philosophical positions go.
Off-topic, but tangentially relevant: a great scene from The Glass Menagerie with Michael Moriarty and (in a coincidence funny to Law & Order fans) Sam Waterston.
@Seth
Really? You think that ObamaCare is so worthless that any honest discussion of its weaknesses will be an unmitigated failure for Obama?
Because when it comes to reversing people’s hatred of X, telling them “the only reason you hate X is because you’re too dumb / ignorant to understand how great X is” is pretty much a guaranteed loser.
I mean, if Obama had a functional brain he could talk about all the attacks from the Left, all the ways it “didn’t go far enough”, bring those up, and use it as ground for pushing for more!
But I must disagree with your underlying & fundamental point: the claim that “politics” means you can’t ever discuss tradeoffs. Having crappy and worthless views means you can’t honestly discuss tradeoffs, because if you did people would reject your position.
Not all positions are that weak.
For someone on the center-left or center-right with a technocratic bent, the ignorant are the biggest obstacle / opportunity.
The centrist isn’t going to convince the libertarians, the monarchists, the socialists, and so on. But the people on the opposite side, but still in the center, they might not love the policy if they fully understood it, but they probably wouldn’t absolutely hate it. However since they are (perhaps rationally) ignorant they are susceptible to being convinced that it is really socialism/fascism.
It sounds like you’re just pattern-matching here, instead of considering what the actual situation was and why he might have thought that explanation was required. The ARRA and the ACA were the huge elephants in the room of his first term; They both polled pretty badly across the country, but the policies they consisted of were very popular. As polled, people weren’t opposed to these laws, they were opposed to “the stimulus” and “Obamacare”. “Explaining things better” seems like an entirely sane response, and has nothing to do with the smug “I’m self-evidently right and won’t consider the possibility that I’m wrong”.
Obama’s presidency is perhaps a particularly bad example because, at least in his first term, there _was_ nothing coming from the other side of the conversation. It’s hard to consider that the other side may be right when they aren’t saying anything except “Our top priority is to make you a one-term president” (paraphrase of an actual quote by Senate leader McConnell).
[1] at least in the political arena: it’s not a coincidence that half the people from my rich California town suddenly switched from Republican to “vaguely libertarian”. Conservative ideas weren’t bankrupt, but its political representation sure as shit was, esp at the federal level.
Nothing coming from the other side of the conversation, or nothing coming through the news channels you prefer? I remember a whole lot of ideas just about health insurance[1] coming from Republican Representatives and Senators in the 2009 – 2011 time frame. I do not remember hearing about any of them on NPR.
You should be more careful with sweeping generalizations.
[1] As Arnold Kilng points out, we’re not actually talking about insurance, and it has a lot more to do with medicine (doctors, hospitals, pills, and procedures) than with health—so a more-accurate term would be “medical services financing.” Politically, of course, this term is a non-starter.
> Nothing coming from the other side of the conversation, or nothing coming through the news channels you prefer? I remember a whole lot of ideas just about health insurance[1] coming from Republican Representatives and Senators in the 2009 – 2011 time frame. I do not remember hearing about any of them on NPR.
You should be more careful with sweeping generalizations.
I don’t see why you’d assume that “what NPR reports” has anything to do with “what’s coming from the other side of the aisle”. I was talking about political proposals, advanced by the mainstream of the opposition party. This is what’s actually relevant, since “some guy saying something with no support from his party” is entirely irrelevant when we’re talking about making policy.
If you think that NPR (from whom I don’t get my news, btw….) or any other large media organization wouldn’t cover policy counter-proposals coming from GOP leadership, you’re delusional.
@Virbie:
1) You’re moving the goalposts from “at least in his first term, there _was_ nothing coming from the other side of the conversation” to “I was talking about political proposals, advanced by the mainstream of the opposition party”.
2) You wrote: “you’re delusional”. That’s a counterproductive debating tactic here; I’m pretty sure we just had a discussion about it.
3) Consider reserving double quotation marks for actual quotations (as I’ve done above), rather than for a “paraphrase of an actual quote”, which is what single quotes were invented for.*
(* Yeah, yeah, I know: vice-versa for Brits.)
Yes, all parts but the mandate were very popular. And of course they were! Of course people would like all the good stuff and none of the bad stuff which is necessary to make it work.
This all seems like so much special pleading. Is there a precedent for trying to determine how people really feel about a law by trying to name just the good parts?
I have a more general objection to the argument. The very fact that the poll results for the parts diverge so much from those for the entire program tells us that the respondents are not mentally connecting the individual proposals with the public debate over the package; their responses are a snap reaction based on such limited information as will fit into a poll question. Even leaving aside the devil’s familiar tendency to lurk in the details, all these results are telling us is that people liked ARRA and PPACA better before they heard the arguments for and against than they did after. Depending on people’s views about the quality of public debate, we can disagree about how much of an argument this is against the programs in question– but it’s odd to say that it’s an argument in their favor.
Wow, this a is a masterstroke of arguing against a point no one is making. My favorite part is how you put words in my mouth in the first paragraph, and then issue an edgy and devastating takedown of those words (which I guess are now mine…) in the second.
What second paragraph?
@Virbie & @ Cerebral Paul Z:
Do you want a safe car with great acceleration that’s highly reliable and gets pretty good gas milage?
Are you willing to pay $200,000 to get it?
No? Why not? You liked almost all the parts! You must be some ignorant dupe of the auto lobby!
Just like people who don’t like ObamaCare are dupes of your favorite “X”.
Do you both now understand why the argument you present is so worthless?
So far I’ve seen a couple of dismissals of this story, basically for being by a white dude about white dudes. Fair enough – all politics is identity politics.
Here’s white dude Kevin Drum with a more pointed critique:
I found this part intriguing:
The fact that SJWs are clearly anti-fun is a point in favor of the “SJWs are the modern equivalent of the Inquisition” theory.
More like modern puritans, or the temperance union.
I’d say Savonarola, especially given the youth-participation angle, along with ruining perfectly good art.
Random question:
did the “lifestyle traits associated with religiosity” study use a similar definition as the definition of “religion” implied here?
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/08/a-theory-of-religion/
This comments-section is more depressing than walking down Court Street in Brooklyn in the rain — 1,100 comments so far, and it’s doubtful anyone would respond to a question and even if anyone did the one who asked would never find the response. On some websites you’re lost in the crowd; on others you’re a dirty Jew whose statements are contaminated from inception; on others you don’t have the expert knowledge and command of jargon to phrase questions correctly; on others there are three essays per day published so that even though there are only ten comments per essay it’s pointless to comment because by the time you look for a response the discussion’s over. The internet has only made things lonelier and more frustrating for the lonely and frustrated. I suspect that the people who converse in comments-sections already know each other in real space and converse there. How many outsiders spend 3 hours composing an essay that is lost forever in the comments section of a blog? I’ll bet a million hours have been lost this way. Maybe a billion. It’s just another way to flush creative energy down the toilet.
What spawned this?
If you have a question, why don’t you test your hypothesis by asking it?
I don’t know anybody else here in real life.
Also, the box in the top right lets you know when new comments have been posted.
Updates are not too frequent, so people follow the latest one or two.
I assure you I know almost none of the people here in realspace. In fact, I may know none in realspace, though I know some from other forums.
> It’s just another way to flush creative energy down the toilet.
Yeah, but what else is there to do with it?
Sometimes that happens here, and it does suck. But for the most part SSC commentariat is pretty good at not leaving things hanging. As long as you’re not posting during a flame war there’s a solid chance that you’ll get someone responding.
Also ditto on not knowing anyone here IRL. That said a lot of the original Less Wrong crew, especially from Berkeley, do know one another.
I don’t know anyone else here in real life. At least, I don’t think I do. I do, however, know a couple people IRL who like Eliezer and LW-adjacent stuff, so it’s conceivable (and always slightly weird to imagine) that I may know some of the other posters and not know I know them, so to speak. But for the most part, I only know people here by their handles (people who use their real names aside).
I also don’t see what makes you think a question would go unanswered. Most people looking for advice seem to get it, so far as I can tell.
As for flushing creative energy down the toilet–I definitely procrastinate a lot by reading and commenting here, but I don’t think I’d be composing new operas in my spare time if I weren’t. Everyone needs a certain amount of down time, and this is probably more productive than Minecraft or whatever. Plus, I actually learn new things here sometimes, and refine my ideas on things/get better at articulating them. Sometimes even change my mind.
SSC is a pretty busy place, easy to feel lost in the crowd. Maybe the SSC subreddit would be a better online group for you. It’s got fewer people and a different pace. https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/
Yeah, the internet can aggravate loneliness and alienation, especially if you’re trying to use it as your main social outlet. I know this works for some people, but I’d do better forcing myself to get out of the house.
I don’t know any SSC people in real life, though I also recognize several people from other places on the internet.
I think there is only one regular poster here who I know that I knew before I started reading SSC, plus one more person who occasionally posts. But I’ve hosted two SSC meetups so have probably met a number of people who post here, although Scott’s the only one I’m sure of.
As someone who has walked on Court St several times, I don’t see any reason to think it’s notably more depressing than any other street.
Was reading about the Foxconn suicides, a story presented in the press as “American electronics giants (Apple, etc.) team up with Taiwanese manufacturing firm to take cruel advantage of poor mainland Chinese workers, making them work under conditions so alienating and dehumanizing that they started committing suicide at an alarming rate.”
But according to Wikipedia, China at large has one of the highest suicide rates–20 in 100,000, and in the worst year for Foxconn suicides, only 14 of 900,000 employees committed suicide. Didn’t this actually make it like the happiest place in China?
Immediate thought: FoxConn employees who have committed suicide, going by Wiki, are almost exclusively late teens/early 20s, and more male than female.
The Wiki page for “Suicide in China” suggests that suicide in China is 75% female (which is unusual – generally male suicides outnumber female) and 75% rural.
So, the FoxConn rate might be high for men in an urban setting.
In the West women attempt suicide at a higher rate than men, but have a very low rate of completion because they OD on pills. The source that wikipedia cites for the high rates of rural and female suicides implies that the cause is easy access to pesticide. Similarly, female medical workers in the West have high rates of completion, apparently because they know which poisons will kill them.
Back to Foxconn, you mentioned age but did not mention that younger people have much lower rates of suicide than older people, the opposite of what most people believe, because the suicides of older people are drowned out by other causes.
It is very difficult to trust any of the statistics, but I think Onyomi is correct that Foxconn had a low rate of suicide, even after correcting for demographics.
With regards to age, you’re absolutely correct that the rate is higher among older people. Numbers are higher among the younger, though, is how I understand it – just because of larger numbers of younger people.
With regards to the rural pesticide connection, I’d read about that in India – but the male suicide rate in India is higher than the female – although still less of a gap than the norm worldwide.
In the United States, per the CDC’s “Fatal Injury Statistics”, the total number of suicides for the year 2014 break down as follows:
age 0-19 2262 (2.75 per 100k)
age 20-29 6528 (14.54 per 100k)
age 30-39 6474 (15.62 per 100k)
age 40-49 7630 (18.39 per 100k)
age 50-59 8955 (20.31 per 100k)
age 60-69 5533 (16.33 per 100k)
age 70-79 3095 (16.29 per 100k)
age 80+ 2292 (19.22 per 100k)
The overall numbers and rates-per-100k seem have increased in the past 5 years, but the overall trend hasn’t changed much.
Outside of the United States, this might be right:
With regards to age, you’re absolutely correct that the rate is higher among older people. Numbers are higher among the younger, though, is how I understand it – just because of larger numbers of younger people.
But inside the United States, that doesn’t work unless you count ages 50-59 as your break-point for “young”
Admittedly, we’re discussing “China” and the “The West”. So I don’t know which region you were talking about.
But the numbers for the U.S. are heavily weighted towards ages above the age of 40. (And, as was mentioned above, males. Females are something like 25% of all successful suicides in the U.S.)
Or it is at least the place in China with the best safety nets…
Well, but they did that in response to the negative press about how all their workers were committing suicide. The nets don’t by themselves prove they had an unusually bad suicide problem; only that they had a bad press about suicide problem. The question is: was that press justified in the first place, or were the workers just committing suicide at the same or even a lower rate than other Chinese people?
I have a suspicion it may be a case of people holding private corporations to much, much higher standards than they would anyone else. With 900,000 people living and working at their factories, these are essentially corporate villages. If 14 people in a town of 900,000 committed suicide one year, especially in a country where the usual rate is 14ish per 100,000, no one would report on it, except perhaps to say “why are the residents of this town happier than elsewhere”?
But when it’s a “sweatshop” run by scary multinational corporations, then, of course, the suicide story fits into preexisting biases.
(Note, I haven’t done that much research into it, and I’m not saying Foxconn was necessarily a delightful place to work; I could certainly believe an argument that though rural migrants were tempted to move there for the higher pay, nonetheless many ended up unhappier than they might have been working outdoors with their families close by; question is, were they unusually unhappy in a way we could blame the company for? Numbers don’t seem to back that up).
This case is also interesting, of course, because it seems highly analogous to the question of whether the industrial revolution actually made people more miserable or better off (the common narrative being that it made people better off on paper but more alienated/unhappy, at least in the short term).
I was trying, and failed, to make a pun about social safety nets vs actual safety nets. Welp, back to lurking for me.
I got the joke! I just thought it might also have been a way of saying “well, of course their rate is lower–they catch you when you try.”
But thank you for bringing it up, even as an an-cap, I still auto-matched the foxconn suicide stuff to big bad corporations in china (even with the idea in my head that it might suck but it was better than those people’s alternatives). I didn’t think to ask “compared to what?” when I read those stories back when Foxconn stories hit the news.
As a libertarian, I expect to see blatant anti-capitalist and anti-corporate bias all over the place, but this particular case just seems so egregious it makes me wonder if I’m not missing something. I mean, this was a big scandal, both in China and globally, and yet nobody bothered to compare the number of suicides at this company to the population at large? Are we really just that bad?
I mean, I have to admit that I, too, just assumed the rate had to be much higher than average or else it wouldn’t have been a story; so maybe I’m party of the problem?
I think this actually makes it worse, but this was known to at least some media outlets from the beginning. I remember reading it, probably on The Economist (e.g.), and being frustrated that even the few who mentioned this didn’t give it the weight it deserved.
It’s funny, I heard the Fox conn story from inside the industry (sort of) and believed it, figuring that rural China maybe so bad that they take a job that drives them to desperation or something, without making the logical question about what that implies about the base rates (if even true at all, of course).
I always have to pipe up here to mention that “sweatshop” does not literally describe electronics assembly. Most of that sort of work is done in rooms which are (at great expense) kept cool, dry, well-lit and dust-free. This is not so much for the benefit of the workers as for the benefit of the product – even very small amounts of dust, moisture or temperature variation can cause the final product to not work.
(I’ve worked at a factory in Guangdong)
I realize “sweatshop” is figurative. It just means “place with bad working conditions run by first world companies in the third world.” It makes sense that the place would need to be kept cool for the sake of the electronics, but the fact that it wouldn’t otherwise be air-conditioned doesn’t, in itself, prove to me that Foxconn is/was an especially uncaring employer.
Most blue collar work in China, whether for foreign or Chinese bosses, is not done in climate controlled conditions (it’s not uncommon for even “middle class” Chinese go to school, for example, in the dead of winter to sit in unheated classrooms bundled in heavy parkas).
In other words, it’s the same problem: working at Foxconn doesn’t seem like a pleasant job to an American office worker, but is it any worse than working an equivalent job for a Chinese employer or being self-employed in rural China?
But since you’ve had the experience of actually working in a factory in Guangdong, maybe you can tell us more about the working conditions and how they compared to any non-foreign owned options the workers might have had.
The factory floor looks like this.
The most labor-intensive part of electronics assembly – the part that involves the most workers – involves carefully putting lots of little pieces together in a precise order on an assembly line. This is done almost exclusively by young women ages 16-20. These women come from poor farming villages in northern China where their family can barely afford to keep them fed and their local prospects are dire. The factory provides room and board and a very small salary and work experience and escape; after a few years they can get a job at another company that pays more for more experienced workers. (Or go off and get married, or do something else.) It’s transitional employment for young people, kind of like working for McDonalds would be here – nobody works at the same assembly line until retirement, but they do it for a few years until a better option comes along.
The air conditioning is a HUGE deal – Guangdong in the summer is miserably hot and muggy and yes, good air conditioning outside of the factory is rare – if you’re going to be sitting anywhere working, the factory floor is where you want to be doing it.
To my western eyes it seemed like a pretty good gig apart from than the low salary. I’d rather be doing assembly work than, say, working a fryer at McDonalds. You get to sit in one place and achieve flow – learn a task and get to do it really really well. Then a week later there’s another product and a new task to learn and master.
One big annoyance for the workers is lining up to go through metal detectors at the end of a shift. Workers take off their shoes and slide them down a little side ramp as they walk through. Imagine going through airport security twice a day every day you work! This is necessary because the components they work with are extremely valuable – without the search, a worker might double their salary by stealing the occasional CPU chip.
The regular-employee bathroom was normal by local standards but horrific by ours – a hole-in-the-floor basin flushed by dumping some water in via a bucket carried from a nearby sink.
In another part of the factory there were a few machinists (young men) creating tooling to, say, make plastic casing molds. They operated heavy machinery that threw sparks. Safety goggles were available but the goggles are hot and uncomfortable so workers mostly chose not to use them. Here in the US some combination of OSHA and private insurance inspectors would be hectoring the firm to make sure people wear goggles, but life is cheaper in Guangdong.
(I have direct experience with two firms based in southern china: GSL (Group Sense Limited) and IDT (Integrated Display Technologies) and only second- or third-hand data about others. My data is about 15 years old.)
Well, so it’s basically as I thought and, in many ways, better than other jobs in Guangdong, where, as you say, AC is a very big deal.
And I think it reveals something else about our biases about jobs: there is such a thing as a job which is a good job for an unmarried person ages 16-20 which would not be a good job for someone aged 45 with a spouse and three kids. As we tend to erroneously conceive of income brackets in static terms, we tend to think about jobs as if they were permanent.
About the “mostly women” thing–I recall reading a story about life for local young men in one such town; apparently it is extremely hard to get a job but extremely easy to find a girlfriend–sometimes two or three.
I’m pretty sure the hiring practices were explicitly sex and age based. There is a stereotype that young women have small fingers and good eyesight and can be patient and careful in a job that requires all those attributes. There’s also the fact that farming in a Chinese village requires physical strength; young men are seen as more valuable staying home working on the family farm whereas young women have a comparative advantage going off to do something else.
I should have mentioned that the work hours can be very long – a 12-hour workday is not uncommon.
If you think in terms of “jobs suitable for a particular stage of life” an obvious comparison is joining the army. When we send our 17-year-old boys off to serve in the military we expect they might have to sleep many-to-a-room in crowded barracks, work long hours doing MUCH harder labor, suffer in sweltering heat and use smelly latrines…but we think it’s okay because it’s only for a few years and “builds character” and has various other benefits. So what, if anything, makes this different from that?
@ Glen Raphael
The regular-employee bathroom was normal by local standards but horrific by ours – a hole-in-the-floor basin flushed by dumping some water in via a bucket carried from a nearby sink.
Just how dirty/smelly was this bathroom, in fact? From a little travel some years ago, I visualized a shiny molded non-porous floor at a good angle, and enough water to keep the floor cleaner than a current US unisex.
Ie, a room designed to be cleanable — not cluttered with a western style commode of Baroque concaves and convexes in a corner.
The smell comes partly from mildew – the (flat, not well-sloped) floor is always wet when you arrive from having water dumped on it – and partly from the fact that in China the kind of places that have this sort of toilet often have a behavioral norm that says used toilet paper should get dumped in a wastebasket near the toilet rather than flushed down the drain.
Here’s a video about Chinese squat toilets that features the kind I’m thinking of (oval, flat with the floor, a rectangle of ceramic ridges on either side).
It smelled pretty bad, though not worse than, say, your average festival porta-potty. I’m sure the locals get used to it. Or were already used to it since it’s the same as you’d see in most of rural china.
Well, this is perhaps the most poetic description of a bathroom I am going to hear.
I am pretty sure I looked this up back around 2009-10 when the story was getting a lot of play and came to this exact conclusion.
Assuming the Foxconn story is as unfounded as it seems, though I do blame anti-capitalist, anti-“sweat shop”-type bias to some extent, I think there may be another factor at work here: inability of human intuition to scale. A city of 900,000 people doesn’t seem like a single “unit,” but a factory town where 900,000 all work for the same company somehow kind of does. But we don’t really have good intuitions about groups of 900,000 (or groups a good deal smaller than that either, most likely).
At my high school there was at least one suicide during the four years I was there. This was seen as tragic, but not wildly unusual. My high school had about 1,500 students. So for my time there, that was a rate of .25 suicides per year (very anecdotal with narrow range, I know–but okay, I think, for a ballpark figure). If we scaled my high school up to Foxconn size that would mean 150 suicides a year.
A high school which has 1-3 suicides a decade probably would not be seen as having a severe problem. But a company which had 150 suicides a year would probably be described as experiencing an “epidemic,” even if the company had 1 million employees.
Dealing with China often causes failure of intuition with respect to numbers, actually. The city of Suzhou where I lived for a while, for example, is considered a “mid-size city” in China with a population of 4 million in the urban center and 8 million when you include its suburbs. In other words, it’s about the size of Chicago, but you actually have to take a train to Shanghai (the “big” city in the area) to find an airport.
I read a book about smartphones that covered the case. Foxconn is about as bad as most other companies in China/ slightly better- hours are long, work is dangerous, monotous and mind-numbing and can be unhealthy.
None of those were the problem. The issue mentioned (at least in one case by a survivor) was that they came to the facility, did their work and then didn’t receive any pay. Attempting to find out where their money is was unsuccessful; management ignored them, they had no one else to turn to due to the amount of time they spend working, the movement of room mates and lack of connection to the local community and so they were pretty much screwed.
Tldr; the conditions were bad but some of the suicides were caused by people slipping through the cracks which is very easy in a facility that big.
Wow, a little compassion for workers on passover. Thanks, Samuel.
Here’s a look at Trump’s employee dormitories in Dubai:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBI0jTyZ2xw&feature=youtu.be
I’ve seen lots of migrant laborer dormitories. These are nice. And for third world blue collar workers $231/mo. is a lot.
The interviewer’s attitude is actually highly elitist. Oh my god, you have to share a bathroom and kitchen! How disgusting! How can you go on??
And, of course, he has such a clear agenda that the editing of the super short clip will be done to make it look as awful as possible. I could probably make my college dorm room look like a third world hellhole with a good film crew and some creative narration.
I don’t generally agree with arguments of the form “these workers’ conditions may be bad, but they’re better than the alternatives by *economics*”, but the living conditions in that video didn’t look very bad at all (although temperature may be a factor, lack of air conditioning is much more important in a 40 degree heat).
@onyomi, your dorm crew might feature a masturbating ted cruz… which is worse than a third world country.
Right now I’m kind of wishing I did suffer aphantasia!
The contrast the authors are trying to draw, perhaps implicitly, is between the comfortable upper middle class Westerners who buy iPhones and the Foxconn employees who make them. That there are other people in China who are even worse off is beside the point.
Yes, it’s purely the Copenhagen interpretation of ethics.
“Name of Vessel”.
It seems to me that you can’t control for confounding variables unless you understand the situation, and there’s no way to guarantee that you understand the situation.
Maybe it’s one of those big data things– the more you know, the more likely you are to run across evidence in the right direction, but I’m feeling very tentative about this.
On not being able to visualize or imagine any other sensory experience. I’ve linked to the metafilter discussion, but I recommend the article that inspired it.
I’d have put the link here, but I doubt anyone would have seen it.
I feel like I developed a mild sort of aphantasia when I went through puberty. I still have the ability to visualize things in my mind, but I feel like it grew weaker and/or I had less of an urge to do so, somehow, as I transitioned to adulthood. Maybe the stereotype that children have vivid imaginations isn’t just about them having nothing better to do, but about a shift which goes on, at least for some people, towards a more “data-focused” mind (moving towards knowing, for example, what you did on Christmas 1997 not as a visceral somatic memory, but more in the same way you’d know, for example, Napoleon’s birthday).
I’ve always been more of an aural processor than a visual processor, but that to me relates: it feels, at least to me, like the distance between narrated facts and data points is less than between visualized facts and data points, though that could be my own cognitive bias (though one also wants to distinguish between remembered visual stimuli of any kind–a memory of a sound, a smell, or a taste, as opposed to data about them: knowledge of the fact of having experienced a sound, a smell, or a taste).
*Upon further reflection, I think there is a difference, for me, in the way I remember sound and visual input: I can and do recall aural input more frequently and vividly, I think. Like when I read the linked article, I can sort of understand what it must be like to be unable to call up a vivid mental image of a beach, it’s definitely weirder to imagine being unable to have memory of music: sometimes I wish I didn’t have this, due to “melodymania.”
I can barely do this.
I mean, I can sort of barely get a rough picture in my mind of what my mother or father looks like. But I can’t “hold it” there or look at it closely. It’s like the phenomenon (I can’t remember the name) when you’re looking through a telescope and there are some nebulae you can only see out the corner of your eye because there are more rods there. When you try to look right at it, it goes away.
Or the most concrete example I can think of is doing math in my head. Say 32 x 8. I can sort of visualize, as if written on paper,
32
x8
__
And then imagine going through all the steps as I would on paper to get
32
x8
__
16
240
___
256
But it’s really difficult to hold all of that in my head at once as a mental image. Which is why people write these things down (right?).
While this is a kind of “inner sight”, it’s almost completely unlike seeing. It has no location in my visual field, no real spatiality. It’s not like a heads-up-display sitting in front of my eyes.
And while I can “visualize” colors in a sense, e.g. “think of a woman with green eyes and red lips”, I can’t really, like, see the colors. It’s hard to describe.
When I’m reading a novel or something, I can sort of roughly visualize a scene, but it’s vague and incredibly indistinct. Nothing has any detail. It’s not like a photograph where you can zoom in and look at the little details. For instance, I’m reading (or listening to the audiobook) of The Diamond Age. But do I have any kind of clear mental image of the facial features of any of the characters? Not at all.
I get the impression that most other people don’t have some kind of photographic ability to visualize things, either. But maybe I’m wrong.
I’d just like to comment on this part specifically, because I can do everything you said you can’t, but I can’t do this. I take books not as an invitation to visualize a rich environment, but (enjoyable) statements of fact. For those familiar with Terry Prachett’s Thud!, early on there’s a sequence where Vimes and Angua rush through a series of dwarf tunnels. It’s taken me four separate readings of Thud! over many years to build a mental visual picture of what’s actually going on.
Math, fine. Parents and acquaintances, fine (though memories will fade). Picturing what’s happening in books? That takes actual effort.
Well, I mean it’s hard to picture what’s happening if it isn’t described very clearly or is very complex. Like trying to read a patent or something without looking at the diagrams:
That’s the first thing I could find off the internet. And that just goes in one ear and out the other, unless perhaps I thought about it very carefully.
But, for instance, there’s a scene in The Diamond Age where Lord Finkle-McGraw is talking to Mrs. Hackworth in a garden outside, while three children play around, finding a hidden passage in the garden wall.
I had a vague mental perspective of a house on the right, the two adults standing somewhere on the left near the perspective of the viewer, and the children running around further afield. The picture didn’t include, like, the colors of all their clothes or what shape everyone’s nose was or what the house looked like or what was in the garden or how many feet away the wall was from the house.
It’s not that these details were there, but I didn’t focus on them. They just weren’t there. Which is what makes it completely different in kind from, say, a photograph.
Are you saying you don’t get such pictures at all?
Or what if I tell you: imagine a desk in a white room with a little cube sitting on top of it. Do you get some kind of mental picture from that?
I think this is a good description of how my reading usually goes. It doesn’t help that I’ll easily gloss over additional details even when they are provided (e.g. George R.R. Martin’s feast descriptions). I realize now that I was unclear in my original post; I meant to say that while I can form clear images of my parents, or visualize mental math, I don’t generate clear visuals from reading unless I’m actively trying.
When considering your exercise, I picture a featureless expanse with a fairly detailed wooden desk (that is vaguely familiar) with a non-descript fist-sized cube. The problem is that I’m now thinking about making visuals from reading. When I’m reading fiction, it’s by default a very non-visual experience.
I spoke about this briefly to my partner, and she compared the process to “fan-casting”, where you have a strong idea of what a character would look like. In my mind, characters are vague blobs of traits and personality.
I think it might be possible to test for this using fiction, because of an odd experience I nearly always get when reading Lee Child books (and nearly never with, say, Ed McBain or Dick Francis).
Child uses a lot of direction-words – north/south, left/right and so on. And these things only fit together in one way to make up an image of what is going on and a mental map of the story. And nearly always, partway through the story, I have to flip all my mental images and my mental map because some direction just doesn’t fit. It’s really uncomfortable to have to do that, so I’ve tried to track down what was causing it. Turns out it is the same thing every time, it is the driving on the left versus driving on the right difference, and the associated difference in driver’s-side versus passenger-side.
Most starkly, I visualised the opening scene of “The Hard Way” back to front because of this – which threw off my perception of the whole first half of the book. No trouble at all with the second half which is set in my native UK.
I had a similarly jarring experience playing the Wii version of Twilight Princess – that’s the version that was flipped left-to-right in order to make Link right-handed, which had the side-effect of making the sun rise in the West and set in the East. I had dreadful trouble navigating in that game but also made the surprising discovery that I unconsciously use the sun for navigating in the real world all the time.
A few years ago I lost the ability to visualise data structures and algorithmic forms after a period of severe burnout (in the lead-in to the beginning of a very severe fatigue condition). This had been a major bonus in my career as a programmer, unsurprisingly, and I tried very hard but unsuccessfully to regain it when I began to recover.
So far, I’ve not been able to restore that capability; I am forced to plan and architect much more extensively since I can no longer just hold the whole thing in my head and access it at will. In truth I think it’s made me a better coder overall; certainly more careful and with a better understanding of systems architecture.
I have limited ability to visualize– it’s work and the results are vague, fragile, and only take up a small part of my visual field.
My visual memory isn’t vivid at all, but my memory for colors is pretty good. Maybe it’s something like blindsight? I can tell what matches what without having a vivid ability to visualize.
My ability to construct tastes is good enough that I can have fun and get decent results with improvised cooking.
As for intermittent ability to visualize, I remember playing a board game which involved setting up short algorithms for moving robots. I was struggling with it but managing to a limited extent. When I got an upset stomach, my ability to visualize short sequences of turns evaporated completely.
I could go either way on the question of whether video games make anyone think any certain way. I think it equally likely that misogynists are more drawn to GTA because they hate women and the game depicts women as, well, walking socks. (Trying to keep my language clean here.)
However.
It is readily apparent the good researchers at Ohio State don’t know any gamers, and neither does the blogger that summed up their work.
What self-respecting GTA aficionado would limit himself to 25 minutes of play, one time?
Give me a break.
Unfortunately adverse selection rears its head (lets blame
OrochimaruMoloch); studies that pay people to play videos game all the way through are indistinguishable from, abusing department funds to play video games.That mirror “experiment” sounds like it comes from the Three Christs of Ypsilanti school of trolling-as-experiment.