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Can any serious theologians please explain Romans 1:18-20, at least as it related to proof for God? In what way may we see “his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature,” … “in the things that have been made.”? Further, is the witness of such things in anyways sufficient to act as a defeater for competing hypotheses which would attempt to disprove a god hypothesis?
Thanks in advance.
I can’t really answer your question because I’m not a serious theologian – but I do have the secular scholarship side covered. Christian theology traditionally holds, based on stuff like this, that knowledge of God was available in some form short of revelation to everyone.
However, at the time it was written, atheism in the modern sense seems to have been pretty unheard of: an early Christian theologian would not be trying to convince people of the existence of a higher power – they would, in the historical context, be seeking to convince people that the higher power was one God instead of whatever the local pagan tradition was.
A larger than expected proportion of US primary students perform above grade level. ‘estimated that between 20 and 40 percent of students perform above grade level in reading and between 11 and 30 percent perform above grade level in math’. Further reinforces my belief that most present education systems are very inefficient.
https://blogs.tip.duke.edu/giftedtoday/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2016/08/IEPPolicyBriefFinalPLUCKER.pdf
Well, they’re inefficient because of ideological straitjackets in which maximizing performance for kids isn’t going to happen if it can’t have all kids converge at the same fairly high, college-degree capable level.
This is obviously nutty and yet it’s clear that bringing a slightly below average kid up to a bit above average is not on the table because they’d still be way below the performance of a child of two director-level IT professionals. That so many kids perform well despite this is actually cause for celebration because it means we have a shot at changing the pedagogy to something that would serve all kids better.
I’m somewhat less convinced: “grade level” is a measure that has to take the less able as well as the most able into account, so you get the “average child of this age should be able to tie their shoelaces”.
Naturally some children will perform well above this, but it doesn’t necessarily mean much for teaching – I think present-day teaching systems probably are awful but how do we change them? Countries everywhere have been tinkering with curricula, exams, do we ‘teach to the test’, rote learning – good or bad?, what do employers want (that’s an awful burden on Irish schools, the government is constantly coming out with “we need more kids doing higher level maths because employers tell us there aren’t enough extruded educational products with the specifications they want” and this changes all the time – so sometimes employers want language skills, then they want critical thinking, then they want team work, then they want computer science degrees, etc.)
If we measure successful schools by “how do the pupils do on tests?” or “how many go on to university?” then we’re going to be stuck with ‘teaching to the test’ and drilling kids into how to write model answers to questions to get the best score on the test. Is that education?
Question. In the math space that somehow has emotions and qualia that we do, what would you say on the prospect that there exist strange math spaces that contain qualia, or utility spaces of infinity or even some higher cardinal order that is hard to understand?
So since I stated just above that I think the debates might end up being really important this go round, do people have any predictions for the first debate? Will Gennifer Flowers really be there? Will it be a crazy circus? Will there be a Candy Crowley “moderators wading in” moment? Will they both come out swinging? Or will it surprise us all by how staid it ends up being? Hillary’s strategy has got to be to fluster Trump, but will he take the bait? Will he attempt to deploy snark and other such snide remarks against Hillary when it’s just him and her (different dynamic than being on a stage full of people)? If so, will it work or backfire?
I’m going for “surprise us all by how staid it ends up being” because, when something crazy in politics is anticipated, that’s how it always turns out.
I think “staid” because Trump’s people will be telling him “Let her have the meltdown, you just stand there and look statesmanlike” and Hillary’s people should be telling her “Okay, the ‘basket of deplorables’ thing – sure, you were fundraising in front of a bunch of rich gays and you had to kiss up to them, but you need to pretend to the little people that they actually matter a damn, so no more insulting half the country that isn’t rich or gay-married or working in Silicon Valley, okay?”
At this point, I’m frankly baffled at how he can expect to walk out of the venue alive. I have zero interest in the debate, but regrettably will be attending a party to watch it. Up to this point I had managed to get through the entire election without listening to more than fifteen consecutive seconds of speeches by any candidate. I am not looking forward to breaking my streak.
Do you mean literally, as in you expect an assassination attempt at the debate?
Given how unpopular both of them are, I’m now imagining a bomb, with the moderator as collateral damage.
more like hating to death. I really despise viewing socially awkward scenarios, and this promises to be pretty freakin’ awkward.
I plan on watching it with /tv/ because the live thread will just be one long, amazing shitpost. Hillary’s not a very good debater, and Trump prefers to fling his poo around rather than debate, so god knows how it will go. But I don’t expect anything featuring Trump to be boring.
jesus, I wish I could watch it on 4chan. that sounds immensely better.
I’ve been waiting for this all year, and I want to see some fireworks. With any luck actual punches will get thrown, maybe an ear bit off if we’re lucky. But seriously, I expect Trump will tone it down a lot, and they’ll be relatively respectful to each other compared to the circus of the primaries. Neither of them have as much to win by making a real show of things – it just makes them look less level-headed and serious. Unlike with the primary where you have underdogs who could likely only win by a knockout blow, so you have stuff like Sanders bringing up Kissinger and Mosaddegh, and Trump doing… well there are too many examples to get into. If that stuff happens I expect it to come in a later debate when one side may be clearly winning and the other getting more desperate.
Still I’d give the “relatively reasonable debate” a 70-80% chance, but will still get some beers and play drinking games to it just in case it turns into the potential poo flinging contest it could be.
I think there’s a somewhat decent chance that Trump will take an excessively personal shot with Hillary and she will either walk out or after the debate announce that she refuses to debate him again.
It seems like she’s really been doubling down on the “this guy isn’t even worthy of taking serious as an opponent” type of reasoning.
That is an interesting thought I hadn’t considered. I doubt that would redound to her benefit (thinking Jimmy Carter not debating Reagan the first go-round; leaving might be even worse than not showing up? As in, “see, she’s so entitled and looks down on you so much she doesn’t even bother to talk to me!”), unless it were in response to a really bad insult.
I doubt the chance of her having some sort of health crisis onstage (including an urgent bathroom trip) is nearly as high as TPC guesses below (though the probability of her acting weird due to being medicated or overcaffeinated to ensure she gets through it might be slightly higher?), but it does seem like, if she does have a problem, pretending that she’s walking off stage due to outrage, rather than due to feeling faint, might be her strategy.
It seems like she’s really been doubling down on the “this guy isn’t even worthy of taking serious as an opponent” type of reasoning.
Yeah, but since he is the only opponent she’s got (Johnson doesn’t really count, unless she’s going to refuse to debate Trump and debate him instead, and I actually think it would damage her to debate Stein since Stein is also a woman and has more of the progressive cred Hillary lacks), she has to show up and perform. Refusing to debate would make it seem like she is so confident of winning, she doesn’t feel she has to appeal to the voters – that they’ll fall into line because what choice do they have?
Whatever about turning her nose up at Trump, she cannot afford to seem to be dismissive of the electorate.
I agree that such a move would be dumb and would not help her candidacy.
I just wonder if she does it anyway. I know she has political smarts and is surrounded by highly paid consultants who should know better than to allow such a thing – but part of me thinks everyone involved in her campaign are 100% true believers in the “Trump is such an obvious unqualified idiot he can’t possibly win” logic and would be arrogant enough to try something like this. Maybe wishful thinking on my part.
At a more realistic level, I agree with something said below – that whenever we expect something to be really crazy and entertaining it ends up being a complete non-event borefest, so that’s probably the most likely outcome.
Edit: Also keep in mind that if her leaving/refusing future debates is immediately preceded by a Trump insult, I find it very likely that all of the mainstream media will 100% fall into line and defend her as a heroic and strong and independent woman who is refusing to submit to abuse and sexism. The “her refusal to debate is disrespectful to the electorate” logic will be the exclusive domain of Hannity and Limbaugh.
Edit 2: In terms of arrogance, that also comes into play if Team Hillary is thinking “we need to absolutely crush him and win in a landslide so that we can claim a popular mandate.” Something like walking out on debates is high risk/high reward – but if they’re convinced the risk doesn’t matter because they’re going to win anyway, they might try something like this.
Refuse more debates? But she’s having fun!
What do you figure the chance is that Hillary collapses during the debate? And what would be the effect?
I think the chance of that happening is low. The result would be Trump victory. Unless her problems prove so bad the DNC decides to slide Biden or Warren or somebody into her shoes. i originally assumed that anyone entering at the last minute would be at a massive disadvantage, but given all of Hillary’s baggage at this point, that may not be true.
Trump has so much baggage, and looks so crazy compared to most politicians, that it’s easy to forget all of Hillary’s baggage and the fact that she seems a little crazy too. This is a kind of bizarre election where seemingly anyone other than the nominees might be winning handily against the other just by virtue of seeming like a “normal,” baggage-light choice. Then again, the GOP tried boring and normal last time and it didn’t work, but Obama was also an incumbent, and better-liked than Hillary.
All of which is to reiterate my sense that the debate is a game of “first one to lose his/her cool loses.” Since both candidates are trying to prove they are the steady, responsible one (though, admittedly, Hillary needs more than Trump to project energy, emotion, and enthusiasm, whereas Trump needs to tamp down his usual style; for this reason I might expect to see Hillary attempt to draw first blood. If Trump’s smart he’ll avoid taking the bait, thereby looking, ironically, like the mature one in the room).
Obama is also boring and normal. It’s easy to forget that given the mass freakouts on all sides for the past eight years, but he is not a particularly exciting and dynamic personality. By and large he thrilled his supporters for what he represented (first black president, repudiation of the evil warmonger Bush, et cetera), not for who he actually is or what he’d actually done.
Obama is also boring and normal.
True, but he and Michelle are fantastic at doing the inspirational guff.
When they dropped in to visit Moneygall thanks to the Irish ancestry link that is seemingly mandatory for all your presidents, they did it very, very well.
Michelle was handshaking with the crowds lined up on both sides of the street and she looked delighted to be in the midst of a bunch of Irish boggers – the same kind of people that, in the US, her husband described as the “bitter clingers”. It was a fantastic performance by both of them, even though you knew damn well the second they got into the car to take them out of the village they were saying “What the hell was that dump and those troglodytes in it?”
Obama can look as if he’s genuinely pleased to be meeting all you lovely folks and can deliver the aspirational foo-faw his speech-writers churn out without seeming to be a robot or a hypocrite.
There’s a 33% chance of Hillary collapsing. Probably not going to happen, but not at all outside the realm of reasonable possibility. Trump is tanned, rested and ready. Not sure at all about Hillary, since so much of her public communication is not hers, but crafted by her staff.
1/3rd? Wow. Personally I would put it at 5%. Very unlikely, but not out of the realm of possibility.
5% seems improbably low given what happened 9/11.
Would you consider writing a medical learning triage guide for lay people?
As in, if we have a few free minutes to study our own health, what topics should we address first, etc.
I imagine this would consider both the importance of the topics and their accessibility to lay folks. (Probably other factors I haven’t considered as well)
Thanks much!
Would you be looking for health advice, factual information on common diseases or something like the workings of the human body in health and disease? I (not Scott!) once entertained the idea of writing about those things, but I haven’t has much time.
I think we are going to start seeing the GDP decrease in the next decade while the value of leasure time keeps going up, and I think this image aptly demonstrates why.
That prompts me to a question. How much would “Matrix” tech add to the GDP, especially with slightly better solar tech?
I cannot tell what the thing in the middle column second row is meant to do.
The GPS or the CB radio?
The… the GPS and the Maps app?
I feel like there’s about a 98% chance I’m missing an obvious joke here.
Now that I know what it is, that does seem like a fitting gag. But alas, I simply literally didn’t recognise the device.
So, does anyone think Trump has a real chance of being elected? I’m seeing on my Tumblr dash some plaintive “for God’s sake make sure you’re registered to vote because it’s 49% to 39% (or some such figure) between Hillary and Trump!” and the even more heart-string tugging (which did make me laugh, I have to admit) “Nate Silver says it’s time to panic!”
Well, gosh, if Nate Silver says it! (Not dismissing his prowess in punditry, simply that the name used in this fashion amused me, and seemingly he’s rowed back a bit on that after a week).
So – thoughts? This time next year we will all be bowing down before God-Emperor The Donald, First of His Name?
I doubt it. I think Trump will do worse than Romney, I think his supporters are setting themselves up for disappointment, and I think the Democrats would have to screw up pretty badly for a Republican to ever be President again.
This time next year we will all be bowing down before the bureaucracy that quietly runs the world while President Clinton smiles for the women’s magazines’ covers.
@Sandy – Those who do not hope cannot be disappointed.
“I think the Democrats would have to screw up pretty badly for a Republican to ever be President again.”
This seems like a probable outcome to me as well, and one of the better possible ones. If the Republican party is damaged enough to lose relevance on the political stage, the Democratic party will be able to govern unhindered, and will succeed or fail on its own merits.
How’s that working out for Detroit? Or whatever city is hosting this month’s race riot?
We get the right to be smug once we have an alternate power structure in place to take over from their failure.
I’m not seeing that happen. Unless we can fix Detroit with Pepes.
@Homo Iracundus
Agreed, In fact this is probably the thing that bugs me the most about those who are ostensibly on “my side”.
Yes, we have identified the opposition’s likely failure mode and that makes us very clever. Can we please not fall into the same trap?
Having lived in Montgomery County, Maryland, which has been under continuous Democratic rule for nearly four decades and is most certainly not a flaming wreck, I find the argument that Detroit is the inevitable consequence of electing Democrats lacking.
(And no, I’m not comparing apples to oranges. Montgomery County is larger in both area and population than its southeastern neighbor Washington DC and counties in Maryland provide what would be city-level services elsewhere in the country.)
Well the Capitol, and area immediately surrounding it, is the wealthiest part of the country by a wide margin. It’d be kind of weird if it wasn’t doing at least ok.
I hear Detroit is starting to attract young tech types due to its rock-bottom cost of living, actually.
Also, I am more worried about the long-term bad outcomes of the status-quo deadlock than I am about decisive victory of my political enemies. I already have to hide my political views from my boss and coworkers; it’s not a fun way to live but it’s probably survivable long-term. Better for them to win, rule, and succeed or fail as reality dictates than to drag this madness on for another decade, or two, or three.
And who knows? maybe they’ve been right all along? Giving them an honest, unobstructed shot at their vision seems like an acceptable idea, even if that vision seems deeply monstrous to me. How else are we going to live, other than secession or civil war?
Aye that’s the rub.
Keep your head down and teach your kids to carry the flame. Best case scenario, everything works out. Worst case the idiots get eaten by the great filter.
“Well the Capitol, and area immediately surrounding it, is the wealthiest part of the country by a wide margin. It’d be kind of weird if it wasn’t doing at least ok.”
Not all of it. From the actual capitol building, you can walk a few blocks and end up in Anacostia, one of the country’s great crap-holes. Warning: Not recommended.
It’s been a very long time since I lived in the area (that was the Barry Era, though I lived in Maryland fortunately), but I’ve heard even Anacostia is being gentrified nowa days. Of course the residents are fighting tooth and nail to keep it a crap-hole, because gentrification mostly means you bring the gentry in and force the underclass out.
It’s possible. I haven’t really been there since like 2005.
It’s tempting to say “neither was the Capitol City in The Hunger Games“, but the reference is a bit dated at this point.
@Faceless Craven
“Citation needed”, as they say. What makes you think it’s “survivable long-term”? (And how long is “long-term”? How many generations?) What if it’s not?
But what if their failing, as reality dictates, is likely to not only destroy them, but us? What if they “win, rule, and fail”, and in failing destroy civilization beyond all hope of repair, or even bring about human extinction?
@hlynkacg
No, the worst case is that the idiots get everyone “eaten by the great filter.” And what makes you think that your descendants will be able to “carry the flame” in secret long enough. “The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent”, “there’s a lot of ruin in a nation”, etc.? (Or, for that matter, that you’ll even have descendants by the time the inevitable collapse?)
From whence do you to draw this irrational optimism that everything will somehow work out for the best, rather than almost certainly ending in fire, doom, and the total and irrevocable destruction of everything we hold dear?
After the election of 2004, there were rumors of a near-permanent political majority in the United States. After GWB’s re-election, the political leadership of the Republican Party was very confident.
In 2008 and 2012, there were more rumors of a near-permanent political majority in the United States. President Obama had brought the Millennial generation into the political world, and had energized them in a way that appeared profound.
Past performance is no guarantee of future results.
But I think past performance shows us how illusory the promise of a permanent political majority is. (Or even the promise of a current President being able to promise a designated successor from his own party in as the next President.)
the Democratic party will be able to govern unhindered, and will succeed or fail on its own merits
If they fail, they’ll complain it was the Republican-dominated Congress that blocked all their plans to bring about heaven on earth.
I want to see their excuse if they have a Democrat presidency and a Democrat majority in the other branches of government, plus the Democrat picks on the Supreme Court as a majority, and we still don’t see the New Jerusalem descending from the heavens, adorned as a bride.
It would be interesting if the Republican Party went the way of the Liberal Party in the UK, but the thing is – who is your replacement third party to take over? In the UK, Labour stepped into the power vacuum but I don’t think the Greens, Libertarians or others have that kind of mass popular support. Unless a really new third party arises out of the ashes of the Republicans and scoops up the Libertarians, disaffected Democrats, etc. and how likely is that?
“I want to see their excuse if they have a Democrat presidency and a Democrat majority in the other branches of government”
They had this in 2008 – not quite the Supreme Court (although it did rule in their favor fairly often).
The excuse is usually “well we didn’t have a filibuster proof majority so intransigent Republicans could still obstruct stuff” and/or “well we needed the cooperation of state governments that were dominated by obstructionist republicans who are making their own people suffer just for the sake of opposing us” (this is the standard accepted view of why Obamacare is struggling)
Yeah, my general impression is that people waiting for a party/political faction representing a given tribe to make such a mess of things that their own tribe have no choice but to realize they were wrong all along are left waiting for a very… long… time.
Pretty much. The left always has an excuse for why utopia hasn’t arrived yet. Communists blamed wreckers for things failing to be lovely. Liberals blame female and nonwhite underperformance on white males thinking evil thoughts at them.
I don’t think that’s true. In the post-Roosevelt era, no party has held the White House for more than 3 terms.
I don’t see anything fundamental enough to have changed the basic partisan fatigue factor that keeps one party from monopolizing the White House. Especially since the parties themselves aren’t static and change in response to losing. As much as I don’t think Trump wasn’t a good choice, it was certainly a different one. He opened the door to someone next time that is closer to the US median on some social issues and entitlements, without Trump’s baggage.
Pretty much says what I was going to. Even if one party collapsed completely, it’d be about 3-6 months before another took their place. Nature abhors a vacuum etc. It’d just be too easy to be basically the same as the winning party but say, “We’re opposed to X which will destroy the country, vote for us!” and watch the support pour in. The contemporary “death of a political party” due to being unelectable is basically keeping the name but having to adjust your policy positions from what your party insiders and big donors in the last election would have preferred.
Running Clinton is pretty much just asking for a Republican win in 2020. She’d have to pull some amazing shit out in the next four years, and given the direction things have been headed the past decade that seems really unlikely, barring some current event that stokes administration patriotism similar to 9/11.
Zombielicious – “Even if one party collapsed completely, it’d be about 3-6 months before another took their place.”
Indeed, but the hope is that this process would involve a general realignment of political coalitions, thus creating actual, significant change in the political landscape.
Hoping this happens is one of the big reasons I’m voting Trump. I really, really did not like the Bush administration, or the current Republican establishment generally.
Even if one party collapsed completely, it’d be about 3-6 months before another took their place.
I’m not convinced. Obviously, the political structure is very different, but: the collapse of the two-party system in Hungary led to a chronically fractured opposition, incapable of winning elections. Certainly no reorganization took place on the 3-6 month time frame.
From the same time period, see the collapse of Slovakia’s HZDS. In Spain, the collapse of the UCD: its successors remained hopelessly splintered for 3 election cycles, until the PP was formed, and it took 15 years until they could actually win an election.
@Publius Varinius
Hungarian victors also took the opportunity to ensure the opposition remains fractured without any shame or sense of decency. Okay, according to various media, USA has rampant gerrymendering and strategic placement of polling stations etc (which does not speak highly of the state of democracy in America), but Hungarian developments are all that and then some.
Do you consider it likely that Democrats would do major revisions to the US constitution to ensure that they can keep doing doing major unilateral amendments to the constitution without being hindered by opposition, or even if by some miracle the opposition could regain a majority in the next elections, they couldn’t legally do much because all the policies of the previous government have been written into the constitution?
I mean, the reports from Orban’s Hungary include stuff like when the Supreme Court interpreted some of the new legislation unconstitutional, the government amended the constitution so that government is suddenly much less restrained by the Supreme Court, and then increased the number of justices overnight so they could appoint enough supporters to ensure Court’s backing anyway.
Similar story for all the other checks and balances: according the news reports, one by one they have been done away with. One other major news was introducing a media authority with a power to fine the independent media outlets to into bankruptcy. The US liberal blogosphere complains about right-ist radio talk shows and Fox News, but I find it unlikely that democrats would blatantly try effectively banning opposition radio and tv.
The top results for “ban fox news” are not fox articles about bans.
They’ve tried to get Glenn Beck off the air multiple times now.
Of course, you need some controlled opposition news outlets to relieve dissatisfaction in a harmless, uncoordinated way. But I guarantee everything else will be shut down as “trolling hate speech”.
@Homo Iracundus
Well, your results may be different, but I have one Facebook page about banning Fox News, and then lots of Fox News articles about bans. But in any case, 2000 people on Facebook (that being the number that like the page) is a completely different thing to the Democrat party in power.
nimim. k.m. – There won’t be any changes to the constitution. Of course you still have freedom of speech! It’s just that “hate speech” isn’t speech. And any speech we don’t like is “hate speech.” No amendments needed.
On the subject of a majority party in a nominally democratic system abusing the rules to stay in power, recent events in Venezuela are instructive. The rules for a recall referendum seem to have been recently set up to make it pretty nearly impossible to hold one.
“There won’t be any changes to the constitution. Of course you still have freedom of speech! It’s just that “hate speech” isn’t speech. ”
It’s not at all uncommon for me to be arguing with people who already believe this is current law. I’d bet you anything that at least one third of Americans under the age of 30 legitimately believe that “hate speech” is not protected by the first amendment.
Edit: I also regularly get into arguments with people from countries that have onerous hate speech laws who insist “There is absolutely free speech in Britain but part of protecting free speech is ensuring people aren’t victims of hatred”
I don’t know about hate speech but I often find myself alone when I maintain that flag burning should be protected speech.
…Flag… burning?
Whoa, it’s not often that we get tourists in here from 1997. How’s it going, person from the past! Feel free to take a look around — our modern politics is crap admittedly, but we do have cool phones.
I don’t know what to tell you. People still argue about it.
To clarify, my point was not “a lot of people think hate speech should be illegal” (which is certainly true), but rather “a lot of people think that hate speech already is illegal“
This time next year we will all be bowing down before the bureaucracy that quietly runs the world while President Clinton smiles for the women’s magazines’ covers.
I agree that this is the most likely outcome (and even if Trump won) but what is getting my eyes to bug out on stalks is the likes of “Don’t vote for a third party candidate, that’s just handing votes to Trump instead of making sure we’ll be under the progressive presidency of Clinton”.
I have to wonder – what the heck do they think will be “progressive” about it? Sure, Planned Parenthood isn’t likely to be defunded, but then it never is. And what else is Hillary going to be ‘progressive’ about? What are they expecting her to do? Is this going to be like “Vote for Obama’s second term and really this time, the Golden Age will arrive” (instead of realising that the guy is a politician, he genuinely made history by being the first African-American president, and that’s about it because he’s a careerist, he’s not going to do anything too out of the way to muck up his career plan).
“What are they expecting her to do? ”
It’s less of what they are expecting her to do and more that they’re expecting Trump to be literally Hitler. Anyone looks progressive compared to that!
@ Deiseach
And what else is Hillary going to be ‘progressive’ about? What are they expecting her to do?
The Clintons 1993-2000 had the Presidency with a (most often) GOP congress. That period looks more golden than 2001-2016 (I agree with you about Obama).
A couple years ago I would have counted nominating Hillary as one such screwup, and yet here we are.
Do you really think you were wrong about this, though? I think you were bang on target, only the Republicans took that opportunity to also do something inexplicably bizarre, instead of managing to capitalize on it.
What I mean is, surely it’s impicit that something can be a terrible screwup without being entirely unsurvivable?
I guess I also mean that I really feel like the Reps dropped the ball here. Not just in the nomination process, but for the last several years.
Both parties dropped the ball, in approximately the same way, by spending most of the last four years assuming that they could get their usual supporters to line up behind a dynastic party insider with one of the most toxic names in American politics. The Democratic leadership was more ruthlessly effective in ensuring that their Chosen One would secure the nomination; it remains to be seen whether that constitutes a greater or lesser error than the GOP’s inadequate support for Bush the Third.
Yes, I’d agree with that. Along with the rapidly constricting freedom of speech (actual), I’d call the parties’ tendency toward making the Federal Government a hereditary monarchy periodically exchanged between the two main claimant lines one of the most serious problems the US has today.
as a data point, I’m voting Trump. If anyone but Trump had been the republican nominee, I’d be voting Clinton.
FacelessCraven, you sound like you just want to watch the world burn.
@TheNybbler – The Joker did nothing wrong.
Seriously though, Republicans, conservatives, and the right wing generally failed. They lost the culture war, they lost the fight for the Constitution, they abandoned their own principles at the first opportunity every damn time. To hell with them. Democrats, liberals and the left aren’t any better, but I made up my mind awhile back to vote against the Republicans until they stopped pushing Romnoids. Well, Trump isn’t a Romnoid.
@FacelessCraven:
That’s very interesting. Could you expand on it?
Is it that Trump is not a conservative and the other Republican candidates were? Clinton isn’t either. Or does Trump have some characteristics you see as strongly positive?
The betting odds page I follow has him at 32%, so a substantial chance of winning although more likely to lose.
Probably not, but then Rubio wouldn’t have either. Utterly destroying the neoconservative block of the republican party is his main victory, although the damage to Clinton’s image is a huge bonus.
Getting people to disengage from the circus of presidential politics and focus on taking control of their communities is a vital step, and Trump has probably triggered that.
Betfair is giving him a 33% chance and PredictIt is giving him a 37% chance. Betfair is considered the more accurate prediction market.
I don’t think he’ll win, but it might be closer than people like to think. And considering way back at the start of all this, the very notion that Trump would be a candidate, much less the candidate, was considered so ridiculous it didn’t even warrant answering, that’s something we should probably be keeping in mind.
Every time someone has said “yeah, okay, he got this far but he’ll never make it past that” – he’s made it past that.
After the Democrat convention and attacking war heroes’ families snafus I thought he’d do worse than Romney; but after Hillary’s health scare, “deplorable” comment, weird appearance on some TV spots (seriously, what is going on there? Is she actually talking to live people or just staring into a camera like a deer at headlights? If the former, it seems really weird*), civil unrest and terror attacks (historically helps challengers and Republican), I think he has a pretty good chance. He just has to continue to not look crazy. I think the debates, especially the first one, will be quite important this time. If Trump keeps his calm, looks presidential, like he vaguely knows what he’s talking about, I think he wins. If Clinton succeeds in goading him, making him look out of his depth, etc., and assuming she can keep her energy up, she wins.
Really, the debate is a game of “first person to let the other get under his/her skin loses.” And I think there’s a decent chance debate performance will decide this election.
This guy apparently has a non-Polls based formula for predicting presidential race outcomes with a good track record, and, despite manifestly disliking Trump, his formula narrowly predicts Trump victory (maybe not so narrowly, since I consider Johnson+Stein to be significant third party and Charlotte to be social unrest; also she wanted to run unopposed, but Bernie saw to it she had to fight at least a little for the nomination).
*Upon further consideration, I think it must be one of those “live feed” type situations where she is talking to people live, but they aren’t in front of her (they must be in the hotel in Las Vegas she mentions). That makes it seem less weird, though it probably still doesn’t help if it goes viral.
I don’t have all that much confidence in Nate Silver’s model this time around because of what a crazy it is, but more than I do in anyone else. Certainly more than I do in my own WAG. So if he says there’s 42% chance Trump is going to win, I think that’s get a better chance of being the “true” odds than any other number.
42% odds (as opposed to polling numbers) is pretty damn good.
I do.
Romney had a 9% chance of winning (according to Silver) in 2012. I don’t know what the betting odds were, but I’d guess they weren’t very much higher. Trump is currently higher than Romney had been the entire season in 2012.
Further a reasonable non-poll prediction favors Trump.
Further, I suspect British elections show that polls aren’t as predictive as they were in 2012, with the difference favoring Trump.
My guess is that the debates offer the last big chance for a change, but there are a large number of wild cards, so I think the election is still pretty wide open with either major candidate having a solid chance of winning.
Yes, Trump’s going to win. The only question is whether it will be a narrow win or a comfortable large 300-375 EV decisive win.
In other news, what the fudge, my Gravatar has just changed all of a sudden.
I’m aware a whole bunch of people’s gravs changed a week back or so, but I just assumed mine had stayed put for somereason. Must be a slow rolling thing, and mine at last got processed. I really dig the new colour, but I preferred the old pattern. Au wail.
As a sidenote, how does one change a gravatars to an image?
Make a WordPress account.
Thanks.
Can this please stop being a thing?
I thought the Samuel L. Jackson ad attacking Romney was bad enough, but this is just ridiculous and comes, ironically, from the type of person who is likely to claim “our democracy” is “broken.” So we’re going to fix it by voting however rich, famous, actors with no particular expertise tell us we should vote?
The last Oscars was really, really bad too.
I think this is really harmful to American cultural unity. I actually am pretty ambivalent about US cultural unity, but to the extent anyone still does care about it, I think we should really rethink the appropriateness of having entertainers publicly, overbearingly lecturing everyone on political questions.
Fortunately, this one is so heavy-handed I think it has a good chance of backfiring.
>really harmful to American cultural unity.
Yeah, I don’t think the “people” who’ve been trying to destroy it care about that.
And the only reason they still use the overbearing lectures is because they can’t arrest their victims yet.
Surely we can agree such individuals are actually people, no quotes necessary, regardless of other disagreements about what they might care about or wish to destroy.
You know, I’ve been reading up on the early soviet union and Boris Pasternak (getting ready to finally read Dr. Zhivago after only ever seeing the movie).
It turns out seeing enough biographies that end with “the Union of Soviet Writers requested all members to denounce the author and call for the death penalty” makes you pretty unsympathetic to totalitarian social revolutionaries.
Acknowledging each others’ humanity isn’t a unilateral choice. Putting on a pretense of civility while they call us rats to be exterminated doesn’t do any good, because it will never be reciprocated.
Why does that “rats” thing remind me of something?
Oh, right
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eternal_Jew_(1940_film)
(or take your pick of Nazi propaganda)
Wow, those guys were really bad at their jobs. I mean, it really rubs in just how little artistry they had in everything they did.
God damn one percenters.
You might do well to at least put on a pretense of civility here, I understand that to be part of the commenting rules (when they existed).
But, also, let’s be clear that the people who called for the execution of authors, the people who tried to use their hollywood fame for political influence, and the people who called other people rats are all separate groups with little or no overlap. The political opinions of people who oppose Donald Trump are quite varied, and while you might find some who are some flavor of anti-free-speech absolutists, nearly all of them would say it would be evil to execute authors for writing books.
Have you considered that your outgroup(s) might appear much more homogeneous to you than they are?
Let’s see, that cartoonist won the Pulitzer Prize for this, “and also received the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for his cartoons related to social justice issues.”
The former are given out by a “19-member board (of) major newspaper editors and executives and six academics, including the president of Columbia University, (and) the dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism”
He’s also been given an honorary degree for it, so hey.
It turns out that when a group organizes to officially confer prestige on someone for dehumanizing the people they hate, those people draw conclusions about the group and its motives.
Especially when that same group still honours Walter “Stalin Did Nothing Wrong” Duranty, which neatly ties us back in to the whole soviet/lefty thing of justifying purges.
Remember Scott’s Muggeridge bio review?
Horsey won the Pullitzer in ’99, when he was mostly doing cartoons about Monica Lewinsky, and again in ’03, when he was making fun of Bush. His honorary degree (from Seattle University) was earned in 2004. The cartoon you linked is from 2014, when he was a finalist for a third Pulitzer and won the RFK award – both, however, awarded on the basis of a few selected cartoons published in 2013, visible here (of course, his work is not very flattering of people he disagrees with, but they are actually people in each of those cartoons).
The Pulitzer committee is not organized to reward dehumanizing people, though, like many humans, they probably overlook or even enjoy it when it’s directed at their opponents.
But even if it were all as you say, that’s 19 Pulitzer board members, 60 journalists for the RFK award, and some deans at Seattle University (presumably also at least a few people on the board of the LA Times). The group you are talking about still does not plausibly include either Soviets or Hollywood stars.
Edit:
And of course, in your additional edit you mean these same 19 members of the Pulitzer board declined to later revoke Duranty’s award. They issued a statement on it, which in fact did not justify any purges:
“Revoking a prize 71 years after it was awarded under different circumstances, when all principals are dead and unable to respond, would be a momentous step and therefore would have to rise to that threshold.”
Gonna file this away the next time we have a public debate on how quickly we need to tear down a statue of Robert E Lee.
First off, I think these sort of ‘celebs tell you what to think is silly. But calling them totalitarian social revolutionaries is begging the question. What’s the evidence that Joss Whedon etc. are totalitarian or for that matter social revolutionaries? The article is about them encouraging people to vote for one of the main two candidates against the other, and clearly the less ‘revolutionary’ and more ‘establishment’ option.
In terms of the rat thing: I don’t think it’s ever helpful to call people rats. But you’re talking in terms of very vague ‘us’ and ‘them’, when the ‘them’ is a specific cartoonist and the ‘us’ he’s targeting is fairly narrow (Nazis, KKK, White Power – not exactly the mainstream right).
Also the ‘isn’t unilateral’ point: the cartoonist could presumably say he’s targetting specifically people who don’t acknowledge others’ humanity. So if you then don’t acknowledge his and label him and a vague group of others apparently including Joss Whedon as pseudo-people then I’m equally justified dehumanising you and whatever group I categorise you in, and then others can dehumanise me… real ‘eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind’ territory.
“Revoking a prize 71 years after it was awarded under different circumstances, when all principals are dead and unable to respond, would be a momentous step and therefore would have to rise to that threshold.”
For another example of the same issue, consider the question of whether Martin Luther King should have had his doctorate withdrawn when it was discovered that his thesis was in large part plagiarized from an earlier thesis by another student. It wasn’t.
In both of these cases, the person retroactively pardoned was someone popular with (especially but not exclusively) the left. Are there any parallel cases on the other side, where it was clearly established that a prominent figure did not deserve an honor he had gotten?
Or in other words, is this a pattern of people the left likes not being held to the same standards as others or merely a pattern of not going after people after they are dead?
It occurs to me that I can think of at least one example–the controversy over Cyril Burt after his death. That was a much less clear case than the others–the state of the debate is suggested by the title of a book on it: Cyril Burt: Fraud or Framed?
If I correctly remember, the relevant professional society condemned him after his death and later retracted the condemnation when it turned out the evidence against him was considerably weaker than claimed.
Muggeridge continued,
Some things never change. Except now they’re film stars who do publicity tours for North Korea and Venezuela instead of the USSR.
Actually, many of them are still cultivated upper-class liberal-minded Fabians named things like Webb…
Probably more of those than the the sum total of movie stars regardless of political affiliation, anyway.
@MattM,
I doubt the specific guidelines the Pulitzer committee uses on the question of revoking prizes will be very helpful on the entirely different and largely tradition-based question of what public monuments people like and dislike. But perhaps the spirit of the rule will get some people to think a bit more long-term and about both sides instead of “I don’t like him, bring his statue down.”
@ David Friedman,
I have a hard time believing Duranty is popular with anyone these days, actually.
I don’t think the default decision is to revoke awards, and somehow Duranty and MLK Jr are unusual in having escaped that fate – I would say, rather, in general committees do not like revoking their awards (e.g. Nobel Prizes cannot be revoked).
@Homo Iracundus,
Yes, the soviets did a lot of bad things and had many fellow-travelers, I agree. My whole point is that, just as it is incorrect to see within every right-leaning person the tendencies and evils of Francoists, Nazis, etc. it is similarly incorrect to see in every left-leaning person the evils and tendencies of the Soviets and their fellow travelers.
Quoting sections of things written about Soviet fellow-travelers and then asserting things are just the same today without a colorable attempt at demonstrating the similarity is just assuming the conclusion.
Do you have a video or other account of a Hollywood star stroking their chin, voicing approval of North Korean crimes?
It’s not quite North Korea, but celebrities used to be tripping over themselves to praise Hugo Chavez.
Weird how they aren’t doing much of that anymore.
@MattM
That’s right, but there’s a distinction here – the celebrities who like(d) Chavez generally would go visit Venezuela (back when it was a functioning state), and say, “wow, poor people seem much better off.” Now, clearly, this didn’t last, and may not necessarily have been true in the first place. But none of them, so far as I know, went to Venezuela, came back, and said “Yes, Chavez keeps a list of enemies he wants to imprison, torture, and/or kill, and I think that’s great!” And that’s the claim H.I. is making.
I don’t think many leftist apologists for anti-Western elements say “Yes, these guys draw up lists of enemies to kill or torture or imprison, so what?” Typically they pretend that the anti-Western elements in question aren’t doing these things, or that allegations to that effect are Western propaganda. Witness Chomsky calling stories of the Killings Fields imperialist lies, or Sean Penn valorizing El Chapo as some kind of folk hero victimized by the War on Drugs.
Montfort, Mrs. Webb wasn’t saying that shit in public either. Muggeridge had access to these people in private conversation where they thought they had sympathy on their side and certainly knew nobody would be so unthinkably bizarre and vulgar as to take their private remarks to the press.
The implication I think is that people who are prepared to praise Chavez in public may very well be openly satisfied with his capitalist-disappearing schemata in private, and that at any rate it’s foolish to assume their beliefs stop where their public remarks do; thus, we should take willingness to openly praise any kind of dictator as a serious warning sign about their private views. Of course I don’t know that this was what any other commenter was getting at, but it certainly accords well with my personal experiences.
@Sandy,
I agree. And that’s one reason H.I.’s claim that film stars are doing the “yeah, so what?” thing seems strange to me.
@Montfort:
But it seems to me that this sort of thing is predicated on people being really stupid, when in fact at least in some cases they’re aware of who they’re defending and just think that the victims of that person either had it coming or were not significant enough to outweigh the perceived goodness of their subject. Sean Penn, for example, knows that El Chapo is a mass murderer, but tries to put a positive spin on him anyway. In that infamous interview, Penn asks Guzman about his victims, Guzman says “I have only ever killed in self-defense”, and that’s good enough for Penn. He begins by wanting to believe that El Chapo is a heroic figure, and will seize any excuse no matter how flimsy to ignore his crimes and do more apple-polishing. The ideology is all that matters, the bodies don’t. It is effectively a “Yeah, so what?” thing, just not said out loud.
You must be new.
I think it’s worth trying to distinguish on the evidence between apologists for bad regimes who have been fooled into believing what they are saying and ones who know they are trying to mislead their readers.
The evidence that Chomsky is in the second category is that, in the chapter on Cambodia in the book he coauthored with Herman, he cites as serious evidence a book which, when you read it, is obviously worthless. The authors treat Pol Pot as a saintly figure and it’s clear reading the book that almost all their information is simply what the KR told them. Chomsky isn’t stupid, he has to know that what he is citing is propaganda, and he never hints at that to his readers.
To assume that someone necessarily supports violent political persecution because they have not denounced a specific instance that they may not be aware of is questionable. But maybe you’re right, maybe Sean Penn and Danny Glover and Michael Moore approve of political violence.
To assume that another group of people, alike only in their career choice and support of an unrelated political candidate, share that support is ridiculous.
To build onto this house of cards that the second group are denying the humanity of their political opponents, and that our only recourse is to deny their humanity is absurd.
Should I take from this line of reasoning that everyone who publicly endorses a candidate for president wishes to round up the opposing side and put them in jail? Or only the ones who personally appear in a PSA? Maybe just the ones who are associated with a half of the electorate I don’t like? I hear some heart surgeons might have given money to ISIS, are other heart surgeons of the same party not people?
Edit:
@ThirteenthLetter,
So you think people’s political opinions are fixed and immutable by mere human effort and argument? That’s fine, but I think it suggests you should waste less effort discussing them.
@Montfort,
What I’m saying is that the “Erase that person from history!” kind of mentality is not the sort of mentality that is willing to entertain charity and understanding towards its opponents. I’d love it if, as they are about to hound yet another artist or engineer or scientist or businessman out of their field because that person expressed the wrong opinion ten years ago, they’d pause and reflect and suddenly realize that this is a weapon that could be turned upon them if the winds blew a little differently, and back off if only out of self-interest if nothing else. But they won’t. They never do. We’ve tried to use this argument for decades with no effect. People who understand this aren’t doing the hounding in the first place.
We have to switch to Plan B: figure out a way to prevent these sorts of damaged persons from having an oversized influence on the world, something which we have failed catastrophically at lately.
Here’s your friendly weekly reminder that conservative bigots hounded gay folk out of their jobs for decades (and, in fact, still do), apparently never pausing to reflect and “realiz[ing] that this [wa]s a weapon that could be turned upon them if the winds blew a little differently.” The question, as always: do you object in principle to political persecution, or only when it happens to your ideological allies? Did you ever stand up for queer folk when they were being fired from their jobs for no reason? Were you even aware that this still happens? If so, why, then, didn’t you mention it just now?
@EK
I’ve been working in tech for more than 20 years. In every company I’ve been in (perhaps save one, which was very small), there have been a few gay people. In my very first job there was at least one trans- person (back then it wasn’t open, but people whispered about it). I never saw anyone hounded out for being gay. I’m sure this happened and happens, just not where I was. So when people attempt to hound me out of my job for not accepting the current political orthodoxy. I’m not about to accept that as my just desserts or anything like that.
@EK
Exactly. Whither this new right wing freedom of expression movement’s Skokie?
EK –
Are you really saying that turn-about is fair play? And the sort of behavior that should be encouraged in today’s society?
And are you willing to say that all behaviors for which “conservatives” blacklisted specific people should have been condoned and permitted?
I’m just curious as to how much you’re against the behavior of blacklisting, and how much you’re sticking at the specific people in specific cases.
@ The Nybbler
I’m not asking you to accept persecution as your just desserts, I’m asking you to care about it even when you’re not a potential victim. Until every mention of Brendan Eich is followed by a compendium of the names of queer folk fired for their sexual orientation and political advocacy, all of this newfound concern for freedom of conscience can never amount to anything more than the rankest partisanship and hypocrisy.
@ keranih
It is sad that the idea that someone might object to all political firings as a matter of principle is so alien to you that you can only understand their words as a call for retribution.
@EK
That’s just a way to minimize what’s going on now by attaching a lot of other baggage to it. What has happened to gay people in the past (or even in the present) does not excuse what happened to Brandon Eich, Tim Hunt, Matt Taylor, or is happening to Palmer Luckey. Those people weren’t (to my knowledge) involved in the persecution of gay people, nor did the persecution of gay people take place in the same place.
Insisting they always be tied together makes about as much sense as saying then whenever we talk about Dylann Roof, we must also discuss Colin Ferguson.
So it isn’t a matter of freedom of expression, enlightenment values, and God bless America after all. Just my boys are are taking hits so I’m gonna throw everything against the wall and see what sticks.
Read ya loud and clear.
And here’s a request for less hyperbole in your rhetoric, with maybe a time-out for some meditation on the difference between “fired” and “hounded out of their job”. If you’re going to use the latter language, I’m going to be looking for specifically hound-like behavior, and you may not like what I find.
Also, if you are going to cite a list of examples of Evil Homophobic “Hounding”, maybe #1 on the list shouldn’t be a teacher who was sleeping with one of her students. The #2 example was much stronger.
His examples may be wrong, but the point isn’t. Or are we going to throw object-level examples at each other until something sticks?
There are always individual assholes, whether conservative or liberal. But there isn’t always mob rule. I can’t think offhand of any instance when a conservative who normally has no power over someone found out that he is gay and successfully organized a campaign over the Internet to get him fired.
Also, I somehow doubt you’d accept that argument in other contexts. “Before you complain about firing Muslims for their religion keep in mind that Muslims chopped off people’s hands, oppressed women, and killed Westerners for decades.”
Jiro,
I was thinking this sounded more familiar to the “Before you criticize radical Islam, make sure you remember the savagery of The Crusades!”
EK,
What good does it to, when discussing Brandon Eich, to follow it up with a list of all the gay people who were fired much longer ago in an entirely different cultural period which seems to have little chance of re-emerging. Right now, today, it’s the Brandon Eichs of the world who are at risk of being hounded out of jobs, not random gay people. This strikes me as pointless virtue signaling.
Great, I get it, people on “my side” did bad things in the 1970s. Cool. So can “your side” please stop doing bad things today?
Striking that over half those examples are from private Catholic schools with a syllabus partially derived from the Catechism. I wonder how this holds up for all such examples across the decades. How many people hounded for being conservative work in companies that essentially have a charter indicating their hostility to conservatism?
“Only conservatives have been punished for thier speech in the last forty years.”
How can you even type that out? Doesn’t it hurt when nose pushes into the screen?
Sorry, who said that?
@ The Nybbler
You are mistaken: Eich was fired for contributing to a campaign to deny equal rights to gay people. Presumably, victims of bigotry deserve more sympathy and attention than its perpetrators, but I see Eich’s name mentioned almost weekly here, yet have never once observed anyone but myself spare any concern for the anonymous multitudes of gay men and women fired from their jobs for being gay.
I think that if someone brought up Dylan Roof week after week as an example of something uniquely horrible and unprecedented that we must go to great lengths to stop, it would be reasonable to start pointing out that blacks sometimes commit hate crimes against whites as well. Here, let’s modify TheThirteenthLetter’s original comment using the analogy you suggest, and see how it reads:
I’d love it if, [the next time white people] are about to [shoot another black man just because of the color of his skin], they’d pause and reflect and suddenly realize that this is a weapon that could be turned upon them if the winds blew a little differently, and back off if only out of self-interest if nothing else. But they won’t. They never do. We’ve tried to use this argument for decades with no effect. People who understand this aren’t doing the [shooting] in the first place.
We have to switch to Plan B: figure out a way to prevent [white people] from having an oversized influence on the world, something which we have failed catastrophically at lately.
Does this sound objectionable to you? It certainly does to me. So it stands to reason that if we object to absurdly one-sided portrayals of racial violence, we should also object to absurdly one-sided portrayals of political firings.
@ John Schilling
Do you really think it would be better if tech employees were quietly and automatically fired once it was found out that they had dodgy views on social issues? Is the hounding really the problem here?
@ Sandy
Nearly all of them, in fact, as most large companies these days have a boilerplate statement somewhere noting their commitment to diversity. Conservatism per se isn’t the problem, of course, nobody cares how much you like free markets. People get fired when they are accused of one of the -isms or -phobias.
@Earthly Knight:
Most of them, particularly in Silicon Valley, also have boilerplate statements out gushing about how open they are to different political and religious views. Mozilla put out a statement after Eich resigned reiterating that sentiment, and also making it clear that he wasn’t hounded by employees, shareholders or board members, but by targeted campaigns from progressive organizations that found it unacceptable that someone with his views could hold a prominent job in Mozilla.
Can’t speak for anyone else, but I think I might prefer that. If a Catholic school says “Look, the Bible says homosexuality is immoral and despicable, and therefore we are firing all gay employees”, I’d be fine with that, as long as they’ve got their reliance on the Bible noted down somewhere. If a company says “We firmly believe opposition to gay marriage is immoral and despicable, and therefore we will fire anyone who holds these views”, I’d be fine with that too. Just formalize these things and get rid of the pretense.
I see the issue here now. You DO think that the treatment of Brandon Eich was turnabout, because he opposed gay marriage, a condition you consider to be persecution.
As for your analogy, it fails because “white people” is not isomorphic to “those who have the ‘Erase that person from history’ mentality”.
@ Sandy
So your campaign against political firings is really a campaign to make corporations more honest about their ideological commitments?
@ The Nybbler
It’s not clear to me that “those who have the ‘erase that person from history’ mentality” was the referent of the “they” in the first sentence I quoted. But nevermind, the point is still correct– if someone brought up Dylan Roof week after week as an example of something uniquely horrible and unprecedented that we must go to great lengths to stop, it would be reasonable to start pointing out that blacks sometimes commit hate crimes against whites as well.
I think tech companies that consider opposition to gay marriage grounds for dismissal should note that down in a formal contract, as well as every other social, religious and political view they consider grounds for dismissal, so employees will know what is expected of them and what to expect from the environment they work in. Tech employers who feel this does not suit Silicon Valley’s culture are free to reject such an arrangement, as long as this is also formalized and applied consistently. Don’t go saying “When I said we proudly accept employees with all kinds of religious beliefs, I didn’t mean this particular religious belief….”.
Not sure if you mean me or Sandy, but… tech companies introducing ideological litmus tests would tear the industry apart. First they’d split into the SJ-requiring and the non-SJ-requiring. (I imagine you could put Oracle and Microsoft in the latter side, maybe Amazon as well). Then the SJ-requirers would turn on each other.
It’d be a bad idea anyway. It’s one thing for an organization whose primary goal is to spread its ideology to have such tests (I wouldn’t expect the Hillary Clinton campaign to hire Trump supporters, or PETA to hire vivisectionists), but when other organizations do that, it seriously limits freedom of thought in that society. The Catholic Church is so big and has its fingers in so many things at the secular-religious boundary that it can be a problem too, but it’s an edge case.
@Nybbler: I’m not promoting a litmus test. I’m proposing a notification that employees who hold certain beliefs should keep it to themselves while employed at the company, if they expect to stay employed at the company. You could be a Salafi who prays every morning that America will crumble and burn, and so long as you shut up about it, you can work for, I dunno, Chik-fil-A or any other Red Tribe-aligned organization. If you’re a gay person who gets married while working for a Catholic school or hospital, your firing should have been preceded by a notification that such a marriage would result in a dismissal.
@ Sandy
And you would be content with the outcome if, like openly gay teachers 30 years ago, most -ist or -phobic computer programmers ended up unable to find employment anywhere as a result?
@ The Nybbler
I am not sure that promoting homophobia is any more central to the goals of the catholic church than promoting diversity is to the goals of a Fortune 500 corporation. I like to think not. So, if the church gets to contractually restrict the political freedom of its employees, why shouldn’t any organization which values equality be entitled to do the same?
This is a perfectly ridiculous claim; not only is it absurd to call opposition to gay marriage persecution as such, but what he did was contribute pocket money toward a specific law that was being debated by the polity at that time. We can’t have a republic where the people have the power to make whatever laws they want BUT it’s permissible to persecute everyone who doesn’t want to make prog laws.
@Earthly Knight:
Sure. Fire all the -ists and -phobes you can find, so the ones who follow will not make the mistake of believing companies mean what they say if they aren’t bound by it.
@Earthly Knight
Your example, and @ThirteenthLetter’s point, do *both* sort of work as:
I’d love it if, [the next time fear-mongers] are about to [propose police-state actions, or even torture, against Muslims], they’d pause and reflect and suddenly realize that this is a weapon that could be turned upon them if the winds blew a little differently, and back off if only out of self-interest if nothing else. But they won’t. They never do. We’ve tried to use this argument for decades with no effect. People who understand this aren’t doing the [police-state proposals] in the first place.
We have to switch to Plan B: figure out a way to prevent [fear-mongers] from having an oversized influence on the world, something which we have failed catastrophically at lately.
That is, the people who advocate massive police-state policies to be used indiscriminately against Muslims, are pretty clear that they’re not worried such a police-state might eventually turn on them. The civil-libertarians who worry about that, aren’t doing the proposals for indefinite detention and torture.
Thus, it doesn’t seem to work to argue the dangers of a police state to such advocates. They straight-out don’t believe it, and repeating the argument has the same outcome that they continue to disbelieve it. Unfortunately, I have no idea about where to go from here.
“The question, as always: do you object in principle to political persecution, or only when it happens to your ideological allies?”
What you are describing is persecution, but not political persecution. Being gay isn’t a political position.
A more relevant case would be the attempt to blacklist Hollywood writers viewed as communists. It didn’t work very well and it was protested by lots of people left of center–not I think true of the attacks on people viewed as insufficiently left more recently.
I don’t know whether there were people right of center who objected to the blacklist or not. I remember my father explaining to me why he disapproved of what McCarthy did.
But those examples raise a further issue for both cases. Driving someone out of his job to punish him for political views you disapprove of is one thing. Driving someone out of his job because you believe he uses that job to push political views you disapprove of is rather different.
I don’t think anyone argues that it’s political persecution to campaign against an incumbent politician because you disagree with the policies he pushes. But that is an attempt to get him to lose his job.
@Earthly Knight:
Back up and pull that “automatically” out of there, or be prepared to defend it. Your cited examples certainly don’t.
Because yes, the hounding is the problem. When a person is quietly fired from a job, they walk into a world that has approximately as many jobs open to them as it did when they took the one they were fired from, except that they have the added experience from that job to trade on. When a person is hounded from a job, there’s still a pack of hounds at large and quite possibly at their heels. You don’t see how that could be especially problematic?
Now, if there were some process by which the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy made people quietly but automatically unemployable across an entire industry, that also would be troublesome. But you’ve presented no evidence of that. Outside of the fairly narrow cases of working for a Christian church or working in a position of intimate authority over same-gendered adolescents, where there is credibly a job performance issue, I don’t think you can make a case for that.
@ Anonymous
I disagree. Opposition to gay marriage is a way of persecuting gay folk in exactly the same way that opposition to interracial marriage was historically a way of persecuting black folk.
@ Sandy
I’m sorry, I don’t follow what you’re saying.
@ David Friedman
I’m sure I could find an example of someone being fired from a job at a Catholic school just for advocating for gay rights, if you really want me to.
@ John Schilling
It might be if we were talking about nobodies, but Brendan Eich is getting along just fine. From Wikipedia:
Eich is [now] the CEO of Brave Software, an internet security company which has raised $2.5 million in early funding from angel investors.
“Opposition to gay marriage is a way of persecuting gay folk in exactly the same way that opposition to interracial marriage was historically a way of persecuting black folk.”
And getting the government involved in marriage in the first place was done for the specific purpose of preventing inter-racial marriage, which would have been a non issue if this were left to voluntary interactions with each individual church deciding for itself who it would marry and who it would not.
“Opposition to gay marriage is a way of persecuting gay folk in exactly the same way that opposition to interracial marriage was historically a way of persecuting black folk. ”
Quite a different way, actually. Opposition to interracial marriage imposed a cost on blacks who wanted to marry whites and on whites who wanted to marry blacks but had no effect on most blacks or most whites.
Opposition to gay marriage imposed a cost on gays who wanted to marry gays, which is to say gays who wanted to marry.
“I’m sure I could find an example of someone being fired from a job at a Catholic school just for advocating for gay rights, if you really want me to.”
Possibly. If you could find an example of someone fired for that rather than fired for being gay it would qualify. That could be either someone straight who advocated gay rights or a school that didn’t fire people who were known to be gay unless they advocated for gay rights.
But you are agreeing that what you actually wrote in the post I responded to was incorrect?
Ah, so Obama was the equivalent of someone persecuting blacks, up until a few years ago?
“I’m sure I could find an example of someone being fired from a job at a Catholic school just for advocating for gay rights, if you really want me to.”
And would you be totally okay with that? Absolutely no complaints whatsoever? If the person who was fired complained, you’d smugly lecture them about how the First Amendment only binds the government, and this was “simply” people responding to that person’s speech?
@Jiro
You have to watch that Overton window. It closes so fast you’re lucky if you only lose a few fingers.
Might be helpful to remember that most of the issue the Catholic church has re: homosexuality is not people who are gay but people engaging in homosexual activities – ie dating or in relationships, +/- dating below the age of consent.
Celibate homosexuality, not such an issue. Arguing with charity and a foundation in Scripture for a change in church policy, also not so much an issue.
One might say “that doesn’t matter” or “that’s even worse”. But it’s not the same, in most people’s eyes, to fire someone because they’re homosexual vs firing them because they were having sex with random rent boys – which is the sort of action which gets heteros fired, too.
@ Matt M
Do you have evidence that this is so?
@ David Friedman
I spoke of “political persecution” in the comment you were responding to– I don’t know that this is synonymous with “persecution for expressing one’s political beliefs.” If it is then that was an error, yes.
@ Jiro
It’s weird to say that one human being is the equivalent of another. I agree that Obama’s past opposition to gay marriage was morally equivalent to opposing interracial marriage while otherwise endorsing equal rights for blacks.
@ ThirteenthLetter
Of course not. Where did you get that idea?
@ keranih
I don’t know why you’re talking about rent boys, several of the people in the Advocate article I linked to were fired just for being married (presumably monogamously) to someone of the same sex.
All I was able to get from 10 seconds of Google was some dude’s blog (unsourced) but I do recall reading something from a more legitimate media outlet on this in the past.
“I spoke of “political persecution” in the comment you were responding to– I don’t know that this is synonymous with “persecution for expressing one’s political beliefs.” ”
It could also be persecution for being known to hold political beliefs, which also would not apply to your example.
If “political” in “political persecution” doesn’t have to do with the political beliefs of the target, what does it relate to? I can see using “political persecution” to mean “persecution via the political system,” as in your example of a law against interracial marriage. But that doesn’t apply to your argument either unless the person being fired is being fired from a government job, which you didn’t imply.
…after a year and a half of being unemployable, Brendan Eich has a job as CEO of a company less than 1/5th the size of the one he was hounded from, thus presumably able to pay him 1/5th the salary he had earned at his old job.
Yep, being hounded from one’s job by the forces of Social Justice is “just fine”, nothing to see here, move along. And if the effect scales down to the “nobodies”, well, they’re nobodies, so that’s just fine too, right?
It’s the hipsterism of free expression advocacy. A perfect bespoke set of concerns so you never have to care about anything but hating the hated enemy.
You fired from your job?
Was it because you are gay? Because then I don’t care.
Okay so you say it was for advocating for gay rights rather then being gay. Was this a Catholic school — because that’s different and so I don’t care.
You say it wasn’t for a Catholic school. Hmm. Um. Ah. I’ve got it! You weren’t hounded from your job, right just fired? What do I mean by hounding, well was twitter involved? No? Well then I don’t care — fuck off liberal asshole.
And don’t forget out Brenden Eich, it’s almost time for his saints-day mass and if I don’t see you there I might have to mention it to your new boss.
Promoting morality is very much central to the goals of the Catholic Church, so it’s perfectly justified in not employing people who publically practise and promote immoral behaviour.
Prop. 8 passed with a margin of 52%-48%, so I’m guessing you think that 52% of the population of California ought to be blacklisted and hounded out of their jobs?
ETA: Or perhaps, anybody who would object to blacklisting 52% of the population of California without also appending a list of people who claim they were fired for being gay is being insincere.
Oh yeah, I was forgetting that you can’t complain about people trying to destroy somebody’s life if those people aren’t successful.
This is an interesting tactic.
It seems like the rule being followed here might be:
(1) if there are no good examples of the problem, claim the problem doesn’t exist.
(2) if among many available examples one is an especially good example, make fun of proponents for continuing to harp on their one best example and suggest the problem doesn’t exist other than in that one case everybody knows about. (Which is old news by now, so they should get a life.)
Is this a fully general counterargument? For instance, if mob-justice critics stopped talking about Eich and picked someone else, you could just apply rule #2 to whoever that somebody else is, right?
But maybe this should work like a second-place auction. That is, in political discussions on any subject X we take the list of victims of X, rank them, set aside the worst example as an outlier and start all discussion at or below the second-worst example, whatever that is.
That…might actually be a good rule.
Let’s apply it to the war on Terror: 9/11 is out of bounds – anybody who gets angry about that is just being silly. We need to find the second-worst case of a similarly-inspired terrorist attack on US soil and see if that example is bad enough to justify all these wars and drone strikes and searches and slogans. If not, we should all just mind our business and stick to the status quo.
For libertarians, getting upset about Waco is off limits; Ruby Ridge is still in play.
Nuclear power (domestic): Three Mile Island is off-limits. Nuclear Power (abroad) Chernobyl is off-limits. Offshore oil drilling: Deepwater Horizon is off-limits. Other examples?
Is Godwin’s Law a special case of this broader principle? Is the principle a good idea?
I think, while this might be fair, it weould be limited to cases where someone asserts that the first place example is an outlier. That isn’t what is being said here; it’s always “we’re tired of hearing about Eich”; nobody ever claims that what happened to Eich actually isn’t going to happen to anyone else.
@ John Schilling
You began with the comparative claim that being hounded out of your job for holding politically incorrect views was substantially worse than being quietly and automatically terminated for your sexual orientation. The fact that Eich is still getting along fine despite being publicly tarred as a bigot is good evidence that this is not the case. When it comes to people not antecedently famous, we have the example of Justine Sacco, the woman who made the unfortunate joke about getting AIDS on a trip to Africa, who has rebounded and is now holding down a good job at a different PR firm.
@ Mr. X
It’s true that promoting homophobia falls under a more general category which does count as a central goal of the church, as you say. But we can perform the same trick with corporate diversity statements, too, like so: “maintaining a good public image is a central goal of any firm, promoting diversity is part of maintaining a good public image, therefore, any corporation is perfectly justified in refusing to employ someone who does not demonstrate an adequate commitment to diversity.” If we take the narrowest descriptions, “promoting homophobia” and “promoting diversity,” neither goal is central to the organization’s mission. If we take broader descriptions, “promoting traditional morality” and “maintaining a good public image,” both goals are central. Hence, if we are consistent about the the generality of the description we employ, there still does not appear to be any relevant difference between the church’s behavior and the corporation’s behavior. So the excuse that it’s okay for church-affiliated organizations to fire gay employees because homophobia is specially central to their function, in a way that diversity isn’t an especially important part of a corporation’s charter, still turns out to be false.
Certainly anyone who vocally objects to firing people for holding conservative political views but remains silent about the many gay folk fired from their jobs just for being gay (or for promoting gay rights) has no principled commitment to freedom of expression.
A strong claim. Perhaps you’d like to first state, in your own words, the Catholic Church’s teaching on homosexuality, and then provide a refutation sufficiently obvious and devastating as to prove that the only possible reason for the Church’s position is irrational hatred.
Except that the only reason Mozilla had a “public image” issue was the large number of people conducting a concerted campaign to get one of their senior managers fired. There literally would not have been a problem if an online mob hadn’t started whipping up public hysteria about Brendan Eich’s promotion. Trying to defend the side cheering on (if not actively participating in) the mob by appealing to a consequence that was only ever going to happen due to the actions of said mob is the sort of sophistry that would make Gorgias blush.
Not unless you can also show that people fired for being gay have more difficulty finding a new job.
The church holds that homosexual behavior is in some way morally wrong. But it is patently obvious that homosexual behavior is in no way morally wrong. The best explanation of why church dogma contains such an obvious falsehood is that church attitudes towards homosexuality are rooted in a tradition of irrational prejudice and hatred stretching back to the bible’s authors.
Even if only a handful of people would have found out that Eich was a bigot if not for the social media mob, that still gives us parity with the case of church employees fired for being gay. It’s true that it would not have done a great deal of harm to Mozilla to keep Eich on board if not for the public furor whipped up by agitators, but it’s equally true that keeping a gay employee would not do a great deal of damage to the goals of a church-affiliated organization.
Schilling claimed that being hounded out of your job is substantially worse than being quietly and automatically fired. To maintain the contrary, I need not hold that “people fired for being gay have more difficulty finding a new job,” only that the difference between the two cases is not substantial. And I have discharged this obligation– based on the examples we have, people who are hounded from their jobs by and large appear to recover within a year or two.
“Certainly anyone who vocally objects to firing people for holding conservative political views but remains silent about the many gay folk fired from their jobs just for being gay (or for promoting gay rights) has no principled commitment to freedom of expression.”
As I pointed out in a recent thread, that’s wrong. Firing someone for being gay is an attack on freedom of sexual orientation, not freedom of expression.
Firing someone for promoting gay rights, on the other hand, is an attack on freedom of expression in the same sense as firing someone for supporting a referendum you disapprove of.
I’m a little reluctant to describe either of the latter as attacks on freedom of expression, but that’s because of the ambiguity of “freedom.” There is one sense in which a man stranded on a desert island is entirely free, since no human being is restricting him, a different sense in which he is far from free. Similarly with a man restricted by other people taking actions they are, in my view, entitled to take–even if they shouldn’t.
Douthat had a piece about this out in the New York Times a couple of days ago. Not the Whedon thing specifically, but about all-pervasive cultural progressivism and its role in electoral politics. Every late night host huffs about Trump and how stupid you would have to be to vote for him; the sole exception is Jimmy Fallon, an idiot clown who tried to stay apolitical and was roundly condemned for it.
This is the product of an aggressively anti-intellectual culture that has decided the big questions of politics and morality have already been decided; all that remains is to make sure everyone knows the answers. Comedians are hailed as modern philosophers, rappers with criminal records are voices for social change, and adults who play dress-up for a living have enough cultural power to be taken seriously as political influences. There’s something C.S. Lewis once said about the role of kings in society, but it can be handily repurposed to describe the role of God, tradition, morality, institutions, leitkultur, any of those regressive old things we no longer need:
“Where men are forbidden to honour a king, they honor millionaires, athletes, or film stars instead; even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.”
“the sole exception is Jimmy Fallon, an idiot clown who tried to stay apolitical and was roundly condemned for it.”
Following nicely in the legacy of Jay Leno, who remained politically neutral and got never-ending amounts of shit from all the official media critics who hated the fact that he actually appealed to middle America.
Douthat:
“Among millennials, especially, there’s a growing constituency for whom right-wing ideas are so alien or triggering, left-wing orthodoxy so pervasive and unquestioned, that supporting a candidate like Hillary Clinton looks like a needless form of compromise.”
Seems to dovetail pretty well with Scott’s “post-partisanship is hyper-partisanship” thesis.
I was thinking the same thing.
Interesting Lewis quote. I’m quite sympathetic with the spirit (e.g. that people who claim they have no philosophical/political stance in an area often have a strong held but unexamined one), but in this case not really clear why kings are ‘food’ for honour and millionaires, athletes etc. are ‘poison’.
Indeed. I hate media/celebrity culture quite a lot, but I find it difficult to believe that it’s really more toxic that worship of (perfidious, extractive, honor-obsessed, murderous, bellicose) royalty. I’m not saying that all kings were bad, but I think celebrity culture is, as a rule, less bad.
But you’re comparing worship of celebrities (who don’t hold a great deal of power) to worship of royalty (who did). How do you think any of the portmanteau-named celebrity couples would behave were we to make them the heads of new royal families, and give them (at least in theory) near-absolute power?
Modern ornamental monarchs like many European countries have are fairly well-behaved compared to, say, ultrarich corporate executives (isn’t one of the princes a combat veteran? I don’t know how many hedge fund managers’ kids see combat).
How inspiring, morally, are the modern political or business classes of most states?
Norm McDonald had something to say about that in a recent interview too.
I’m sure it depends on the philosopher, working in smoky nightclubs and hit on waitresses for a living sounds a lot like the bohemian ideal.
“If you can tell me one funny, socially relevant joke I’d give you a million dollars.”
Should I sent him this one?
“In America, we have a two-party system,” a Republican congressional staffer is supposed to have told a visiting group of Russian legislators some years ago.
“There is the stupid party. And there is the evil party. I am proud to be a member of the stupid party.”
He added: “Periodically, the two parties get together and do something that is both stupid and evil. This is called-bipartisanship.”
Ok, that one was good
“The last Oscars was really, really bad too.”
Man if they could confine all this stuff to the Oscars that’d be wonderful actually. Who watches those things other than pretentious cultural elitists that are 99% likely to be voting for Hillary anyway?
I have plenty of (aesthetic) complaints about Hollywood movies, but I still enjoy many of them, and they are still one of America’s most popular and iconic cultural products at home and abroad. People from all walks of life enjoy Hollywood movies (though maybe not always the same ones).
Thus far, not many have taken to heart calls to boycott certain ideological stars or Hollywood in general. There aren’t a lot of alternatives, though I guess you could confine yourself to Clint Eastwood movies and, apparently, Angry Birds. In any case, having preachy right wing movie or actors isn’t really a cure for preachy left wing actors.
It used to be that movies and entertainers were relatively apolitical and everyone could enjoy the movies and, indeed, kind of idolize the actors–in a “he is so cool” sort of way, rather than a “he supports all the right causes” sort of way. Sure, you had your Sinead O’Connors periodically taking a controversial stance here or there, but that was mostly not much approved of and it wasn’t like this “united front” where the Avengers all do a PSA to tell you how to vote.
But the message being sent by stuff like this Whedon thing is, basically: you are no longer allowed to remain neutral, even in your choice of entertainment. You’re part of the enlightened group or you’re not. This is expressed not just in how you vote or opine on explicitly political issues, but in what you wear, where you shop, which stars you like, Apple/PC…
This strategy will probably convince some marginal people to stick to the tribe where the cool people are, but eventually it has to truly alienate those who just don’t see eye-to-eye politically. They really will start to boycott or just start making super right-wing movies to combat super left-wing movies, as we’ve seen with TV news, but now penetrating into a realm where, frankly, it doesn’t belong (one can argue that openly partisan political reporting is also bad and divisive, but at least it’s about politics). How long before we see the “Fox News” of film studios?
I’m sure they really do think they’re helping, but in reality, they’re driving the wedge deeper and deeper between Red and Blue America. It may be only a matter of time before it splits, literally (though that might not be a bad thing in the long run on my anti-centralization views).
“I have plenty of (aesthetic) complaints about Hollywood movies, but I still enjoy many of them, and they are still one of America’s most popular and iconic cultural products at home and abroad. People from all walks of life enjoy Hollywood movies (though maybe not always the same ones).”
The Oscars haven’t had much to do with the types of Hollywood movies that the general public enjoys in a very long time. It used to be a silly cliche for third-rate stand-up comics about how nobody has actually seen the movies that have been nominated, but now it’s become more of a clear message and deliberate point of cultural separation. Real people enjoy Star Wars and The Avengers. The elitists who tell you to how to vote enjoy whatever it is that gets nominated for an Oscar.
“They really will start to boycott”
And like I’m saying, this has already happened. Not in an organized, deliberate, “let’s show those crazy lefties!” way, but in more of a “we simply won’t watch their overly preachy nonsense when Batman is available” sort of way. And fortunately, there are enough Hollywood executives left that seem to believe in capitalism (for themselves at least), that it doesn’t seem there is much risk of Batman going away any time soon.
If you’re worried about a future where the red tribe and blue tribe enjoy entirely different forms of entertainment, it’s already here, and has been for years.
Digression here: This is super-interesting for me as a Brit. Are the Oscars seen as of interest to the cultural elitists? I’d have assumed the whole setup was fairly middle or lowbrow. Can’t imagine e.g. Frasier Crane (my most available stereotype of an American pretentious cultural elitist) caring much about contemporary American films, and certainly not seeing their awards as important.
“Are the Oscars seen as of interest to the cultural elitists?”
They are of MUCH greater interest to Frasier Crane than they are to his father. Oscar nominees are usually comprised about 75% of art-house style films with progressive social messages.
Meanwhile, of the Top 10 grossing films of the year, one or two, at most, would be taken as serious contenders for the oscars.
Source
Grosses of last year’s best picture nominees:
The Martian: $630 million
The Revenant: $533 million
Mad Max: Fury Road: $378 million
Bridge of Spies: $165 million
The Big Short: $133 million
Spotlight (winner): $88 million
Brooklyn: $62 million
Room: $36 million
But you’re right, the real problem here is that the Oscars aren’t commercial enough.
Meanwhile, Star Wars is almost at $1 billion by itself.
When the winners are routinely 1/10th as popular as movies that don’t even get nominated it’s hard to paint the picture that this is some sort of “mass market” event that celebrates general popularity with the American public.
Also worth noting that often, the obscure movies that do well at the Oscars see a sudden upsurge in interest, meaning that your figures (probably not for The Martian or Mad Max, but almost certainly for Spotlight) are highly inflated by the fact that being an Oscar winner makes them more popular than they were prior to being one (and once again, even after the fact, it’s about 1/4th as popular as Captain America: Civil War ($400 million gross – not likely to win any Oscars)
Edit: In 2016 alone, so far, I count 24 movies that have grossed more than Spotlight did in its entire run (assuming that is what your numbers indicate) – a list which includes the likes of Sausage Party, The Conjuring 2, Ride Along 2, and Bad Moms.
One more adendum re: best picture nominees.
It might be more instructive to look at the nominees compared to box office from like 2005 – 2009. In 2009 they increased the amount of nominees from 5 to 10, and the “new” spots were increasingly occupied by more popular mainstream movies (a cynic might speculate that this was a desperate ploy to trick regular people into tuning in) – of course such a movie has yet to actually win (since 2009 at least, I know prior to that there have been abberations such as Titanic, Gladiator, etc.)
The Oscars are firmly middlebrow. The only small tastes of highbrow are in the categories no one cares about, like best short.
Movies made by major studios with major actors and directors but somewhat artsy and/or about a Very Serious topic practically define middlebrow.
On Frasier the two brothers make fun of the 1812 Overture. If you want high brow isn’t going to the philharmonic, it’s listening to some atonal sound poem.
” The only small tastes of highbrow are in the categories no one cares about, like best short.”
And yet, there IS a best short award, a best foreign film award, a best documentary award, etc.
There is no “best car chase” award or “best sex scene” award or things that come close to appealing to low-brow.
Remember, I didn’t say that Frasier would care deeply about the Oscars, only that he is far more likely to care than his low-brow working-class father.
>best sex scene
That’s the AVN awards.
Also the academy is filled with total plebs, the idea that they’re highbrow is preposterous.
@ Matt M
I don’t think the Oscars are marketed as being a naked popularity contest. If that’s what you’re looking for, you might try the Teen Choice Awards instead. But at that point, why bother? If you think that judging movies on the basis of anything besides mass appeal is unbearably elitist, you can just look at a list of box office returns. It will spare you the trouble of even seeing the movie.
I don’t see the Oscars as particularly high or low brow. It’s just people within the industry trading favors, isn’t it?
One thing I found funny though, the year Frozen won best animated picture, people on the voting committee admitted they hadn’t seen any animated movies and just voted for Frozen because it was popular.
and “people within the film industry” are likely to be what brow level?
Medium? The summer blockbusters and the arthouse indie movies both almost never win.
I did think that RDJ was above this. I comfort myself by remembering I don’t watch his movies for his brains. (Or him, half the time.)
Joss Wedon I’m torn on, if only because I know he can and will write sympathetic characters of povs very different from his own and not every writer will do that.
Yeah, I instinctively think better of Joss Whedon. I guess this sort of thing is perhaps more normalised in the celebrity circles/culture (like giving your kids ridiculous names, which normal-seeming famous people do weirdly often).
giving your kids ridiculous names
You wonder how much of that is true, and how much is what the publicists put out, and her name is Moonbeam Sensei Houyhnhnm-heart Cyan when if you look at the birth certificate, it’s really Susan Mary.
I really think it’s a much more general problem than that, both in scope (it’s not just America) and in principle (it’s not just celebrities endorsing candidates in a smug way).
There is, and this isn’t at all new – it dates back at least to the temperancers – a strain of ostensible charity/”concern” for the poor which isn’t at all about improving their material conditions (e.g. by eradicating hunger) but about “improving” their morals away from the common morals of most of mankind and toward the only ideal Puritan utopianists find palatable.
We see this everywhere; just yesterday I happened to read an article about Robert Mugabe’s 92nd birthday celebrations, in which the writer noted with disdain that Zimbabwe was refusing to take Western food aid because it’s contingent on showing a positive attitude toward gays. The journalist seemed to think it was only natural to attach such conditions, but to me it seems, on the contrary, obviously monstrous to demand of a starving person that he abandon his own morals if he wants to eat.
I honestly can’t say if it’s increased generally in the last decades or not, but I certainly do think that it’s a huge factor in the slow collapse of the European left – the party politicans of the left are virtually all middle-class now, and they no longer care primarily about increasing the health, prosperity and liberty of the working class, just about forcing the working class away from its own culture and beliefs because those are considered retrograde. Effectively, that is, unapologetic cultural imperialism toward the backwards indigenous folk.
“it seems, on the contrary, obviously monstrous to demand of a starving person that he abandon his own morals if he wants to eat.”
Why, if their “morals” are wicked and hateful. If a person is willing to pass up literally life-saving charity in order to cling to his bigotry and hate, then he probably deserves to die, and the sooner the world is rid of such people, the better.
Anita advocating converting muslims by starvation!? Wicked and hateful.
Anita, I think you’re simply not very good at this trolling thing. Maybe you’re too young, maybe you’re too dumb, maybe you’re not ready – you should go and practice on some other forum, preferably wih up/downvotes so that you get immediate feedback.
Publius Varinius, do you not remember that we are all the most blazing rightest-most of right-wingers on here, so naturally we think what Anita thinks we think?
And so she is only putting the words into our mouths that we all have percolating through our hindbrains? 🙂
It’s basically meaningless. Because everyone already knows what the glitterati are going to say; the electorate already assumes they’re for anyone with a (D) in their name. The only times they make any difference (and not much even then) is when they go against the grain, as when Caitlyn Jenner said good things about Trump.
Well, but it’s actually not so much the possibility of affecting the election outcome that worries me.
It’s the divisive cultural message being signaled that concerns me.
Are you a good member of the tribe? Are you with us or against us? Don’t you want to be one of the enlightened?
So how well do you think it’s working?
Well, going back to the election: I know many people who probably wouldn’t have voted for Trump anyway (though maybe some would have) who, upon hearing the topic of the election coming up, basically say
“Oh, Trump, ICK. I just HATE him. Blegh.” I am paraphrasing, but not by much. The reaction bears no resemblance to any reasoned evaluation. It’s just “oh, god, he’s SO not me. That hair, the way he talks, the types of people who like him…”
Which is not to say that most people ever, in general, are super well-informed and careful about whom they chose to vote for, but the disgust and incomprehension of both sides for the other is growing, it seems.
And I think this sort of thing adds to that.
(A) This is a thing?
(B) This is a thing I should care about?
Well, it’s only in the past two elections I’ve seen any Hollywood star political ads. Last time was the aforementioned Samuel Jackson thing, and now this, much preachier and more populous example.
I hope it doesn’t become a thing? Sadly it seems to be becoming one?
I’m seriously not trying to be smug here, but: how old are you? I remember the cast of Rent (the Hamilton of its day in terms of reflexive worship*) performing at the ’96 Dem convention, and I wasn’t even old enough to vote then myself. You might be referring to ads specifically, but I don’t know if the Whedon thing is actually airing on TV, and a viral video obviously isn’t going to have precedent that early.
* for the record, both musicals are legitimately good, just not as perfect as their liberal-signaling reputation indicates
EDIT: Here’s an example from 2008, just for a start of pushing your timeline back. There were definitely some celebrities who had televised endorsements of Kerry in ’04 as well but finding a link would probably take some digging.
I loved rent when I was a teen.
Now I love partsof Rent as an adult.
Growing older makes you start to see the characters as really unlikable (The musical is fully aware of this, so this is kind of an overblown criticism) but at the same time its SJ bonafides have aged really badly, the diverse characters get way less stage time (Mark really doesn’t actually do much but gets a whole lot of attention) and rot13 angel literally dies and natry, gur genaftraqre punenpgre qvrf naq freirf nf dhnfv qvivar vagreiragvba gb oevat zvzv onpx. The musical comes across as being well meaning but kind of weirdly tone deaf (The fact that Larson died suddenly in New York in the eighties probably helped his reputation)
Also, I really quite liked the filmadaption but it was panned even when the musical was big. Chris Columbus seems to be a guy people love to hate on.
One of the thing I noticed is that during the Bush administration basically every musician decided they wanted to be Zack de la Rocha.
There have been “political” entertainers as long as I can remember. I mean come on, John Lennon and Jand Fonda weren’t exactly shy about their opinions. More recently, we all know that Sean Penn is a champion of the Blue tribe and Clint Eastwood a champion of the Red. The thing that’s changing, near as I can tell, is that remaining neutral/apolitical is becoming less of an option.
Yes, Lennon even recorded a presidential campaign commercial. For the 1970 campaign.
Hell, Reagan turned it into a Governorship and a Presidency.
Will Rogers: “I’m not a member of an organized political party. I’m a Democrat.”
I hope it doesn’t become a thing? Sadly it seems to be becoming one?
I’m from the same country as Bono. Imagine how that was (luckily, they seem to have shut the hell up since the 2006 controversy over U2 moving parts of its business to the Netherlands in order to avail of lower tax rates).
Thank all the gods and little fishes for that because we’re starting into a new cycle of political activism over Repeal the Eighth and I really could not stand having him pop up everywhere in Irish media telling me what to think. It’s going to be bad enough listening to all our C-list celebs (oh look Cillian Murphy and Hozier were marching in Dublin in support, fortunately I am too old to be a Hozier fan so it matters less than nothing to me if they want to wear out shoe leather) and the opinion formers in the media, as well as the Usual Suspects.
Eh. It has always been a thing.
What I wonder is if Herman Cain – an African American businessman, and Ben Carson – an AA surgeon – appearing on the Republican ticket, has done against the influence of AA sports figures.
I do not pretend to know what goes through the minds of other humans. I would like to think that what people who are humans respect in surgeons is more than what they respect in basketball players. Or actors. But what do I know?
I think a whole lot of people (on both sides) respect someone who has the correct political views more than they respect someone’s occupation or whatever.
In a vacuum, they might respect surgeons more than football players, but in real life they respect an athlete with the correct views more than a sell-out, uncle tom, race-traitor, surgeon.
Samuel L Jackson has a serious activist past (he was an usher at MLK’s Funeral then later held MLK’s dad hostage to protest the governing of Morehouse college then joined the Black Panthers) and has starred in politically charged films before, plus the ad has actual content, it’s hard to fault him for it.
I didn’t know about his activist past. And it was a lot better than this Whedon thing.
Nonetheless, while I don’t think one has to abandon activism or speaking out on charged issues just because one has become a big movie star, I don’t care for people using the fact of their stardom as a platform for spreading ideology.
I guess here’s where I bring up football players using football as a platform for political statements. If you have some cred outside of being a football player, as Samuel Jackson apparently does outside of being a movie star, then, okay, maybe. But if you only have the platform because people pay to watch you act or play a game, then why not just stick to entertaining everyone and playing the game for everyone? It used to be that politics was sort of contained. Having it spread to every area of life, regardless of the kind of politics, is very bad, imo (look at societies where politics pervades all aspects of life: Cultural Revolution China, DPRK…)
But we’ve gone beyond just saying it’s okay to use stardom as a platform for ideology; it’s getting now to the point where it’s almost like a responsibility (see discussion of Fallon, above), and that is much worse.
It continues to amaze me that the same people who will roundly condemn the corrupting influence of money in politics, and seriously assert that Citizens United effectively legalized political bribery, will then turn around and defend the right of celebrities to wield the outsize voice their fame brings to push their personal political agendas (indeed, as you note, they often praise the celebrities for their bravery, or even assert that the celebrities have a moral duty to use their fame to influence politics).
Why is it evil and corrupt for the Koch brothers to buy a political ad, but brave and praiseworthy for Sam Jackson to star in one that people only watch because he’s Samuel freakin’ Jackson?
Because he’s openly speaking as himself, instead of secretly using his money behind the scenes in a way people may not be aware of. More importantly, because he can’t easily use it to bribe politicians who think they need his voice to get elected. (I could imagine a scenario where he could, but it seems unlikely and I haven’t heard of a case of it happening).
Well, apparently it’s not all that secret. And politicians certainly use celebrity endorsements to benefit their careers – “I’ll say how great you are if you do X” is potentially just as valuable as a cash bribe. Hanging out with celebrities is itself a thing of great social value.
You’re simply privileging one form of unequal influence over another, and I don’t see how you do that in a principled way.
Because Jackson supports the correct candidates, and the Koch brothers do not. Duh; I’m surprised you even needed to ask.
(Note that the key word is candidates, not political positions. The Koch brothers support marijuana legalization and gay marriage. That gets them zero points.)
ThirteenthLetter,
But this cycle they’re anti-Trump! I’m sure the left will remember that and not vilify them in the 2020 general election!
I’m going to buck a little against the tide (I think) and say that not only do I not have issues with “money in politics” I also don’t have issues with people at any level using their personal charm and good looks/broad shoulders/big boobs using “charisma and popularity in politics” – so long as those doing so acknowledge that they are using powerful resources as well.
It would also help if people acknowledged that it is easier to get money with charisma than it is to get charisma with money. (*) Think there’s inequality in wealth in this country? Try in the “able to get people to like and agree with you” bucket.
The other caveat is that persuasive efforts should be limited to those people voting in your own parish, so to speak. National contests for President, okay, any US citizen can advocate for or against any party. But as a matter of moral (not legal) correctness, person from state A should butt the heck out of discussions about the senate race in state B or the city council in town C.(**)
Which is one reason why I’m really strong on voter id and voting in your correct precinct and not elsewhere – you vote on the issues and races of your area, not the area of other people. People who only vote every 4 years forget that there are other things on the ballot.
(*) There may be sex-linked differences in outcomes.
(**) I can not emphasize enough how I think this is a moral thing – people of course have the legal right to talk smack about Warren and Ryan alike, no matter where they live. But it’s very poor taste to do so around those who actually live and work in those areas, as if those voters were incapable of making their own choices.
@Thirteenth Letter: I’m not very familiar with this sort of money/celeb controversy (here in the UK we’re stricter with spending limits). But from your comment, is it the case that no-one on the left is attacked for funding ads on the right and that celebs can’t support the right without criticism?
If so, that seems like an interesting thing to unpick in itself. Without unpicking it, your and MattM’s comments just read as anti-left applause lights cutting over a genuine discussion between pku and Gbdub.
I don’t quite follow your first example, but the second — I may be in a bubble, but that’s certainly how it seems. It’s almost a cliche at this point that most people in Hollywood who do support Republicans keep it tightly secret, in the manner of spies in a hostile nation’s capital.
@ThirteenthLetter
While I agree with the general thrust of your argument, I think you are grossly exaggerating. As I said above, there are openly “Red Tribe” entertainers in Hollywood they’re just vastly outnumbered. The problem isn’t that entertainers have suddenly become politicized, its that the politicization appears to be increasingly one-sided.
Well, Red Tribe celebrities in Hollywood seem to instantly become viewed through the lens of perceived Red Tribe beliefs, while Blue Tribe celebrities are treated as normal human beings. So many reviews of Clint Eastwood movies now make snide jabs at his politics, even when the films are completely apolitical.
So I suppose it’s not just that Blue Tribe celebrities are treated as normal human beings, they are treated like Havel’s greengrocer — worthy of being left alone, because they hold the correct opinions. Clint Eastwood has not hung the appropriate signs in front of his store, so you get Top Critics sneering that Sully is “fascinating as a study of Eastwood’s persecution complex, his fear that not everyone in the world adequately worships an accomplished white man”.
“The problem isn’t that entertainers have suddenly become politicized, its that the politicization appears to be increasingly one-sided.”
Couldn’t it be both? Even though I’m more right wing, I don’t really want all my movies becoming right wing paeans, or all my celebrities mouthpieces for the GOP either (though I’m sure it would bother me less if the celebrities were spouting stuff I agreed with). Personally, I think the politicization in general is the bigger problem than the lack of balance in that politicization.
“while Blue Tribe celebrities are treated as normal human beings. So many reviews of Clint Eastwood movies now make snide jabs at his politics, even when the films are completely apolitical.”
I’ve actually noticed a new code word for this. Right wing celebrities are described as “controversial.” As in “whatever you think of his controversial political views, you have to admit Clint knows how to direct.” As you say, liberal views are just normal, and, therefore generally not worth mentioning at all.
I’ve been trying for most of this subthread to remember where I saw it, but I know I’ve seen an interview with John Milius (“The Conan director” for those who don’t recognize the name) where he describes being effectively blackballed for being right-wing in the mid-80s. It’s nothing at all new.
(Although I admit that fiasco with Neeson recently was particularly gruesome to watch unfold)
What happened with Neeson? I’m completely out of the loop on celebrities.
I think it is him speaking out against American gun ownership (weirdly following the Paris terrorist attacks)
Hollywood’s been lefty for a very long while (probably Day One), but there used to be something of a core of more-right-wing people, including several big action stars.
Here’s an article from last year referencing a 1990 study:
http://www.newsmax.com/TheWire/top-hollywood-republican-celebrities/2015/02/10/id/623957/
onyomi says:
I’m inclined to say “no” simply because it’s clearly been going on since long before either of us was born. The difference I think, is that in the past there was a rough parity between sides, which meant that there were serious social and professional consequences to pissing off the other side to the point where they didn’t want to work with you.
You’re overthinking it. When people encounter something that hurts or threatens their political cause, they get upset, and then invent reasons to justify being upset by it. Principles are hot air.
Think of it as a labor saver, a chance to say “Shut up and act” to everyone in Hollywood at once.
Onyomi – “Can this please stop being a thing?”
here’s the Romney version.
Status independence is a marvelous thing.
Hillary Clinton proposes a top 65% tax rate on inheritance: http://fortune.com/2016/09/23/hillary-clinton-inheritance-tax-billionaire-estates/
I’m against all taxes, but I’m particularly against the government feeling entitled to more of the property of very wealthy people than the family, friends, or strangers that the wealthy person would choose to give it to. Does anyone feel a tax rate higher than 50% if justified?
I’d strongly prefer a property tax of some sort, if we as a society decide it would be better to reduce concentration of assets. I could see an argument for a higher tax on investment gains (either capital gains or estate tax) if inflation were removed from either gains, as well (with the effect of a higher rate but only on the real gain).
It seems like a pretty good idea – the government gets a lot of money, and it doesn’t seem too hard on the billionaire’s kid to have him inherit just 400 million dollars instead of a billion. Obviously there’s limits to this idea, in terms of both overall economic efficiency and personal property rights, but this seems fairly moderate and reasonable.
How about the farmer’s son who has to give away half the family farm at firesale prices, just because his father died and half of what his family owned now belongs to the state?
Clinton is proposing a 65% inheritance tax on billionaires. If the farm was worth over a billion dollars, not crying a lot of tears over the son having to break it up. There’s no mention of changing the rules for exempting small estates from tax, which at present exempt estates up to $5.45 million. I suppose at that level it’s theoretically possible that there could be a very large family farm that would be valuable enough to be adversely affected by inheritance tax, but nobody has ever provided an actual example of one that had to be sold to pay such taxes.
She proposes lowering the limit to 3 million. At the $6000/acre value of US farmland (in the core agricultural corn belt), an average size (440 acre) farm comes in just under the limit on the value of the land alone.
It’s the opposite. Inheritance tax is unusually harmful because it forces people to break up functioning businesses. It’s not just “poor trust fund baby gets 10 million instead of 20 million.”
Can you cite any examples where this has happened?
Yes, but I’m not listing them here, as they are small businesses known personally to me. Besides, they’re still antecdata – we need a broader view/survey.
Death taxes are worked into most estate planning, and assuming an orderly progression of events, can be seen coming long enough out to shift funds and/or orderly liquidate non-essentials to prepare for the tax hit.
Sudden deaths to young-ish professionals/business owners during a time of moderate crisis for that business (mergers, dissolving partnerships, local downturns, weather events) are hard blows to come out from under. The effect of the death tax may not be fatal in and of itself, but it doesn’t *help*.
Edit – one coping mechanism that obscures easy measurement of this sort of thing (ie, a simple survey that says “how many small businesses go out of business in the year following the death of a partner/owner?”) is that loans taken out to pay the death tax are a thing, and sometimes this works. Sometimes it doesn’t.
I’ve wondered about this (as instinctively I think inheritance is one of the best places to tax if you can do so efficiently). If the business is estabished enough to have a high value wouldn’t the logical solution be to sell equity?
More broadly, I’m interested in the implications of family businesses passing down generations. Presumably such businesses are both in a good and bad way ‘less capitalist’: people are likely to be more cautious and conservative than in other companies as losing the family silver is worse than losing an equal-sized new company.
You could achieve the same effect, with a lot fewer lawyers involved, simply by taxing inheritances as income and the sale of inherited wealth normally without stepped up basis.
Do you also tax gifts as income? If not, there is a strong incentive for wealthy people to transfer before death.
If you do tax gifts as income and are trying to implement a progressive tax system, there is an incentive for wealthy people to transfer over a period of many years, keeping the annual amount below what triggers the high tax bracket. That doesn’t work very well for transferring a billion but works fine for a million over twenty years, especially if there are several heirs to divide it among.
Gifts are taxed.
> That doesn’t work very well for transferring a billion but works fine for a million over twenty years, especially if there are several heirs to divide it among.
This does does happen. I know because I personally benefitted from the practice. But it requires that the assets in question be highly liquid and divisible, and as you say, caps out at a quantity of money far below current estate tax exemptions.
The primary problem, as I see it, is that we have this idea that there is a largish pool out there of filthy rich people who have so much money that the gubmint could snatch away 9/10 of it, and in any practical sense, it wouldn’t matter to those rich people, because they’d still have more money than God.
And while those rich people might have worked for it, their kids surely didn’t, and it Would Do Those Kids Good, were their trust fund to dip (a lot) lower. After all, it’s just money, right?
And sure, there are some of those people, whose funds are pretty much entirely liquid/transferable, and who leave it all to the kids in a lump sum.
But honestly, most people with that much money are either really smart, or smart enough to hire really smart people to watch their money for them. They will route around tax rules in a heartbeat, and figure out how to shift those liquid funds elsewhere and into something that goes to the kids more or less intact.
Who this rule will hammer is those kinda rich people with illiquid assets – art, f’zample. Or land. Or a family business. Things that you can’t sell 65% of – you have to sell the whole thing, or none of it. They are going to lose that thing, and because they are in a position where they HAVE to sell, they’re going to lose even more.
Oh, and you can forget the odd million going to the homeless cat shelter or the new cathedral roof repair, too – Unca Sam needs his cut of that, too.
TL;DR – it won’t raise that much money, because those who can restructure their assessts to avoid the tax will, and the majority impact will be on the people we didn’t aim at hurting with this.
“Do not envy a worthless heir; his wealth is not yours and you would have done no better with it. Do not think that it should have been distributed among you; loading the world with fifty parasites instead of one, would not bring back the dead virtue which was the fortune.” – Fransisco D’Anconia
On a more serious note, the idea of “the rich person/their kids won’t really miss an extra 400 million” is rich given that we have to counterbalance that with the idea that such a sum WOULD make a difference to the federal government. I can’t remember the exact stats and don’t care to look it up right now, but I remember watching some Youtube video that ran the numbers and came up with something like “We could confiscate the wealth of the 50 richest people in America and it wouldn’t be enough to run the government for more than six months”
The heir who loses out on 400 million is going to miss it MUCH more than the average American is going to enjoy the “benefits” of the extra $1 per person the federal government can now spend on their behalf.
Related to this, anyone who favors the taxes in question would do well to consider whether they really lead to less concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a very few.
The idea that government is a magical exception in cases like this is a dangerous one.
“Gubmint is what we do together.”
That we assume “knitting circle” and not “lynch mob” is left as an exercise for the reader.
I would take it further: on average, a dollar spent, invested, or saved by a rich person (or any private individual) is more likely to make society a better place in general than one spent by the government.
No, I can’t prove that. But I think most people never even consider the possibility.
About 76% percent of government spending is on various social services, and that’s if you assume the military provides no value to society. By contrast, average charitable giving is somewhere around 3%. Even if the government is fantastically inefficient and half the money goes to waste, and private industry is a 100% effective charitable heaven, that’s still thirteen times better. So no, it’s not a dangerous idea – it’s just a realistic one.
I doubt you’re comparing like to like. How much of that social service spending would be considered “overhead” if we evaluated it like a charity?
“Even if the government is fantastically inefficient and half the money goes to waste, ”
There are worse things than waste. Quite a lot of government expenditure–enforcing the War on Drugs and Tariffs are two obvious examples–is spent making the world worse.
Bob runs a business that directly and indirectly employs 10,000 people producing useful goods and services, and donates nothing to charity. Bob’s sons have to liquidate 65% of the business to pay the estate taxes, leaving only 3,500 people gainfully employed.
The government uses its tax windfall to hire 2,000 new bureaucrats and social workers to administer the expanded social-services programs that subsidize 4,500 more chronically unemployed people who produce nothing.
Sorry, but on this one I’m with Gordon Gekko. Sometimes charity is just what we use to fill the niches where greed isn’t good enough.
“evaluations of government-sponsored school and work programs have found that some three-quarters of those have no effect.”
http://www.vox.com/2015/1/19/7628801/obama-evidence-based-policy
@Finger
Interesting article. I wonder how good the studies for the six evidence based government programs are and how transparent the process will be on evaluating the impact of the interventions.
No. That would be insanely stupid to do. If you think the government needs a 56% voting share of Google you are a moron. Repeat 48 more times.
Rich people don’t have money, they own industries. Government is really terrible at running nationalized industries.
Oh I agree that it’s stupid.
The point of the video was to suggest that people who think that the problems of government can be solved by “steal more money from rich people” have absolutely no understanding of the scale of government spending in comparison to even the wealthiest private individuals.
I’ll admit I read the tone wrong, what with being 3am and all, but I don’t think it can be said enough that wealth taxes is a backdoor for nationalizing the means of production and what have you.
The “we shouldn’t make laws about x because obviously everyone we want to target will just avoid it” argument is dumb when it’s about abortion, and it’s dumb here. And the “the government wouldn’t have much use for it” part just seems like a blatant case of scope insensitivity.
Saying “the government wouldn’t have much use of it” is in direct response to the argument of “those rich heirs won’t even miss it.”
You can’t tell me that a person “won’t miss” 50% of their inheritance but that at the same time the government will derive great value from confiscating that inheritance so that they can increase their total revenues by 0.01%
In another topic, we recently discussed how so much bad regulation gets passed because small groups with a vested interest have more incentive to lobby for some sort of subsidy than all taxpayers have incentive to argue against their taxes going up by a few dollars or the cost of some product going up a few cents due to protectionism or whatever.
Well this is the same logic, just applied in the opposite direction. Should we really steal 50% of someone’s wealth in order to provide the equivalent of $1 per person in increased government spending?
I really like the idea of inheritance taxes except for one important detail, which I’ll get to in a moment. What tax could be less onerous than one that takes from dead people? Yes, it really takes from heirs, not dead people, but I have a hard time feeling their pain. Why do children of the rich deserve more inheritance than children of the poor? While I think the inequality angle of the Left is greatly over-played, it certainly is true that those that inherit in no sense deserve their wealth. If we want to decrease inequality, then doing it at death is probably the best way. And I think decreasing inequality is a good thing — it’s just that most of the methods to do this are much worse than the problem. And as far as breaking up businesses, it is not difficult to incorporate businesses so pieces of it can be sold instead of the whole.
Now for the problematic detail. Figuring out how much value there are in estates is a very complicated process, and greatly raising the tax would greatly raise the effort spent on the valuation. And even more important, the easiest assets to hide are very mobile assets like jewelry. A high tax on estates would encourage a much higher proportion of assets in these mobile assets. These kind of assets are not very productive for society, so we’d be discouraging more productive uses of assets.
Hillary’s proposal itself I find somewhat contemptible. The US government wouldn’t make much money on such a tax (on just billionaires) — the purpose of the tax is to signal that Hillary is willing to attack rich people. It is similar to her proposal of a minimum 30% tax on million dollar income. It is about class welfare, not rational government.
“While I think the inequality angle of the Left is greatly over-played, it certainly is true that those that inherit in no sense deserve their wealth. ”
This is the wrong way to look at it. The issue is not whether the heirs “deserve” the wealth or not – the issue is whether or not the person who legitimately earns wealth has a right to choose how it is disposed of after their deaths.
If you work hard and earn a lot of money, you should have the right to dictate what happens to said money in the event of your death. If you want to give it to your children, that should be your prerogative. If you want to give it to a random poor child, that should be your prerogative. If you want to give it to a charity, that should be your prerogative. The fact that virtually no one (not even elite limousine liberals) wants to give it to the state is telling.
No I think you (and Gbdub below) are looking at it wrong. The Federal government already takes a trillion or two per year. The question isn’t how much they take, it’s how they take it (at least that is what I am arguing, any increase in estate tax should be accompanied by a decrease elsewhere).
It is a lot less onerous to take money after death than before death. Tax on income clearly has bad effects, in my opinion, in discouraging productive behavior. Perhaps a large inheritance tax would discourage some folks whose main focus is to leave a big estate, but I think most people want money when they are alive, not after they die.
Although as I said, the difficulty of valuing the estate makes it a lot worse.
“It is a lot less onerous to take money after death than before death.”
This is non obvious. The revealed preferences of billionaires seem to indicate that they place a large value on being able to direct the disposition of their estates even after their death. If they really believed that money was useless to them after they died, they’d spend more of it while alive or not bother drawing up complicated wills and estate plans, etc.
In any case, you are changing the argument. I specifically quoted you commenting on whether the heirs “deserve” the wealth.
Do you agree with me that whether or not the heirs deserve the wealth is irrelevant to the matter at hand then?
No I do not think it is irrelevant. I wasn’t changing the argument. My point is that it doesn’t make sense to say that a particular tax is too onerous when ignoring the level of how onerous are its competitors.
Most of the Federal budget currently comes from individual income tax. This tax distorts the economy because it discourages work, and it takes money from people who would rather spend it elsewhere (since I don’t notice people donating to the Federal gov’t when their taxes go down).
We could shift some of this tax burden to estate taxes. This of course has the downside that people would rather direct their estates elsewhere. But I think this has the same moral weight as the income tax, where people would rather use their money for other than taxes. But the estate tax has other attributes. I don’t like it because it is so complex and encourages mobile assets. But I do like it because it is less onerous to take someone’s money after they are dead than beforehand. And because the money goes to heirs that don’t deserve it any more than the poor. And in fact, taxing estates has the good effect of reducing inequality by taking from the non-deserving rich.
I don’t think that many of the rich doing the responsible thing and having complicated estate plans shows that they consider death taxes to be as onerous as living taxes. If I was rich, I’d do that too, because I would rather decide where my money goes, instead of depending on inheritance by Stirpes. And I would prefer my money to go to the charity of my choice instead of the government. But the government rightfully has other priorities. And that doesn’t mean the death taxes aren’t a lot less onerous than living taxes.
” And in fact, taxing estates has the good effect of reducing inequality by taking from the non-deserving rich.”
You are trying to have your cake and eat it too here. You are simultaneously arguing that
1. It’s less onerous to take money from a dead person than it is from a living person
2. It’s morally superior to take money from an undeserving heir than a deserving entrepreneur
But you can only be taking the money from one or the other – the money cannot belong to both the deceased and the heir at the same time. My point is that the heir is irrelevant – what an estate tax does is take money from the deceased by depriving them of their right to dispose of their property post-death as they see fit.
Now if you think this is not a right that people should have, simply come out and say so. Your assertion that this is “less onerous” is entirely a subjective value judgment. Let us hypothesize a rich person whose ordinal value rankings go something like this:
1. Leave 10 million dollars to heir (taxed at 35% so the heir gets 6.5 mil)
2. Spend 10 million dollars on a yacht
3. Leave 10 million dollars to heir (taxed at 60% so the heir gets 4 mil)
Your new increased tax, in this case, simply causes them to buy a yacht instead of leaving the money. Government gets less revenue, the deceased gets less utility than they otherwise would have (because you forced their hand to take preference #2 instead of preference #1), etc.
I don’t understand how you can’t see that they are both true, and both applicable to inheritance. You have been arguing that it is important to allow people to give the full amount of their estates to whoever they choose. I think that income taxes are worse than estate taxes, both because choices of the living are more important than those of the dead, and because the usual choice is to give the money to undeserving rich.
Of course my comment is totally subjective, just as your ranking of choices is totally subjective. But I find it hard to believe that much of anybody cares as much about income when they are dead as much as income of the current time. Your subjective judgment is apparently that they care MUCH MORE about income after they are dead, since you prefer the status quo of the vast majority of taxes coming from current income. It would be useful if someone came up with a study on most folks’ preferences. In the meantime, I guess we have subjective judgments.
If the proposition up for debate was a dollar-for-dollar replacement of current income taxes with estate taxes, you may convince me to agree with that – but it seems abundantly clear this is not what Hillary – or any politician who argues for increasing estate taxes, intends.
My point is that the actions of many people with large estates exhibits a clear revealed preference for inheritance. If they wanted to spend all their money while they were alive, they could do so. The fact that they choose not to indicates they value directing the money to X after they die more than they value doing it currently while alive.
Why does the government “deserve” the money any more than the heir? Why should they have a greater say in what happens to it than the heir? I don’t think the answer is as clear cut as you seem to believe it is.
And anyway, all the assets, except tax advantaged ones like a 401k, have already been taxed – why should the government get another bite at the apple? Most of the assets will still be taxed as capital gains if they are sold, and if they aren’t sold, they are being just as productive (or not productive) as they were in the hands of the original owner.
Inheritance taxes just seem to be a punitive tax on death, taking a chunk of liquid assets at a significantly higher rate than they’d otherwise be taxed, and forcing illiquid assets to be broken up or sold inefficiently.
Maybe they hope it will serve as a deterrent.
Damn it, there was a very old (2006?) Marginal Revolution post about that. There was a great natural experiment on estate taxes and death timing caused by a law change, and now I can’t find it or remember what the results were.
On the other hand, there’s a lot of very interesting tangentially related MR posts on estate taxes.
[Librarian reflex: activated] Here’s an academic paper examining the issue, though their results are inconclusive:
Kopczuk, Wojciech, and Joel Slemrod. “Dying to save taxes: Evidence from estate-tax returns on the death elasticity.” Review of Economics and Statistics 85.2 (2003): 256-265. http://www.columbia.edu/~wk2110/bin/dying-final.pdf
There are a few obvious problems with implementations, which have already been hinted at. If you know 100% of your estate (for sake of argument) is going to get transferred to the government, you’ll just be incentivized to give it away right before you die. Death is just a technicality, and it makes planning inconvenient since people who don’t want it to go the government then can’t wait until they’re actually dead, they have to pick the right moment to transfer the assets.
The similar problem is that taxing heirs isn’t much different from taxing whoever else they would have decided to give the money to. Assuming the tax would be on any money left after death, you’re punishing people who would have liked to have left it to charity, or just other random people, as much as people leaving it to their direct offspring. People seem unusually willing to say “you can’t leave this to your kids, it has to go to the government,” but it sounds a lot weirder when you make the equivalent statement, “this money can’t go to charity or anyone else like that, it has to go to the government.” Which leads back to the first problem – if you think you have a better use for it than the government, you’re forced to transfer the money before you actually die or else risk it being “wasted.” (Assuming you think you have a better use for it than the guv’ment does.)
“Why do children of the rich deserve more inheritance than children of the poor?”
They don’t. But if the rich are entitled to their money, they are also entitled to decide who gets it.
Why?
edit. Seriously. The concept of ownership is something the society collectively agrees on (which also includes practicalities like taking into account the ability of owners to make their claim to stick). Why deciding on who gets it is deemed such an obvious sacrosanct right in this kind of discussions?
Currently in my country the law specifies very strict limits to what extent you can disinherit your spouse and offspring. The common understanding here seems to be that your children have a birthright to certain percentage of your property (after being taxed by the government).
The cross-confusion on values might be related to the US definitions of rights, in which property (as well as life and liberty) were things which can not be removed from a person by government action without a demonstration of due process.
This has been weakened over the years – we also have rules concerning the disinheriting of spouses and minor children – but the idea that the State has a legit right to some of your stuff is less well received in American than in other places.
The inheritance tax should be eliminated and instead we should get rid of the rule that transfers at death reset the basis for the purpose of capital gains.
That makes sense, but we should also index the basis, since the present system can result in your being taxed on capital gains you didn’t actually make.
That’s a fair amendment.
No, changing the rule that the basis resets at death is a horrible idea, for this reason: it would mean that your ability to do your taxes correctly depends not just on how good your record keeping is, but how good your ancestor’s record keeping was as well. At least with the current “reset-on-death” rule, you have the opportunity to record the correct basis at the time you inherit the asset.
If you don’t know the basis you could always pay cap gains on the full amount. Or the estate could, and transfer the asset with a new basis.
I can’t think of any justification for deferred cap gains simply disappearing at death. In fact, there’s an argument to be made that the transfer should trigger an immediate gain and the basis transfer shouldn’t even be an option.
But rmtodd just gave a very good reason for basis resets at death — it can be administratively very hard to find the original basis.
Although an immediate gain at death might be a good thing too — maybe as a substitute for estate taxes. I wonder what the difference in taxes received would be.
http://iret.org/pub/BLTN-93.PDF
I don’t buy this at all. I skimmed the report, and I saw not one comment that most people are more concerned about tax while alive than after they die. All their quantitative analysis would have exactly the same answer if the money was taken when still alive. That is nuts. If you put a tax on someone’s big chunk of capital when they are still alive, this would have a bad effect on the economy. That is what they are measuring. That is much different from a tax on capital after they die.
This is an appeal to what I call “Disney Economics”; the belief that great wealth takes the form of Giant Bins of Money held by greedy rich people to no good purpose. It’s a really silly idea that leads to worse-than-silly policies.
Billion-dollar fortunes are the result of effort and sacrifice on a vast scale. There’s a purpose to that, and the purpose is rarely “make it so me and my nephews can swim around in piles of money”. The purpose may be colonizing Mars, or curing disease, or uniting humanity through social media. It may be something mundane like running a huge energy corporation that employs 50,000 people while providing light and heat to millions.
It is very likely a purpose that will extend beyond the natural life of the original billionaire. If he choses to leave billions to his biological offspring – which increasingly isn’t the option – it is likely because a billion-dollar going concern is seen as more useful to the end goal than bits and chunks sold at auction to pay the tax, and the person trained from birth to run the concern as better qualified or more trustworthy than some stranger.
I. It isn’t obvious to me that the sum total of the goals of the nation’s billionaires is any less laudable than the (actual) goals of the nation’s government. Nor that the government has the superior moral claim to the billions in question.
II. If the goals of the billionaires and the governments are roughly in alignment (diseases should be cured and everyone should have a good job), then this just adds layers of bureaucratic inefficiency to little purpose.
III. If the government’s goals are at odds with the billionaires’, how does this work again? The billionaire has to work and sacrifice to create the billion dollars that will be left to the government on their death. They have to conspicuously not consume it in the form of hookers, blow, and megayachts. They have to not refocus on shorter-term goals that they can see completed in their lifetime, nor transfer it to trusts and trusted allies in their lifetime. They have to not move it out of the country where it can be devoted to long-term good elsewhere. They have to not devote it to lawyers, lobbyists, and political campaigns aimed at tearing down the government that circles like a vulture to tear apart their life’s work.
Incentives matter. Hillary and her supporters seem determined to incentivize the nation’s billionaires to doing much less long-term good for America, in exchange for an occasional windfall with which Hillary’s preferred government can do smaller amounts of long-term good.
I cannot help but suspect that the reason for this might be that Hillary and company can imagine taking credit for the little bits of good they can do with the wealth stripped from the occasional billionaire’s carcass, but loathe the thought of actual billionaires taking credit for the good done with private fortune.
Bah! Kid talk! No man’s poor who can do what he likes once in a while! And I like to dive into my money like a porpoise! And burrow through it like a gopher! And throw it up in the air and let it hit me on the head!
…or to put it a different way, I have to say I’m acutely uncomfortable with the idea that wanting to bathe in umpteen fantasticatillion dollars is a bad goal, as much as I agree that few if any wealthy people actually have that ambition. I can’t think of any rigorous way to defend disallowing it that doesn’t end with me not being allowed to own a sofa.
Besides, if nothing else, wouldn’t three cubic acres of money act as a powerful load balancer on the economy, sort of like that article about Smaug preventing the gold economy in Middle Earth from collapsing?
Three acres of paper money, fiat money more generally, would represent a massive interest free loan by the billionaire to the rest of the society.
This is one thing which seems never to come up in discussions of millionaires and billionaires “hoarding” money.
Sure, if they invest it wisely the benefits to society are obvious. But if they just bury it underground or, better yet, burn it, they are essentially making everyone else’s money worth more. It’s like earning a bunch of interest-free IOUs and sitting on them for a very long time or even forever. The IOU writers are better, not worse off, as a result.
In terms of how the use of money benefits or doesn’t benefit society and the economy, I guess it goes something like:
wise investment>hiding under a mattress>frivolous consumption>unwise investment>spending on something actively harmful (which, as you say above, I find the government much more apt to do than private individuals)?
While the “cubic acre” is admittedly dubious as a term, I believe the accepted idea is that the Money Bin has a square three-acre footprint with a vertical side as great as the other two (≈110m, I believe).
On the other hand, it seems to consist mainly of coins.
If the dwarves had just made paper IOUs for all the gold Smaug was keeping safe for them, they could have kept their empire running quite handily.
It’s a bit like “Goldfinger”. “Oh no, you’ve irradiated all the gold in Fort Knox. Now we… can just let it sit there like we always do, but now nobody will try to steal it. Thanks supervillain!”
But only if no one finds out your gold is inaccessible due to radiation, or dragon, right?
Why does it matter? You don’t need to move the damn stuff to trade it.
I mean, in the Dwarves’ case a lot of their wealth was in arms & armor and such, which would be a significant loss. But the big pile of gold and gems? As long as everyone knows how much is in there, it doesn’t matter who’s guarding it.
But if people don’t believe that they (dwarves, post-Goldfinger USG) can access the gold, they won’t accept certificates drawn upon it. What’s the difference between that and say, issuing money drawn upon unmined gold? “We have a bunch of core samples saying there’s gold in that mountain. Here’s a gold certificate against it.”
With fractional reserve banking, there is a certain amount of fiction behind a gold-backed currency. However, like all fictions, there’s a limit to how far you can stretch it before people go, “Oh, c’mon!” Look at the Star Wars prequels.
““We have a bunch of core samples saying there’s gold in that mountain. Here’s a gold certificate against it.””
This is basically what it’s like to own a stock in a gold mining company.
This is basically what it’s like to own a stock in a gold mining company.
Except in this case the gold mining company does not own nor has rights to mine the mountain. They just know the gold is there.
ChillyWilly covers my first of two responses to this. People expect that you both de jure and de facto own something you’re drawing against, and while the dwarves can make a good argument that they legally own the gold under the mountain–like the Dali Lama can make a good case that he’s legally the ruler of Tibet–nobody is going to confuse that with them actually having access to it.
The other is that few people treat stock certificates as good as cash, since there’s a much greater risk in owning a gold-mining company compared to having the money. I mean, most mines are holes in the ground into which the owners pour money. Just because the gold is in the ground in the mountain (and, unlike Tolkien’s dwarves, it’s not really as sure a thing, since the geological report can be wrong), doesn’t mean that it can be profitably extracted. You take the risk that your gold company stock will turn out to be worth zero, if the company goes bankrupt and all the assets end up sold to pay the creditors for mining equipment, shaft sinking, payroll, etc.
Yeah, a certificate claiming ownership of dragon-hoarded or irradiated gold would be worth something, but a lot less than gold which you can easily access.
Death, like land, is a very non-distortionary thing to tax, because its elasticity is zero.
All police should wear body cameras while on patrol. People given the right to engage in force that would be considered wrong if done by those not wearing a badge, should have to be very transparent about how that authority for force is used.
Does anyone have good arguments against police wearing body cameras? Too costly? Too intrusive of the officer’s privacy?
My initial thinking was that police would be less likely to make judgement calls in dangerous situations because of the awareness that their actions will be recorded and scrutinized on camera. Sometimes this will lead to deaths because officers hesitate and do not act quickly enough.
But it turns out bodycams might increase the rate of police shootings because officers now have their reasons for engagement captured on video so no one can doubt them. And this apparently leads to more dead blacks and Hispanics than whites and Asians, which suggests officers have been holding back all along, if the findings are correct.
Beat me to the punch.
On paper it sounds like an awful idea, letting people pick apart an officer’s moment-by-moment actions after the fact. But then you remember that happens after a controversial use of force anyway. At least in this scenario there’s an unequivocal record that makes things more difficult to spin.
Body cameras seem like a great example of technological win-win scenarios. It should discourage inappropriate uses of force against civilians, bribery and the rest. But it will also give cops confidence that taking down criminals won’t end up with them crucified on the national media.
Hmmm, from that article:
“Surprisingly, we found that the use of wearable video cameras is associated with a 3.64% increase in shooting-deaths of civilians by the police.
…
The professors found almost no link between cameras and shooting deaths in 2013 and 2014. The difference between those years and 2015, they surmise: Officers grew more comfortable using the devices in the field. ”
That seems like weak evidence of a significant body camera effect on increased shootings. Two years there was no difference, and one year there was a very small 3.6% increase in shootings. I don’t know if the authors tried to control for variables but it’s possible that police shootings increased in response to an increase in violent crimes that justified lethal force from 2014 to 2015.
“We explain that video recordings collected during a violent encounter with a civilian can be used in favor of a police officer as evidence that justifies the shooting. ”
Video recordings can only be used in the officer’s favor if that video evidence actually justifies the shooting. If not, it’s video evidence the officer engaged in an unjustified use of force, in which case the officer should be held accountable in the same way a civilian would be held accountable for an unjustified use of force. The video should make prosecution easier.
Too easily turned off? Then again, you asked for good arguments, and I’m fairly sure I’m too biased in favor of them to come up with one.
I’d be curious about a camera integrated into their firearms: every time they take a shot, it takes a shot, so to speak, and unless I’m missing some complications with the mechanics (recoil effects on the picture could be mitigated by taking the pictures at the trigger point just before the explosion, and discarding them if no explosion actually occurs), it would display exactly who they were shooting.
Same deal for tasers, though I’m not sure how well this would work for nightsticks.
Rifle and Helmet-cams, basically go-pros bolted to a standard accessory rail, were already becoming fairly wide-spread in the military before I left. You’d need some additional work (and redesigned holsters) to mate them to handguns but I don’t see any reason, aside from cost, you couldn’t make them work.
Arguably it’s too intrusive of citizens’ privacy: every cop walking or driving by becomes part of the panopticon, giving anonymous tips becomes effectively impossible, any potential stoolie has to worry that the video will fall into the hands of the people he’s squealing on. (If the cop says Lennie the Snitch told him about the Don, well, the cops’ll say anything, boss, I’m your guy! If the Don has it on video…)
I’m tentatively in favor of body cameras, because I increasingly suspect that the panopticon is unavoidable anyway and recent events have pushed me towards thinking the benefits of recording police activity exceeds the cost. But I think the costs are likely to be real.
You could avoid the liability problem by having undercover cops without guns. Regarding the costs, do you have any idea how to estimate what the costs (in terms of money for body cameras for everyone, or at least all cops in roles that might end up in them shooting someone) are?
Also, I’m pretty sure the Don shouldn’t be trusting a guy called Lenny the Snitch anyways. Presumable Lenny’s mom was a Harry Potter fan, but still, nominative determinism and that.
People given the right to engage in force that would be considered wrong if done by those not wearing a badge
Well, all of us are given a right to engage in force, and there are more of us, engaging in more incidents every day, so why stop at just the cops?
(Having said that, I agree that the state and its actors should be held to higher standards.)
The part of me that is into total information technology *really* wants lots more people enrolled in lots more data-gathering methodologies all the time, every day. Not just cops, not just employees, not just teachers, not just students, not just doctors, not just patients, everyone. Yes, one of the things I’m looking forward to when I die is a God’s eye view of all the world and all the things in it, so I can finally, definitively, figure some shit out.
The part of me that is a more rational human runs screaming from the idea that there would be cameras constantly filming *at all*, much less that anyone would be suggesting that they make more such cameras.
So, on the whole, I can see the utility, but we should be prepared for both the negatives we can forsee and those we can’t predict yet.
@ keranih
The part of me that is into total information technology *really* wants lots more people enrolled in lots more data-gathering methodologies all the time, every day. Not just cops, not just employees, not just teachers, not just students, not just doctors, not just patients, everyone. One of the things I’m looking forward to when I die is a God’s eye view of all the world and all the things in it, so I can finally, definitively, figure some shit out.
Heh. I always liked the part of middle school where after the teacher graded the papers and handed them back full of red ink, she went through and told us the right answer to each question. It was great to get all those puzzlements cleared up and off my mind. I hoped appearing before the judgement seat of God would be like that.
The part of me that is a more rational human runs screaming from the idea that there would be cameras constantly filming *at all*, much less that anyone would be suggesting that they make more such cameras.
My instinct (ah, Privilege!) is just the opposite. I see an objective record as defense if I’m falsely accused of something. An alibi if I wasn’t present; a picture of the real criminal if it wasn’t me; if it was me and I was there and I did it, showing what I was defending myself from. Well, more likely in my real case, a dash cam in my car showing what really happened.
I’d happily wear an ivory locket containing a curl of my grandmother’s hair and an invisible body cam at all times. The point is, my dash cam or my locket — the film remains in my own possession. No one else can claim the camera wasn’t turned on or the film had been lost.
I can’t really come up with a reason for not permitting people to wear such a thing, if they want to. Certainly, as you’ve said, there would be advantages.
But that’s not what we’re talking about – and that wasn’t what I meant when I talked about data gathering.
What is proposed is that some people – the OP said cops, I suggested everyone – wears these things not-optionally. And they don’t belong to the individual, they belong to the data collection agency, which in the case of the cops is The State.
Who I don’t trust to not burn my eggs with a cold pan in Antarctica.
“I can’t really come up with a reason for not permitting people to wear such a thing, if they want to.”
Didn’t Google Glass basically get abandoned due to a combination of film studios raging about their copyrights being violated and young women going into hysterics over potential sexual harassment?
I never had one myself, but from the various reports and reviews it kind of seems that google glass got abandoned due to being expensive and terrible more than anything else. And for that matter, “abandoned” may be premature; google still seems to be working on a non-terrible (and perhaps cheaper) version, and others seem to be working in that area as well.
@ keranih
And they don’t belong to the individual, they belong to the data collection agency, which in the case of the cops is The State.
Ah. I’m not sure how we get from current hardware to anything worse than what The State already has — except perhaps in tracking down someone they are already after. They already know where you last used your credit card, bought gasoline, drove past a speed trap machine. Putting a GPS type bug in the camera each person is mandated to wear, would be feasible — useful once they know who to track.
But who in The State is going to watch all those flims of what everyone is doing, to find if anyone is doing anything illegal?
@ Matt M –
Clearly my imagination is lacking in scope.
@ houseboat
(And can I say how much I adore your screen name? I have, for some time…)
But who in The State is going to watch all those flims of what everyone is doing, to find if anyone is doing anything illegal?
Here I must defer to CS Lewis, and his observation that there are no more horrific gaolers and tyrants than those who would imprison us for Our Own Good.
They already choke the lists, those who would volunteer to Hunt Down the Offenders Against Humanity, Good Taste, and Right Thought.
If you can’t identify, among your social set, those who would mark people for the gas chambers and the fires, because Someone Has Decreed it to be so, and the Decree is only Common Sense…
it is very possible that such a person is yourself.
And if you’re going to get in a huff and say that such is only nonsense, blabber-dash, and the stuff of rabble-rousers and hysterics…
well, yes, it always it. Until it isn’t.
“But who in The State is going to watch all those flims of what everyone is doing, to find if anyone is doing anything illegal?”
The Stasi and the KGB didn’t seem to have a big problem finding people to do this stuff (although the fact that neither regime is still around may be relevant)
@houseboatonstyx – “But who in The State is going to watch all those flims of what everyone is doing, to find if anyone is doing anything illegal?”
…slightly different context, but are you following the Youtube Heroes situation?
Incentivisation and crowdsourcing are a hell of a thing.
@ keranih
And can I say how much I adore your screen name?
Ah, thanks. I meant it as a backwater from the flaming crowd, but LiveJournal didn’t allow enough characters for ‘the’, so they get credit for the Baba Yaga touch.
Does your screen name have a story?
those who would volunteer to Hunt Down the Offenders Against Humanity, Good Taste, and Right Thought
Not vintage Lewis. Maybe in the collection when he was complaining about Christmas carollers, at best. He did the same idea much better (and shorter) using Robber Barons.
If you already knew your target, you might follow his cam and catch him privately kicking a dog, or something. But with so many places bugged and videoed already — and with a candidate’s own supporters secretly recording things like “47%” and “bitter clingers” — nothing that’s said or keyboarded has much privacy as it is.
Crowd-sourcing a target’s emails (Palin’s, Hillary’s) works because these are already public figures. But enough watchers to find if any random people anywhere are smoking joints or getting blow jobs … the hours wouldn’t work out.
@ houseboat
“Kerani” is from Kipling, mentioned in one of his introductions, meaning ‘writer’.
Depending on the venue and my lousy memory for passwords, I sometimes change a vowel or add a silent letter.
That wasn’t actually a Lewis quote, but my paraphrase. (Here, although you might have meant this already.)
But yeah, it only works if all of us are engaged in watching all the others for infractions, rather than minding our own business and leaving others to do the same.
The practical downsides to this sort of benign neglect in an environment where even just a few people are actively looking for opportunities to harm others (terrorists and petty crooks alike) are rather sobering to consider.
(edit: stooopid close tags)
On the general issue of the time cost of surveillance, I’m not sure people are allowing for the use of technology. For a simple case, consider wiretaps.
The main limit on wiretaps in the past wasn’t getting court orders, it was that they were very expensive. Someone has to spend many, many hours listening to conversation much of which was irrelevant in the hope of catching a relevant bit.
That problem has been solved. Use speech to text software to convert conversation to speech, have a computer run through the text looking for keywords signalling what you are interested in. Years ago I did some back of the envelope calculations and concluded that it would be possible to tap every phone in the U.S. (thinking of the line from “The President’s Analyst”) at quite a modest cost in hardware. It would cost even less now.
For the video equivalent, you use face recognition software to identify your target in the panopticon video data and have a computer look for patterns that suggest something of interest to you. Once you have a clue as to the time of the events you want to spy on, you look at them in the video data.
@ David Friedman
For the video equivalent, you use face recognition software to identify your target in the panopticon video data and have a computer look for patterns that suggest something of interest to you.
That, like my other examples, starts with you already knowing who you want to target, or at least having a seed picture of him or of his stetson and mask or whatever.
Then, computer assistance can be very useful. But it still takes a lot of man-hours to look through what the computer offers you, to find something of interest.
Hm. I suppose you could have the computer search for pictures of bongs in use, to get a set of random smokers committing this crime in supposed privacy.
Or, more useful for K’s dystopia, watch news of a protest and have your computer find the protesters, show you where each one is and what each one is doing now.
Read an article in the alt-weekly that boiled down to “other times the police said they were going to adopt something that would reduce abuses or increase transparency, and it generally hasn’t.” I think this is partially reasonable – the behaviour of some police departments has not inspired trust, to say the least.
I suppose it really depends on who controls the camera, who keeps the footage, and a lot of other issues. If, say, the cameras are prone to running out of juice quickly and accidentally stopping recording, you’re going to both have the obvious technical problem, as well as some officers using it as an excuse to say something like “whoops, I forgot to charge it” (switches it off and proceeds to hit prisoner with phone book).
It could limit officer discretion. Instead of letting the letting off a first time shoplifter, e.g. a kid who shoplifted one small item, with a stern warning, the officer now has to enforce the law to the full extent.* This will make many more people criminals and add many more costs in time and money to their lives, as well as give people another reason not to like or trust the police.
@ Odoacer
Instead of letting the letting off a first time shoplifter, e.g. a kid who shoplifted one small item, with a stern warning, the officer now has to enforce the law to the full extent.*
Who is going to make the meta-rule that says “enforce to full extent”? What is the full extent on a first time shoplifter (I doubt it is shooting)? Who is going to try to enforce that meta-rule, and how? With what likely result? We can’t even get police punished for big deal things, much less for letting a shoplifter off with a lecture.
Somewhat related anecdotal example:
“Cop Who Didn’t Shoot Black Man Fired for ‘Failing to Eliminate Threat'” (not The Onion)
Elsewhere on this thread, people have asked how much we can trust the Officer/Department to provide video.
After all, the recording equipment might fail unexpectedly. [1]
However, there is another angle to the whole problems.
There are something like 22,000 police agencies in the U.S. (Variations of City Police, County Sheriff’s offices, State Police agencies, State Game Wardens, State University Security departments, U.S. Marshalls, U.S. DEA, U.S. FBI, U.S. ATF, U.S. Customs Agents, U.S. Postal Inspectors, etc.) [2]
Of these agencies, a small number see events that can be called Officer-involved-homicide. That is, a fatal shooting by an officer. (Usually, the deceased person is a Person Of Interest in some sort of investigation. Even if the investigation began as “random citizen jaywalking”, escalated to “same citizen reacts vociferously to officer and attempts to take firearm from officer”, the citizen in question is still officially a Person of Interest.)
Most years since 2010, the numbers of such officer-involved-deaths run between 390 and 450. During those years, total homicide numbers in the range of 13,000 to 14,000 were reported. [3]
A quick glance at the numbers show that most Police Departments in the United States don’t see an officer-involved homicide during any given year.
This may also explain why it would be so hard to bring in the same level of technology (and consistency of data storage) across all 22,000-or-so Police Agencies in the entire nation.
It’s a good idea in the abstract. But implementing it well–even on the level of all City Police in jurisdictions with populations above 500,000–is a challenge.
And verifying good data-handling will also be a challenge.
———————————————————————————-
[1] Blast from the past: in the days when the Internet was all dial-up, and some people in the U.S. wondered if various U.S. Government agencies might have stuff to hide…
In April of 1993, There was a confrontation between Federal agents of the ATF and some sort of religious commune near Waco, Texas.
After the flames settled down, and after years of effort litigating a Freedom-of-Information-Act lawsuit, the ATF produced some documentation. Including documents that had not been presented to the Congressional inquiry on the matter.
But a good deal of video evidence had simply disappeared. Stolen, mislaid, or otherwise unable-to-find. The last time it had been verifiably in the custody of either the ATF or the FBI was the day in April 1993 when the final assault on the compound began.
That video, and those photos, might have helped citizens figure out how the fire started that day. A fire that was fatal to 70-some adults and children inside the commune.
Anyway, agencies with Police power will likely have the ability to make information disappear. Unofficially.
Even if the officer in question isn’t mucking around with his own equipment.
Kind of makes me wonder what was on those videos. And why it was so long before the ATF and FBI admitted that the video was simply unavailable…
[2] Most of the numbers I’m quoting here came from the Crime in the United States reports published by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, available here.
[3] This number was actually reported by the FBI as “Justifiable Homicide by Officer”.
A different set of government statistics, the cause-of-death statistics maintained by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, list approximately the same numbers for “Homicide; Legal-Intervention” during those years. I conclude that most Officer-involved-shootings are reported as “Justifiable Homicide by Officer” in the FBI stats.
Whether or not the label “Justifiable Homicide” is accurate is up for debate…but the underlying numbers are hard to dispute.
For those who are interested in percentages, those numbers put officer-involved shootings in the range of 2% to 3% of the total homicide figures in the United States.
A noticeable figure. Even a figure which will cause people to worry whether their next interaction with a Policeman will turn into a life-threatening situation.
But not one which indicates that death at the hands of a Policeman is the highest cause of death for any social, ethnic, or economic group.
The government has always done a great job of “releasing” documents/video/audio that has been heavily redacted/edited/altered such that they can claim openness and transparency without ever really having to show the public anything they don’t feel like showing them.
The FBI count of police killings is not exhaustive. It is only a total of those voluntarily reported by police departments to the FBI. There is a list of which departments report, from which one might extrapolate an actual estimate, but I have not seen such an exercise.
Here is a list of 1200 killings by police that received press coverage in 2015. I don’t know why the coroners produce so much lower a number, but they probably just don’t produce as much precision as ICD-10 allows.
One’s I’ve seen (I don’t necessarily agree with them, but none are crazy):
– A day-to-day fishbowl for cops to live in, with superiors possibly scanning for, say, off-color jokes and getting people fired over them
– Privacy issues for citizens who interact with the police (e.g. “I saw on the bodycam-video website that Maisy’s husband got the cops called on him during an argument”)
– Police are generally assumed to cut corners and just write down whatever was supposed to have happened after the fact (e.g. “smelled marijuana”, “dog alerted”, “subject was combative” etc.) People didn’t seem to mind too much as long as nothing serious went wrong. They won’t be able to do that with a video record. (Though it seems to me that having a video record would make honest paperwork easier, or the paperwork could be delegated to interns who review the video).
This is a feature, not a bug. If the police have to say it while it’s happening, this makes it harder for them to lie. Since they have to say it while the recorder is running they would no longer be able to lie by waiting until later and lying only when it’s necessary to bolster their case. If they want to lie they would have to lie every time, and that would be too obvious to work well.
Police are _already trained_ in lying about events as they are happening.
https://hdp.press/to-the-4-white-male-policemen-who-beat-me-for-checking-the-health-of-a-sick-black-man-in-their-8d77789fb24d#.rdmcvieea
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/police-dash-cam-video-exonerates-nj-man-implicates-cops-article-1.1701763
Hey slatestar folks. Long time reader, first time poster. I’ve got this idea for an effective giving tool where people who want to give to the most effective charity take a quiz and it tells them the best ones to give to. The idea is I do the hard work of researching the charities which do a really great job of using the money effectively, and they just have to tell the tool what their moral priorities are, so they can find out what charities are best at pursuing the kind of aims they think are most important.
I’ve spent a little time working out some questions, which you can see below. But any ideas of ways to improve them or additional relevant questions would be much appreciated.
Select the statement that most resonates with your sense of mortality.
1.
a) Saving as many lives as possible should be of the highest priority
b) Focusing on improving quality of life is better than just saving lives
c) Human life and well-being should not take priority over the lives of other living things.
2.
Select the statement that most resonates with your sense of mortality.
a) We should focus our efforts on improving conditions for the least well off humans.
b) The natural environment should take precedent over human well-being
c) Improving the well-being of animals in captivity is more important than the well-being of humans.
d) There is no point trying to improve human well-being, we should focus on efforts to prevent existential threats to the whole human race.
3.
Select which scenario you think the level of suffering is highest, and thus should be the one where the most resources are dedicated to solving.
a) You are a child dying of an infectious disease due to lack of access to clean water and sanitation. You do not understand why you are in such agony.
b) You are dying of a cancer of which the survival rate is very low. As an adult, you understand the nature of death and have to face the prospect of not-existing.
c) You have woken up to discover all of earth is to be destroyed by an asteroid. The death will be relatively quick, but you must face the prospect that not only yourself, but everyone you’ve ever known will die.
Also if you think the questions are too leading in any particular direction, feel free to let me know and suggest better ways of wording them.
you must face the prospect that not only yourself, but everyone you’ve ever known will die.
News just in: you and everyone you’ve ever known will die anyway, since as of yet, death is still the end. You might want to re-word this a bit to emphasise the “you knew abstractly you would die, but now you know concretely it’s going to happen really, really soon”.
Or that “Not only will you and everyone you know die right now, but the human race and everything you’ve ever considered worth caring about will cease to exist.”
Yep, that’s what I was going for with that one, just tried to make it as concise as possible and I guess it lost most of it’s meaning along the way
That’s what I assumed you meant, but always nice to laboriously unpack things, I guess.
To get back to your original point, I was going to suggest a Likert scale instead of multiple choice — it may be less frustrating for gray areas / appearance of arbitrary either/ors, but on the other hand I supposed I would be tempted to vote every moral concern as a 10/10 importance because I like to appear morally concerned.
How many charities would you include? I’m trying to gauge how many questions it would take to get a sense of somebody’s moral priorities. I’d say 10, but only because I’m too lazy to take long surveys.
To keep it simple and quick to fill out i’d try to keep the number of questions to a minimum, maybe 5 to 10. As for number of charities I’m not too sure, but again for simplicities sake I’d probably keep the number fairly low, so for each area of moral priorities I could pick the very best most effective charity that gets the most money to where it’s needed as a % of donation. Like the mosquito net charity Scott likes to bring up on occasion.
Closest current thing is probably https://www.effectivealtruism.org/cause-prioritization-tool/
I think the Centre for Effective Altruism might be looking for software developers and project managers to hire–get in touch with them and maybe you can get paid to improve that tool (and do other EA software projects)
Fantastic, thanks! – I’ll have a look around the tool, it does seem to be pretty similar to what I had in mind.
Given the subjects of this blog, has anybody here read yet former Association for Psychological Science president Dr. Susan Fiske’s defense of psychology research against the “methodological terrorism” of it’s self-appointed “destructo-critics”:
“Mob Rule or Wisdom of Crowds?”
I think she makes an excellent case. What do others here think?
I find myself sympathetic to Andrew Gelman’s view. No empress likes when hoi polloi point out she has no clothes (and her ass isn’t in great shape).
And who is this Gelman?
[looks]
I see he’s not even a psychologist, so who is he to argue with an expert in the field? His post seems to be an example of the sort of agenda-driven sniping by “online vigilantes” attacking “individuals, their research programs, and their careers.”
And Gelman notes that the “paradigm” in which Fiske is working is “followed by Roy Baumeister and John Bargh, two prominent social psychologists”. If it’s followed by prominent people in the field, then who is Gelman, as someone outside the field, and thus a non-expert in these matters, to declare the paradigm “dead”?
And nowhere does he address that his Internet-based “open discussion” is a recipe for every random person to present their individual interpretations of the data (rather than leaving that to the experts), leading always to unending disputation which prevents the expert concensus that gives us settled science and a clear, authoritative understanding of which position is the Truth.
As I pointed out before, you need to learn to troll better : -) Maybe practice at some of the dumber forums..?
Anita isn’t quite passing the Ideological Turing Test.
Taking the question at the face value, Prof. Gelman is a respected statistician, specializing in Bayesian statistics in the context of social science. I started following his blog because he (together with other authors) wrote an excellent textbook [1] on Bayesian statistics which I throughly enjoyed.
In regards of criticism of statistical methodology in a specific field as psychology, I’m much more inclined to refer to people with doctorates in statistics than psychology. Guess who teaches statistical methodology to whom?
[1] Andrew Gelman, John B. Carlin, Hal S. Stern, David Dunson, Aki Vehtari, and Donald B. Rubin. “Bayesian Data Analysis” (3rd edition). Chapman & Hall/CRC, 2013.
Agree with Lumifer and Gelman. Psychology has a long history of systemic bad methodology and low standards of evidence, and the traditional discourse Fiske writes about has, for the most part, failed to fix or even acknowledge the problem (although I don’t know about APS specifically).
Okay, this is the point at which I realize I was wrong and you were actually a troll all along.
You should feel good about yourself, because you did a great trolling job and I was really uncertain for a long time. But you’re still banned.
This year’s MacArthur Foundation Fellows were announced today. If the pattern set by the last two years holds, one of them will be somehow involved in next year’s Tony winner for Best Musical. Any bets as to which one?
Definitely the one “repositioning beadwork into a potent platform for commentary on social and political injustices.”
For anyone who hasn’t read it yet: “The Billions of Dollars That Made Things Worse”
And some commentary from Nydwracu.
Disapprove all you want of the MacArthur Foundation, they gave one of these grants to Richard Stallman back when he was just some bearded freak nobody cared about. Thanks in part to them, he’s a bearded freak some people care about, plus we have GCC and Emacs. For that alone I’m grateful to them.
That was a while ago. Things change.
This years ‘science’ fellows looks pretty good.
They are still useful, very useful.
You just have to actually *read* what the person was nominated for.
https://www.statnews.com/2016/09/21/chronic-fatigue-syndrome-pace-trial/
It turns out that the advice to people with chonic fatigue/myalgic encephalomyelitis to execise and get therapy of the “just ignore your symptoms” variety was based on extremely bad research.
Excuse me if this has already been posted.
Here are the original study and the reanalysis. It looks to me like the original results mostly hold up. Patients with chronic fatigue syndrome treated with cognitive-behavioral therapy did significantly better under the relaxed outcome measures used in the original article and non-significantly better under the stricter ones used in the reanalysis. Let’s call the proportion of patients who satisfy the relaxed outcome measures the “improvement rate” and the proportion of patients who satisfy the stricter outcome measures the “recovery rate.” Then we have:
With CBT:
22% improvement rate
7% recovery rate
Specialist medical care alone:
7% improvement rate
3% recovery rate
It’s true that the difference in what I am calling the recovery rates falls short of significance (p=0.107), but this is largely because the study turned out to be underpowered. It’s still a pretty big effect pointing in the right direction. Taking the two together, it looks to me like CBT should remain the frontline treatment for chronic fatigue syndrome.
Related to the other comment, but separated for topical reasons:
Does anyone know how much the cost of things is decreasing, on an annual basis, as a result of improving technology? How would I go about disentangling that from inflation, and would it even be possible?
Is that just productivity? That’s a fairly standard measure. Or do you mean something else?
Productivity is generally measured in terms of GDP per capita, which is measured in terms of dollars spent; if we reduce the cost of a good by 50%, and sell twice as many, GDP per capita won’t move at all.
Indeed, our GDP might begin regressing if we get too good at producing things cheaply.
This is wrong, GDP per capita will increase. While the GDP is measures in dollars, it is measured in constant dollars; the GDP price deflator is specifically designed to adjust for your scenario.
No it isn’t.
If somebody actually adjusted for my scenario, per-capita GDP would be millions of dollars as a result of cell phones.
The price deflator is just a tool for calculating price changes that are a result of inflation.
If you’re going to calculate per-capita GDP this way, you need to have a base value, and “the base value at the moment cell phones first appeared in the market” is a poor one, although the correct one is not obvious.
Don’t think it matters much where you set the zero point. Think about constant dollars, which constant dollar is a matter of convenience, it never actually matters to the argument.
The cost of thought not located in the human brain is improving quite a good deal each year. Better hardware makes a single part(like a sort) of a thought cheaper to do, and the thoughts more complex with software.
You could look at the changes in the Hedonic Quality Adjustment in the CPI. It’s not perfect, but it’s broken down by product/industry.
Does anybody here follow The Archdruid Report?
I’m curious to know if he offers any more substantive arguments anywhere that technology has gotten worse. (I agree that people fetishize progress and linear perspectives of history, but disagree that this extends as far as he wants to take it.)
Mind, the average instance of a given product has definitely gotten worse, but I’m pretty certain this is a result of a combination of regulation (if not for the proliferation of computers, the US would have a per-capita energy consumption roughly equivalent to, if not less than, the 1930s today, so much has regulation reigned in the amount of energy all our products consume) and luxury goods being made more affordable (read: slightly worse) to fulfill a larger market segment.
Washing machines are an excellent example. The average washing machine is slightly worse than the average washing machine of the 1950s. A washing machine that costs as much as the 1950’s washing machine cost, however, is significantly better.
“A washing machine that costs as much as the 1950’s washing machine cost, however, is significantly better.”
Isn’t this the much more relevant comparison?
In the 1950s, the “average washing machine” should probably include data points such as “washing the clothes in your sink” (or however people who didn’t have machines washed clothes). Why get hung up on what the average machine quality is when it’s obvious that the average “method by which clothes are made clean” has unquestionably improved significantly.
Why do you think the average instance of a given product has gotten worse? What is better about a 1950s washing machine compared to a 2010s washing machine? It’s certainly not capacity, nor is it reliability. It’s not reduction in damage done to clothes, nor is it cleanliness of clothes.
The biggest retrogression I know of is fairly recent, and it’s cycle time, which is a regulation-driven trade-off against water use.
Taking the other white goods — ovens/ranges, dishwashers, and refrigerators — I again fail to see retrogression, though dishwashers suffer the same regulatory cycle-time/water-use tradeoff.
Tools have perhaps seen the greatest “retrogression”, but that’s precisely as you say; the market has been flooded with low cost low quality tools which are often good enough for very light use. The professional tools haven’t changed much, if at all, in either real price or quality.
I’m not familiar with the Archdruid Report, but left-leaning libertarian Jeffrey Tucker has written on this topic more than a few times – exclusively from the angle of “the government is making our products worse.”
Here is one such example of many. This one is about water use, which you mentioned above – but others are about energy use, banning “dangerous” cleaning chemicals, and other various environmental initiatives that necessarily result in product downgrades.
I thought everyone knew about removing the flow-restrictor from showerheads. Although my current 2.5 gallon head is fine in that regard, at least for me. Dangerous cleaning products require a little creativity; yesterday’s lye-based oven cleaner is today’s lye-based grill cleaner (absolutely not for use on anything indoors, no sir), for instance.
Though drain cleaners are as dangerous as ever, at least outside California; I can still get both sulfuric acid and lye drain cleaners at Big Orange. Just avoid the ones which claim to be safe and go for the ones with the scary warnings. (and don’t use both on the same clog, or you’ll be the poster child for the next regulation)
These are regulatory retrogressions, though, not technological ones.
Likewise, anyone whose dishwasher went south around 2010 (I spent six months thinking we needed a new one, because changing detergents certainly wasn’t helping!) might be interested in knowing that yesterday’s dishwashing detergent is today’s “Fryer Boil-Out” under the same widely-known detergent brand.
The old commercial boxes always had instructions for the latter use. Now it’s the only on-label use, but the formula didn’t change– so far at least. And suddenly glasses aren’t cloudy and aluminum isn’t turning black.
(But I’m hanging on to our fifty-year-old toilets until I’m much more confident in the modern versions’ ability to do more with less. They say the kinks have largely been worked out, but thus far I’ve seen too many that needed a plunger constantly at the ready.)
@LHN
I can personally recommend Toto brand low-flow toilets; we had two 30-year-old toilets replaced a couple of years ago and have barely touched the plunger since. (I don’t remember which model we chose, but definitely not the top of the line.)
Glad to hear it. Toto is the brand I frequently hear recommended, and if we ever do get around to a replacement it’s probably what we’ll go with, so it’s good to hear some confirmation.
Effectively, I’m taking other people’s word on it. (I don’t really care, but some people seem quite convinced on the matter.)
I do, and I don’t have any object level defenses that I’m aware of, but here’s a meta-level tip: If you haven’t yet, grab a copy of Green Wizardry. In the book, Greer reveals that there are about 20 books that are basically The Sequences: He expects everyone who’s heard of him to have started with them, and thus thinks it’s basically a waste of time to go over any of the information contained therein, except in the most cursory reference. Whenever he lobs out an argument in an “of course Bob” kind of way, it’s reasonable to assume he thinks it’s covered by one of those books.
Forgive me if this has been asked already too recently –
What is your favorite SF trope? You know, the one where you read the first two chapters (or just the back blurb) and you go jimminie, I’ve read this eighteen times before! I must purchase this novel NOW!
I am a sucker for “mil SF focused on NCO of dubious moral qualities but consummate professionalism who leads a quarreling crack team through difficulties and gathers in noble/expert characters of the Other Side along the way”. And yes, this is A Thing.
Examples are Ash: A Secret History, the Novels of the Company by Glen Cook, and (of late) Tanya Huff’s Confederation series. Oh, and Seven Samurai (and the Western remake).
(David Friedman – I think CJC’s Chanur series almost counts as this – and her Mri (Faded Sun) series absolutely does.)
Other thoughts?
(Now that I’ve said this all, I’m not sure this is just a SF trope. Pretend it is.)
Not an SF trope but a fantasy trope: I’m a sucker for anything with the Devil as the hero, or at least non-villainous protagonist.
The SF/hard boiled detective subgenre… not sure if it counts as a trope, but that one.
The technical puzzle story; think Heinlein’s Andrew Libby stories, or most of Asimov’s Robot stories.
Please tell me you’ve read Mike Cary’s Lucifer graphic novels.
Re: SF Detective – have you seen KKR’s Retrieval Artist novels?
Yeah, the Retrieval Artist stuff is good; I’ve read a few of the novels and the stories in Analog. I’ve never gotten into graphic novels, so I haven’t read Cary’s Lucifer.
I second the recommendation for Lucifer, it’s fantastic.
Pure-Good (but not stupid) character (e.g. Superman, Vimes, Tavi, Ender) alongside machiavellian manipulator (e.g. Vetinari, Gaius Sextus, Graff) , in a way that has both of them turn out to be right in their own ways (no strawmen!). Also, I approve of yours (and need to get to seeing seven samurai sometime).
General Trope: The tomato surprise. I love it.
For those unfamiliar with it, it is best demonstrated by this joke:
I’ve always liked the tomato surprise too, never known its name before.
This webcomic is a nice example, I think.
Yeah, but I don’t see it standing alone. There’s an elephant sized plot lurking somewhere in there. It’s a good opening for a What Does He Do Next, or How Did This Come About, or What Does the Mother Want and Hey, She Was Right All Along [when the narrator is revealed as a talking tomato and is attacked by the other kids].
I wouldn’t say my favorite trope but an underrated one: Planet of hats
Sci-fi is at it’s best when it tries to play with new ideas. Aliens are a good way to contrast these ideas with our own. However, worldbuilding is really hard, as I’ve learned from experience. There are a million variables to consider and even then, someone is going to criticize your setting for not being as diverse as Earth. Planet of hats allow writers to explore these simple ideas without the unnecessary details. A good example is probably “Darmok” in Star Trek, where they had a group of people who communicated in a way vastly different than our own.
Have you read the Draco Tavern? It’s a pretty good exploration of this trope (bartender runs earth’s only alien bar, interacts with various hats from other worlds).
Also (naturally) a good example of the “I heard it in a bar” style of science fiction and especially pulp. And proof that Niven is a much better at short stories than novels.
The Tamarian language always struck me as really dumb. I mean, they were already using a standard vocabulary and grammar (hence, “when the walls fell” versus” “walls the fell when”). How would they ever develop such a grammar only then to use it in a completely ellipitcal way?
An extremely limited vocabulary extended through a massive number of idioms?
Or possibly all non-idiomatic use of language stopped at some point in their history. Or possibly non-idiomatic use of language is something like baby-talk; performed by very young children, but generally non-sensible to adults.
Remember that there is still have the universal translator. It translates any grammar to our own. What it couldn’t do was translate metaphors.
Yes, but presumably there is still a grammar to translate. Unless the universal translator is just guessing, but then the metaphors wouldn’t make sense.
The Universal Translator is one of those Star Trek techno-miracles that it’s generally best not to think too much about.
I’m curious as to how they ever reached the point of building starships without a straightforward way of asking for the 9/16″ socket wrench.
The engineers and technicians speak straightforward language, but aren’t allowed contact with aliens or indeed any of the higher castes of society, aside from a caste of translators to give them their instructions. “Darmok” is a society where the humanities majors rule.
You really don’t think there could be an allusion reference to a 9/16″ socket wrench? What about the name of a legendary maker’s well-beloved and trusty wrench which passed into lore as the name for all such instruments of that type, as Durandal is named and Excalibur is named and Rain Dragon is named?
When requesting the 9/16″ socket wrench, one states “[Name of Trusty Tool] wielded by [Famous Engineer, as we might say Weyland] when he triumphed!” and then Clueless Apprentice gives you the wrong one, to which you respond in the appropriate manner, fitting the action to the word: “[Name of tool corresponding to the unwanted one] cast aside by [Famous], despairing!”
The Witch-king of Angmar was annoyed no end when the stupid orcs brought out Grond, Hammer of the Underworld, when he’d quite specifically asked for Klonk, Spanner of the Underworld.
It would be amusing if they *were* speaking in a straightforward manner, but something about their language managed to trigger some universal translator bug and make it spew out etymologies instead of simple equivalents.
Our hypothetical starship engineer says “That thing will heat up the dilithium, up to a thousand Kelvin” and the translator spits out “The folkmoot from the land of ice, hot rising of the two stones of metal, rising toward the swollen hundred of the Baron of Largs.”
Shaka, when the engine rattled. Mirab, with a 9/16″ nut untightened.
More than this, one needs to be able to say things like, “adjust the sine-wave of the magnetic envelope so that anti-protons can pass through it but anti-gravitons cannot”. Tamarian seems inadequate for the task.
More than this, one needs to be able to say things like, “adjust the sine-wave of the magnetic envelope so that anti-protons can pass through it but anti-gravitons cannot”. Tamarian seems inadequate for the task.
Take it away, Poul Anderson and Uncleftish Beholding:
You don’t want anti-gravitons to pass through: so, “Hodor at the Raven’s Cave!” for whatever reference used for anti-gravitons, but you do want anti-protons, so the same kind of reference of passing through, gaining entrance, one gets in while the other doesn’t.
If French can manage with “four twenties and sixteen” for “ninety-six”, I’m sure Tamarian can manage to construct some kind of numbers 🙂
Are you suggesting that Abe Lincoln was French?
There is a Star Trek verse novel that explains that. The Tamarians have a separate language for talking-about-things, but it is Not Done to use it to talk-to-people-about-people
Extensive allusions are not exactly limited to fictional peoples.
— St. Gregory of Nyssa, On the Deity of the Son
I hated this trope until I spent a great deal of time trying to communicate with non-native English speakers and realized how idiomatic my own speech was. Now it seems more plausible.
Reminds me of a social media post by a foreign acquaintance years ago, complaining about people who explain one idiom with another idiom.
Other Person: (subject of discussion) is just icing on the cake.
Him: Wait, what does that mean?
Other Person: It’s like… gravy.
I laughed out loud at Loquat’s example.
Reminds me of Bill Bailey’s line about dentist lingo and how to freak them out back. Anytime the nurse asks you if anything’s alright, respond “The pheasant obscures his threshold”, see how they react.
The Tamarian language always struck me as really dumb
Who else has noticed that conversational American English is entirely too much like Tamarian? And in fact, just about every living language, as used day to day, is very much like Tamarian.
It’s full of commonly used phrases and terms that mean the opposite or at least different from their literal meaning, and requires a shared cultural and shared media context to explain their meaning.
It really shows up when trying to have an open ended “get to know you talk about whatever” conversation with an intellegent person who speaks literal English well, but comes from a very different cultural context.
That particular ST:TNG is interesting in showing the flaws of that fictional setting, in that the “universal translator” should have rendered most languages like Tamarian.
I actually hate this trope.
I mean, I agree with you that worldbuilding is hard, but I would then see this as something of a “necessary evil.” One of the things that bothers me most about Sci-Fi is that humanity is always portrayed as (even after uniting under one universal government) a diverse melting pot of races, cultures, tradition, languages, etc.
And yet somehow, every other race in the universe consists of a monolithic race/ethnicity/culture/tradition/language, etc.
It’s also somewhat awkward in the sense that if these races were actually real, the way they are treated and referred to would be considered incredibly racist and inappropriate. #NotAllKlingons
More sympathetically, you could interpret this as the human narrators having massive outgroup homogeneity bias, which you would expect when it comes to an actual alien species.
Narrator aside though, even in-universe we see characters who are presented as outstanding moral representatives of humanity that do not hesitate to apply stereotypes to individual members of alien species – and aside from the brief subversion here or there (DS9’s long-running effort to reform the Ferengi into humanity), nobody ever seems to have a problem with this.
The fact that Sisko can simultaneously be a dedicated historian of the American civil rights movement while also being all “man everyone knows you can’t trust those sneaky Romulans” strikes me as a little odd.
This is the 24th century. Racism has been dead a long time and they aren’t as hyper aware of it as we are. Maybe if they had a long history of abusing other aliens they would be but it’s certainly not something they give much thought to. Of course, this doesn’t mean that they are going to go out and treat aliens like dirt but it does mean they are more likely to be “casually speciesist” with their language and attitude.
Well, at the risk of obsessing too far over one individual example, the reason I used Sisko as one is because there’s a whole episode where he refuses to use a holosuite program based in the 1950s because he is so sensitive to the fact that he is black that it bothers him that in the real 1950s he wouldn’t have been allowed to visit such an establishment.
And yet, he doesn’t come across as at all bothered by the fact that everyone judges entire alien races in a stereotypical manner – and even indulges in a little of it himself on occasion.
It’s not at all uncommon for people to be sensitive to their own group’s past treatment while confidently asserting that their understanding of Those People isn’t the same thing at all.
That probably wasn’t the intent in every case where a Trek character engages in speciesist stereotyping. But it pretty clearly was when it comes to Sisko’s arc regarding Jake’s friendship with Nog. Which begins with him discouraging his son from associating with the Ferengi (when Jake and Nog get in trouble together, clearly it’s Nog’s bad influence), and culminates with Sisko’s giving Nog a recommendation to Starfleet Academy.
(Followed by Jake guilting Nog into using his shady capitalist ways– and his filthy unnecessary-to-a-good-Federationer money!– to get his dad a present.)
@LHN – to be fair to Sisko, if his kid is hanging around with the nephew of the local unsavory and shady black-marketeer, it’s not speciesist for a parent to think that’s likely not a good situation.
But on place like DS9, there should be a huge number of aliens who don’t fit their species cultural “hat” very well. That’d be why they’re out in the boondocks. Maybe Vulcan slackers who want to be hedonists, Klingons who’d rather run businesses than be warriors, Ferengis who want to see the universe instead of accumulating piles of credits, etc.
@Seth It’s not, but as I watch the scenes they’re shaded as him being unfairly judgmental rather than properly protective.
DS9 does have the decidedly unmilitaristic Cardassian Garak (“a simple tailor”), Nog and later Rom drifting away from Ferengi culture, and the occasional guest like the Klingon lawyer who fights his honor battles in the courtroom.
Garak was a former intelligence officer, IIRC, so he was still very Cardassian in that sense.
Now that I think about it, though, the Cardassians seem pretty similar to the Romulans. If you’re going to do the racial characteristic trope, at least make them different from the other established races.
I’ve heard rumors that when the show was first pitched they were going to have Romulans in place of the Cardassians, but with TNG still running the producers were under instructions from Paramount High Command to maintain strict separation.
The Cardassians are probably the least offensive non-human Trek race in this regard in the sense that they take a little bit from several other races and have no huge distinct quirk of their own (and that we get to know enough of them well enough to learn that outliers do in fact exist)
I’m also partial to the Bajorans, who always struck me as a much more realistic, non-utopian version of what humanity will probably be in the future (still stuck with old traditions, still dealing with factionalism, likely to pick a fight with an alien race that is technologically and militarily superior, etc.)
There was one throwaway line in Dragon Age which I absolutely loved. You can ask a party member to tell you about his people (as one tends to do when you’re the protagonist of an RPG), and he’ll say “What, should I give you a broad stereotype of my people, like ‘City elves tend to be impoverished thieves living in the slums?'” (my character was a city elf).
IIRC, the various races in that game were sort of nation-of-hat-ish, but I was still very happy that they called out that trope.
To be fair, a very quick broad-brush treatment is the easiest way for someone to describe their background. It gets complicated when you’re asked “So what happened in that thing last week where one lot of you got into a fight with the other lot of you? What was all that about?” and you have to go “Okay, to explain this, I’ll have to start in the twelfth century…”
“Slum dwelling poor thieves” is the short and simple version when you and your interlocutor don’t have the time or patience for the three-hour “introduction to my culture and history” lesson.
That’s actually all entirely accurate re the City Elves in Dragon Age as well, who have a whole history and mythology underlying their going from Tolkienesque immortal magical beings to downtrodden ghetto-dwellers.
(And their cousins the Dalish Elves will insist on giving you the full “back in the twelfth century” version.)
Accurate, perhaps, but I think “It’s pretty fucking rude of you to ask me to stereotype myself” is still a fair answer. I wasn’t a typical city elf, and he wasn’t a typical Qunari.
I can’t remember the title, but there was a Poul Anderson novel where aliens formed symbiotic triplets– one was rather like an elephant, one was a bird, and the third was a monkey. There were different cultures with different attitudes about how flexible the triplets should be.
Yes, Vinge was influenced by Anderson.
IIRC, this was The Rebel Worlds, one of the Flandry novels.
Thanks. That’s definitely it. Tiresomely, all the reviews I can find in a casual search focus on the humans, who are much less interesting than the aliens.
Is it possible that this recognition of diversity is an artifact our culture’s atomistic individualism? It seems to me that other cultures might have a much more uniform conception of what it meant to be a [individual of culture]. I could be wrong, but it seems to me that if you asked a Jormviking what Jormvikings were like, the reply would much more likely be something like “fearless, fierce and strong of arm” and much less “we’re all individuals, so we’re not all “like” anything.” Ditto for Spartans, Athenians, Persians, 18th century englishmen, chinese, etc, etc. I think it’s possible that a lot of cultures would value this sort of general aspiration of a specific ideal. Under that theory, mature enlightenment-style individualism seems rather more out-of-place than cultural uniformity.
It’s definitely possible. I met a lot of international students in grad school who absolutely did not hesitate to use cliches and stereotypes to describe their own people/culture. This was especially common with Asian students, (and of course the cliche is that Asian societies are generally more collectivist than western ones)
Sure, but would you, coming from a culture heavy on atomistic individualism, meet a group of five Jormvikings and conclude they’re all “fearless, fierce, and strong of arm” in the same way, or at least in the same proportion? They may all point to the same ideal sort of person, but you or they could likely recognize that each instance is not fully representative of that ideal.
In the execution scene from Jomviking saga all of them come across as brave, but they respond to the situation in quite different ways. One of them insults the enemies who are executing them. One of them takes being killed as the opportunity to perform a scientific experiment on the location of consciousness. One tricks the enemy into crippling one of their own people. …
And, of course, the Young Jarl and his father Jarl Hakon come across as very different people.
I really like casual transhumanism. Good examples of this can be found in the works of Alastair Reynolds; with the exception of Pushing Ice, which briefly steps into advocating for transhumanism, and Century Rain, where the possibility never appears, all of his novels that I’ve read have a great deal of transhumanism flying around without it really bothering much of anyone. His short stories are not always great in this regard; he sometimes falls into the trap of creating a war between heavy transhumanists and originalists, and then having the originalists go transhuman later.
Speaking of, PSA for those in or near Chicago: the House Theater is mounting an adaptation of Reynolds’ Diamond Dogs early next year:
http://thehousetheatre.com/playsandevents/diamonddogs
You will love Peter Watts’ Blindsight.
NCO of dubious moral qualities but consummate professionalism
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OldSoldier
+
gathers in noble/expert characters of the Other Side
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MagneticHero
=
quarreling crack team
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheSquad
?
Heh. Sure, it can happen that way, too.
Derelict spaceships (distinct from BDO’s).
– Motley group of weirdly-empowered renegades, not necessarily bad guys but certainly not on the side of the Law, planning raids and getting up to shenanigans
– Lone high-powered figure exits stasis or suspended animation, plot follows his attempts to learn what’s changed
– Perfectionistic flamboyant demiurge follows a morally dubious quest to unravel world’s secrets, creating beauty and causing uproar at once, battling occasionally with an old friend/rival/sibling who’s douchy but fun and gives less fucks
– Anything with one or more complicated, hyper-compartmentalised, ravishly autistic systems of classification which interact with the character’s statuses and motivations, the locations of the setting and powers/technologies
None of these things are sci-fi specific, because frankly none of any kind of fantasy-slash-speculative trope is era/explanation specific. They could occur equally likely in a historical kitchen sink, modern/superhero and futuristic story alike.
~
Scrolling up through the thread, I’ll also had that having lots of funny species and peoples with a predominent theme or gimmick (Planet of Hats) is a favourite of mine, and really helps build depth into a setting. And as a notable extension of the first and last of the hyphenated points I raised, settings where there’s lots of different types of overlapping powers, where characters can have an ability from group A and an ability form group B, work wonders.
The best example of a setting that accomplishes these two points is the manga One Piece. Generic superhuman feats like strength, speed, jumping, toughness and so on are one system that can be simply strengthened through training (certain body types have a natural headstart, and normal humans can be born gigantically big to grant extra power in return for being a larger target). Then there are the “Haki” mind-projection techniques, which are personality dependent and one of which is genetically limited to certain personality types – these abilities allow generic extrasensory perception, the ability to strike intangible shapeshifters and deactivate powers, and the ability to knock people out with a glance or spoken word. Finally the major powers come from eating cursed “Devil Fruits”, of which a person can only eat one or die and which inflict a weakness on the eater (they lose strength and consciousness when submerged in water) – in return for a hard superpower like turning into a wolfman or some form of telekinesis. Between this and the many different species in the setting (fishman, borrower-esque tiny people, true giants, mermen, animal folk, longarms and long legs) there are a million different ways to empower characters and create interesting matchups and scenarios.
Sounds like you would enjoy Revelation Space.
It’s by a Welsh guy, so that’s an immediate plus. 😛
You wouldn’t be able to give me a brief blurb wouldja? Wikipedia’s summary is too synoptic/spoilerising.
It’s primarily about humanity several hundred years into the future, which has fractured in to a few groups: spacers, colonists, cybernetics-enhanced, and possibly others. I think most of the novels are actually tangential to the main plot, which revolves around the discovery and investigation into one candidate for the “great filter.” The setting is interesting, and the stories are mostly good too. It’s kind of hard to describe without getting into spoilers or turning it into a synopsis, but I think all four of your bullets are very well represented.
That’s certainly interesting. Flicking through the thread, Revelation Space has been characterised as about galactic cycles of extinction. That’s a plot neutral at best for me; apparently also the writing dips in later books? Regardless, I’ll see if I can acquire a book or two come the holidays.
Petty post-edit: For the post-stasis scenario, change him to it (no reason it can’t be a woman) and reword to remove “plot” (it can just be a normal event or element to the story).
Fleshing this out with examples I realised I like that others here have shared along with further reflection or refinement of expressed tastes:
– Mundane issue in an alien/fantastical world (thank you, hlynkacg); how exactly does a wizard get his clothes ironed, two tense branches of a ninja clan passive-aggressively spying on each other, pretty much every good episode of Red Dwarf and so on.
– Huge scale differences between sentient and hominid species. I watched Zootopia for the first time yesterday and one of the most exciting bits of the setting is the architecture and infrastructure needed for gerbilmen to live alongside elephant and giraffe people.
– The broader “functional Black Box” discussion, I realise, is one of the more interesting aspects of the Devil Fruits from One Piece – many powers seem comical or useless at first (turning into rubber, rearranging things within a small area, producing soap on command) which can be stretched into incredible forces with creative ingenuity and deeper understandings. Make your circulatory system, diaphragm and lungs rubber to increase their elastic threshold and thus massively jump the supply of oxygen to your muscles. Learn to swap nervous engrams in the confined area to exchange consciousnesses/personalities. Soap that leaves people physically soft, slippery and rubbery, unable to fight back. The strongest case example is the “Push” fruit, which sounds as useless as it is useful.
– Generally following the progression of a raid or operation by a group of varied specialists – this is a refinement on the motley crew trope above, as in truth no combat or “one-off event” is required. It could just be the life-span or cycle of an industrial mission or research tank, or of course a police procedural/mystery. Specialised powers beyond the mundane help of course.
I’m a big fan of incomprehensible Lovecraftian aliens.
I know a lot of people differ on this point, but for me I feel that most of the time alien species in SF make more sense as human offshoots. They generally have hominid, if not outright human, physiology and psychology and are often interfertile with humans. Their cultures are similar if not identical to historical human societies. And if they have more or less advanced technology the magnitude of that difference is still, at most, about as different as the Maori and British. Why bother making them aliens in the first place?
(This applies to a lesser extent to alien bugs, squids, robots, etc. It’s nice to at least have them not be humans but you’re still just copy-pasting Earth critters.)
Aliens which are sufficiently alien in form and capability, and whose motives we do not or cannot easily understand, pose much more interesting questions.
You will love Peter Watts’ Blindsight.
I liked what I read of it. Never finished the story, and got spoiled on the ending, but plan to at some point.
The only real weakness that I noticed in the story was the personalities of the human characters. Maybe it was the point, but I really disliked all of them. And they act like it’s a mystery why the ship vampire doesn’t want to spend time with their neurotic asses.
at the risk of further spoilers…
Gur aneengbe, Xrngba, vf haeryvnoyr. Ur qbrfa’g gehfg be yvxr gur inzcver, naq cebwrpgf gung srryvat bagb gur erfg bs gur perj. Va snpg, ur’f gur bar vfbyngrq sebz rirelbar, naq gur erfg bs gur perj ner pbbcrengvat jvgu gur inzcver gb xrrc uvz vfbyngrq sbe cybg ernfbaf qverpgyl eryngrq gb uvf zvffvba ebyr.
Well, those human characters aren’t exactly human, now are they? But in Abby case, you might prefer the sequel, Echopraxia.
Read an extract of it, disliked the whole concept so intensely it never hooked me into reading more.
Though now I can’t help imagining that, as the ultimate creatures of curved time/space, the vampires replacing humanity will find their match and nemesis in the Hounds of Tindalos 🙂
Would you mind elaborating? It’s my favorite science fiction novel, I loved the premise and concept, I’m curious what about it turned you off so intensely.
I’d also like to hear what you didn’t like about it. The first book turned me off Watts too, but couldn’t put my finger on why.
Mars (or conceivably Venus, or Jupiter) is (just barely) inhabitable and populated by scantily-clad humanoids who fight with rayguns but also swords, as well as bizarre monsters with too many feet. An Earthman accidentally ends up on the planet (if at all possible, I prefer the reason to be a crashed Flash Gordon-ass rocket) and becomes some sort of crazy warlord or hero.
I’ve seen it called Planetary Adventure; anyway, A Princess of Mars is obviously the canonical entry.
I do like the “Venus is covered in rain forests” trope in old sci-fi, and I’m a little sad that space probes have killed it stone dead.
Exactly! Mars should be mostly one huge red desert; Venus should be damp and jungle-choked. If I can have a Victorian English guy wearing a burnous and a ceramic saber flying through the jungle on a magic carpet with a weird, glowing alien huqqa on it, I’m entirely happy.
(Gullivar Jones, of course, goes to Mars and the carpet is how he gets there in the first place, but I like it better that strange Venusian wires woven into the carpet are what give it lift and that the guy, as I said before, crash-landed his bulbous rocket on the planet originally.)
, straight up. From the collected works of Robert A. Heinlein to, yes, Andy Weir’s The Martian. Used to be, this was pretty much central to SF as a genre. Less so now, but it’s what I look for. And it has started moving into other genres, e.g. technothrillers and police procedurals.
I haven’t seen it myself but I’ve heard the phrase “competence porn” used to describe the recent movie about “Captain Sully”
The Reasonable Authority Figure page has some pretty great examples. (Particularly good ones include Professor Kirke, Grand Admiral Thrawn, and of course Dumbledore (both the original and the HPMOR versions).
More in the science fantasy vein, but “dead alien civilisations while the new, young races squabble in the ruins of vast ancient forgotten glory and establish their raw yet vital colonies on the New Frontier In Space”.
Bradbury’s “Martian Chronicles” did this with added poetry, C.L. Moore did it with Northwest Smith in the good old pulp tradition. M. John Harrison’s “Viriconium” stories from the New Wave.
For hard SF, not so much the engineering and ‘how can I keep this as rigorously in accordance with known scientific principles as possible?’ (although I appreciate some of that), but again some smack of the Sensawunda. The cynical or nihilist attitude where we get grubby (or oily, or other ichors) dystopias is tolerable in small doses, but I can’t read pages of it. China Miéville is a good writer, but for those reasons I can’t read his work. Verne, on the other hand, is the grandfather of this.
Check out Leigh Brackett’s stuff – and, more recently, SM Stirling’s Sky People and In The Courts of the Crimson Kings.
Brings to mind pretty much every faction of Warhammer 40,000 to some degree.
I’m a big fan of memetic hazards or ideas that are harmful in and of themselves. The King in Yellow is my central example of this, but madness-inducing Lovecraftian horrors/Greek gods and the Total Perspective Vortex in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy are too, as are the infectious universe of “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” and the titular wallpaper in “The Yellow Wallpaper.”
Have you read the SCP Antimemetics stories? I think you’d like them.
No, I can’t say I have. Does the SCP Foundation even have an antimemetics division?
The first rule of Antimemetics Division is you’re not allowed to make that joke.
Start here and go from there.
Probably the whole “galaxy caught in cycles of extinction from some more ancient and advanced lifeform that allows sentient life to grow and harvests it when it reaches a certain point” thing. Most famously done by Mass Effect and Star Control 3, but you can see lesser variations of it in so many things – Halo, Babylon 5, Fire Upon the Deep, etc.
Btw, if anyone knows the origin of this trope, or just more stories that do a take on it, I’ve been trying (unsuccessfully) to trace its development for a while now…
It’s really convenient for a star-spanning story, since it explains the Fermi Paradox and why the species you meet are mostly in a relatively narrow tech development band. (The advanced species are at most decades or centuries ahead, not a million years.)
(Though honestly, I wish Mass Effect had treated the end of the first game as the resolution to the Reaper problem and just gone on to tell stories in the resulting universe.)
The Revelation Space series does this very well. It builds up to it though.
Thanks, I’ll add it to my to-probably-read list.
Revelation Space is good because it also tells you why these things are happening – it’s not precisely a harvest.
It’s less good because the writing quality dips in the later novels.
Don’t know that it’s common enough to be called a trope (and it’s certainly not confined to science fiction), but I rather enjoy those stories where it’s from the perspective of (some of) the alien(s), commenting on human culture, illuminating their own more by what they take for granted than by exposition.
I’m drawing a complete blank on the author and title, but there was a delightful short story about a sorta dragon and a sorta tiger alien who were watching a pair of other aliens.
Also – CJC does this marvelously in the Chanur series and in Cuckoo’s Egg.
Hmmm. Could this be one of Anderson’s David Falkayn stories? I don’t recall the specific bit you’re describing, but the “sorta dragon and a a sorta tiger alien” could be Falkayn’s partners Adzel and Chee Lan.
I know I’ve read some of the Chanur books, but not recently; Cuckoo’s Egg I’m sure I haven’t. Will have to remedy both of those facts. Thanks!
Have you read Terry Bison’s “They’re Made out of Meat”?
Why read when you can watch the movie?
Read and enjoyed (again), yes.
That’s a tough question, but if I had to pick a favorite it’d probably be “Used Future” / “Completely mundane issues in a fantastic setting”. For instance, I’d fallen in love with the crew of the Nostromo long before the titular in Alien monster showed up, and my own fiction has been heavily influence by that “space trucker” aesthetic.
Are you a fan of Glen Cook’s The Company stories, by any chance?
Not familiar with them.
Black boxes – Mankind has encountered complex alien systems, and has figured out how to extract value from them at hideous cost, but true understanding remains elusive. Examples: Hinterlands, Roadside Picnic, Project Long Stairs. I eat this stuff up like candy, but examples are extremely rare.
Lovecraft versus humanity – Eldritch horror exists, people are trying to stop it and usually failing. Examples: Hellboy, A Colder War.
Heists, raids, general fireteam-based military action. No Rourke’s Drift though, I’ve read that too many times.
Frederick Pohl’s Gateway would be another of those.
That’s the exact one his prompt made me think of. Had no idea there were more than two books in that series, so thanks for the reminder.
yeeessssssss,, thanks for the recommendation!
no Rouke’s Drift
Heh. Well, in that case, skip the first of Tanya Huff’s Valor series, and pick up the rest. The second one is Black Box – well, it’s a Yellow Box, but still.
An older one, and not *quite* Lovecraft, but GodStalk by PC Holden had a lot of those elements.
The Reynolds novella Diamond Dogs is a good Black Box story.
I’ve read two of Reynold’s novels, and enjoyed them massively. Been meaning to pick up more; The synopsis of Diamond Dogs I read a long time back was an inspiration for a story of my own I’d like to write.
Algis Budry’s classic novella Rogue Moon is Black Box.
Have you tried Peter Watt’s Blindsight? A fantastic book, right up the alley of a lot of people here, and available for free online.
Other examples I can think of: Arthur C. Clark’s Rama novels (the 2001 novels also being black box novels in the most literal sense), and Mike Brotherton’s Spider Star. Jack McDevitt’s Omega Cloud novels might qualify, too.
yeah, I’m a big Watts fan, and Blindsight is one of the best sci-fi novels I’ve ever read. Come to think of it, though, Blindsight isn’t very black-boxish. The story involves a mystery, but it’s resolved in fairly short order. To me, Black Box stories involve a far larger scale of mystery.
Thanks to keranih and everyone in this subthread for lots of promising-sounding suggestions.
I read Bleak Seasons almost 15 years ago, and enjoyed it despite being totally confused about what was going on. Are the rest of the books pretty similar?
There are a few different narrators over the course of the “Black Company” series. In none of the others are the narrators quite as confused as Murgen in Bleak Seasons. Honestly, the books narrated by Murgen are not my favorites. I don’t know if that means you’ll like some of the others even more, or if it instead means that our tastes are completely different and you might not like the non-Murgen books at all.
I mean, not having the time-shifty problem of “what is happening when, and who the hell are all these people it shall be going to have happening to” would have made it more enjoyable. I’ll give it a shot, thanks!
My favorite … well, it’s larger-scale than a trope, and unfortunately rare … is When Genres Collide. Star Wars 1977, Firefly, Babel-17, The Butterfly Kid. ‘Collide’ as in strike sparks out of each other, with a “But of course!” effect. Part of it (most? all?) is using the tropes and plot of one genre in the setting of another.
This seems like a good place to post this: a whole slew of Phillip K. Dick short stories for free download.
Closed loop time travel, where events are set in stone, and it’s only a question of how we get there. Although, I didn’t care much for The Time Traveler’s Wife, so maybe I actually just like Tim Powers’ “Anubis Gates” and Babylon 5.
A while ago (I think it was in an open thread, but I guess it could have been a links post) someone made a list of puns on “Anonymous”. I couldn’t find it; does anybody have a link?
The better ones:
Anonymoustache
Anonymoustafa Kemal
Anonymoussolini
Anonymouzeltov!
Anonymouscular Dystrophy Association
Anonymouster of Disguise
Some others:
Elonymusk
The Sound of Anonymousic
Anonymiss Scarlet in the Library with the Candlestick
Anonymoustery Machine
Hieranonymous Bosch
Anonymausoleum at Halicarnassus
Thanks much.
My username is actually a shortening of “Anonymous Bosch,” which I got from some old crappy videogame.
Did anyone mention Ann O’Nymous ?
I was always partial to Alfred Norman Onymous.
We received the results from our employee satisfaction survey.
2/3 of our department is either disengaged and looking for new work, or didn’t bother to respond.
Mandatory meeting tomorrow to improve morale.
Huzzah!
What employee engagement techniques have worked for the various posters here? I wonder if anyone has stumbled across a working “this job is no longer a nightmare” strategy.
Our major difficulty is that we are a middle-skill A/R function responsible for oversight of an offshore company. This is…uhhh…challenging.
Dude. You don’t want to be asking *me*. You want to be asking the guys in your shop who are having a good time.
One thing is for certain, the mandatory meeting, the tone of which (no matter how hard you try to make it not be) will certainly be “why aren’t you malcontents happier!!!???” will only make things worse.
These things probably happen best when they’re gradual rather than through some grand sweeping gesture or initiative.
I can offer the general rule of thumb that management, when giving feedback to employees about their performance, should include praise for what they’re doing right, not just criticism of what they’re doing wrong. My employer even has a program where one can submit praise for something a co-worker did and they’ll receive a minor prize and recognition on the company intranet, department newsletter, etc.
Beyond that – what are the actual problems making employees unhappy?
Are you familiar with the Gervais Principle?
Intimately. It…may describe our situation, but I would prefer not, because then I would be a Clueless. 🙁
I can think of a few causes for nightmare jobs.
A. Your company is terrible. You hold unnecessary meetings which only get people further behind on their work and provide little in the way of guidance or coordination. The bureaucratic nature of the organization makes doing simple tasks complicated. Your co-workers are untrained and apathetic. You are not provided the proper resources to accomplish your tasks. Everything happens last minute because nobody plans ahead.
B. Nobody cares about you. You are nothing but a number, a small cog in a big machine. Your boss doesn’t know your name and doesn’t care about you; he didn’t let you leave early when your daughter was sick. Nobody knows or cares about your aspirations or interests. Your ideas are ignored. Harassment and bullying are rampant because only the toxic leaders get promoted. You’re not sure how you’re doing at work because you don’t get any feedback, positive or negative.
Depending on where you are in the organization, you may not be able to influence A, but you can always influence B. I don’t think you need a strategy to engage with employees. Just talk to them and treat them like PEOPLE YOU CARE ABOUT. This has three effects:
1. The feeling of being cared about improves morale and will likely elicit requited feelings of caring about the company. When people work because they want to, not just for a paycheck, they do better work.
2. When your employees feel like they can talk to you, they will come to you with their problems (personal and professional). This allows you to receive feedback about the employee and their perceptions of the company or tasks at hand.
3. When you have a relationship with your employee you are more likely to give them feedback which helps them adjust their behavior accordingly.
This is not to say that you should become close friends with your employees, that has its own problems, but there is a happy medium.
This is all great.
When people feel helpless and stifled by the inertia of a painfully inefficient process, they’re going to be disengaged. Getting shit done feels good. Wading through fragile and burdensome process doesn’t.
Great stuff.
I am a peon. I submitted my resignation today and was one of the “Disengaged” people. When I took the survey, it told me I was disengaged, then gave me materials and told me to make myself more engaged.
That pissed me off. About as much as the all-corporate email asking us to wear flair (I shit you not).
My interest is more….how to prevent this nightmare from happening again. I think a lot of the angst is driven by upper management, a great example being how they removed the water cooler because it promoted excessive fraternization.
But I think a lot might be a middle management role, too. We technically had our best year ever, but almost everyone feels like they just spent the last year and a half in Gitmo. Even our sunniest, rosiest people look like they have painted on smiles barely concealing broken souls.
That’s to say nothing of the contrarians like me. It’s unprofessional, but we just cuss and run our mouths so other departments can hear us, and we just don’t care anymore.
I guess I am wondering if this is something our team leads and middle managers could have prevented, or if we were just screwed no matter what we did. Like, say, Poland. Poor Poland.
Leaders at all levels can mitigate the effects of upper management, but they can’t reverse them. Also, the more awful the upper management is, the more likely middle management is to be suffering the same way you are. It extremely draining for middle leaders because they have to deal with the same bs, and on top of it they have to work twice as hard to keep the shit from rolling downhill on to you.
all-corporate email asking us to wear flair
they removed the water cooler because it promoted excessive fraternization
Upper management sounds deeply confused about what does and does not promote employee satisfaction, and prone to issuing stupid decrees. I suspect there wasn’t much middle management could have done about that.
the all-corporate email asking us to wear flair
Oh, God. You can always tell when one of the higher-ups has been to a conference and/or read the latest guru, can’t you? 🙂
I was going to ask how did the mandatory “the beatings will continue until morale improves” meeting go, but it sounds like we can tell without asking.
Middle management can’t do much when they’re hobbled by stupid crap like “take out the water cooler, there’s too much standing around yakking with other departments and not enough working at their own desks!” and then they also send around stuff about brainstorming and synchronising and looking at things from a different angle so try and get the perspective of someone outside your department.
We had a touch of that ourselves about “too much mixing with other departments”, which is stupid: problems with tenants come up that mean we need to talk with Roads, with Environment, with Planning, etc. (and vice versa; we often get queries from Environment about fly-tipping with ‘this name was on something found in the rubbish, is it one of your tenants?’) so basically people simply ignored upper management disapproval and continued on as always.
Mandatory anything never improves morale. Most people do not appreciate being dragged away from a desk full of work to sit and listen to a higher-level boss or hired-in speaker lecture at you for half an hour to an hour about something you have no control over, then have to go back and both catch up on the work you had to set aside and deal with the new work that piled up while you were being talked at.
If two-thirds of your people were that brassed off, things really must have come to a sorry state, but it’s the higher-ups with the real power that should be getting the tough questions about “so what are you going to do to improve this?” and not the coalface guys, unless the higher-ups will actually listen to what, and make the changes that, the people at the coalface are talking about.
What employee engagement techniques have worked for the various posters here? I wonder if anyone has stumbled across a working “this job is no longer a nightmare” strategy.
Don’t know any specific techniques. I’ve had jobs I loved and jobs I hated; the hated ones I even called in sick sometimes because I just could not stand the thought of going there to work, the loved ones I even enjoyed Monday mornings because the work was interesting.
What does not help:
(1) big vague aspirational mission statements and things like giving lip-service to policies like “work-life balance” (because Management read in a book or heard in a talk by the latest management guru this was a good thing for workplaces to have) but in practice there’s a snowball in hell’s chance of you getting time off or being able to reliably say “I have a free weekend” or not have to take an armload of files home in the evening to work on at home
(2) Something goes wrong, it’s your fault (whether or not you have the responsibility or the power over it), something goes right – not even a ‘thank you’
(3) Bosses or people with the power not being there/available when all you need is their signature on the poxy piece of paper so you can finish this thing but instead it’s lying on their desk for three days while they’re at a conference or the other end of the country, and no, you can’t go ahead without the signature or else see number (2)
What does help:
(1) Being treated like a human being and not a piece of machinery that can walk
(2) Bosses/higher-ups listening to what the people at the coalface have to say and asking their opinion/input before implementing big changes
(3) Clear chain-of-command without it being “I’m the boss and you’re the peon” attitude so everyone knows who is responsible for what, who to go to with a problem, but Jack is as good as his master
(4) Interesting and varied work. You don’t need huge money in the paypacket to make the job enjoyable (though it doesn’t hurt), and contrariwise, a big salary will only outweigh being treated like crap for so long.
Some countries show English-language movies and TV shows with subtitles.
Other countries dub them.
The former kind seem to have much better knowledge of English by their population, as measured e.g. by being able to talk to a random stranger on the street in English.
E.g. Israel has subtitles, Russia has dubbing. In both countries kids study English from 2nd grade till they graduate high school. In Israel one is able to ask locals for directions, order coffee at a cafe or food in a restaurant, etc. In Russia it’s mostly futile to try outside the two largest cities and often won’t work inside them.
France has subtitles, the Netherlands has dubbing. I’m told that, strikingly, in Belgium the Dutch-speaking population uses subtitles and has excellent English, while the French-speaking population uses dubbing and the knowledge of English is very poor.
Is this a causal link? Is the choice of subtitles/dubbing in fact a strong/primary factor in how well the population ends up knowing English? Alternatively, is there in fact poor correlation and it only seems strong because of cherry-picking? Alternatively, are there more important underlying factors that encourage both English and subbing?
It is definitely causal: good English causes subtitles.
Counterexample
haha, “DOOOO NOOOOOT WAAAAAANT”
Except that subtitling isn’t just done for English movies. Movies in other foreign languages are also subtitled.
I also suspect that in most countries the tradition of subtitling was started in a time when English skills in the general population were still much lower.
My guess is that dub/sub is a question of how many speakers the language has and how economical that makes the extra expense of producing a dub. There are far more speakers of French and Russian than there are of Dutch and Hebrew, thus the former get dubs and the latter get subtitles.
Israel is a bit unusual in that even TV shows in Hebrew are subtitled in Hebrew (or at least they were when I was there ~10 years ago).
Your explanation does not explain the facts, at least the facts according to Anatoly. He claims that the French don’t dub, despite their large population, and that the Dutch and Walloons do, despite their small populations. (And that the Flemish don’t use the Dutch dubs.) [I suspect that Anatoly is wrong, both about who dubs and about who speaks good English, but it does not go to throw around explanations without acknowledging the incompatibility of the facts they try to explain.]
I figured that for a typo. It certainly goes against the knowledge I have. A few years ago Télévision Française 1 produced an action-comedy series called Taxi Brooklyn that was filmed in America, in English, and then dubbed into French to air on TF1.
Yeah, it was a typo, sorry. I meant to write that the French have dubbing and poor English, while the Dutch have subbing and good English. And that the same effect reproduces for French- and Dutch-speaking populations in Belgium.
I don’t think this is correct. Dubbing really is not that expensive, and The Netherlands + Flanders are small, but not that small. About 23 million people have Dutch as their first language.
In fact dubbing is sometimes done in The Netherlands. Foreign children’s movies generally are dubbed, and then they are released twice: Once dubbed and once subtitled. (A tip for foreigners in The Netherlands: If you go to a cinema, and you see a movie listed twice, always go to the version that says “(OV)” and not “(NL)”).
If it’s cost effective to both dub and subtitle a movie that is released for a relatively narrow audience, I don’t think the extra cost of dubbing is in general a problem.
Subtitling is just a strong preference in Dutch audiences. Foreigners from countries where dubbing is the norm, and who live in The Netherlands, seem to strongly prefer it as well, once they are used to it.
I am probably biased, but I suspect that subtitling is simply a superior system, but it’s hard to switch to once everybody is used to dubbing. Audiences not used to subtitling will probably prefer dubbing, so no movie distributor wants to be the first to switch.
If you’re familiar with the state of anime in the US, it is full of cases where dubbing actually is too expensive and subbing is not.
I’m not saying that dubbing isn’t more expensive that subtitling.
But Dutch cinemas can apparently run dubbed and subtitled versions of children’s movies simultaneously, for the same price. I don’t doubt the dubbed version is slightly more expensive to make, but it can’t be many dollars per ticket, or they wouldn’t be able to sell the tickets for the same price.
No doubt there are small arthouse movies (is that a term in English? I mean small independent movies) for which dubbing would be too expensive. But for major releases, it is clearly profitable because it’s already being done.
*edit*
It was difficult to find numbers, but apparently high quality movie dubs cost about 100 euros per minute. So say 10k for the average movie. A typical blockbuster movie will easily sell half a million tickets in The Netherlands, and probably about half that in Flanders? So dubbing will clearly not be a significant cost for large movies, though it might be prohibitively expensive for small ones.
Subbing is almost certainly a prerequisite to dubbing, in the sense that once you have translated the script for dubbing it is trivial to add subtitles to an un-dubbed copy. Further, because of things like lip flaps, dubbing is sometimes limited in its ability to translate a line well (in the sense of producing a good-sounding dubbed line). This gives you an audience (but not the whole audience, because some people don’t like subtitles) that prefers subbed films over dubbed ones, and an essentially free sub. Thus, it is no more (or at least not much more) costly to the distributor to release a dubbed copy and a subbed copy. It may be more costly to the cinema, but they can probably adjust the timing so as not to have two theaters running the same film at once if such a thing would not be profitable.
>once you have translated the script for dubbing it is trivial to add subtitles to an un-dubbed copy
Not necessarily. You have to account for the fact that quite often subtitles can’t be full translations of the spoken dialogue, especially fast-paced dialogue; often a direct translation would mean that the screen would be filled with more than two lines of text or subtitle texts would be changing uncomfortably fast.
I think you’re wrong about France – they have dubbing, not subtitles (at least for TV).
I think the causal link goes the other way – countries that learn english more/are more open to learning other languages are less likely to bother dubbing.
Yeah the original post has France and The Netherlands switched in its example. France dubs, The Netherlands subtitles. The part about Belgium is given correctly.
And it seems to be ridiculously obvious that subtitling improves English skills. More exposure to a language always improves your skill in that language, and is in fact one of the best ways to learn a language. If you truly want to learn English, go live in the UK for a while.
That doesn’t mean there couldn’t also be a causality the other way. Causality can go both ways. But I’m not convinced, because, like I pointed out in another reply, subtitling / dubbing isn’t just done for English, but for all foreign languages. Our news will subtitle a speech from the Chinese president, and that’s not because they think a significant number of people will be able to follow the original Chinese. Even on radio they won’t dub him, they’ll just first transmit the original and then the translation.
Anecdata:
I picked up a bit of Japanese from watching subtitled Dragonball Z episodes in the early 90s.
In the late 80s when I was watching Godzilla movies, they were dubbed and I learned no Japanese.
When I went on a trip to the Galapagos Islands a few years back my tour guide told me that he learned how to speak English from watching the Simpsons. I think it’s definitely possible to get a feel for a language by watching shows with subtitles.
Question: There’s some controversy over whether the Daily Caller should have released the name of the woman on video screaming at Nicholas Christakis. For example, see:
https://www.thefire.org/new-york-times-corrects-jim-sleeper/
Ok, but why is there a controversy? I get that the Caller shouldn’t have included a link to her home address, but what are the best arguments that you should be able to scream at person in public and remain anonymous? Is Christakis entitled to anonymity, and if not, why not?
I agree that posting the home address was a dick move. It’s fucked up when the folks at HuffPo or Gawker do it and it’s fucked up here. Beyond that, I don’t know.
I’m vaguely reminded of the London and Stanley Cup riots in 2011 where people started “outing” rioters on social media with predictable results.
Thanks – I’m still kind of sympathetic to outing, although I guess it doesn’t have a limiting principle.
This kid, for example, did his best to blow up a car. After he was identified, his family got some mean emails and moved out of their house for a while.
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/family-flees-home-after-sons-vancouver-riot-apology
The guys threatening them are certainly a-holes (even if, as I suspect, the threats were along the lines of “somebody should blow up your car so you know how it feels”). but overall, I guess I’d rather have fewer people lighting cars on fire even if it means more people sending stupid emails.
Sounds like we’re on pretty much the same page.
Blowing up a car is a crime.
Screaming like an under-napped infant at other adults is not.
One identity is public need-to-know, one is gossip.
The category which you will have less of is not “people lighting cars on fire”, but “those things which the mob on the Internet will think are as bad as lighting cars on fire”.
I think she is entitled to privacy, mostly because of the predictable results – once it became news, it was inevitable that publishing her name would lead to disproportionate threats and harassment.
I’m inclined to say Christakis isn’t, mostly because she made a public proclamation in full awareness that it was, well, public.
That said, I think it’s kind of horrible that a student can scream at a professor who is by all accounts a well-liked and very sympathetic person, get the professor harassed to the point where she (and her husband!) leave the university, without getting expelled.
Agreed on all counts.
The letter showed bad judgment and there should have been a mild talking-to for sending it. The student’s behaviour was unacceptable – you can’t treat people like that in a place that’s supposed to be an academic community – and I think she should have been punished with something like banning from social events for a period of time, that wouldn’t harm her education like suspension or expulsion would. Instead, they all (the Christakises and the student) got conscripted into the Culture Wars, thanks to technology. The harm any of the 3 has received from abuse of various forms far outweighs any harm they caused.
Are you serious. You can’t be. You wanted her given a “talking-to” threat for telling people not to get so violent about Halloween costumes they dont’ like?
She was in an official administrative position and it’s bad judgment to express personal opinions in a situation where you are speaking officially, or could be perceived as such.
EDIT: I don’t mean a talking-to on the basis of the content of her letter. I mean a talking to like “hey, it’s dumb to send out personal opinions that piss the students off when you’re a residential admin.”
That the students are getting pissed off (although I question your use of the term “violent” – I think the definition creep of that word is not a good thing) over stuff that maybe they shouldn’t be, is a different issue.
I somewhat disagree. If they wanted a glorified babysitter they could have gone with grad students , older undergraduates, or even random employees hired off the street. One of those three is what most other universities do for RAs. Instead Yale went with live-in professors exactly because there was supposed to be an intellectual element to the relationship rather than just an administrative one.
The colleges date from the 30s and so on (Silliman from 1940) and I suppose part of the problem is that, evidently, some of the students now do want glorified babysitters.
Is that their call to make? If you got into Yale you surely could have gotten into plenty of other schools. If you choose to go the one with this college system it seems to me you don’t have much room to complain about it.
“Is that their call to make?”
The results (and similar results at many schools around the country) would seem to indicate that yes, it is – and it’s more likely that you will get your way if you aggressively scream at people than if you write a formal and dignified complaint letter or something.
@brad:
Not that I disagree with you, but again, evidently, a lot of them seem to think that they shouldn’t have to choose between different priorities.
@Matt M
I’d say don’t count your chickens before they hatch, but I get the sense that they aren’t your chickens. Instead it looks like you are wallowing in some sort of woe is me, all of my enemies’ chickens are going to hatch. Don’t think that’s any better.
The Christakises left, which is unfortunate, but the university publicly supported them, the college system is still in place, and by all accounts alumni (read: donors) across the country are not being shy about telling administrations what they think.
This is kinda whistling past the graveyard, given how the administrations keep giving in to the students’ demands, despite the massive financial penalties. Look at Mizzou, for example: a massive contraction in student applications, donors leaving, heavy criticism from every side, and they’re doubling down instead of backing away. Look at Yale, which is quietly giving in to student demands for change even if it didn’t explicitly go after the professors. Et cetera.
I’ve noticed this more generally. News media viewership contracted by fifty percent when they dropped their pretenses of objectivity and went all-in against Bush. NFL viewership is down since they endorsed National Anthem protests. Game journalism has lost massive amounts of readership in the recent unpleasantness. And yet, all of those groups continue to double down on their politics. Capitalism is failing: for an awful lot of organizations and companies, including ones you wouldn’t think would be politicized, giving the outgroup another kick at every opportunity seems to be worth the massive financial and reputational damage they suffer for taking a side.
@ ThirteenthLetter
How’s that “capitalism is failing”?
Capitalism does not require everyone to be interested only in money and nothing but money. If anything, capitalism says that if you piss off your customers (which you certainly can do), you will suffer the financial consequences and that, indeed, seems to be the case.
Lumifer: Fair point. Maybe I should rephrase that as “stereotypical capitalism is failing.” If these greedy businessmen were really only interested in money like the uninformed stereotype would have it, they wouldn’t be so eager to stick their thumbs in the eye of half their audience.
One expects capitalism to be a system by which businesses maximize profits. This doesn’t preclude individuals from having greater concerns, but does seem to be working towards something other than what it would be expected to if companies are leaving money on the table.
@Thirteenth Letter: Isn’t the NFL ratings more likely to be because they’re a few weeks into the season (or something schedule-related, in any case)? Even if politics is affecting them, I would expect the effect to be statistically insignificant compared to that.
I think the beginning of the season usually gets some of the highest ratings. According to this link almost every game is down from a comparable game last season. Especially striking is that the first Monday Night Football game of the year was down 30% from last year, and that was Kaepernick’s first game of the year, so I think that it’s very likely that politics was in play here.
People ditched old media in droves in favor of the internet during Bush’s presidency. I’m not sure you can attribute all of that to a media bias against Bush. Bush was also president during the years things like Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube were being invented.
It’s a little hard to re-run history and say “what if there hadn’t been the Internet back then.” However, trust in the media has been steadily collapsing, and you can’t blame that on the existence of Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube; the existence of social media, no matter how crappy, did not put a gun to the TV networks’ heads and order them to go all in for their favorite politicians.
It’s wrong to aggressively publicize the student’s name worldwide for shaming purposes, just like it would be wrong to aggressively publicize the name of someone who vandalizes a window. But that doesn’t mean that the police should ignore the vandal, or worse, hold a press conference announcing that vandalism has been decriminalized, anyone who disagrees with this will be arrested for hate speech, and a committee of prominent vandals will now be advising the City Council.
The university should have punished the student and made it clear this behavior won’t be tolerated. But the punishment should be minor and proportional, taking into account that dumb kids do dumb things sometimes and it shouldn’t be the end of the world. In the end we got neither of these things: a crappy online tabloid delivers nuclear punishment to someone who doesn’t deserve it, and the university hands over the keys to the place to the dumb kids so they can make the whole place dumb.
This is exactly correct.
hey, long time reader, first time commenting
I feel like you (and by extension anyone who reads this blog) should try out gab.ai. I’d like to see y’alls thoughts on the site since most of you tend to turn the “critical thinking” dial in your heads up to 11 half the time.
The site is a new social media platform based off of free speech and apparently a lot of “alt-right” people have swarmed onto it. I figured that even if it doesn’t warrant a post it’d at least be a fun way to kill a few minutes B)
thanks for the consideration, keep on keepin on
The site didn’t show me anything useful but asked for my email and told me to get in line. After it was given an email, it told me that my place is #somebignumber.
My thoughts? Wasted 30 seconds.
Yes, what is this about getting one’s e-mail before showing us ANYTHING. I like to look at a web site a bit to see if it is worthwhile before committing. There is so much dreck out there it isn’t worth spending a lot of time on a site until I see its worth. Why won’t they even advertise themselves before making demands? Maybe it is a great site despite that, but I hesitate to look any further.
The world seems ripe for replacements for both the bird noises and the book of faces with less americanised political censorship, but I’m not convinced Gab is it. Giving it a try though.
A new ReaganBook hit recently: codias dot com, don’t know how well it’s doing or how long until it’s overrun with trolls.
A few threads ago we brought up the issue that civil servants in China or the UK are much more competent than in America, since it’s considered a much higher-status job there (e.g. Humphrey Appleby, who may be an obstructive bureaucrat, but is an incredibly competent one). Another example I’ve seen is airport security in Israel compared to the TSA – in Israel it’s considered an important job, while in america it’s the worst job imaginable, and partly as a result of that there’s a huge gap in competence levels.
So the question is: Can anyone think of other examples where jobs considered high-status in one place are better performed there? And what areas are there where american workers are unusually competent compared to peers in other countries?
American doctors would seem a significant example.
I’m not aware of any country that considers doctors low-status.
Well, there was the USSR, which paid them as one did plumbers and stone masons…(*)
But then again, there is no more USSR…
(*)I am completely open to the idea that stone mason requires as much investment of time and effort as physician. However, physician requires far better grasp of Latin, and far less standing in the rain over seeing drunken day labor, so that I expect the supply for one to exceed the supply for the other.
My understanding of the USSR – which is quite limited – is that stuff that would be rewarded with more money in the US or wherever was rewarded with official perks. A nicer apartment, for instance – I’ve read an anecdote from a judoka/coach about how, after he won the European junior championships, his family got moved to a much bigger apartment (and his parents stopped bugging him to give up competitive judo and become a doctor or something).
Contains evidence from fiction.
English doctors were still low enough to be condescended to by some gentry in Christie’s 4.50 from Paddington, 1957. Harriet Vane’s village doctor father was apparently middle class, respected in the village and invited to the Pig Club, but nothing like as high status as our current US doctors. Mary Innes’s doctor father was apparently not well to do in Tey’s Miss Pym Disposes.
In an earlier century English doctors were lower status yet. Perhaps sawing bones was manual labor.
They’re never LOW status, but they seem to have unusually high status in the US, compared to what I’ve heard about, say, the UK.
What have you heard about doctors in the UK?
that working for the NHS is dreary, rigidly bureaucratic, and not very well paid.
If it was that bad, I would expect fewer doctors to be immigrants (not just from India and Pakistan, but also from Germany and Australia). I think pay and stress varies massively depending on seniority; junior doctors work long hours for little pay, consultants (the equivalent of a US attendings) are fairly highly paid, and often have enough spare time to work privately to supplement their income. I don’t know why it would be particularly dreary work, and I have no knowledge of how bureaucratic it is. Regardless, supply for doctors vastly outstrips demand, suggesting it is still a pretty high status job.
The standard example I see offerered is K-12 teaching, where it is claimed that teachers are low status here, high status in some other countries such as Finland.
I’m not sure it’s true. A competent teacher is high status in the classroom where he spends much of his time, and I think teacher in general is thought of as a mildly prestigious profession. K-12 teachers in the U.S. receive salaries above the median for the population as a whole but below the median for college graduates, at least as of a while ago when I looked up the numbers.
But it is probably true that there are countries where their relative status and/or income is noticeably higher than here.
I think most people who make this argument aren’t necessarily familiar with the social dynamics of Finland (not that I am claiming to be either) and are simply assuming that higher salary = higher status.
Which may be a fair assumption, but my guess would be that it’s not entirely that simple. It might also depend on what exactly you mean by status or “held in high esteem.” Lawyers are high status in that they make a lot of money compared to schoolteachers, but teaching as a profession is almost certainly thought of as more noble or what have you than lawyers in America…
I don’t know much about Finland either, but my assumption was more like “higher credential requirements tends to imply higher status” — Finnish teachers do a master’s degree with a thesis requirement.
Really? I know a couple teachers (both my mother and best friend from childhood are teachers) and both of them insist that the profession is over-credentialed (as in, you’re either required, or simply won’t find a job without, a masters degree that you don’t actually need).
To echo what fubarobfusco said above, from what I’ve read in the past its not the teaching profession itself that is high status in Finland but the teaching qualification. Finnish people can take a teaching degree in Finland and then simply walk into position they want, which inevitably leads to a load of really competent people taking the qualification. Equally inevitable, some will then decide after all that teaching is actually what they want to do and Finland ends up with some really competent teachers.
This is opposed to systems in other countries where the only people who really take teaching degrees are those who already want to teach, and whilst many of them are of high competence it still greatly limits the talent pool.
I would guess this might apply to the military in America. Certainly in the “it is held in higher esteem” sense. Whether that translates to superior performance is anyone’s guess I suppose.
I’m not sure about other countries, but sports like basketball seem pretty high status in the USA and don’t seem to be very high status elsewhere.
I mean, basketball is about as high status as any sport not named football can be in a country not named america.
I think you’re confusing status with money here. Football in Europe is not a high status sport. It is in fact traditionally considered a lower class sport.
There is a difference between a player in a major league and a fan who watches the games.
This also might be a U.K. vs U.S. difference having to do with how formal and widespread class is.
There are two ways to look at the question. One is, are the stars of the professional sport high-status? The other is, are the youth/amateur teams composed almost entirely of people who are high-status?
I’m thinking here of sports like polo and yacht racing, which were regarded at one time as exclusively sports for not just the well-to-do, but the “well bred”.
There’s a distinction between class and status. Even if professional footballers come from lower class backgrounds more frequently than say tennis players do, they can still be high status
@sweeneyrod:
Certainly, and I wasn’t disputing that.
I was merely pointing at the idea of a fictional stereotypical reaction to young Biff McMasterson, Jr. trying out for the football team from Biff, Sr. that might go “Muffy, We must put a stop to this football foolishness. It’s uncouth and vulgar. He needs to play a gentleman’s game. Why can’t he play tennis, or throw himself into golf?”
The sport itself, in that context, is low-status, even though it might high status at the local plebeian secondary school.
They can be high status within their class, but not high status in society at large. Look at the footballers’ wives: you do see pop stars who made it big, women who trade entirely on their looks, and so on, but never countesses or similar (unlike what you might in fact see with a stockbroker these days; I get the feeling as an outsider that well-heeled stockbrokers with the right Oxbridge background are this generation’s loaded Americans, to the old and less-moneyed upper class).
The footballers and their wives are the kings and queens of the rabble, to express it brutally. Even most middle-class professionals sneer at them. (Although I do personally find that a large number of both sexes permit themselves to drool in private, this is not something expressible in public without fear for status loss, which is the crucial point here.)
@HeelBearCub
I should have probably made it more clear that I was responding to Diadem, not you. In any case, I mostly agree with you, though I don’t think football is especially low-status in the sense of being considered lower class; the rules were codified by British public schools.
@Anonymous
“society at large” means society at large, including lower class people. Being high status doesn’t mean being respected by middle class people, it means (as I understand it at least) being influential and respected (on the surface at least) by the media. Lots of people dislike Theresa May, that doesn’t mean she’s low status.
To address the premise rather than the question, isn’t there an issue that the Humphrey Appleby role in US simply doesn’t exist as a civil servant: that sort of seniority would be political. So the equivalent of Sir Humph is, I dunno, Leo McGary.
How does it (or at least a more junior version of it) not exist? I know people love to argue about, say, food stamps, but presumably there’s got to be someone in the government whose job it is to actually run the program – and they can’t switch everyone involved in running every program with every new administration, the government would collapse.
I’m in the UK and my knowledge of the US system is at least 50% from West Wing. So I don’t know. But point is that Sir Humphrey is an unfair comparison because there simply is no equivalent.
My understanding is that you indeed have more operational and more junior non-political civil servants.
But just speculatively, surely lots of top posts being taken by political people rather stops ambitious/talented people entering the industry. Just like it being off-putting for an ambitious young businessperson to enter a family busiess (not their own family) where all the top brass have the same surname. Or e.g. where the top brass of the Army in France just before the Revolution was all-noble so ambitious commoner rising stars either leave ir get really, really annoyed.
The impression I’ve gotten is that a lot of things that would be done by appointed personnel elsewhere are done by elected officials in the US, and there’s maybe less of a culture of official apoliticism among appointed bureaucrat types. Additionally the Commonwealth countries all have some positions that are tied up with the monarchy – they are generally as ornamental as the monarchy itself is.
To take your example, the person in charge of food stamps* is the Administrator of the Food and Nutrition Service, which is designated as a Senior Executive Service position. This means the position can be filled by either a career civil servant or a political appointee, with various rules and restrictions around each of them. (The SES is capped at 10% political, for instance.) There are three levels of political appointees – Secretary, Deputy Secretary, Under Secretary – between the Administrator of FNS and the White House.
So there’s no Sir Humphrey. It’s not even fixed which jobs go to a Sir Humphrey and which to a Jim Hacker. But there are enough career civil servants to run the nuts and bolts of government while all the partisans are switched out between administrations (or in situations like when there was no Secretary of Commerce for a full year – those were dark times).
*Technically, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. It was renamed in the 2000s, partly as a euphemism but mostly because they went all-electronic and there are no actual stamps anymore.
You brought up bureaucrats in the UK and China, but my impression is that the status of government bureaucrats tend to be much higher in less developed countries. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to lead to more competency in administration, but instead competency in bribery. Maybe I am showing bias here based on journalists who love to highlight bribery but would be totally bored in talking about competence. Perhaps third world bureaucrats are more competent in third world countries than in the US, at administration as much as in taking bribes.
But that brings up the issue about whether this is a good thing. I’ve often heard people bemoan how being a politician in the US is a low status job (and low paying), so we don’t get enough good politicians. The problem with this complaint is that the amount of competence per profession is pretty much a zero sum game. If more competent people became politicians, that means fewer competent people are in our labs and running our businesses. While I’d like to have competent politicians, I think it is even more important having competent folks looking into microscopes and running companies, so I don’t think it is a good idea to get more smart folks into government. I also suspect the respective status of politicians is one reason the US has a bit of a lead on Europe in science and business management.
Being a politician is very high status in the US; we get excellent ones. Being a good bureaucrat, or being skilled at governance, is not high status. Those skills aren’t terribly low status either, though; they seem largely unrelated to the skills that get play in the status game.
[blinks] …what?
I think he means “excellent campaigners” although it’s hard to measure that since it is relative to other campaigners.
Presumably there’s a trade-off in corruption vs. competence, and having too much corruption undoes the competence advantage. US Healthcare seems to have a similar problem – someone above pointed out that you would expect american doctors to be better based on the status of the profession. While this is probably true, the advantage may be undone by the messed-upedness of american healthcare bureaucracy (and this is without getting into medical care vs. public health, which is a whole other issue).
Some of you may have already seen this, but I found it quite entertaining: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1488342/
I much appreciated L. Garew’s contribution 🙂
Is mint tea the antihirsuitic being investigated?
How plausible is a drug that behaves radically different under less gravity? I’m thinking of a lethal chemical on earth that would be an addictive psychotropic on a space station.
Not plot critical, but might be an interesting sci-fi touch to a project if it doesn’t seem too bizarre.
Maybe it’s so addictive that if its supply to the brain is cut off even momentarily, death results? On earth when you stand up, the pressure of gravity forces much of your blood down, and various cardiovascular mechanisms kick in to offset this and restore the adequate supply to the brain (when they aren’t working well enough, that’s how people get lightheaded/dizzy/pass out when standing up quickly). But I guess it takes several seconds in which the amount of the drug available to the brain through blood suddenly decreases markedly. In space, there should be no such drastic effect.
Blood pressure related, maybe? Some kind of super Adderall?
It’s an interesting conceit for a sci-fi novel, if you’re a writer you should run with it. Middle-finger any hard explanation, you’re only interesting in the realism of the consequences.
Perhaps instead of a biological response to gravity, the change in response is effected by other means? I’m thinking of radiation. Imagine a chemical that is psychotropically inert. Exposure to radiation induces a structural change to a similar chemical that is unstable, but wildly psychoactive. The relatively constant radiation flux in space ensures that the inert precursor is transformed to the psychoactive product at a rate that is practically unsustainable on Earth. As the product decays, it reverts to the precursor.
This would, of course, require the precursor to be effectively harmless, as the conversion rate would never be large enough to convert the entire product.
Not hard science by any means, but passes the sniff test.
If you’re willing to go sub-lethal, perhaps the drug could work everywhere exactly the same, but one of its side effects is permanently destroying the user’s sense of balance. Not a problem in zero gravity, but a major issue for anyone returning to a planet.
Well I’m not sure about lethal or psychoactive, but there could certainly be personality-altering chemicals which are “addictive” in the sense that you really don’t want to stop taking them while in space.
Hormone treatment to prevent muscle and bone atrophy is something Wikipedia says NASA is already considering. If an astronaut at peak physical condition can deteriorate to the point where he can’t stand unassisted, you have to wonder what extended microgravity would do to a civilian couch potato. Doping could easily be necessary for anyone who doesn’t want to spend the rest of their life in space.
And naturally, with that comes various personality changes including ‘roid rage.
I think it might be better to go the other way–something benign on earth, or maybe anestetic, but on the space station it becomes mind altering and addictive for some reason.
But not something required for daily operation, as I want a smuggler to be involved.
It might work to have the effect be caused, not directly by changes in gravity, but by changes in the user’s microbiome. If you’re on a space station, you’re inherently cut off from any new supply of the normal bacteria you’d be exposed to on Earth, except for what you’ve deliberately brought up in probiotic pills and such, and you may have a much more restricted diet that affects the proportions of your various gut flora. So then you could postulate a substance that gets metabolized by different species of gut flora into products with markedly different effects on the human body.
I am in no way an expert.
The idea of a drug that itself behaves differently under weightless conditions seems tenuous.
On the other hand, changes in metabolism under weightless conditions are well documented. So it doesn’t seem like much of a stretch that a drug could behave differently due to a competition with different metabolic products (or some such). Under that scenario the distinction would need to work out over a longish period of time.
(I’m assuming your space-station would not have artificial gravity from spin or unspecified technology. If the drug is supposed to work differently under those conditions Einstein might have reason to quibble.)
Not plausible. At the scale humans work at, the electric field vastly dominates drug interactions.
The only drug I can maybe think of is something that could counter peristalsis, which may be aided by gravity.
A friend of mine just posted on facebook a very good reply to another friend’s post which articulated something I’d vaguely felt for a while but never really thought through. I’ll here paraphrase friend A’s position and friend B’s position.
A: Don’t lose friends over politics! It’s great that we live in a nation where you can express a diversity of opinions, but at the end of the day, we all believe in freedom of expression and we’re all Americans and we shouldn’t let petty ideological differences get in the way of us all respecting each others’ basic human decency! After you have a big political argument, make sure to hug it out and get a beer with your friend!
B: That’s easy for us to say, because we have the luxury of viewing politics as a hobby. Whoever wins the next election, we will probably be okay. Our incomes or taxes might go up or down a little, but we’ll probably be okay. We aren’t going to be deported or have our house foreclosed on as a result of the outcome of the next election. But that’s not true of everybody, so people for whom politics is more than just an intellectual hobby or game they watch on tv every four years are justified in getting really emotional about it, losing friendships over it, etc.
I kind of agree with both, though B’s statement is sort of giving vent to the dissatisfaction I have long felt about the A position, which is somewhat related to “In Favor of Niceness and Community…” Anyway, I just thought it was an important point worth considering.
A’: People for whom politics is more than just an intellectual hobby should especially try to avoid losing friendships over politics, because if they lose they’ll need friends who weren’t quite so detrimentally impacted to help them out.
Agreed that both make valid points, but I would say that to extent that *(Person B) can go out for a beer or what have you with *(person A) the world is better off.
The biggest problem might that those two people aren’t in a position to go have a beer together.
Had he and I but met
By some old ancient inn,
We should have set us down to wet
Right many a nipperkin!
But ranged as infantry,
And staring face to face,
I shot at him as he at me,
And killed him in his place.
The Man He Killed
Everyone from soldiers, to gangsters, to corporate officers recognize the tragedy and reality of brothers at heart that must fight viciously due to conflicting larger causes.
Though seeing politics as an all-consuming war without so much as a Christmas truce football game may be symptomatic of the problem. If the soldier doesn’t shoot the enemy he may be the one shot, right now, or his buddy might. If you fail to convince your friend to vote your way he’ll… make an infinitesimal contribution to a large-scale decision in November.
The people whose position is least secure also tend to be the people least likely to vote.
Person B’s standard just incentivizes everyone to be assholes about politics while guilt-tripping everyone around them.
We’ve already seen this with SJW tactics: some Queer Studies major (with insanely wealthy parents and a guaranteed sinecure after graduation) screeching at a scholarship boy about how “THIS IS REAL AND DANGEROUS FOR US!! It’s just a GAME for you, white boy!!”
Well, the validity of stance B is dependent on the person actually being in a position to experience serious consequences, not just thinking or claiming they are (though, obviously, there’s the problem of there being no objective, outside judge of whose concerns are really serious, and who is blowing things out of proportion or just incorrect about imagined consequences. That said, it seems like there are unambiguous cases: if you are, for example, an illegal immigrant, and one candidate is running on a platform of “deport all illegal immigrants,” it seems clear you are in a position to experience major differential life consequences depending on the outcome of the election).
Yes, but if you are an illegal immigrant, you really shouldn’t be voting against the candidate who wants to deport the illegal immigrants because, you know, illegal immigrants aren’t supposed to vote at all.
But you still might get into a debate about whom people in general ought to vote for, possibly with a legal friend planning to vote for the pro-deportation candidate.
Question is: would you be justified or even well-advised to break off your friendship with that person, assuming you can’t convince them otherwise?
“would you be justified or even well-advised to break off your friendship with that person, assuming you can’t convince them otherwise?”
That depends on why the friend is voting for that candidate. If it’s because he thinks all illegal immigrants are slime and doesn’t realize you are an illegal, breaking off the friendship might be prudent.
If it’s because he doesn’t think Trump will really deport illegals and expects Clinton to get us into unnecessary wars, then there is no reason to break off the friendship.
A person who has no illegal immigrants as friends is even less likely to sympathize with them. Breaking a friendship with such a person might radicalize them.
Indeed. If the friend respects you and doesn’t know you’re an illegal, “coming out” to him as one (but keeping the friendship) is far more likely to make him consider the human costs of deportation (he’d lose a good friend) rather than denouncing him as an evil racist that no self-respecting illegal should associate with would…
What if he believes that illegal aliens are, on a statistical basis, more likely to be slime than citizens? This might mean that he has no negative feelings about you personally (since he does not believe that every single one is slime), but he thinks that since the laws cannot mention you as a special case, prohibiting all of them (including you) is better than letting them in (and helping you)?
What if the government is arbitrarily giving money to businesses which sell X, and you run a business which sells X, and your friend, a libertarian, doesn’t like subsidizing businesses and therefore thinks you should not be given the money (because he thinks nobody should)? He’s certainly suggesting something which would result in you personally being worse off, just like if you’re an illegal alien and he wants to deport all illegal aliens.
What if your car is stolen and your friend rants about car thieves, not knowing that you’re one? What if you are a well-meaning car thief who claims to only steal from businesses who could afford it, and so would be no personal threat to your friend? (And what if your friend thinks of illegal aliens as like well meaning car thieves?)
I think the question then becomes, how does he feel about occasionally violating the law?
It’s obvious that no sane set of laws can cover all facts. Thus occasionally it may be morally acceptable (or even required!) to perform an action the law forbids, so long as your morality is not a deontological acceptance of political law. How does this friend feel (or more properly, what feeling does he demonstrate) about exceptional violations of the law?
A more personal example for me: Trump wants to stop or severely restrict the H1-B visa program. If that happens, I’ll have a much harder time staying here and may have to leave. I’m not one of the super anti-Trump people who think he’s the devil – I just think he’s kind of an incompetent buffoon – but if he does get elected, I’ll actually have to deal with the consequences in a way a lot of my super-Trump-hating american friends won’t.
To what extent do you predict Trump would restrict H1-B Visas compared to Hillary? (disclaimer: I prefer Trump to Hillary, but increasing the amount of allowed “skilled” immigration from friendly countries is an issue I feel very passionately about)
This isn’t a gotcha question and I won’t challenge your answer – I’m just curious what you think. 10% fewer visas offered? 50%? 90%? 100%?
Hillary wants to increase the cap, while Trump has repeatedly promised to decrease and limit H1B visas (according to his official site). I don’t know if Hillary would manage it – congress is likely to stay republican, and she might need their help – but I think Trump would probably make meaningful progress on it if he gets elected – I’d guess somewhere in the 20%-40% range.
I think I’m on the safe side, for various reasons, but Trump getting elected would probably decrease my odds of being able to stay here 5-10%. Which isn’t catastrophic, but is a concern.
I think the B position vastly over-estimates the power than the President holds over the direct, day-to-day government decisions that affect the lives of normal people, AND the differences between Republican and Democrat Presidential candidates. As we’ve discussed in previous threads – people are already being deported, houses are already being foreclosed upon, etc.
In other words, position B would be legitimate if true, but I estimate that it’s very very rarely true, and those of whom for it IS true probably don’t even realize it. I think this is a very good example of the recent trend of people who get really offended on behalf of others. Person B is saying “I won’t be affected by this but some hypothetical others will have their lives ruined and that justifies my getting really emotionally involved in politics,” to which my response would be, “Prove it.” Or at least substantiate your speculation in a little more detail.
Well, I do think there is an extent to which position A is more defensible for just about any 21st century American, than say, a 1930s German Jew. That is, there have been many times and places in history when elections and leadership struggles were real life-and-death questions for many people, but very few recent US presidential elections qualify for most Americans.
That said, I still think there are real, if less dire, consequences for Americans in recent and upcoming elections. I know someone, for example, who voted for Obama in 2012, not because he was very enthusiastic about him, but because he worked for PBS at the time, and Romney had pledged to cut funding to PBS. A Romney presidency, therefore, would have not insignificantly increased the probability of his losing a job which he enjoyed. He would not have starved without that job, but it was still a probable, real life consequence, and one which a president would be in a position to effect.
It’s entirely understandable to vote one’s pocketbook. That said, I wonder how likely major PBS funding cuts really were. Funding to the CPB originates in Congress, and it’s not as if President Romney is likely to veto a budget (assuming that budgets were even being passed in this hypothetical) over PBS.
(Eyeballing historical appropriations, it’s not obvious that the CPB has done worse under Republican administrations, though I may not be looking closely enough. http://www.cpb.org/appropriation/history )
The funny thing is that the specific example Romney gave, Sesame Street, is AFAIK no longer federally funded under the Obama administration. (Not because of defunding, but because the Children’s Television Workshop made a better deal with HBO.)
More generally, federal appropriations are about 15% of PBS’s funding. (Not that I’d expect anyone to be excited about the prospect of their employer losing 15% of revenues. But I don’t know how likely that was to really happen.)
Person B’s position assumes that you and your friends are in a position to make a non-negligible impact on politics. That may be true for, say, a local mayoral election, but if they’re arguing about the Presidential election, it’s more productive to treat the outcome as exogenous. It’s like watching a hurricane head towards the coast – sure, batten down the hatches and get ready for the worst, but don’t pretend that blowing into the wind is going to turn away the storm.
Well, but this hurricane is made of people. No one friend of yours who is planning to vote for the candidate who threatens you is going to make the difference, but they are part of the problem.
I think position A as stated is too facile, and that might be why person B felt the need to push back against it. But the problem that A is highlighting, and it is a very real problem, is the tendency for both sides to become so entrenched in their positions, and demanding ideological purity at all costs, that there is no room for position C: Compromise. Getting things done requires people to work together. They may not agree with each other on everything, but they need to be able to set their personal feelings aside and find the common ground. Or at best they need to be able to bargain, “I’m willing to give up this if you give me that.” The major political issues of the day are hard. The solutions are going to be complicated and full of nuance, and no one is going to fully get what they want. The question is what is the solution that will provide the best outcome for the most people (and which people are they). Modern political and SJW discourse doesn’t seem to have any room for nuance or compromise, and I find that extremely disturbing.
There is also the issue with those who do believe in compromise, but think, “I demand 10 dollars from you, you want to give me 0, so you giving me 5 is clearly the best compromise”. Which is to say, if you want to argue against the status quo and for a compromise, you still have to convince those happy with the status quo that the compromise leaves them better off (or at least gives them something for what they lose).
Funny anecdote: you say this as an analogy, but I literally had this happen to me earlier this week. Some crazy person at work, same numbers and everything.
Some people just have no shame whatsoever.
Say I commandeer just one of Jay Leno’s 130 cars. It’s for a good cause – I need to go propose to the woman I love, drive my kid to the hospital, and get to work in the morning. Surely with all those cars, he won’t even notice it’s gone for the day and I’ll be much better off having used it. I’m a very careful driver so there is nothing to worry about. I can certainly see in this scenario Mr Leno refusing to prosecute even if he did find out.
And now dozens of people like me are commandeering Jay’s cars, many for causes just as valid as my own. Jay’s starting to complain, even though he always has a car to drive himself, and even though the commandeering population actually has a safer collision rate than Jay himself. I have an urgent situation come up, do I still feel confident that I won’t be prosecuted as long as I have a good reason to explain myself when I get caught?
The larger principle is: the amount of people committing the [victimless] crime matters. Most good people are happy to turn a blind eye in relatively unique circumstances but don’t want to put themselves in that role in perpetuity. In fact, that probably moral thing to do after commandeering the car is to be a volunteer security guard, instead of a guy who helps others to borrow Jay’s cars.
You have to stop Jesus from sleeping with your wife?
Person B’s statement bothers me, in part because of my past experiences with those who support “righteous anger”. (In particular, those times when I’ve come unglued and had those same people chastise me for undue emotion still rankle.)
But mostly (I think) it’s because B’s position is the weaker one, for a number of reasons.
Firstly, an argument based on emotion, and/or delivered in an emotional manner, is more likely to be in error, than one which is derived and delivered in a more dispassionate manner. Do this too many times, and the repeated pattern becomes one of “angry people are wrong/liars” which does nothing to help advance B’s position.
Secondly, as others have said, “cutting off” or insisting on not befriending opponents has an emotional effect on the opponents, and it’s not conducive to bringing them around to your side.
Thirdly – if I insist that everyone I speak politely to and am friends with has to agree with my top five positions, to the same degree as I hold them (violent disagreements with fellow travelers about how far to walk today are a thing, even if all agree on the road and the direction), and in order of how I rank them, wellll…things can get cut down to a crowd of three PDQ.(*)
Finally, it’s a tactic that depends on the other side not engaging in a like scorched earth policy – and here, I think, is the real rub. The people that B imagines as ‘having skin in the game’ aren’t the only ones. For everyone that might be deported, there is another who is struggling harder to find a job due to illegal immigration, or who fears violence from the immigrants, or who morns the loss of community from a changing culture. Some of these might rationally take precedence over fear of deportation, some might not, but there are real people with real emotions in the other side of the debate as well. There is always someone who feels as strongly.
Gamefully swallowing down anger and breathing deeply past deep disagreements with friends is not a perfect solution. But it’s a better universal solution that serves us – and reality – better than the options.
But hey, you don’t have to agree. We can still talk.
(*)me, myself, and I
Actually, it’s worse than that.
Some policies have concentrated benefits and diffuse harms, such as taxing a large number of people at a slightly higher rate to benefit a small group. (Or, perhaps, even letting in illegal immigrants at the cost of a marginally higher crime and unemployment rate for a much greater number of people.)
We know of the phenomenon where government is full of these because the concentrated group is more easily able to lobby. But it becomes even worse here–requiring that your friends not disagree with positions that personally harm you is essentially privileging the concentrated benefit over the diffuse harm. On a societal level, this will have really bad effects.
Person B sounds like a real pill, frankly.
Actually, let me back up and say something more useful: The problem with Person B’s approach is that if everyone followed it, the foundation of civil society would be completely destroyed. If you can’t be friends with someone who has different political opinions, might as well just pick up the guns and have the civil war now. That’s far worse than some hypothetical harm to whoever B is worried about (not to mention that most people with the attitude B has are completely uninformed about what the side they dislike is up to anyway.)
Reality bubbles (not mentioned in the OP) make this hard to do, though. Eventually communication becomes impossible, as you get to the point where you’re trying to discuss paleo-anthropology with a young-Earth creationist.
The answer clearly depends on where you live and what are the consequences of politics.
I think this thread is in need of godwinning.
I think of Nazis cutting Jews out of social life rather than vice versa.
I think there are two things here in friend B’s position
1. The ‘literally you can make a difference’ one (which runs into issues about whether your vote makes a difference, what the benefit of ending friendships is etc.)
2. The ‘this issue matters enough to me that I can’t see it as a hypothetical talking-point – it’s personal.
I pretty much agree with the critiques of (1) above. (2) is I think a huge problem. People can be quite inconsistent about whether someone’s politics is a reason for personal judgement/unfriendship, with a hefty dose of ‘my side is different from yours’ but I think also something fairly major about the Overton window. E.g. I think most people would see an advocate of e.g. slavery as beyond the pale, but think that vegetarians and pro-lifers shouldn’t not be friends with meat-eaters and pro-choicers even if the philosophical basis of that vegetarianism or pro-lifeness means consistently that meat-eaters and pro-choicers are supporting mass murder. More than that, the vast majority of vegetarians and pro-lifers themselves tend to do this to. What feels like an issue-worth-fighting-over obviously varies massively over time and individuals. And some big political movements seem to be less about changing the issues as making them have this intense personal feel.
I think this is also another way of perhaps spotting people who are exaggerating their own beliefs and/or engaging in over the top hyperbole.
I would suggest that someone who really does believe abortion is the moral equivalent of murder could not possibly be friends with people who believe abortion on demand is a moral good and should be provided for free by the state. Someone who goes around saying “abortion is murder” but also is close friends with people who have had abortions strikes me as someone who does not truly believe what they are saying. Unless they also have a lot of friends who are murderers, I guess.
“Someone who goes around saying “abortion is murder” but also is close friends with people who have had abortions strikes me as someone who does not truly believe what they are saying. Unless they also have a lot of friends who are murderers, I guess.”
I think there are two dimensions to this. One is how morally wrong you think an act is. The other is how obvious you think it is that it is that it is morally wrong.
I’m thinking of a real world example not quite as extreme. I concluded years ago, on the basis of an account by one of my colleagues of her role in a legal change at the state level, that she was probably responsible for a larger reduction in human happiness than anyone else I knew.
That didn’t make me dislike her, since it was obvious that that was not what she believed the consequences were of the legislation she had supported. And given how many intelligent people disagree with the relevant part of my views, I did not think she obviously should have believed it, even though I thought it was true.
Lots of people still support their friends and family even after they have murdered someone. I think it is human nature to look the other way when it is someone you are close to that commits the bad act.
Also, I think a lot of the people that believe abortion is murder are also people that believe you should “love the sinner and hate the sin”, so that is another reason someone could be friends with someone that has had an abortion.
I’m thinking less “someone who had one abortion in their teens and has since repented and regrets it terribly” and more “someone who wanders around denouncing anyone who doesn’t favor state-funded abortions as an evil monster who opposes women’s health all in defense of a useless clump of cells”
Well, I would guess there aren’t a lot of people out there that truly believe abortion is murder and have militant pro-abortion friends.
If there are, I would guess it mainly falls into the second category. They like the person, but believe they are badly misguided.
@Matt M
I think this is clearly a special case:
I’m thinking less “someone who had one abortion in their teens and has since repented and regrets it terribly” and more “someone who wanders around denouncing anyone who doesn’t favor state-funded abortions as an evil monster who opposes women’s health all in defense of a useless clump of cells”
The thesis that people often don’t get on with people who denounce them as evil monsters is not very surprising. The first move in ‘don’t be friends with those you disagree with’ would have been made by the pro-choicer in this case. What’s more interesting is if they’d be friends with someone who strongly advocates for pro-choice but doesn’t condemn pro-lifers as monsters.
On the broader issue of whether people really mean what they say about this sort of thing, I find this hard. Because the argument that people don’t often act like they think abortion/meat is literally murder, but so is e.g. the argument that people don’t act like they believe in the afterlife or for that matter that smoking/drinking/whatever has the consequences it does. I think breaking it down to one ‘genuine’ position and one ‘false’ one is oversimplistic. People are just inconsistent.
Wait, hold on a second. That violates are deepest principles of freedom of expression. It’s not just the government, any consequences flowing from speech is simply wrong, wrong, wrong.
Or have I misunderstood something?
DavidS,
It’s the most extreme case, but I think the general concepts can be applied almost universally.
Here’s an example for you. As a teenager, one of my close friends suddenly converted to hardcore conservative Christianity. He then spent most of his time loudly trying to convert everyone in our circle of friends. Most of the circle got annoyed and ended their friendships with him – “Hey man, stop preaching to me already!”
My friendship with him and respect for him increased, largely based on two factors I considered.
1 – The fact that he was willing to lose friendships over this suggested his belief was in fact deeply held and legitimate, rather than some silly teenage phase.
2 – Given that his belief is serious, the fact that he feels very strongly about my not going to hell is evidence that he respects me and values my friendship. Even if I don’t agree with him on the existence of hell, he does believe it, and given those beliefs, it makes perfect sense that he feels very strongly about me not going there to the point where he’s willing to risk annoying me from time to time in order to save my soul.
Most people saw him as the bad kind of religious person – overly preachy, doesn’t know how to take no for an answer, etc. But I saw him as the only logically consistent one. If you believe not converting will cause your love ones to suffer in agony for literally all eternity, how could you not constantly be trying to convert them?
So at the same time, if you believe abortion is murder, how could you possibly be friends with someone who advocates it as a totally acceptable thing to do. Nobody would be friends with someone who supported regular murder (even if they didn’t call you a monster, etc.). To take it one step further – if you really think abortion is murder, why wouldn’t you bomb an abortion clinic? If there was a house on your block where someone was routinely murdering people by the dozens and the authorities refused to do anything about it, wouldn’t you eventually take matters into your own hands?
Agreed that converting people if you think they’ll go to hell is morally consistent and essentially laudable.
I think this depends on what you look for in a friend. I don’t prioritise that sort of hard-core moral consistency (though totally inconsistent/immoral people are annoying). Personally, I’d rather be friends with someone inconsistent than someone whose consistency drives them to act in an obnoxious way.
I live right near one of the worst neighborhoods in Oakland, where people are murdered by the dozens and little is done. I think it’s wrong, but I have no intentions of taking matters into my own hands. I think you overestimate how much people are willing to risk for their beliefs.
@Matt M – Because people aren’t good, and our problem isn’t just that we haven’t gotten rid of all the bad people.
I’m tempted by the idea that personal relationships (both family and friends) are a very important part of the country. Eroding the social fabric over politics is costly.
I like the next logical step to person B’s argument:
“If you deny that privileged groups (for example white cis men) exist we can’t be friends. We can’t even have mutual friends.”
“No enemies to the left, no friends to the right” is always a workable default strategy. It’ll take you a long way without any need for actual thought, saving a lot more time for taking “bomb ass naps”.
It’s funny how almost everyone in this thread assumes that politics is something you talk about.
In some places politics is what you do. If you take one side, you go to the central square, pile up a barricade of tyres and set them alight. If you take the other side, you call the authorities and tell them that your neighbour has been making Molotov cocktails and is preparing to go to that square. Kinda hard to be type A in this situation.
I would guess a cultural expectation of preserving friendships and social bonds across political lines would help make doing those kinds of things unnecessary. Politics is best when it can remain something people merely talk about, whether in the legislature or the town square. I agree with you it’s hard to be type A in your situation, but I don’t think the fact it’s like this in some places has much (or any) bearing on how people in the US (or like places) should treat politics.
If politics is something your merely talk about, how different are you from a feudal serf gossiping about the affairs of lords?
Given the many well-known cases of across-the-aisle friendships among people actually involved in governing, it seems pretty clear that actually doing something in politics isn’t inherently incompatible with civil relations with the opposition.
It’s probably incompatible with an ongoing violent uprising. But that’s pretty much what the political system is set up to avoid, most of the time successfully. Dividing society into camps that won’t willingly interact with one another is a step away from politics, and towards war.
” it seems pretty clear that actually doing something in politics isn’t inherently incompatible with civil relations with the opposition.”
Of course this might also fuel speculation that they aren’t actually opposition and/or aren’t actually “doing something” at all…
@ LHN
True, but it is incompatible with treating politics as “something people merely talk about”.
Sorry if it wasn’t clear, but by “merely talk about,” I tried to imply that passing legislature through debate and compromise is, in fact, merely a kind of talking (hence “in the legislature” as well as the street). I agree with LHN that politics is supposed to be a way of solving problems by talking (albeit enforced by police with guns, etc.) so as to avoid war (i.e. politics by other means).
Regardless, my contention was more with the idea that the fact something happens to be worse or different somewhere else should influence how I think it should be handled in my own country by my fellow citizens. I really don’t think the way Syrians conduct their politics should inform how Brits or Americans conduct theirs. As another example, I don’t understand the common response to Americans complaining about gas prices that they should be happy given how much more it costs in country X, when it costs more because of a higher tax imposed (which is, in effect, the people of that country deciding to make gas more expensive for themselves). What has that to do with anything regarding an increase in price in the states? Why should the breakdown and failure of politics in other places suggest Americans are narrow-minded for wanting or expecting to keep their own politics civil (i.e. limited to talking)?
@ Chilly Willy
People (the general populace) do not pass legislation. For legislators (who are what, 0.000…% of the population) talking might be the way to do politics, but I thought we were talking about more or less regular people.
Huh? Politics is a system of arranging power in a society. Sometimes it works by talking, sometimes it works by defenestration, sometimes it works by bullets…
Politicians pass the laws, of course, but regular people can talk about whom or what to vote for. They can organize into groups to become more effective mouthpieces. Even if votes are effectively worthless, I’m still a lot less likely to grab a gun if I have a ballot. Trump seems to be an example of people managing to vote against their betters’ wishes, so maybe votes can still have some effect. Defenestration and bullets are ways of arranging power, but talking is a better (nicer) way.
I guess I’m saying the “best” in “politics is best when it’s talking” in my original post was meant to be doing a lot of work. I agree politics often happens by other means, but I’d rather live in countries with the highest talk to bullet ratios. Politics as talk is an ideal, but as ThirteenthLetter pointed out below, it’s the breakdown of communication and community with political opponents that makes your situation more likely.
I completely agree that I wouldn’t be able to talk my way out of serfdom, but I disagree that American or European politics (which was what onyomi was implicitly talking about, right? Not politics in Angola or elsewhere?) has reached the point where fighting is a legitimate alternative to talking. Which is why I thought your comment that it’s strange to think about something being the way it normally is in your society (a society set up exactly to make that thing that way) instead of something else that it may often be elsewhere, was odd. It’s like being surprised people in Vancouver wear rain jackets, when people in the desert think of rain as something you try to collect, not something to keep away from you. My question, poorly worded, originally was: “In some places politics is something you do, not say,” “OK, but who cares? We’re talking about here, not there.” Why should we care?
+1 To me this is the definitive answer to the original question. Person B seems to be an advocate for war with the opposition. Whatever you think of friendship with somewhat with diametrically opposite views, it is good for peace in the world.