OT60: Openitentiary

This is the bi-weekly visible open thread. There are hidden threads every few days here. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. Also:

1. I went through some of the reported comments and banned the appropriate people. If you can’t post, check the Register of Bans to see if you’re on it. Note that I was also kind of a jerk in a few places and in order to avoid accusations of bias I have banned myself for one week (commenting only; I can still post). TheWorst, you are not yet banned but are on your final warning. Jill, you are not yet banned, but you are forbidden to reference Ayn Rand, accuse other people of worshipping Ayn Rand, attribute everything you dislike to a conspiracy centered around Ayn Rand, or use Ayn Rand as a metonymy for any view you disagree with. I will lift this restriction if you read and post a book report on Atlas Shrugged.

2. Comment of the week is Azure on linguistics.

3. Book II of Unsong is finished. If you’ve been waiting to read it until there was a big chunk you could read all at once, now’s your chance.

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1,447 Responses to OT60: Openitentiary

  1. Dell says:

    Question: there is rare condition which appears to have no name, and endocrinologist have been useless at treating it, based on a number of health site chat rooms. Afflicted males lose all their libido despite having virtually all hormone readings in their age-appropriate ranges. Testosterone gels have near-zero effect. It’s not related to stress, trauma, and (presumably) not a pituitary tumour. Is there a name for this syndrome? It appears to be untreatable

  2. John Foss says:

    Are there any Trump Trade voters here who will be in the bay area in the week leading up to the election and would be willing to give a radio interview?

    There’s a reporter on the #NeverTrump app looking for volunteers. She’s not having any luck there yet, so I thought I’d check here to help her out.

  3. Broggly says:

    A conservative scholar makes the case that Trump is the disruptive force America needs

    Intellectuals are supposed to understand that history works on a deeper level than what day-to-day events show. We can look back on the past and see trends and truths underway that people at the time didn’t recognize. The philosopher G.W.F. Hegel terms it “the cunning of Reason,” the advance of certain ideals and values, the spirit of the age, running beneath or through particular actions and individuals.

    When one stage of history begins to run down, Hegel says, a “World-historical individual” often arises, a willful, single-minded strong man who disrupts the status quo and embodies everyone’s profoundest hopes and fears. He needn’t be bright or virtuous, just in perfect tune with the moment. Sometimes he is creative, sometimes destructive, but he is inevitable.

  4. Kevin C. says:

    Came to this bit of discussion a bit late, so I’m setting it out separately here.

    @Lumifer

    Anyone here wants to propose that the drug war is a good thing and we need more of that? That we should apply more law enforcement resources to stamping out prostitution? That churches (but not mosques, of course) should be granted a role in, say, writing legislation?

    Anyone? Anyone..?

    Let me step up on a few of these.

    For the drug war, I actually have a couple of arguments. First, I know that I come from a much lower socioeconomic background and environment than most people here. Who else here has spent any time in the waiting rooms of a state welfare office? Or a state-funded community mental health clinic? Or people in vocational rehabilitation? (I’ve been in all of those… as a client.) Spending time around people who are poor and have substance abuse issues, one finds that there are plenty of people who are fundamentally pretty lousy at managing their own lives, and most of the illegal substances tend to straight-up wreck what little they have. This is why I’m not a libertarian (and why libertarians skew massively white, male, and middle-or-higher-class); a sizeable chunck of society really do need a fair bit of paternalism.

    The second drug war argument is that, as Stuntz’s “Collapse of American Criminal Justice” points out (my copy is presently loaned out to a friend, or else I’d give a more specific cite), the enforcement level of both drug laws and gun laws correlate, both in time and space, less with use and more with overall violent crime. Given the over-reliance on eyewitness testimony in our legal system due to the US Constitution enshrining 18th Century rules of evidence, and the “no snitching” atmosphere of many neighborhoods, and the view in those problem neighborhoods of the police as essentially invading agents of an oppressive outside power, actually punishing the violent behavior is incredibly difficult; drug laws serve as a necessary “patch”, a proxy tool for getting violent, predatory thugs locked up when witnesses can’t or won’t testify.

    As for prostitution, I’m not as solid here, save as part of a general case against sex outside monogamous marriage in general. Namely, the issues of venereal diseases, bastards, and the general importance of stable, long-term monogamy to the order and prosperity of civilization.

    For churches having “a role in writing legislation”, I’d say that one religion already does have a massive role in legislation in this country. It’s just a non-theistic religion, the religion of which Harvard and Yale are seminaries. (And note that even people like Jonathan Haidt agree it’s an orthodoxy of religious character.) Freedom of religion in the sense of tolerance for Nonconformist churches to exist and practice so long as they are barred from positions of official power and prestige (see Restoration England) is possible. The American myth of total absense of religious establisment is not. See also the work of Winnifred Sullivan, author of “The Impossibility of Religious Freedom” (Razib Khan summarizes here).

    @green Anonymous

    Enforcing how? By specific performance?

    I’m going to to be dangerously edgy here and say that I would not entirely rule it out a priori.

    @IrishDude,

    As a firm, Xunzi-reading member of the Civilization-Barbarism axis view, let me second this.

    @John Schilling

    Was much easier when there was a dowry the aggrieved groom could keep or the aggrieved bride’s family demand be returned, but I don’t think even the Death Eaters want to turn the clock that far back.

    Let me, as a very much Death-Eaterish invidual, say that not only would I want the clock turned that far back, I have, elsewhere argued (mainly citing Chinese and Japanese thinkers and sources) in favor of arranged marriage as superior to “love marriage”, to the return of marriage being an agreement/transaction between two families, not two individuals, concernedd first and foremost to the production of offspring to continue the family line. “First comes love, then comes marriage” has it exactly backwards.

    • Kevin C. says:

      Oh, and on alcohol prohibition, as a comparison to the drug wars, I’d also point out that I live in a state with plenty of “dry” villages, which exist for good reason.

    • a non mouse says:

      Well said.

      Expect a ban on some pretext in the near future.

      • John Schilling says:

        This is not likely, not helpful, and not really distinguishable from a snide personal attack on our host. Please knock it off, already.

        • Jiro says:

          Scott runs this blog, and thus does all the bans. If a complaint about banning policy counts as a personal attack merely because it casts aspersions on Scott, that is equivalent to saying that nobody should ever complain about banning policy at all.

          • Psmith says:

            nobody should ever complain about banning policy at all.

            I pretty much agree with this.

          • Orphan Wilde says:

            I disagree with Psmith, but also with you.

            There are complaints about banning policies. Then there are snide personal attacks which implies a complaint about banning policies without actually specifying it.

            This is the latter, not the former.

    • Evan Þ says:

      Could you expand on “the over-reliance on eyewitness testimony in our legal system due to the US Constitution enshrining 18th Century rules of evidence”? I’m aware this could happen (e.g. pre-1945 British law on treason), but AFAIK that isn’t currently the case in the United States. Courts admit physical evidence; courts admit (with far too much lenience, IMO) expert testimony to interpret that evidence; courts have no inherent requirement for corroboration.

      And regarding marriage contracts, enforcing “to have and to hold… as long as you both shall live…” by specific performance seems dangerously close to enforcing a slavery contract. I’m definitely open to enforcing damages, and I might – might – be able to be convinced to forbid a divorcee from marrying someone else as long as their previous spouse was alive, but I wouldn’t go any further.

      • David Friedman says:

        “and I might – might – be able to be convinced to forbid a divorcee from marrying someone else as long as their previous spouse was alive”

        As a practical matter, I think that is the sense in which the marriage contract usually was enforced prior to the shift to easy divorce.

        • Evan Þ says:

          Remember, though, that communication between parishes was difficult back then; if you married someone in Plymouth and then ten years later tried to marry someone else in a country parish in Essex, you would probably succeed. The constraining factor, besides public sentiment, was the risk. Just as much as you risked prosecution for bigamy, you risked prosecution for adultery even if you didn’t have a second wedding, and (if a wife) you risked your husband finding you and seizing your property under coverture. I’m not aware of how substantial each of those risks was, but I wouldn’t think bigamy was any easier to enforce.

      • Kevin C. says:

        Could you expand on “the over-reliance on eyewitness testimony in our legal system due to the US Constitution enshrining 18th Century rules of evidence”?

        Again, I don’t have my copy of “The Collapse of American Criminal Justice” at the moment; Stuntz had a fair bit on this. In particular, consider the way the right to “confront one’s accuser” leads juries to focus more on the forensic technician presenting the evidence from the witness stand than the evidence itself; especially in comparison to the presentation of physical evidence in European courts operating on the inquisitorial, rather than the confrontational, system. To quote from The New York Review of Books‘s review,

        Stuntz also comments in this chapter on the very live debate among the current members of the Supreme Court about the extent to which the Confrontation Clause of the Sixth Amendment—the right of the accused “to be confronted with the witnesses against him”—requires the exclusion of certain evidence obtained from witnesses who are unavailable at the time of trial. He is critical of two recent decisions that—like both Miranda and Mapp—require exclusion of probative evidence. I think Justice Anthony Kennedy, who dissented in both of those cases, might well have written the comments Stuntz offers. Stuntz argues that while “live witness testimony may have been the best possible means of proving guilt…when the confrontation clause was written and ratified,” “it hardly follows that it is the best possible means today” now that forensic and scientific analysis of physical evidence are more accurate. And he claims that “forcing crime laboratory technicians to double as courtroom witnesses raises the cost to the laboratories of performing the technical analysis,” which “mean[s] less analysis, and hence a less accurate adjudication system,” rather than one that reflects contemporary needs and capacities.

      • Lumifer says:

        If you treat the marriage as a contract, can a bride and a groom agree to a contract which says “to have and to hold… until we change our mind”? Why not?

        I think a lot of confusion comes about because in civil law a marriage is just a contract approved by society, but in Christianity marriage is a sacrament and so has a lot of religious implications which are embedded in Western culture.

        • The original Mr. X says:

          A contract that’s just “until we change our mind” isn’t really much of a contract, is it? Unless you mean “until we *both* change our mind”, I suppose.

          • brad says:

            I’ve seen plenty of contracts which allow either side to terminate without a breach. Generally just some advance notice is required.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            What brad says. I believe that’s a fairly standard clause in lots of contracts the setup a relationship of some sort between two parties.

        • John Schilling says:

          I doubt anyone here would consider a couple entering into such a contract controversial, though some would ask why it needs to be called “marriage”.

          And not necessarily on religious/sacramental grounds, either. If there is legitimate demand for both “…until we change our mind” domestic partnerships and “…until death do us part”, the latter is harder to achieve through civil contract law but exactly what centuries of marriage law have been optimized for. Why break one tool just so you can use it for a job you’ve already got another tool suited for?

        • Evan Þ says:

          Yes, if we let people choose the terms of their marriage contracts, there can be all sorts of things! Fixed-term marriages! Marriages that say “You can divorce but not remarry”! Marriages that say “All bank accounts need to be joint”!

          I enthusiastically support this effort… but I think it’d be really tough to get through and get the courts to honor. Look at how often prenups are thrown out, or at the dubious fate of “covenant marriage” even in the states where it’s legal.

          • brad says:

            Look at how often prenups are thrown out

            How often is that?

          • Lumifer says:

            Fixed-term marriages exist in some versions of Islam : -)

            As to getting the courts to enforce, it works just like any other contract: if the court is really unhappy with it, the court will call it non-equitable and refuse to enforce. That’s how contracts have been treated in courts of law since forever.

    • IrishDude says:

      Xunzi-reading member

      Never heard of that, would you mind explaining?

      • Kevin C. says:

        Xunzi (“Master Xun”) was a Confucian philosopher of the Warring States Era:

        Xunzi witnessed the chaos surrounding the fall of the Zhou dynasty and rise of the Qin state – which upheld legalistic doctrines focusing on state control, by means of law and penalties.[2] Xunzi’s variety of Confucianism therefore has a darker, more pragmatic flavour than the optimistic Confucianism of Mencius, who tended to view humans as innately good. Like Shang Yang, Xunzi believed that humanity’s inborn tendencies were evil and that ethical norms had been invented to rectify people. Xunzi was educated in the state of Qi and taught proponents of legalism, including the Qin Chancellor Li Si and Han Feizi. Because of this, he is sometimes associated with legalism. But like most Confucians, he believed that people could be refined through education and ritual.

        I’ve heard some describe him as “the Hobbes to Mencius’s Rousseau”, but this perhaps exaggerates the gap between Xunzi and Mencius. Xunzi is also usually classed as an atheist (though there is some debate there), but emphasizes adherence to rites and traditions not merely despite, but to some extent because he classes them not as handed down from Tian, but as inventions of the ancient Sage Kings (to whom are also attributed the invention of such things as writing, agriculture, etc…), in short, as a kind of “social technology”. I could go on at length about the insights taken from multiple readings of his work, and various points of interest. In short, definitely my favorite Chinese philosopher, possibly my favorite philosopher period, and someone I’d consider a “must-read” for any secular/non-theist rightist.

    • Lumifer says:

      a sizeable chunck of society really do need a fair bit of paternalism

      We have a baseline value-level disagreement here.

      Other than that, sure, a lot of people suck at managing their lives. But I am not convinced that having other people manage their lives is better — that’s usually called “totalitarianism” and history suggests it… has downsides. Besides, we are talking about the War on Drugs and it’s pretty clear that it did nothing to stop the flow of drugs into the neighborhoods you’re concerned about. It does make the drugs more expensive and it does make the locals dislike and distrust LEOs — neither outcome is helpful.

      drug laws serve as a necessary “patch”, a proxy tool for getting violent, predatory thugs locked up

      I am strongly opposed to this approach. Let me throw in a quote from Ayn Rand (yo, Jill, take notes!):

      “Did you really think we want those laws observed?” said Dr. Ferris. “We want them to be broken. You’d better get it straight that it’s not a bunch of boy scouts you’re up against… We’re after power and we mean it… There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.

      Do you need reasons as why this is a bad thing, or just “hell, no” will suffice?

      • The original Mr. X says:

        Other than that, sure, a lot of people suck at managing their lives. But I am not convinced that having other people manage their lives is better — that’s usually called “totalitarianism” and history suggests it… has downsides.

        Political rhetoric notwithstanding, there’s a pretty big gap between libertarianism and totalitarianism. It’s quite possible — and, indeed, normal — for the state to discourage some behaviours, without going into full-on 1984 territory.

        There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.

        Arresting violent gangsters for drug offences isn’t really like what Rand’s describing here, since the gangsters are legitimately guilty of a pre-existing crime. A better analogy would be arresting Al Capone over tax evasion because the FBI couldn’t make the other charges stick.

        • Lumifer says:

          Arresting violent gangsters for drug offences isn’t really like what Rand’s describing here

          You’re missing the point. What happens to a society where everyone is a criminal, out of jail only at the discretion of law enforcement? What happens to law enforcement when it has so much power?

          • a non mouse says:

            You’re also missing the point.

            What happens to a society where there is no law enforcement for actual natural law crimes like murder, robbery, burglary, etc.?

            That’s what the drug war patch is there to fix.

            Yes, it’s an imperfect solution but (obviously better) alternative to go back to early 1960s style law enforcement (with modern technology) has been so relentlessly propagandized against that most people can’t even conceive of it. At the same time, people can’t live in constant fear so something has to give.

          • Lumifer says:

            @ a non mouse

            A society with non-functioning law enforcement develops, basically, private alternatives (warlords, mafia, gangs, etc.)

            That’s what the drug war patch is there to fix.

            How will additional laws fix the problem of enforcement? I already expressed my opinion about making everyone guilty by default.

            Besides, how would you evaluate the effectiveness of the “drug war patch” in reality? Did it actually do much good for the purpose of prosecuting robbery and murder? Or did it just make gangs rich?

          • dndnrsn says:

            @a non mouse:

            What do you mean by “early 1960s style law enforcement”?

          • a non mouse says:

            How will additional laws fix the problem of enforcement?

            The new laws are easier to enforce for the reasons described above – no one is intimidating police chemists but they sure are willing to intimidate witnesses to violent crimes.

            Besides, how would you evaluate the effectiveness of the “drug war patch” in reality? Did it actually do much good for the purpose of prosecuting robbery and murder?

            For prosecuting? No. For imprisoning violent offenders – moderately effective.

          • Lumifer says:

            @ a non mouse

            Do you happen to have any estimates of the number of people who were convicted of drug offenses when their real offense was murder and the police knows it but is unable to prove it?

          • a non mouse says:

            Do you happen to have any estimates of the number of people who were convicted of drug offenses when their real offense was murder and the police knows it but is unable to prove it?

            I think you’re entirely missing the point.

            Crimes aren’t committed randomly – they’re committed by low impulse control, violent men who generally escalate the severity of the crimes they commit. The escalation is an important point.

            Most of the time someone committing a murder is already a failure of the criminal justice system because that same man has given plenty of indications that he’s unfit to live in civilized society. Locking him up until he’s age 50+ after his second violent assault before he commits a murder is preferable to locking him up for life after he has. Locking him up for possession of crack is a next best alternative.

            The evidence for the relative efficacy of this approach is the reduction in violent crime that accompanied the increase in the prison population.

            The simple fact is that people aren’t going to put up with 1970s levels of crime – it’s intolerable. The drug war isn’t my preferred approach to solving this problem but it does function moderately well as a hacked together patch to route around the damage that progressives have done to the law.

          • Anonymous says:

            @dndnrsn
            The cops decide who they think is guilty based on who looks at them wrong first, bring him down the station house and beat the shit out of him until he decides to confess. He gets taken to court where he doesn’t get a lawyer and a judge asks him if he wants to plead guilty or risk going to trial and ending up hanged, especially seeing as how he has already confessed.

            Truly it must be pervasive propaganda that causes people to reject a return to those halcyon days.

          • Lumifer says:

            Ah, I see. So you basically want to get rid of a substantial part of the population, the undesirables, your own basket of deplorables. But then why do you want to bother with prisons? If you intend to lock somebody up for life because of “low impulse control”, why don’t you just hang him? Prisons are expensive and there doesn’t seem to be any point in keeping the guy alive.

            By the way, once cops get such powers as you desire and send all the “violent criminals” away, why won’t they start going down the list? This guy looked at a cop’s girlfriend in a wrong way, that guy has a boat that’s too good for him, this girl doesn’t want to date my buddy — OFF WITH THEIR HEADS!

          • IrishDude says:

            @a non mouse
            That’s a novel way to analyze the drug war, using drug use as a proxy for violent people, and then locking away drug users/dealers to get violent people off the street. What do you think the false positive rate is though, where non-violent people use drugs and get locked up? Also, how much additional violence is introduced with the black market in drugs and inner-city turf wars over drugs?

          • Lumifer says:

            @ IrishDude

            using drug use as a proxy for violent people

            That’s not what a non mouse means. He is basically saying that the judicial system has difficulties in prosecuting bad guys because it can be hard to assemble enough evidence to satisfy the usual requirements. His solution is to make everyone guilty (see the Ayn Rand quote upthread) and in this way allow law enforcement to put away whoever they consider to be the bad guy without having to bother about such burdensome things as proof of guilt.

          • IrishDude says:

            @Lumifer

            I interpreted this passage “Most of the time someone committing a murder is already a failure of the criminal justice system because that same man has given plenty of indications that he’s unfit to live in civilized society. Locking him up until he’s age 50+ after his second violent assault before he commits a murder is preferable to locking him up for life after he has. Locking him up for possession of crack is a next best alternative.” as saying that let’s lock the crack user up before he inevitably robs/murders/harms someone in the future due to low impulse control. Let’s not wait before it’s too late. I could be misinterpreting, so it would be good for a non mouse to clarify.

          • a non mouse says:

            But then why do you want to bother with prisons? If you intend to lock somebody up for life because of “low impulse control”, why don’t you just hang him? Prisons are expensive and there doesn’t seem to be any point in keeping the guy alive.

            My preferred law enforcement approach only has 3 punishments:

            Fines / Restitution
            Public Flogging
            Execution

            …but this discussion isn’t about my preferences. You want to say the drug war is bad – I don’t disagree that strongly – it’s sub-optimal but it does exist for a very specific reason – namely that people aren’t willing to live in anarchy. Progs got rid of the old approach of law enforcement which was to trust cops with authority enough to police the communities (so they know who the potential criminals are) and issue beatings to troublemakers in a pro-active way if necessary – that approach isn’t perfect either.

            One way or another people are going to deal with crime because you can’t live in 1970s American cities.

            IrishDude

            That’s a novel way to analyze the drug war, using drug use as a proxy for violent people, and then locking away drug users/dealers to get violent people off the street. What do you think the false positive rate is though, where non-violent people use drugs and get locked up? Also, how much additional violence is introduced with the black market in drugs and inner-city turf wars over drugs?

            False positive rate – my estimate is that it’s probably very very low because the amount of background violence and disorder is so high.

            Additional violence due to drug black markets – some but not that much. High level players aren’t into retail violence and low level players who shoot each other over corners are men who enjoy territorial struggles and would do it for free. Crack deal A shoots crack dealer B because of a thousand reasons but the main reason is because both of them are violent hotheads who live in anarchy and who escalate arguments to deadly violence for no rational reason.

          • a non mouse says:

            as saying that let’s lock the crack user up before he inevitably robs/murders/harms someone in the future due to low impulse control. Let’s not wait before it’s too late.

            Not in the Gattaca sense or the Minority Report “pre-crime” sense but in the “by the time you get locked up for crack possession you’ve already committed lots of assaults” sense. I know that this is a difference in worldviews here but I don’t view it as plausible that cops just go out and randomly find drug users and arrest them for no reason then have DAs spend time prosecuting them. Yes, I’m 100% sure that it does happen. I’m also sure that DAs and cops don’t get up in the morning and go to work just to screw with people and if they did act that way your society has already fallen apart.

          • “(obviously better) alternative to go back to early 1960s style law enforcement ”

            Homicide rate 1960: 5.1/100,000
            Homicide rate 2014: 4.5/100,000

          • a non mouse says:

            That really more makes my point than any you would like to make David. Here are two dates you left out that give a clearer picture –

            Homicide rate 1955 – 4.1
            Homicide rate 1973 – 9.8

            Get rid of old style law enforcement, murder rate more than doubles. People adapt both by moving out of certain cities and changing their patterns of behavior. Socially they adapt by enforcing drug laws on otherwise difficult to prosecute violent offenders. All the while trauma treatment technology advances tremendously in the wake of 3 major wars.

            All that to barely undo the damage of the change in law enforcement which started in the late 1950s / early 1960s and peaked in the early 1970s.

          • John Schilling says:

            I know that this is a difference in worldviews here but I don’t view it as plausible that cops just go out and randomly find drug users and arrest them for no reason then have DAs spend time prosecuting them.

            I don’t think anyone is suggesting the cops’ selection of targets is random. It is your assumption that selective prosecution highly correlated with actual wrongdoing, as opposed to mere suspicion, disgust, or perceived insubordination, that is at issue here.

            Giving anyone, even Hero Cops Stalwart and True, license to lock up whoever they please, and assuming they will only use it against people who actually deserve to be locked up by your standards, seems ill-advised.

          • Aapje says:

            @a non mouse

            Your arguments are based on a false dichotomy between criminals and non-criminals.

            Some criminals fit the stereotype that you offered up, but many don’t. For example, the recidivism rate of murderers is extremely low, compared to other crimes.

  5. Hwold says:

    I’m trying to find a blog post which I pretty sure was posted on SSC. It was about the cofounding on a a proxy of the dependent variable. Does this rings a bell to someone ?

  6. Tekhno says:

    Does anyone know where that recent paper on nuclear winter we were ripping apart a while back is? The one that IIRC made the mistake of scaling firestorm area linearly to yield?

    Thanks.

  7. Snodgrass says:

    If you are a misanthrope, and you feel the world is becoming too cosmopolitan, there are still a lot of Welsh hill-farmers who’d be willing to let you be a Welsh hill-farmer for a moderate sum.

    If you are a cosmopolitan, and you feel the world is becoming too misanthropic and separatist, what’s the equivalent thing to do? Almost by definition, in that case the big diverse cities elsewhere in the world won’t let you in.

    • Psmith says:

      in that case the big diverse cities elsewhere in the world won’t let you in.

      I don’t know how extreme a hypothetical scenario you’re envisioning. Certainly places like Singapore and Dubai will let you in now if you have a job lined up and not too much of a criminal record, and will probably continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

  8. David Friedman says:

    I have not figured out why I couldn’t post, but I have found a workaround. It looks as though what caused the problem was my website URL in either my email address or the Website in the reply form. If I use a different email and do not give my website, I can post.

    As I am now doing.

    • Theo Jones says:

      In previous threads Scott said he bans people not by account, but by keywords in the username. Maybe there is overlap between something in your email/url and one of the banned usernames?

      Also akismet/spam filter plugins sound like candidates.

      I wonder what would happen if you put the url/email in the body of a comment? Would a filter eat it?

      • Douglas Knight says:

        Here’s how to test whether it’s a manual ban or whether it’s the spam filter: post the same comment twice. If it silently fails twice, it’s a manual ban. If only the first time is silent, but the second time it complains that the comment was a duplicate, it’s the spam filter.

      • David Friedman says:

        I’ll try the experiment.

        My web site URL is http://www.daviddfriedman.com

  9. David Friedman says:

    Testing

  10. I am trying to post, this time using my gmail address.

  11. Hello, this is a message for anyone who has been arguing with my father. David Friedman has been quiet not because anything major is wrong or because he doesn’t want to argue (this is, after all, my father we’re talking about) – however at the moment he can’t post, and neither he nor Scott have any idea why. He’ll be back when he works that out. In the meantime, I’m letting people know what’s up.

  12. Anatoly says:

    Scott, today’s Yom Kippur. I’ve seen some bloggers use this day as a thematically appropriate occasion to clear the list of bans, giving everyone a chance to start over. I liked the idea enough to adopt it myself. I don’t have a strong opinion on whether it’d be good if you did that, but wanted to throw the idea out there for you to be aware of.

    • anon says:

      I don’t know that that’s appropriate for short bans… or spambots.

    • Anonymous says:

      I think this is very fair, assuming the banned posters publicly confess their sins (while hitting themselves in the chest) and fast for 25 hours.

    • Manya says:

      Heh. I’ve seen this in exactly one blog, and it’s always struck me as a little… idk, arrogant. Kind of like… “look at how magnanimous I am! I even forgive those that I was going to ban forever!”

      On the other hand, how would not unbanning people be any better?

  13. TMB says:

    So, one of the criticisms of Kant’s metaphysics is that the interaction of sensibility with understanding represents a form of dualism, with all of the interaction problems that that implies. How can timeless understanding interact with temporal sensibility?
    I find it quite difficult to understand this critique. From what I understand, one suggestion, as presented by Fichte, is that the object is the subject.
    But, I always took that to be the point of the distinction between noumenon and phenomenon. Phenomena are part of your consciousness. So when we think about phenomena, we are thinking about an aspect of ourselves. We cannot say anything about anything that isn’t a phenomena of one sort or another.

    It’s really strange, I read Kant once while sitting in a bathtub had a eureka moment, and try as I might, I’ve never really been able to understand any of the criticisms of his (basic/as I understand it) position.

    [Does anyone have any suggestions for really straightforward, easy to understand books on German idealism?]

    • Urstoff says:

      I’ve never heard that particular criticism of Kant. From what I gather (although most of what I know about Kant comes from analytic commentary on him, not the 19th century German Idealist commentary), the criticism in that area is that Kant is basically a full-blown idealist without admitting it. If all we have are phenomena, even if the understanding cognizes via the categories the raw data provided by the sensibility, we still have no evidence of noumena; all we have are concepts applied to phenomena. No amount of congnizing/categorizing phenomena will lead us to knowledge of noumena (as noumena are literally inconceivable). Kant knew that, of course, but subsequent German philosophers ditched the “transcendental” part of transcendental idealism, as they viewed it as a distinction without a difference. I’m not quite sure how this lead to the fairly bizarre speculative metaphysics of the German idealists, but I think that’s the gist of their critique of Kant.

      As for books, Beiser is a major scholar in this area, so his “German Idealism” might be helpful, as well as the Cambridge Companion to German Idealism.

  14. TMB says:

    @Lumifer – drug war

    Let’s assume that people drink alcohol because they have a good understanding of the costs and benefits of drinking, and find it to be a net positive.
    The fact that rates of alcohol consumption, and consumption patterns, differ so much depending on area suggests that a large part of the utility/disutility comes from the culture of the drinker.
    It’s impossible to talk of preference in this matter without reference to the surrounding culture, therefore influencing that culture through punishment isn’t an attack on individual choice – it’s just altering the social context that (to a large extent) determines the decision.

    Culture can be changed, but individuals rarely have the power or inclination to change it. If we look at drink driving – there used to be a culture of drink driving. When the law was changed to severely punish those who drunk drove, the culture changed. The same is true of smoking indoors – when the law changes, the culture changes.

    I would say that the culture of drug taking (other than alcohol), is a very recent introduction – it has no deep roots and therefore it would be really easy to undermine that culture by a change in law.

    So, how should we determine what our culture should be? I think, to a large extent, it’s about the story we tell ourselves. When we’re in the business of determining which culture we should live in, we’re looking for an appealing story. In my opinion, the hedonistic society fails even on it’s own terms, since there isn’t much joy to be had in the the selfish pursuit of short-term pleasure. Mileage may vary.

    So… promote sobriety and selflessness, stick middle class drug users in prison for a few months with hard labour, and undermine the hedonistic justification for selfish drug use. Seems like a winner to me.

    • Lumifer says:

      It’s impossible to talk of preference in this matter without reference to the surrounding culture, therefore influencing that culture through punishment isn’t an attack on individual choice – it’s just altering the social context that (to a large extent) determines the decision.

      Sorry, given any meaningful levels of enforcement that’s nonsense. You are not punishing the culture, you’re punishing individuals and moreover, individuals who made a particular choice. Sure, the culture will change but only as a consequence of you forcing a particular choice on specific individuals.

      And since we are talking about alcohol, how good was the Prohibition (and a variety of similar measures elsewhere) at “changing the culture” of drinking? At what cost?

      I would say that the culture of drug taking (other than alcohol), is a very recent introduction – it has no deep roots

      Boggle. Humans have been taking psychoactive chemicals since time immemorial. To quote Wikipedia, “Psychoactive drug use can be traced to prehistory. There is archaeological evidence of the use of psychoactive substances (mostly plants) dating back at least 10,000 years, and historical evidence of cultural use over the past 5,000 years. The chewing of coca leaves, for example, dates back over 8,000 years ago in Peruvian society”.

      Pretty much all human societies use psychoactives, the only difference is which particular ones.

      So… promote sobriety and selflessness, stick middle class drug users in prison for a few months with hard labour, and undermine the hedonistic justification for selfish drug use.

      That’s more or less straightforward Puritanism. Didn’t it already fail badly? And I’ve mentioned the Prohibition — it didn’t each you anything?

      • Psmith says:

        In re Prohibition, see 1, 2, and linked sources therein. Not definitive, of course, but more arguable than you think.

        Historic rates of drug use: some discussion here, not much hard evidence one way or the other, but I suspect there’s room for contrarian perspectives here, too.

        Historical Puritanism gave us Massachussetts. Not a bad result on many axes of interest.

        • Fahundo says:

          Historical Puritanism gave us Massachussetts.

          Counterpoint: Massachusetts gave us Boston.

        • Lumifer says:

          more arguable than you think

          I am not quite sure of the point you’re making. Are you saying that the Prohibition succeeded? was a good idea? we should try again?

          Historical Puritanism gave us Massachussetts.

          Failed Puritanism gave us Massachusetts. To borrow a quote from Scott’s review of Albion’s Seed, “The underlying foundation of life in New England was one of profound, unutterable, and therefore unuttered melancholy, which regarded human existence itself as a ghastly risk, and, in the case of the vast majority of human beings, an inconceivable misfortune.”

        • Salem says:

          Prohibition was a great success in reducing drinking, and people underrate its effect in that regard. Similarly, the War on Drugs is a great success in reducing drug usage rates, and the Pollyannas who think everything will be fine as it ends are in for a rude awakening.

          But Prohibition was nevertheless a disaster, because of the collateral effects.

          • Winter Shaker says:

            And as someone who is in favour ending the War on Drugs (in a cautious, phased-out manner, with strong provisions to redirect a lot of the money currently spent on enforcement into public health / harm mitigation interventions), I suspect, and certainly hope that the pollyannas are a minority – as far as I can see, the collateral effects of prohibiting other drugs are about as disastrous as the collateral effects of prohibiting alcohol, and it should be possible to engineer a system of legal regulation which does away with the majority of prohibition-caused harms without letting in even greater directly drug-caused harms.

          • Salem says:

            Sure, the War on Drugs is a disaster.

      • TMB says:

        “You are not punishing the culture, you’re punishing individuals and moreover, individuals who made a particular choice.”

        And saving those who haven’t had a choice. If people make a choice because they live in a certain culture, and will make a different choice if they live in a different culture, if the utility derived from alcohol consumption is largely cultural, in the long term, cultural change in the form of punishment is neutral.

        So, my reference to alcohol at the top there, was to support my point that people aren’t making their decisions about drug consumption in a cultural vacuum.
        Of course, if something has deeper cultural roots, the effort needed to counteract it, to undermine it, is going to be greater. You bring up prohibition. You bring up psychoactive chemical use. Fair enough.
        Question – What percentage of people do you think had tried cannabis in France in 1958? How about alcohol? How about now?
        I’m sure that if we were to travel back in time, it would take some extreme measures to persuade the Inca to lower their coca consumption – but, we aren’t the Inca.
        I can imagine that eliminating alcohol from our culture would be a completely different proposition from eliminating any other drug, because no other drug has the deep cultural roots of alcohol.
        Having said that:
        http://blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/blog/pubs-vs-first-world-war/
        maybe not so different.

        So… my inclination is to think that in most western countries, even where, officially, possession of drugs is still a criminal offence, there has been a de-facto decriminalisation. (Given my experience in the UK where this is the case.) Rates of drug use exploded with (de-facto) decriminalisation. Drug habits have been changed by changes in the law (drink driving, smoking.) Those countries that still seriously pursue drug possession (for example, Japan) have far lower levels of drug use.

        And… we’re all puritans in some respects. I don’t think extreme restriction of drug consumption has been shown to be a failure, though.

        • Lumifer says:

          And saving those who haven’t had a choice.

          Save? In which way are you saving me by preventing me from drinking?

          You seem to view people as passive, lacking agency. Moreover, you assume the right to shape their lives as you see fit, based on vague ideas of “for their own good”.

          Attempts at social engineering usually fail, sometimes they fail badly, and occasionally they fail horribly. The XX century is full of examples.

          What percentage of people do you think had tried cannabis in France in 1958? How about alcohol? How about now?

          And what difference does it make? People use and have always used psychoactives. Which particular psychoactives they used, depended on time and place.

          If you want to get rid of all psychoactives (see e.g. Mormons), I don’t think you’ll be able to. If you want to get rid of some, then why do you have strong feelings about which ones to get rid of? In which way marijuana is so much worse than alcohol so that one is fine but the other is illegal?

          What you basically have is a substitution effect, you suppress the usage of something and people shift to use equivalents and analogues.

          there has been a de-facto decriminalisation

          To some degree, yes. I see it as a good thing. I think it should be followed by de-jure decriminalisation as well.

          we’re all puritans in some respects.

          Speak for yourself : -P

          • TMB says:

            Save? In which way are you saving me by preventing me from drinking?

            I was thinking of the children. And the families, friends, neighbours, more generally. (I’m not sure whether we can get a measure of how annoying people find drug users? Set up a crack den next to a house and see how it affects property prices? I’m certainly cheesed off the the wafts of cannabis stink that drift into my home from next door – and I’d certainly pay *something* to be rid of it)

            You seem to view people as passive, lacking agency. Moreover, you assume the right to shape their lives as you see fit, based on vague ideas of “for their own good”.

            I think people respond to incentives.
            I would guess that you think that drug use has inherent benefits to individuals (feels good, man). There is an individual and drugs feel good, so he takes them. Then society says, hang on, that’s not good for the rest of us, stop it.

            I’m saying society might have an *even* better case for changing the incentives it provides, if the benefits of drug use largely take the form of social incentives in the first place.
            This is certainly true in my experience – I have never taken any drug (with the exception of chocolate) because of the intrinsic tingles it gives me – it’s always been because I was in some social situation where drug use was normal.
            So – it’s like a win-win. We could get most of the same benefits that come with drinking drugs together just by drinking a cup of tea or something, with none of the (other) negative stuff added on top.

            In which way marijuana is so much worse than alcohol so that one is fine but the other is illegal?

            I think marijuana might be as bad as alcohol – but if we have some really bad habit that is deeply ingrained in our culture and hard to get rid of, it doesn’t seem like an especially good argument for creating another deeply ingrained habit that will be hard to get rid of.

            What you basically have is a substitution effect, you suppress the usage of something and people shift to use equivalents and analogues

            I think that what people do is determined by the culture they live in, and that one of the tools for shaping culture, is law and punishment.
            Maybe you’re right, and people have some fundamental desire for psychoactives that just doesn’t change. I suspect, that for most people this isn’t the case. They take drugs because they are in a culture in which drug taking is normal.

          • Lumifer says:

            @ TMB

            I was thinking of the children.

            Besides the obvious : -/ I’ve me a guy in his 20s whose father ran a pot farm. He’s been smoking weed since he was about 10 or so. A cool guy, very relaxed, without obvious problems. Had a job, a girlfriend, etc.

            I also know a whole bunch of people who are occasional-to-regular drug users. They have their shit together, some have families and kids, and I don’t see why their habits represent a problem for their kids.

            Sure, some people screw up their own life and life of everyone around them, but that’s a function of these people, not a function of which chemicals they have access to. If they have to, they’ll sniff glue and drink mouthwash.

            Running a social policy on the “affects property prices” basis sounds like a really bad idea to me.

            if the benefits of drug use largely take the form of social incentives in the first place

            I don’t understand this. How do incentives replace benefits?

            We could get most of the same benefits that come with drinking drugs together just by drinking a cup of tea or something, with none of the (other) negative stuff added on top.

            I don’t think this is possible. Again, people have been actively using psychoactives throughout the entire human history. You don’t think there are good reasons for that?

            what people do is determined by the culture they live in

            To some degree, yes, but only to some degree. Cultures are not arbitrary, they grow out of what people want and do. Attempts to enforce an artificial culture that someone, basically, made up to be “better” don’t have a good track record.

            However I think we have a deeper disagreement, on the values level. You want to have a culture where everyone does what the society expects him to do, does not take any psychoactives and generally doesn’t behave in any weird way.

            I don’t want such a culture at all.

        • Jiro says:

          Attempts at social engineering usually fail, sometimes they fail badly, and occasionally they fail horribly.

          Social engineering to discourage smoking has been slow, but ultimately successful.

          Also, there is availability bias here; you’re a lot less lijkely to vividly remember the cases where social engineering has succeeded.

      • Anonymous says:

        how good was the Prohibition (and a variety of similar measures elsewhere) at “changing the culture” of drinking?

        I highly recommend Ken Burns’ Prohibition miniseries. He claims that it did substantially change the culture of drinking – bringing women into the fold and making it more social than just ‘men get drunk at the bar, pass out in the gutter, and stop fulfilling their responsibilities’. The other reason I like to recommend it is because the political issues at play simply do not match any political divide that exists today. Pretty much no matter where you stand on prohibition today, you’ll find that ‘your team’ from that time held some positions that you really don’t like.

    • IrishDude says:

      When the law was changed to severely punish those who drunk drove, the culture changed.

      Evidence? I could see that going the other way, with the law following cultural changes.

    • jlow says:

      >In my opinion, the hedonistic society fails even on it’s own terms, since there isn’t much joy to be had in the the selfish pursuit of short-term pleasure. Mileage may vary.

      That’s your terms, not its terms.

      The reasoning used here and below could justify doing anything to anyone: “sure, executing individuals for skiing harms innocent individuals, but it will change the culture and save others who might have died in ski accidents.”

      So the question becomes: how much harm does US- or Japan-style drug-related punishment, of individually innocent people, cause? Is it more than the drugs?

      I think that, apart from the distasteful idea of harming someone for a purely personal choice, because the Greater Good demands it, the answer is clearly “yes”; drugs saw more use in 1900 than you might realize, and were later banned less because they were causing problems than because alcohol prohibition was a lost cause and some victory was needed for the temperance movement. Even now, we can compare countries like Portugal or Uruguay to the US, compare Texas to Colorado, or simply look at maintenance programs to see how drugs-without-criminalization look.

      • TMB says:

        I don’t know – in a sense, maybe I’m cheating. A set of rules can’t be it’s own meta ruleset, so of course hedonism couldn’t be justified by hedonism.

        So the question becomes: how much harm does US- or Japan-style drug-related punishment, of individually innocent people, cause? Is it more than the drugs?

        I think the question is what kind of world do we want to live in, and is our society providing the correct incentives to make that world a reality?

  15. Aido says:

    Anyone have recommendations for which works of Robert Anton Wilson to start with?

    • Urstoff says:

      Just read the Principia Discordia instead.

    • Anon. says:

      Illuminatus! is great. Prometheus Rising/Cosmic Trigger are tinfoil hat-tier, highly recommend against them except as a curiosity.

    • maas says:

      If you have no exposure, watch some videos of him on youtube.

      If you know a bit of his schtick, I would start with Illuminatus! It’s a little long, and takes time to get to the good drugs and fucking parts, but feel free to skim if you feel like you’re giving up.

      Unlike Urstoff, I prefer RAW to Principia Discordia. But since we disagree, I guess you’ll have to try both.

  16. TMB says:

    Discussing tribes/right-wing/left-wing etc. etc. is just a way for people who like talking about people to pretend they are discussing ideas.

  17. Orphan Wilde says:

    The difference between a libertarian and a stereotypical Republican, condensed neatly:

    The stereotypical Republican doesn’t want you to get a sex change operation. The libertarian doesn’t want government to force other people to use your preferred pronouns.

    The Republican doesn’t want no-fault divorce. The libertarian doesn’t want government making decisions about what marriage is and what it is not in the first place – but we’re also, broadly, against sweeping changes to millions of what are, effectively, contracts, and would like people to be able to sign the contract they want to sign rather than the contract society says they should sign.

    The Republican wants a tax code and regulatory structure which encourages business development. The libertarian wants a transparent and limited tax code and regulatory structure. (The difference is that the Republicans are broadly going to approve of regulations, say, like limited liability for corporations who accidentally murder a bunch of people, whereas the libertarians are never going to actually pass the law because they’ll be too busy arguing about principles.)

    Roughly, if you think libertarians are right-wing, it’s only because the left wing is currently in power and we’re opposing what you’re trying to get done. During the Bush era we were generally regarded as left-wing, and that abruptly reversed when Obama was elected, because we oppose the shit that the people in power are doing.

    The younger libertarians, who don’t remember the Republicans behaving the same way the Democrats are behaving now, will tend to be right-wing leaning just because they’ve never seen the right wing misbehave in the way the left wing is misbehaving today.

    I regard with amusement the claim that libertarians are right-wing. It is essentially an admission to statist impulses. It’s the same shit with either party – you’re all for the kind of liberty you approve of, which is to say, you approve of people’s abilities to make the decisions you agree with.

    • Zombielicious says:

      This seems like you’re affirming the consequent.

      All Republicans are right-wing.
      Libertarians are not Republicans.
      Therefore libertarians are not right-wing.

      • hlynkacg says:

        Agreed.

      • Orphan Wilde says:

        This seems like you’re deliberately misrepresenting rhetoric as a logical construct in order to score points in a competitive game I have no interest in beating you soundly at.

        See, a key word in the second paragraph is “stereotypical” – I opted not to repeat it in every subsequent paragraph because it got clunky, but it is in fact implied by rhetorical convention. It’s a word which, deliberately invoked like that, denotes that the categories being referenced are fuzzy.

        • Zombielicious says:

          [removed]

          • Orphan Wilde says:

            No, you were erecting and beating a strawman in an attempt to score debate points, as you’re doing again with your thinly-veiled insult here.

            See, if your shoddy strawman were the argument I were attempting to make, I wouldn’t immediately contradict myself by talking about right-wing-leaning libertarians in the same bloody comment.

          • Zombielicious says:

            This is getting out of hand. My point was that it completely defeats the point you seemed to be making, to list a bunch of ways Republicans and libertarians are different, when no one (I think) is claiming Republicans == libertarians, and then to move on to saying “therefore libertarians aren’t right-wing”, when right-wing is a superset of Republicans. My reply seemed to be the most concise way of pointing out the error, and I didn’t know you were going to take it as me trying to “score debate points” or playing some game with you. It seemed better than writing 1,000 words trying to vaguely infer the disagreement when the mistake seemed pretty obvious.

            Accusing me of deliberately misrepresenting you to play some signaling game isn’t exactly polite either, and your response seemed to be that you were just making a rhetorical case rather than actual argument. So directly pointing out why the entire post seemed (and I was already trying to be polite with “seems” rather than just “your argument is invalid,” assuming I might have made the mistake myself) invalid isn’t a “shoddy strawman,” while your response came off as an irrelevant ad hominem about my ulterior motives just to defend yourself.

            This is clearly going nowhere productive though, so I can’t see any good in continuing. Sorry if I offended you, and I’ll edit to remove my last comment.

    • Anonymous Bosch says:

      During the Bush era we were generally regarded as left-wing, and that abruptly reversed when Obama was elected, because we oppose the shit that the people in power are doing.

      I was a libertarian during the Bush era (much more staunchly than I am now) and I never had an issue with being considered left-wing. Who considered libertarians left-wing?

      • Anonymous says:

        No one said “libertarians are left-wing,” but lots of people said “war protestors are left-wing.” People got judged on a single issue then as now, but no one was proud of this method of judgement.

        • dragnubbit says:

          Yep there were always isolationists in the Republican party. Even non-libertarian isolationists. And the lines between hawks and doves have only gotten blurrier since then between the two parties now with Trump.

          So if someone was ascribing (anti-war=left-wing) that was their categorical error. And I do not recall at any time in my lifetime when libertarians were not considered an apostate wing of the GOP by non-libertarians.

      • HeelBearCub says:

        I think Libertarian opposition to the wars post 9/11 did have them being treated to a certain extent as apostates.

        But I don’t recall any major Libertarian figures throwing in with the liberal anti-war movement and protests either.

        • Orphan Wilde says:

          Libertarians don’t tend to “throw in” with other people, of either flavor. Hell, we can barely be convinced to vote for other libertarians, because they’re not exactly the right shade of libertarian.

          • Anonymous Bosch says:

            I think it’s a little pat to say that libertarians don’t throw in with other people like fusionism wasn’t a thing for 40 years. Libertarianism may be a distinct tradition, but ever since the term first came into use there has been far more cross-pollination to the right than there was to the left. The Kochs are libertarian but spent 98% of their political capital electing Republicans (I said 98%, don’t @ me about the ACLU). The LP has nominated former Republicans at the top two spots of the ticket every cycle since 2008, and several libertarian stalwarts like Ron Paul and Roger MacBride drifted back and forth multiple times.

            Even Trump, who has strained fusionism to its absolute limits, still finds some of his most strident cheerleaders among the the libertarians of the Austrian clique, who apparently remember an alternate version of the 1990s where the paleo strategy accomplished something besides selling a lot of newsletter subscriptions.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            Except that libertarians do “throw-in” with Republicans on lots of things.

            Ron and Rand are Republicans. The Koch Brothers support lots of Republican candidates*. Reason argues in favor of lots of Republican positions and actors.

            *No, this isn’t a boo light. I’m not making out-sized claims about the Koch’s just pointing out who the actually put money behind (and assuming that you can’t “No True Scotsman” the Kochs as non-Libertarians).

          • Whatever Happened to Anonymous says:

            Reason argues in favor of lots of Republican positions and actors.

            It does?

          • dragnubbit says:

            @bosch

            Using the Libertarian Party as an exemplar of libertarian thinking is not very fair.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Whatever Happened to Anonymous:
            So, I perhaps should retract that point slightly, as I’m going off of my remembered perception of Nick Gillespie from appearances on Bill Maher.

            That said, if you look at Gillespie’s Bio at reason.com you see this which they themselves included:

            The Daily Beast, where he now writes a column, named Gillespie one of “The Right’s Top 25 Journalists,” …

            If they are self-including that nugget… I think they agree that they are on the right.

          • Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

            If they are self-including that nugget… I think they agree that they are on the right.

            For sure, I don’t even know what’s the big deal about being “right-wing” like it’s evil or something.

            I would reject the conservative label, even if individual libertarians may be conservative in their beliefs and/or behaviour.

          • The Nybbler says:

            @Whatever Happened To Anonymous

            As gbdub pointed out:

            So when “right” is used to mean “the board has a lot of libertarians, therefore its right-wing, therefore I can deploy general purpose anti-Republican insults” then that’s a problem.

          • Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

            Yeah, but you should, like, ignore those people anyway, so what gives?

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @whatever:
            Right wing means that, as conservatives are also right-wing, libertarians are in general coalition with conservatives. It does not make them conservatives.

            I think the “big deal” with acknowledging being right wing (here) is: a) libertarians aren’t conservatives, but nuance is not necessarily a speciality of the human race, and b) that XKCD comic that I won’t link, but something something feel superior to both.

        • FacelessCraven says:

          @HeelBearCub – “I think Libertarian opposition to the wars post 9/11 did have them being treated to a certain extent as apostates.”

          Also being anti-patriot act, anti-torture, anti-spying, pro-gay-marriage, pro-choice, anti-war-on-drugs…

          “But I don’t recall any major Libertarian figures throwing in with the liberal anti-war movement and protests either.”

          Ron Paul?

          • HeelBearCub says:

            To be clear, I’m not saying that Libertarians didn’t express opposition to the war, I’m saying that I don’t remember them doing so in coalition with the left.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            yeah, apologies, I probably should have picked that up.

            I remember early on seeing a lot of common ground between the Tea party and Occupy Wall Street, and feeling intensely frustrated when (from my perspective) the former was co-opted by the Republican establishment while the latter was stonewalled into irrelevance.

          • onyomi says:

            I think libertarians are justified in claiming not to really fit into either the mainstream “right wing” or the mainstream “left wing” today, though we sympathize with elements of both. I think this presentation by Roderick Long, for example, does a good job chronicling Rothbard’s own struggles to find a home for libertarianism, first more on the left, and then more the Pat Buchanan-style right. Though Rothbard was ultimately disappointed in the latter as well, I think the conditions that obtained when he died still largely obtain, especially with Trump now reviving, in a certain sense, the paleo-conservative strain.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @FacelessCraven:
            As I think I have mentioned, I have a friend who has definitely circled all around the fringe right. Prepper, gold, guns, militia movement, a little sovereign citizen, etc. I think his basic sensibilities are libertarian, but that he also really likes to do the “dive into the minutiae of a law or statute and find the one sentence that contains the hidden meaning” which isn’t particularly libertarian and is just conspiratorial. Also he has gone sort of hard-core Catholic.

            He was really interested in OWS for a while, right up until he decided they were hippy freaks. I think what pushed him over the final edge was seeing a video of the group communication methods they were using, which involved the crowd repeating each sentence of a speaker and certain hand signals. He and another of my friends just absolutely loved mocking that. It was too “weird”.

            I feel like there is something there about expected conformity to standard social norms, where even as a libertarian you are using words like “disgusting freak” about people just because they are different and have gauges and black fingernails. I can’t quite express what I mean there, but some part of the libertarian movement wants the freedom to go back to openly expressing that disgust, which somehow they think the government is preventing.

            Again, I’m not sure I’m quite being accurate (or charitable).

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @HBC – “He was really interested in OWS for a while, right up until he decided they were hippy freaks. I think what pushed him over the final edge was seeing a video of the group communication methods they were using, which involved the crowd repeating each sentence of a speaker and certain hand signals. He and another of my friends just absolutely loved mocking that. It was too “weird”.”

            Yeah, I’ve seen those vids. I think OWS was my introduction to the concept of the “progressive stack”, in fact. There’s a visceral sense that this is not what confronting The Man looks like, that nothing good can possibly come from this, like glancing over at the soldier beside you in the trench just before you go over the top to see that he’s dropped his rifle and is making daisy chains.

            “I feel like there is something there about expected conformity to standard social norms, where even as a libertarian you are using words like “disgusting freak” about people just because they are different and have gauges and black fingernails. I can’t quite express what I mean there, but some part of the libertarian movement wants the freedom to go back to openly expressing that disgust, which somehow they think the government is preventing.”

            I can’t speak for your friend, obviously, but for me it was never a right wing thing, and it was never about “disgusting freaks”. There’s an old military saw that goes, “you can’t stiffen a pitcher of spit with a handful of buckshot.” Those people seem obviously ineffectual, and I saw a lot of the same frustration from other elements of the left as well.

            Even so, despite the hippies and the weirdos, I admired them a lot and thought they were doing good work.

          • jaimeastorga2000 says:

            He was really interested in OWS for a while, right up until he decided they were hippy freaks. I think what pushed him over the final edge was seeing a video of the group communication methods they were using, which involved the crowd repeating each sentence of a speaker and certain hand signals. He and another of my friends just absolutely loved mocking that. It was too “weird”.

            Oh, yeah, this video. Weird indeed.

        • David Friedman says:

          “But I don’t recall any major Libertarian figures throwing in with the liberal anti-war movement and protests either.”

          I don’t know about examples in the post 9/11 period. I’m pretty sure that back when Rothbard was pushing alliance with the left he and his faction were doing that, and Justin Raimundo, who was part of that, is currently the editorial director of antiwar.com. On the other hand, he self-describes as a “conservative paleo-libertarian.”

          Also, of course, the event that catalyzed the libertarian/traditionalist split within Young Americans for Freedom was one of the libertarians at the St. Louis convention publicly burning his draft card, or at least what appeared to be his draft card.

      • Orphan Wilde says:

        The right-wing, back when we spent most of our time campaigning against the actions of Republicans; at the time we were popularly regarded as the anti-Patriot-Act, pro-marijuana party. Then-prominent leftists of the time such as Bill Maher frequently called us out as allies.

        • Anonymous Bosch says:

          The right-wing, back when we spent most of our time campaigning against the actions of Republicans; at the time we were popularly regarded as the anti-Patriot-Act, pro-marijuana party.

          The Internet was a thing back then; show me the receipts. I recall a lot of issue-specific pushback about how Libertarians were naive about “Islamofascism” or whatever clash-of-civilizations buzzwords the neocons were pushing at the time, but “generally regarded as left-wing” is a much stronger claim.

        • Jaskologist says:

          Oh, so you were only anti-Patriot-Act during the Bush administration? Proof that libertarians are a bunch of leftists!

    • Chalid says:

      I feel like the natural use of “right” and “left” in US politics is defined by the two-party system. Whatever Republicans believe is “right,” whatever Democrats support is “left,” and to the extent you support one party over the other you’re basically pushing the country back and forth along that axis. (And the direction of that axis shifts over time as the parties shift positions.) To a first approximation, you might have all kinds of idiosyncratic views, but to the extent that you support a Democrat you’re making the country more “left” and to the extent that you support a Republican you’re making the country more “right.” I would claim that this is the main way right and left are used in the context of US politics today.

      This means “left” and “right” are philosophically incoherent, of course, but that just properly reflects the incoherence of the coalitions involved. And it really does put a lot of libertarians on the right – if you do some sort of handwavy preference-intensity-weighted projection of libertarian views onto the Democratic-Republican axis you’ll usually land on the Republican side of things.

      Remember that non-libertarian Republicans are hardly homogeneous either – it’s not clear to me that there’s less distance between a big business conservative and a Christian fundamentalist anti-abortion crusader than there is between either of those and most libertarians. But we put the business conservative and the abortion activist on the “right” because their strongest preferences align with the Republican party.

      • Orphan Wilde says:

        if you do some sort of handwavy preference-intensity-weighted projection of libertarian views onto the Democratic-Republican axis you’ll usually land on the Republican side of things.

        Eh. It varies with who is in charge. We tend to side with the minority party, because the party in control tends to try to use their power to achieve their ends.

        Again, during the Bush administration, we were mostly busy fighting the Patriot Act, and dozens of internet regulation schemes, and also religious-freedom-in-schools. During the Obama administration, we’ve been busy fighting the PPACA, and dozens of internet regulation schemes, and also gun regulation. People have short memories.

        • Chalid says:

          My impression is that libertarians tilt rather strongly Republican when Democrats are in charge, and weakly Republican when Republicans are in charge.

          But anyway what this conversation really needs is data and I don’t have time to find it.

          • Iain says:

            This seems reasonable to me.

            Out-group homogeneity is naturally going to make libertarians look right-wing from the point of view of those on the left. The interesting question is whether libertarians look left-wing from the point of view of those on the right. My impression is that, at least in the comments here, they largely don’t: there seem to be more instances in which a left-wing commenter perceives a (self-identified) libertarian as right-wing than instances in which a right-wing commenter perceives a libertarian as left-wing. I am open to counter-examples.

          • Fahundo says:

            Sounds like a self-fulfilling prophecy. If there are no non-libertarian right-wingers, and you declare that the libertarians are on the right, of course the right-leaning (read: libertarian) commenters aren’t going to make posts about how all the libertarians seem left-leaning to them.

          • Lumifer says:

            @ Iain

            I’m pretty sure the cultural conservatives have always considered libertarians as left-wing and continue to do so. Granted, some of them get confused between libertarians and libertines : -/

          • Iain says:

            @Fahundo: Is somebody saying that all right-wingers are libertarian? That is definitely not what I said.

            @Lumifer: Do you have an example of cultural conservatives doing so in the comments here? Or intelligent cultural conservatives (definition: smart enough to know the difference between libertarians and libertines) who understand the basics of the libertarian position and nevertheless declare libertarianism to be a leftist ideology?

          • a non mouse says:

            I am on the right and consider libertarians to be on the left while believing that an ideal government will be much more libertarian than what we have now.

            I am not a “cultural conservative” because conservatives are merely losers who would like to preserve whatever progressive ideas were fashionable x years ago.

          • Fahundo says:

            Is somebody saying that all right-wingers are libertarian? That is definitely not what I said.

            Paul Brinkley’s numbers above had 69 libertarians and one right-winger.

          • Randy M says:

            I’m comfortable with “cultural conservative” in general; I think things are a little more complex than left and right or else you have people who are basically social democrats but oppose abortion in the same camp with people who oppose any government action up to and including enforcing borders.

    • sweeneyrod says:

      I don’t think it is symmetrical like that. Libertarian economic policies were adopted Reagan (amongst others), but not by any left-wing politicians I’m aware of. In any case, it is perfectly possible for libertarians and Republicans to disagree on many things, but still both be right-wing (unless you claim that because Emma Goldman disagreed with Soviet Russia’s policies, one of the two is not left-wing).

      • Orphan Wilde says:

        Bill Clinton probably pursued the most aggressively libertarian economic policies since Calvin Coolidge – which is to say, not terribly libertarian at all, but the bar there is really bloody low. Government spending increased under Reagan, revamped income taxes so that businesses had to collect them for the government, and engaged in money supply manipulation. He wasn’t as interventionist as, say, Carter, but he was about as interventionist as Clinton.

        Right-wing is of course a meaningless phrase, but the thing is, Republicans and libertarians are a distinct cluster.

        But if your lot are determined to convince me that voting for Republicans is in my best political interests because they’re the same thing as me, by all means, go ahead.

        If, on the other hand, you have an ounce of political sense to you, maybe you shouldn’t be making that argument.

        • HeelBearCub says:

          @Orphan Wilde:
          If you find Democratic policies or representation more to your liking than whatever is on offer from Republicans, I heartily endorse you voting Democratic.

          But you aren’t really the focus of this conversation.

          The question is, what does the over all territory actually look like?

    • Nyx says:

      > The younger libertarians, who don’t remember the Republicans behaving the same way the Democrats are behaving now, will tend to be right-wing leaning just because they’ve never seen the right wing misbehave in the way the left wing is misbehaving today.

      Like notorious whippersnapper Ron Paul?

    • ThirteenthLetter says:

      During the Bush era we were generally regarded as left-wing, and that abruptly reversed when Obama was elected, because we oppose the shit that the people in power are doing.

      Please don’t take this the wrong way — I consider myself highly sympathetic to Libertarianism — but this feels like wishcasting to me: kind of like how Reason magazine aggressively and, slightly desperately, calls out people like Todd Akin, but never gets credit for it from the left.

      Libertarians do indeed hold many positions that would never overlap with oldschool Christian Coalition types, but the broad smaller-government ideology is popularly identified with Reagan and the GOP and has been pretty much since 1980, and there have always been lots of secular small-government types in the GOP during this era. Meanwhile, any small-government tendency in the Democratic Party that Bill Clinton might have endorsed ended the day Bush v. Gore was decided. There were occasional wishful mumblings about “liberaltarians” during the Bush years but the liberals tended to respond by throwing rotten fruit. Sorry, guys, but you’re stuck on the right.

      • The Nybbler says:

        Again, if the defining characteristic of “the right” is smaller government, then “the left” gets all the totalitarians.

        • HeelBearCub says:

          C’mon, man.

          “Smaller” government isn’t the defining characteristic on the right, and no one is saying it is. There are plenty of conservatives who want to expand the scope of government. Look at the concept of theocracy, for instance.

          “The right” is a coalition of multiple ideologies, just like “the left” is. Coalitions also change over time, reacting to changing concerns and differing circumstances. Libertarians and conservatives don’t have to be in coalition together for all time, but they are right now.

          However, “small/less government” is an idea that is firmly established as a right wing idea, even though not every right-singer shares this as a terminal value.

          • The Nybbler says:

            And you’re claiming that wanting smaller government is sufficient to put libertarians on the right.

            You claimed elsewhere that while many libertarians were anti-war, they weren’t in coalition with the left in being anti-war. Well, libertarians are for smaller government, but they’re not in coalition with the right in being for smaller government. To most of the right, it’s just a talking point anyway.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            Again, I gave other examples of how Libertarians actually are in coalition with the Republicans specifically and the right in general. Ron, Rand, the Kochs.

            And Reason magazine is willing to describe its most well known editor-in-chief as “one of the top-25 right wing writers in America”.

          • sweeneyrod says:

            @TheNybbler
            But libertarians blatantly are in coalition with the right, as they run for election as Republican candidates (the Pauls, Gary Johnson when he was actually in a position of power etc.).

          • Orphan Wilde says:

            “small/less government” is an idea that is firmly established as a right wing idea

            No. I assume you’re not a libertarian; “small/less government” isn’t our terminal value. It’s a side-effect at best of our terminal value, which is negative rights, which is to say, liberty.

            Small-government Republicans just want to pay less taxes. That’s something I can get behind – the freedom to spend the money I make in the way I deem best is a freedom I value – but it’s not the only value in my bucket. There’s a lot of overlap between small-government Republicans and libertarians, largely because it’s a policy approach we agree on. What makes these Republicans uniquely suitable for libertarian crossover is that they tend to basically be single-issue voters: Does this increase government spending?

            So we’re in broad agreement with that contingent of Republicans. This isn’t because they’re “basically libertarians”, however, it’s because their specific terminal value is roughly compatible with ours, and they tend to be uniquely situated to only have the one terminal value with regard to government.

            But they’re about as libertarian as the Russian selloff of government goods to connected political insiders for pennies on the dollar was a free market restructuring of their economy.

          • Randy M says:

            Some “conservative” advocates call for less government taxing as a way to get less government and more liberty in general.
            Or did, before this was shown to be somewhat of a farcical notion. But the argument was made.
            People who would not fully take the Libertarian label often argue for less government in areas beyond simply taxation, see Obamacare. Beyond the practicalities and financial impact on the middle class, there were principled objections that the government had no right to control individual spending choices and that it was taking responsibility away from the citizens.

          • Tekhno says:

            Small government is an ideal of the liberal-right, which is almost the only popular form of right which exists in America (Trump is moving things a little away though). Libertarians are largely just liberals of the extreme center.

            The USA doesn’t utilize this terminology broadly however, and the only liberals are left-liberals in popular understanding.

      • David Friedman says:

        “Meanwhile, any small-government tendency in the Democratic Party that Bill Clinton might have endorsed ended the day Bush v. Gore was decided.”

        Does Cass Sunstein count? He self-describes as a libertarian paternalist and is part of a small group of intellectuals–Larry Lessig is another–who think of themselves as left but have substantial libertarian sympathies.

      • Orphan Wilde says:

        the broad smaller-government ideology is popularly identified with Reagan and the GOP and has been pretty much since 1980

        Smaller-government is just government -spending-. Libertarians, as the name should imply, prioritize liberty, not just the amount of government spending.

        • Randy M says:

          Disagree, see comment I made just above, but for another example, who is more likely to oppose seat-belt laws? Government imposed (as opposed to private establishment) smoking restrictions? Plastic bag bans?

          • The Nybbler says:

            Who is more likely to oppose drug laws, flag-burning laws, and laws against the wrong kind of sex?

          • Randy M says:

            Let me know with a recent survey the levels of support for those among self-identified groups. I suspect it is spotty at best, especially among more “mainstream” Republicans.

          • Eccdogg says:

            Drug laws not so sure there is a big difference, the other two the left was generally on the libertarian side and the right was not. BUT those issues have long been decided and there are essentially no conservatives calling for any change. And both those were decided in part by SC judges on the right in coalition with those on the left. So even there there was some sympathy on the right.

            Do you think you would get any SC justices appointed by Democrats who would say that seat belt law or smoking restrictions were unconstitutional or even any current Democrats speaking out about them? Or look at the Kelo ruling why was there no one on the left that opposed? Or Obamacare mandates for that matter.

            I think there used to be a left that was a strong defender of freedom*. Today I don’t see a left that holds freedom as one of its core values. The right is not a reliable champion of freedom either, but it is one of their core values.

            *I know freedom is a term that some interpret differently. Here I am using it the way libertarians use it. Negative liberty or freedom from coercion. I know under different definition the left may be seen as having freedom as a core value.

          • brad says:

            The ACLU is still out there doing a lot of pro-freedom work. I’d bet their donor base is overwhelmingly left of center.

          • Anonymous Bosch says:

            Or look at the Kelo ruling why was there no one on the left that opposed?

            The decision was criticized by Bernie Sanders. It was criticized by Ralph Nader. It’s been criticized by the ACS (left-wing equivalent to the Federalist Society). The NAACP filed a fucking amicus brief for the petitioners! Can you either exit your info bubble or at least run a basic Google search before saying shit like this?

          • Eccdogg says:

            ^ I should have been more clear. I was referring to the members of the supreme court.

            In both the Sodomy case and the Flag burning case. Republican appointed justices sided with the more libertarian position. In neither the Kelo case or the Obamacare case did you see liberal dissenters.

            Looking back at what I wrote I see that it could have come across that no one on the left opposed. As you have pointed out correctly that was not the case.

            And probably my last paragraph was too strong as you and brad point out there are elements of the left that are strong on some freedom issues.

          • Randy M says:

            To clarify, in my first comment here, I wasn’t trying to imply that there are no freedoms liberals will support, but that there are at least some non-financial areas where conservatives push for smaller government, contra Orphan’s assertion.

    • David Friedman says:

      ” During the Bush era we were generally regarded as left-wing, and that abruptly reversed when Obama was elected, because we oppose the shit that the people in power are doing.”

      I think you are exaggerating. There was a point at which Rothbard was pushing an alliance with the left, but that was earlier. A lot of us were critical of Bush but I don’t remember any point during that administration where libertarians were routinely described as on the left.

      I did comment, back when Bush was still in office:

      “That’s why, on the whole, I thought it would be better if Bush had lost the most recent election–not that his opponent would have been any better but that at least we wouldn’t have gotten blamed for what he did.”

      And in partial support of HBC’s argument against me, an old blog post on the subject, distinguishing between emotional and intellectual alliance.

      • HeelBearCub says:

        @David Friedman:
        As I don’t think I have mentioned you in this OT, can you expand on what argument you mean?

        Edit: After reading the post, I think I understand it’s about our argument about whether you are “on the right” from the previous OT.

        • David Friedman says:

          Correct.

          I concede that we may have had one or two other arguments in the past.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            Maybe. 😉

            I have to say, I’m struck by that post. I’m not actually sure it would be productive to say more.

            But yes, it is a good illustration of what my point was.

      • Orphan Wilde says:

        A lot of us were critical of Bush but I don’t remember any point during that administration where libertarians were routinely described as on the left.

        I lived in a rural heavily Southern-Baptist town at the time. Libertarians were definitely regarded as “on the left.”

        Was your bubble predominantly leftist, or predominantly rightist?

        • David Friedman says:

          My bubble was primarily leftist, which may explain the difference between my perception and yours.

          I’ve been in the academic world for almost my entire life.

      • Eccdogg says:

        David Friedman good post. I have similar feelings

        I don’t know if Libertarians are right or not, but I do think they are willing to ally with the right but are not likely to ally with the left. At least as far as left and right are mostly understood in a US context.

        I usually vote libertarian, but sometimes vote republican I never vote democrat (at least at the national level I do at the state and local level). I also generally feel more emotional sympathy to republicans. I think it is because the right at least pays lip service to some core libertarian ideas. Even when the left’s policies are more libertarian the arguments they use to get there often put me off.

    • ChetC3 says:

      Roughly, if you think libertarians are right-wing, it’s only because the left wing is currently in power and we’re opposing what you’re trying to get done. During the Bush era we were generally regarded as left-wing, and that abruptly reversed when Obama was elected, because we oppose the shit that the people in power are doing.

      My experience was that the self-described libertarians I encountered online during the Bush era were regarded as right-wing, in essentially in the same way libertarians are considered right-wing in the Obama era. The only people I could see describing libertarians as left-wing in the Bush era would be hardline social conservatives, and people who hadn’t had much exposure to libertarians.

      • Orphan Wilde says:

        The only people I could see describing libertarians as left-wing in the Bush era would be hardline social conservatives, and people who hadn’t had much exposure to libertarians.

        So… most Republicans?

        The Internet is bizarre. Libertarians are severely, SEVERELY overrepresented on most non-social-network internet communities. We also tend to be prolific and relatively skilled persuasive writers, and also, for some reason, technical.

        In meatspace, however, we tend to be underrepresented, so a given individual’s understanding of what libertarianism is, is whatever the libertarian they happen to know tells them it is. (Because we’re all, every one of us, the holders of the sacred True Libertarianism, of course, and all the others are heretics and sell-outs.)

      • Tekhno says:

        In meatspace, however, we tend to be underrepresented

        Because libertarianism is embarrassing.

    • TheAncientGeek says:

      People think libertarians are right wing because making property rights paramount favours the wealthy and employers over the poor and employees.

      • Orphan Wilde says:

        Historically, movements to reduce property right importance always increase the concentration of power, rather than spread it around. The original (true?) left was in favor of strong property rights for a reason.

      • IrishDude says:

        Hernando De Soto is an economist who believes one of the primary causes of 3rd world poverty is the lack of property rights, which contrasts with your statement. Here’s a nice summary write-up on his ideas:

        “Informality is a central concept in de Soto’s work on poverty. It describes the realm to which the Third World’s poorest are relegated — banished from their nations’ official economies to what he has called “the grubby basement of the precapitalist world.”

        He argues that their exclusion — the product of a lack of enforceable property rights — holds back them and the entire world economy. It’s why capitalism, despite its triumph over communism and its wealth generation in America and Western Europe, has failed elsewhere.

        Nicholas Eberstadt, an American Enterprise Institute expert on economic development, lauds de Soto for demonstrating how property rights — often disparaged by left-leaning intellectuals as an instrument of the privileged — help the poor: “He has helped explain to convincible readers how radically egalitarian the rule of law and property rights are. Plutocrats, strongmen — they have their muscle. They can take what they choose in lawless situations. But the poor and weak are protected by the rule of law and property rights.

        Americans struggle to understand the plight of the Third World’s poor, de Soto says, because they take for granted the robust U.S. legal system that makes their prosperity possible.

        The anarchic Wild West America of squatters and gold rushers gave way long ago to a nation where:

        • Ownership is uniformly documented and insured.
        • Trustworthy records of transactions are easily accessible.
        • People have fixed addresses and recorded credit histories.
        • Property titles are sacrosanct.
        • Convenient legal instruments exist to limit business liability.”

        http://www.investors.com/news/management/leaders-and-success/hernando-de-soto-revolutionized-world-thinking-poverty/

  18. AoxyMouseOnArgo says:

    How impressive was Nate Silvers correctly calling all 50 states?

    I thought there were only ever about 6 states in an election that are so called *swing* states, and just looking at some polls a month before will cover half of them.

    • pku says:

      Well, telling which states are swing states in the first place can be tough. And polls often disagree (right now they range from Trump+2 to Hillary+12), so you have to consolidate them somehow. You can just average the pollsters, and you’d get pretty close to Nate Silver’s model – and he puts in some more math to take in the average and trend lines.

      So he has significantly better than others. If you know just the right polls to look at you can get most of the way there (but with a slightly higher error margin), but that assumes you have polls in the first place, which is already a lot of the work.

      • AoxyMouseOnArgo says:

        Well, he adds a bit more then polls to the models. He factors in demographics quite a bit, and who is likely to vote and note vote from the polls.

        It seems heavily poll based, plus trying to find which groups of people are not counted by the polls as much, and which are more counted. Correcting for demographics per town is big.

    • Chalid says:

      My impression is that Nate Silver (and other forecasters) are smart and are generally doing the right kinds of analysis, but they aren’t really adding that much value over basic simple polling averages, which already predict the election pretty well. They could be doing all their adjustments incorrectly and it probably wouldn’t make much difference. Certainly calling all 50 states correctly on the election eve is no big deal.

      The thing that Nate Silver did that was really genuinely impressive, I think, was declaring the 2008 primary a lock for Obama *way* before anyone else did, based on a really nice analysis of delegate math and of Democratic demographics back when he was a random diarist on Daily Kos. That’s what got him his reputation in the first place and allowed him to launch 538.

      • Anonymous Bosch says:

        My impression is that Nate Silver (and other forecasters) are smart and are generally doing the right kinds of analysis, but they aren’t really adding that much value over basic simple polling averages, which already predict the election pretty well.

        I think the value demonstrated in 2012 was pretty impressive. The RCP average on election night in 2012 was Obama +0.9, with two polls showing Romney leads and three showing ties. This led to a lot of hopeful wishcasting among conservatives while Silver’s model had it as a reasonable (>90%) lock and predicted a +2.5 popular vote advantage. This still turned out to be an underestimate but generally someone viewing the election through 538 was both more accurate and more confident than someone looking at poll averaging. Even betting markets only had Obama at -400, and if you’d taken some of the more aggressive wagers (e.g., Obama by >100 EVs) you could’ve made substantial money.

      • HeelBearCub says:

        but they aren’t really adding that much value over basic simple polling averages

        I think the concept of understanding an individual polling firms “lean” is a pretty valuable add. Yeah, that basically washes out in averages, but it really helps to put each new data point in perspective.

        If your polling average is HRC +2 and a new poll comes out that is DT +1, does it actually represent a true shift in the average? Or will it come out in the wash as we add all the other polls?

    • Edward Scizorhands says:

      He didn’t call them all. In many places he said “there is a 51% chance that this state goes X” and it did go X. This attempt to force him into this “master predictor” box that he doesn’t even want to be in is misguided.

      • Gbdub says:

        If that’s how he did it (assigned a probability to each state) then how likely would it be, using his own probabilities, that he got all 50 states “right”? E.g if 5 states were predicted “60% likely to Obama” then you’d expect 2 of them to go to Romney, meaning Silver’s model was actually under confident.

        Though actually I suppose it’s more complicated than that, states or events could be correlated (maybe “unemployment percentage of X is worth Y to Obama”, and that applies nationwide). Point is you’d have to dig deeper than “he correctly picked all 50 states!” and into the assumptions and models to find out how good of a prdiction it really was.

  19. sconzey says:

    I have some concerns about Nate Silver giving an 80 pct likelihood of Clinton winning in November. His predicted outcome is very sensitive to his assumptions.

    In 2012 polls were showing a 1-3 point lead for Obama with 1-3 pct undecided. Polls today show Clinton with a 1-5 point lead in key states with 10pct undecided and another 7-9pct voting third party. Silver assumes that the undecideds will break 50/50 in all states, and there will be a small amount of defection from third party voters to a mainstream party, which is also split 50/50.

    Small changes in how the undecideds split can completely wash out clinton’s lead in key battlegrounds, and Silver doesn’t take into account this uncertainty in his model.

    I’m curious if anyone else has noticed this. I’d feel better if there were someone else replicating Silver’s result.

    Especially as this is what caught people out about the Brexit vote and the Scottish Independence referendum– a large number of undecideds splitting disproportionately for the politically incorrect answer.

    • Deiseach says:

      Now you make me wonder: if the latest Trump scandal makes everyone assume that’s it, Hillary has it in the bag, is there a likelihood some who aren’t so enthused about her (from Berniebros to “eh, I don’t like her, but she’s our party candidate”) might decide they can afford to vote for Jill Stein or any of the other third-party/write-in candidates?

      I know Sanders’ candidacy was being blamed for potentially splitting the Democrat vote so that they’d hand the victory to whoever the Republican was. Could something like this happen – the undecideds deciding Hillary has enough votes to win so they’ll vote for the candidate they really like instead?

      • sconzey says:

        It’s a concern. There seems to be a big enthusiasm gap between Clintons and Trumps supporters– compare rally attendance.

        Clinton’s strategy seems to be to present herself as the low variance low risk candidate and hope people will put more minor policy disagreements aside to stop Trump.

        Good poll results for Clinton will demoralise Trump supporters, but they will also make Clinton’s more grudging supporters complacent about her victory. Silver adjusts polls to take account of differential turnout to give a 0.3 pct advantage to Trump. I would be surprised if the difference is that small.

        The was the other thing with Brexit– a lot of people who had never voted or don’t normally vote turned out to vote Leave, but how pollsters come up with their lists of Likely Voters is by asking ‘did you vote last time?’

        You can make an argument for this effect for both Clinton and Trump supporters but no one seems to be trying to measure it.

    • HeelBearCub says:

      538 is modeling “if the election were held today”. They aren’t trying to model what will happen to undecideds in the next month. That is a key distinction.

      • Johnjohn says:

        They make three predictions, only one of them is “if the election were held today”. One is “based on the polls, what will happen in novemenber?” and the last one is “based on the polls, and economic data, what will happen in november?”

      • sconzey says:

        I don’t think that’s right. In the polls-plus model that I refer to above Silver uses demographic data and looks at the polling trend to attempt to forecast forward to Election Day.

        He has a specific ‘now cast’ for if the election were held today.

        The other thing is that the undecideds are still likely voters. They will probably still vote even if they’ve not made up their mind at the time the poll is done.

        With the brexit polls the pollsters included ‘nudge’ questions in an attempt to measure how the undecideds were leaning. If any US pollsters do that, Silver isn’t obviously using the data.

        (Actually with Brexit the nudge questions were worse than useless. They tended to ask about risks associated with Brexit, failing to notice that both Leave and Remain voters agreed Brexit was the riskier option, only disagreed on whether the risk was worth it)

        • HeelBearCub says:

          Here is what the site says about polls-plus and polls-only:

          Polls-plus: Combines polls with an economic index. Since the economic index implies that this election should be a tossup, it assumes the race will tighten somewhat.

          Polls-only: A simpler, what-you-see-is-what-you-get version of the model. It assumes current polls reflect the best forecast for November, although with a lot of uncertainty.

          So, it assumes that the current polls are what they are, but uncertain. That isn’t really an assumption or model of how undecided’s will break. Polls plus does assume, because of fundamentals, that the race should be tighter than it is in the current polls.

    • Anonymous Bosch says:

      I’m curious if anyone else has noticed this. I’d feel better if there were someone else replicating Silver’s result.

      Sam Wang and Nate Cohn both run data models of their own that are actually more bullish on Hillary than 538. You also have prediction markets and pundit surveys, but those probably aren’t like-to-like.

    • Chalid says:

      I haven’t really dug into the details of all the various polling models out there (PEC, Upshot, Linzer/dKos, etc) but I am under the impression that 538 actually assumes *more* uncertainty about the undecided vote than the other modellers do – which is a big part of why 538 is consistently less bullish on Clinton than everyone else.

      Here Harry Enten at 538 discusses undecided voters and you can see he definitely thinks about the issues you’re concerned with. “A 5-percentage-point lead with about 15 percent of the electorate undecided or voting for a third-party candidate (about where the race currently stands) is far better than a 5-point lead with over 20 percent of the electorate undecided or voting for a third-party candidate.”

      • sconzey says:

        It’s good to see people at least mentioning the undecideds… Perhaps it’s a US-centric perspective. In the UK we’ve long had a so-called “shy Tory” effect where a lot of Tory voters tell pollsters they’re undecided. It’s what was responsible for swinging the last UK general election from Labour minority coalition which is what the polls predicted to a Tory majority. I had wondered if they might be a similar ‘shy Trumper’ effect.

        On the other hand that link says that in the US undecided voters have split evenly historically.

        • The Nybbler says:

          With the huge shame “argument” against Trump, being pushed strongly by the media (which also does the polls), I suspect there is a relatively large “shy Trumper” effect and that the latest controversy pushed it higher. Whether it is enough for him to win, I don’t know. The latest controversy pushed me from being a reluctant supporter of Trump to a somewhat less reluctant supporter of Trump; I’m tired of the shame “argument”.

          • Iain says:

            Conversely: 33% of married men say their spouse will vote for Clinton. 45% of married women say they will vote for Clinton. The shy voter argument works both ways. (source)

          • Anonymous Bosch says:

            Based on observed behavior this election cycle I have a very hard time believing that “shy Trumper” is a thing.

          • sconzey says:

            Iain: um. you know women can marry women right?

            Anonymous Bosch: that’s fair. Trump rallies seem to be a lot livelier than Tory hustings, but I don’t expect every Trump supporter goes to Trump rallies. (I certainly hope not every Clinton supporter goes to a Clinton rally or she’s shafted)

            I’d like to see a poll done with nudge questions like: “Which is a greater threat to US interests, radical Islam or Russia?” or “Which is a more important quality in selecting a president: picking a strong leader, or sending a message about the kind of country we are?”

          • The Nybbler says:

            @Anonymous Bosch

            That’s just selection bias; the Trumpers you see aren’t the shy ones.

          • Whatever Happened to Anonymous says:

            Iain: um. you know women can marry women right?

            I don’t think those cases would move the needle that much.

          • Anonymous Bosch says:

            I’d like to see a poll done with nudge questions like: “Which is a greater threat to US interests, radical Islam or Russia?” or “Which is a more important quality in selecting a president: picking a strong leader, or sending a message about the kind of country we are?”

            Breitbart/Gravis has been doing some fairly explicit push polling of late (see Wisconsin, Florida). Of course, being Breitbart, they put the post-push margins in the headline and bury the topline halfway down the article.

          • pku says:

            But you would also expect it in the primaries, and we didn’t see that.

          • Iain says:

            @sconzey: I am quite aware. There are 60 million married couples in the US. Of those, about 170,000 were same-sex couples in 2013, which is the most recent data I can find. Even if we say that number has quintupled post-Obergefell, you’re still looking at less than 1% of married women who are in same-sex relationships.

            Even beyond that: are you seriously trying to argue that there are a bunch of lesbians out there who believe that their wives will vote for Donald Trump?

  20. God Damn John Jay says:

    Question for people who are experts in this: how scientific is textual analysis? I am thinking of the Bart Ehrman style examination of biblical texts (but other examples would work too), where someone would read a passage and argue that based on the fact that something was inconvenient to the reader it was probably historical or passages that are too convenient were likely added in post hoc.

    I am wondering if these methods have ever been able to advance a new paradigm which was later verified by evidence, or if it is it just a matter of argument.

    • Gazeboist says:

      I think the argument would usually go that because some passage or stricture was inconvenient to or anachronistic for the alleged writer that it must have been added later. There’s also a substantial amount of “these passages just straight up contradict each other if taken literally” and “this chapter describes fundamentally the same events as the one before it; it was probably a separate legend later compiled” to go around.

      I don’t actually know of any verified predictions; one to check for would be the historicity of the “two kingdoms of Israel” narrative. I know one of them is generally not believed to have actually been a united kingdom, but I forget which one.

    • dndnrsn says:

      Textual analysis of the bible is basically a weird sort of algebra, when you get down to it. It isn’t scientific, because you can’t do the sort of testing that is the core of the scientific method.

      The “this is inconvenient therefore it is true” thing isn’t just for the bible; you’ll see it in court also – “I saw the accused doing the crime while I was getting super high on coke in an orgy with a dozen prostitutes” is more credible than “I saw the accused do the crime while I was walking a senior citizen across the street”.

      If we’re actually talking about the bible, a new historic discovery would be far more valuable than any amount of scholars poking about.

      • LHN says:

        One thing I’ve wondered is why they can’t at least apply the methods to modern documents and see if they work. E.g., have two or more people write documents and edit them together, and see if different (blinded) teams can a) separate them out to (more or less) the same number and content of proposed source documents and b) if the resultant documents match reasonably closely to what was edited together. That would at least be a pointer to whether the method works in principle.

        (Or has this been done? When I asked someone who worked in the field, I was told not, but that was a while back.)

        • dndnrsn says:

          I think a lot of scholars would probably not want to do this sort of thing, because it might embarrass them. The most solid textual study of the Bible is fairly boring and uncontroversial, and was largely complete by the mid 20th century, but due to the way academia works a lot of really speculative stuff gets presented as fact. There’s any number of people who will tell you they’ve figured out what was in Q… a document the existence of which is hypothetical, after all. But hey if they can move a few copies of their book…

    • M.C. Escherichia says:

      I’m not sure how many experts you’ll find here. But it’s fascinating how textual criticism lines up with evolutionary biology. You have the original source text (common ancestor) that went through a process of copying (reproduction, speciation), and alterations (mutations, selection). Mutations can be “random” (though a scribe is more likely to make certain types of mistake) or intelligently designed. Various selection pressures exist. We occasionally discover old manuscripts (fossils). And the job of the critic is to reconstruct the ancestor, via a sort of maximum parsimony approach — what sequence of events makes the most sense to explain the data?

      Since in biology we can in fact know things about what old organisms were like millions of years ago, I don’t see any fundamental impossibility in textual criticism. The sort of argument you mention is analogous to discussion of what sorts of mutations are common.

      • Randy M says:

        Since in biology we can in fact know things about what old organisms were like millions of years ago

        How do you mean? Like, find organisms that haven’t changed since then, or find fossils to examine?

        • M.C. Escherichia says:

          As well as fossils, we can also directly infer things about the common ancestors of current species, e.g. from morphology (and possibly from genetics?)… the book The Ancestor’s Tale goes into this.

          For example, it seems highly likely that the most recent common ancestor (MRCA) of all mammals laid eggs; our most distant mammal cousins, the echidna and platypus, still do this, and the likely explanation is that the placental mode of doing things evolved after the platypus and echidna had separated from the lineage that gave rise to everything else.

          More generally, the MRCA of current species surely had all the features that are common to all the modern species (e.g. the MRCA of all insects had 6 legs, we may suppose). When a feature is absent from a few members of a group, the situation depends on exactly what the relationships are (DNA analysis helps greatly with this); the evidence may support multiple independent losses, or a single loss that gave rise to multiple species, or the feature being absent in the MRCA, depending.

          The original insect was probably wingless, for instance. While there are many wingless insects today, the important fact is that the earliest-diverging insects, e.g. jumping bristletails and silverfish, are wingless. So wings evolved later, then the winged insects speciated like crazy, and then some of those species, e.g. fleas, lost them again.

          For the Bible, one wrinkle is that we’re not interested in the most recent common ancestor but the actual first organism; the text as originally written. If someone immediately came and altered it, and then every copy we had was made from that altered text, a feature shared in all later texts might still have been absent in the true original… still there’s nothing magical we can do about that.

  21. pku says:

    So, I think part of the disagreement about the Trump tape is that everyone imagines people try to signal one way: Feminists think everyone wants to signal respect for consent ideals, so they assume anyone who says something like what Trump says would only say it if it were true – after all, from that perspective, he can’t get signalling benefits from it. And the people who say “it’s locker room talk” assume people often want to signal power and influence, so they believe Trump has motivation to exaggerate how easily he’d grab a woman, because that signals strength.

    In principle, I’d be sympathetic to the second argument, except there’s enough evidence of Trump harassing women that I think that, in this specific case, he might have been both signalling and being honest about what he was doing. (Whether a candidate’s sex scandals/alleged private crimes should affect his electability is a separate conversation).

    • Philosophisticat says:

      I don’t think that makes much sense. If everyone wants to signal respect for consent ideals, why would they say what Trump says if it were true? It would be the sort of thing you would hide, rather than brag about. In fact, feminists don’t think that Trump wants to signal respect for consent ideals (or at least that he has a horrifying view of what consent ideals amount to). And feminists will be the first to point out the existence of masculine norms of sexual aggressiveness and dominance that affect how men present themselves.

      Also, you seem to think that the big dispute is over whether Trump was lying or telling the truth in making those remarks. But the more important disagreement is over whether the remarks show something reprehensible about Trump’s character. Of course, if they’re true, that’s one way they show something reprehensible. But most feminists think that it shows something bad about his character and his attitudes towards women even if he were lying in order to signal strength. Probably most of them think he is exaggerating.

      The people who say “it’s (just) locker room talk” are saying more than “he was lying when he said it” – they want to suggest that it’s a relatively normal way of talking in private between men in casual settings and shows nothing unusually bad about Trump’s character.

      • gbdub says:

        I don’t think “it’s just locker room talk”, in that it’s worse than what I’d normally expect (but men really are more crude about women in male-only settings, and I suspect women are about men as well).

        At the same time, “he’s literally admitting to sexual assault” is an overreach to me. It’s clearly a boast, and it’s clearly meant as “these women are so into power/fame that they’ll let me do anything, because they want to be with power/fame” rather than a statement that he makes a habit of randomly groping women.

        Trump exaggerates plenty. Adding hyperbole on top of that is not likely to steer you toward the truth (but it sure fires up the base I guess).

        • Iain says:

          To be fair, there have been persistent allegations that he does make a habit of persistently groping women: see, for example, this case.

          • gbdub says:

            Fair enough. And certainly, someone who assumes women are going to fall all over him (even if he’s usually right) is more likely to overstep against someone who doesn’t feel that way. Still, most critiques are focusing on the language it seems, and my objection is limited to the parsing of the quote itself.

            And anyway, if this is such a huge, disqualifying issue – why the hell is Hillary Clinton the other option? This election has been unusually bad for political consistency (on both sides).

      • pku says:

        > Probably most of them think he is exaggerating.

        I agree, but there’s a surprising number who seem like they genuinely don’t. For them, Trump would only say things like that if he was guilty.

        To clarify: I’m saying Trump values signalling other things, like strength and influence (“I can just grab women” does signal those), but doesn’t much care about signaling “consent culture”, even if he and most of his followers do agree that rape is bad. And I’m not sure feminists realize how much of what he says is the fact that he’s trying to signal in a different direction.
        To reverse the example, think of a BLM activist signalling he hates cops/the prison system. He might well say things that can be interpreted as “shooting cops is good”, especially by people opposed to his positions in the first place, because they come from a culture that values cops and don’t realize the degree to which signalling cop-hatred is a thing in some places.

        > Also, you seem to think that the big dispute is over whether Trump was lying or telling the truth in making those remarks. But the more important disagreement is over whether the remarks show something reprehensible about Trump’s character.

        I agree with this part – I should have explicitly mentioned that this is also part of the debate that is filed under a separate conversation.

        • William O. B'Livion says:

          Of course Trump is reprehensible.

          But so is Hillary.

          But which one will get away with more reprehensible behavior in office?

          • Brad (The Other One) says:

            Trump would do something stupid and maybe even a few things that aren’t and get yelled at by pop culture and the press, as was George W. Bush – and then nothing else happens.

            Hilary would get away with stuff, but no one would yell at her (beyond the usual right wrong people who are always yelling at her anyways) because we’d never find out about half of it, and the other half will have evidence tied to people who either die unexpectedly or are suddenly massively discredited.

          • The Nybbler says:

            Hillary, clearly, because she has backers in Congress and in the majority of the press. Trump is pretty much on his own.

  22. Jill says:

    I wonder what Trump will do at the next debate– punch Hillary in the face? And what excuses will Trump’s supporters give for that behavior? And what will the media then do? Get all giddy and happy because that will mean more viewers/listeners/readers of media, and thus more advertising revenue?

    • TheWorst says:

      And what will the media then do?

      Remember that the media’s incentive is always for a close race. This means that under normal circumstances they benefit from ignoring any too-inappropriate behavior on the part of whichever candidate isn’t the favorite. When doing so conflicts with their actual preferences as to the outcome of the race, their behavior sometimes gets weird. But their personal outcome is best if their disfavored candidate loses by a little.

    • Elephant says:

      All of these are good questions. (Punching: probably not, but I was genuinely creeped out by Trump closely-following-behing Clinton.) I wonder, too, about the media, which seems remarkably spineless. I don’t think it’s a conscious aim to make the race close for ratings purposes — that would take much more thought and coordination than I think is likely. Rather, I think it’s a consequence of a belief that all behaviors are ok, and that each “side” of a story gets equal weight; this is mistaken for being ethical or principled.

  23. Alex S says:

    I think Trump’s stance on ending alliances is not a reason to oppose him. There were many alliances before WWI, and we know how that turned out. One of the costs that the US pays for defending allies is the risk of being targeted in a nuclear war. As long as the US is committed to many allies, the total risk of nuclear war somewhere in the world is probably lowered by having one superpower (or not), but the chance that the US in particular goes to war seems higher because we might get dragged into defending an ally. So fewer alliances is safer for us.

    • Maven says:

      But we should definitely maintain our alliance with Japan as-is because super kawaii anime.

      • FacelessCraven says:

        It’s the only sensible course of action.

        • Maven says:

          In all seriousness, I would absolutely love to study if and how Japanese pop culture has influenced young Americans’ geopolitical views towards Japan. It could make an excellent case study in the importance of art and culture (contrary to what “le STEM is le best” types say…).

          • Lumifer says:

            young Americans’ geopolitical views towards Japan

            Direct quote from a young American on a Narita – Tokyo train: “So this is the land where schoolgirls battle invisible robots…”

          • dndnrsn says:

            Japan has a wildly outsized presence on the world stage so far as pop culture is concerned, even though the version of Japanese pop culture that most non-Japanese get is wildly different from actual Japanese pop culture.

            This is really really cool when you think about it.

          • arbitrary_greay says:

            All countries’ exported pop culture is wildly different from their actual pop culture. I love seeing the bits of “this is what they think America is like” in foreign media. Cool Japan has NOTHING on South Korea’s support of Hallyu, but there are still all sorts of articles about disdain for Koreaboos and how swathes of Korean culture are being lost in the promotion of Hallyu.

            But I would be really interested in someone documenting the rise and fall of Japanese influence on video games in America.

            Le STEM still has the most widespread influence, but its invisibility is what contributes to that. Sony and Toyota…

    • Nyx says:

      > I think Trump’s stance on ending alliances is not a reason to oppose him. There were many alliances before WWI, and we know how that turned out.

      WWII was fought for the sake of Britain’s alliance with Poland, and I think that was a worthwhile endeavour.

      • Alex S says:

        I agree WWII was worthwhile but I doubt Trump would actually end NATO. With the NATO expansions after 2000, we’re more extended than ever before.

      • Gazeboist says:

        WWII was fought for a lot of things. Poland was the proximate cause, but Austria, Czechoslovakia and direct but not strictly military conflicts with France were important as well.

      • Anonymous says:

        WWII wouldn’t have happened if WWI hadn’t.

      • TMB says:

        Was it worthwhile?

        What happened to Poland in the end?

        The only good thing to come from WW2 was the idea that we fought off the world’s worst super-baddies, and saved the world.

        It’s a really compelling idea – not a reality.

        • Montfort says:

          Really, the only good thing? There’s certainly a lot of death, destruction, pain, despair, and waste to tally up against the good, but to claim there was no good at all seems absurd. A number of certain ethnic and sexual minorities were saved from death (maybe on net, maybe not, depending on what you think happens without WW2, but still some individuals). West Germans and Italians got new governments they probably liked a little better. The UK managed to retain some diplomatic credibility. There were significant technological advances in many fields. There’s been peace in Western Europe ever since. Countries like India and Australia got their independence. It inspired tons of great wargames.

          This is a point of view that requires an actual argument, not just a bare assertion optimized for provocation.

          • TMB says:

            “A number of certain ethnic and sexual minorities were saved from death (maybe on net, maybe not, depending on what you think happens without WW2, but still some individuals).”

            This is only true in the sense that, in some hypothetical alternative reality, some of those who survived the war may well have been hit by a bus, or something.

            I can’t see how the alliance with Poland or the declaration of war did anything to help the persecuted minorities of Europe – unless we speculate that delaying a declaration of war, or avoiding it, would have somehow led to an even faster collapse of the allied powers on the continent.
            I don’t think that is likely.

            As for diplomatic credibility – the Second World War was the absolute end of Britain as even a second-rate world power. They called when they were bluffing.
            So, yes, I suppose that might be the one advantage of the Second World War, depending on your perspective – American destruction of British Imperial power. The end of independent European power.

            But, if the solution was the most destructive war ever, it makes you wonder what the problem was.

          • Montfort says:

            This is only true in the sense that in some hypothetical alternative reality, some of those who survived the war may well have been hit by a bus, or something.

            You will need to expand on this. Presumably some of the many potential victims of Nazi concentration camps were saved by the collapse of the Nazi regime, as some were still living in the camps at that time, and others were still hiding in Germany but could have been discovered. Or are you of the opinion that without WWII these organized killings don’t happen?

            I can’t see how the alliance with Poland or the declaration of war did anything to help the persecuted minorities of Europe

            This statement looks quite a bit more narrow than your original post! If you meant to say before “The only good thing about declaring WWII specifically in response to the invasion of Poland and not later was the idea that we fought off the world’s worst super-baddies, and saved the world,” then 1) it didn’t even give us that story, we would’ve come up with it anyway with a later start, and 2) I’d have to rewrite my response but their are still benefits and the destruction specifically caused by this is much lower.

            If you mean WWII didn’t help any individual potential victim of T4/Holocaust, see my response above.

            As for diplomatic credibility – the Second World War was the absolute end of Britain as even a second-rate world power. They called when they were bluffing.

            WWII did mark the end of the UK as a major power, yes, but that’s not the same as destroying their credibility. Major powers can be regarded as credible or not credible, and the same with minor powers and even third world nations. What I’m saying there is that the UK at least preserved the perception that their word was worth something.

            But, if the treatment was the most destructive war ever, it makes you wonder what the problem was.

            Yes, that’s a good question. There are many books dealing with the causes of WWII and what the various allied leaders thought they stood to gain by declaring war, and many books dealing with the legacy of WWII, so perhaps some of those would give you an idea. I’m quite confident you’ve read something on the subject, but generally it begins with the idea that it would be nice if people stopped trying to annex other people and/or destructively reorganize their economies and governments – eastern europe ended up that way anyway, but at least it didn’t last in the west.

          • TMB says:

            “Or are you of the opinion that without WWII these organized killings don’t happen?”

            I would say, that the genocide couldn’t have happened (at least on the scale it did) without war. Whether war was an excuse, or a pretext, or an actual cause of the genocide, I don’t know.

            There were also things that the Western powers could have done to save the persecuted that would have been far more effective than declaring war.

            It’s like, if there is a madman outside my house and maybe he’s got a knife and he could break in and kill my family, and I decide to pre-empt him by throwing a knife at him, and I miss, and then he uses that knife to kill half of my family before I manage to subdue him – well, in that case, I’d say the whole “throwing the knife” thing didn’t have a good outcome. And, I’d find it hard to say that subduing him after he’d killed half my family made throwing the knife a good idea.

            But maybe it’d be a good story. Especially if we assume that he already had his own knife (but we can’t really know that.)

            But, yes, I suppose the war between Russia and Germany was quite likely – but to me that’s more of your traditional pointless war. Two competing evils crushing the lives of ordinary good people. It’s “World War One, Two: This time it’s evil.”

            ” it begins with the idea that it would be nice if people stopped trying to annex other people and/or destructively reorganize their economies and governments ”

            It depends on your government. The whole destructive reorganisation worked quite well for Japan. End of Imperialism worked out badly in Africa.

            “What I’m saying there is that the UK at least preserved the perception that their word was worth something.”

            Yeah, maybe.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            I would say, that the genocide couldn’t have happened (at least on the scale it did) without war. Whether war was an excuse, or a pretext, or an actual cause of the genocide, I don’t know.

            Hitler had been quite exercised over the Jewish Menace since before he became Fuehrer. Obviously we can’t know for certain what would have happened absent WW2, but it’s certainly plausible that he’d have launched a Holocaust-like genocide anyway.

        • dragnubbit says:

          Relitigating the justness of WWII seems so far out there that it is impossible to argue on an internet message board (and therefore ideally suited for the medium). Maybe you could recommend some books that share your particular viewpoints to speed the process up.

        • William O. B'Livion says:

          So you’re saying we should have just let Japan continue to rape and pillage it’s way across Asia?

          I realize that most leftists and alt-right types are all like “F*k the Jews”, but Germany wasn’t only gassing them, they were doing a pretty good job on the Gypsies, Homosexuals (the ones that Goring wasn’t goring anyway), blacks (but then the left doesn’t really care about THEM either apparently), Communists (well, one good thing doesn’t undo a lot of bad) and generally anyone else that got on the wrong side of the government.

          Look, warfare is a time honored way of increasing the size of one’s estate. That’s fine.

          But at some point civilized people really have to put their foot down (collectively, and with an atom-bomb if need be) and insist that what you take by conquest you TREAT HUMANELY.

          I’m pretty much a battered old man (relatively), but I’d go out the back of a C130 with a rifle strapped to my back in about the time it took me to get my boots on to stop the sort of shit that was happening in Europe and Asia during WWII. Oh, and I’ve been in the US Military, worked with them or for them across 4 decades and three continents including one more-or-less war zone, so I’m not Walter Mittying. Well, not much given the state of my feet and eyes. I can carry the rifle but without a good scope I can’t *HIT* anything with it 🙂

          I think it’s a *stain* on the UN and the US that the Rwandan genocide wasn’t stopped earlier. And frankly the behavior of the UN peacekeepers alone is a reason to disband the UN, blow up the buildings, melt down that dumb ass sculpture and make the whole property an parking garage.

    • The Most Conservative says:

      Eliezer Yudkowsky says the issue is he makes it ambiguous what countries we’ll defend

      https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154650743819228

      • Alex S says:

        That was a fun read. I’m not convinced some risky ambiguity for a time is worse than a permanently flawed situation.

        • dragnubbit says:

          Only if you are equally happy with both outcomes and poised to take advantage of either.

          When it comes to the Baltics, the only good thing that could come from some probes of LGM (followed by separatist freedom fighters that are surprisingly well armed) would be a reinforcement of the ideals of NATO as Europe pulls together to respond in unison. But if you are worried the Euros might go wobbly if winter is coming and they need cheap heating oil to keep a lid on their own nationalists, then an unambiguous message to Russia is best.

          I am convinced myself of the evidence that the Kuwait invasion was a similar problem. No way Saddam does it if he knew the response was going to be Desert Storm. And the echos of consequences from that act reverberate today.

          • Alex S says:

            The ambiguity is probably bad, but if Trump’s position is that he wants to reassess NATO and for some reason add some stupid ambiguity on the Baltic states, I’m not sure the ambiguity is so high a cost that we should object. Lately the trend with NATO has been unsustainable expansion. People who want to reassess NATO and defy the “institutional inertia” leading to expansion don’t seem to come along too often. We may need to take what we can get.

      • Anonymous Bosch says:

        If I were to try summarize very briefly why Trump’s remarks on NATO crossed a HOLY SHIT line, it’d be along the lines of: “If you read the history books, you realize that it is REALLY REALLY bad to have any ambiguity about which minor powers the major powers will defend; that is how World War I *and* World War II both started.”

        I wish Eliezer would stop placing his key insights past thousands of words of unnecessary context-setting and jargon-defining. It’s a very salient point and one the “Hillary will start WW3” crowd seems to miss.

        • gbdub says:

          Not sure I buy that that’s how World War II started – the ambiguity was obviously bad for the first couple countries the Nazis absorbed, but it’s pretty clear Hitler was planning to start the war regardless. Sure, he was willing to take what the appeasers gave in the meantime, but I don’t think Poland was an “oh shit, now they’re serious” mistake.

          Hell, even WWI, was that really “ambiguity” so much as a complex (but known) web of alliances combined with some leaders itching for a fight on any pretext?

          • cassander says:

            the ambiguity in ww1 was almost entirely on britain’s end. there a foreign minister who considered it a good thing and he allowed everyone to assume what they desired, the germans that they wouldn’t come in and the french that they would. Some very firm commitments might not have stopped the war, but this policy definitely made it more likely.

        • John Schilling says:

          Hitler pretty clearly wasn’t expecting to fight a war with England and France over Poland, and I don’t think he was planning to start a war with them ever. IIRC, he assumed such a war would likely happen in 1945 or so, but I think it far more likely that the war which actually happened would have been Germany v. Russia with the western allies being pretty cool with letting those two go at it.

          The world where the western allies decide to cede Poland to the Nazis might or might not have a World War II in it, but I’m pretty sure it’s not just a slightly-modified version of our WWII delayed six months or so.

        • Lysenko says:

          The “let’s not be ambiguous about how much we’ll defend which countries” ship sailed in 2008 with regards to Russia. Possibly prior to 2008.

          We’re already in “But THIS country is different and THIS time we mean it!” territory for whatever region is the next locus of Russian hegemony-flexing.

          • Anonymous Bosch says:

            The “let’s not be ambiguous about how much we’ll defend which countries” ship sailed in 2008 with regards to Russia. Possibly prior to 2008.

            Did we have a mutual defense treaty with Georgia?

          • Lysenko says:

            We had at that point an ongoing history of military cooperation, training, and aid, and they were on the road to exactly such a treaty, which is about 75% of the reason that the Georgian-Russian war happened. South Ossetia and Abkhazia were and are fig leafs, and the decision to draw up and execute a plan for military operations against Georgia was finalized when they continued to seek (and appeared to make headway on) NATO membership.

            It was a deliberate pre-emption of any such treaty, and established that as far as Russia is concerned, they have veto power over US or NATO-led defense agreements anywhere Russia considers to be its sphere of influence. Add to that the way the security guarantees to Ukraine have worked out in practice, and you’ve got a very stark situation.

            If you aren’t already in NATO, Russia can have a high degree of confidence that it is free to act militarily and politically as it sees fit.

            In several cases, even if you ARE in NATO (I’m looking at you, Estonia and Latvia), I am by no means confident that at some point over the next 20 years a Russian leader won’t just decide that NATO and/or EUFOR will not seriously contest measures taken to, say, “protect the lives and livelihood of endangered ethnic Russians” in those countries, and decide do a bit of client state building and ‘regime change’.

            Article 5 has been invoked exactly once (by the US for OEF and the GWOT) and the result was, frankly, mostly lackluster. The countries that responded strongly and with serious commitments did so out of longstanding bilateral ties to the country doing the invocation. Even then, it was arguably a best case scenario: a country with the -most- political leverage at the time to get the rest of NATO onboard.

            Point blank: If in 10-20 years there is a flare up of Russian-Latvian or Russian-Estonian tensions and a Russian force punches out of Kaliningrad to cut off that chunk of the baltic NATO states from the rest of Europe while they scream about Article 5 at the top of their lungs…do you really think anyone except America is going to commit to go to the mat with Russia over it?

            Hell, given the way things are going, in 10-20 years do you think -America- will be willing to?

          • John Schilling says:

            We had at that point an ongoing history of military cooperation, training, and aid, and they were on the road to exactly such a treaty,

            But if the key issue is avoiding ambiguity in who we are going to defend, isn’t “we actually have a treaty” vs. “we don’t actually have a treaty” the critical distinction?

          • latetotheparty says:

            I’m sorry, but what business does the U.S. have in making any sort of commitment to Georgia (the country, not the U.S. state)? Thank goodness it wasn’t an overt military guarantee! Talk about world police! We sure are far away from “peaceful trade with all; entangling alliances with none.”

          • Lysenko says:

            John, you really think that Russian political and military leaders looked at NATO response to OEF and the GWOT, US response to Georgia, Ukraine, and Syria, and then went:

            “Nope, this tells us absolutely NOTHING about our forecasts and prior probabilities vis a vis US and/or NATO response to our actions in the Baltic or other regions.”

            ? I doubt it.

            And Late, my point is independant of my views on whether or not our recent actions were wise or not. For my part, I would prefer to see a repudiation of NATO and other collective security agreements in favor of bi-lateral alliances with minimum commitment requirements (% of budget and minimum deployable capability requirements, etc), but that’s neither here nor there. We’re stuck with the history we’ve got and our current policy stances and have to work from there.

          • Evan Þ says:

            Guess what? NATO already has a minimum commitment requirement, expressed as a percentage of GDP. I don’t think any European state’s come close to it since 1991 or so. Trump could go a long way just by declaring he’s going to enforce that.

          • Lysenko says:

            Yeah, except it’s A) a flat 2% of GDP, B) as you noted, pretty much ignored, and C) doesn’t capture the really godawful spending priorities and actual readiness levels of several member countries.

            To be more explicit, by “spending commitment” I mean “Match the partner’s spending levels”, although I could be persuaded that a per capita or per capita GDP capability requirement was acceptable.

            For example “for every X million population or Y Billion GDP, you maintain at least Z much of a military with all necessary munitions stockpiles and other logistical supports to conduct high intensity combat operations for one year from the start of hostility.”

            No battalions or squadrons with 1/2 of their vehicles and only a 1/3rd of those not deadlined or stripped for parts, but with triple or quadruple the amount of field grade officers and senior enlisted.

            For the record, the countries that currently meet the NATO spending requirements last I checked are the US, the UK, Poland, Estonia, and I think maybe Greece. Of those, I think Poland may already meet those sorts of terms, and I think the UK -could- meet those sorts of terms without too much pain (they did so prior to the 90s).

            In other words aside from Greece the same NATO members we’ve been able to rely upon -anyway-.

            France -probably- could in pure spending terms, but I’ve heard a lot of very mixed things about their real-world capabilities and readiness. Ditto Germany.

          • John Schilling says:

            “Nope, this tells us absolutely NOTHING about our forecasts and prior probabilities vis a vis US and/or NATO response to our actions in the Baltic or other regions.”

            It tells them LESS than an explicit treaty commitment would, and in the case of the Baltic states, does. If the consequences of miscommunication are a war between nuclear powers, I want the communication to be as unambiguous as possible.

            And, Evan Þ, several European states have not only come close to but exceeded the 2% requirement in recent years. The United Kingdom, because Brits just get it. Greece, because Turkey. And conspicuously present on the list are Poland and Estonia. Latvia and Lithuania are close but won’t quite reach 2% this year. If you want to argue that, on account of non-payment, the United States is not presently obligated to defend Belgium in the event of Russian invasion, OK, but the nations that are likely to actually invoke Article 5 are pretty solid.

          • Alex S says:

            Apparently Russia has been lowering the bar for its use of nuclear weapons because it thinks NATO being in the Baltic states makes it possible to invade Russia and quickly take Moscow. Trump’s language is vague. Maybe he’s talking only about ambiguity with the Baltic states, or maybe he would just boot them out of NATO. If it’s the boot, then we are better off.

    • Orphan Wilde says:

      As I understand it, there’s a lot more subtlety to Trump’s position, particularly vis a vis Russia, than is being credited.

      Specifically the issue is Ukraine, which has caused increasingly heated tensions between NATO and Russia, and which REALLY isn’t as clear-cut as “Russian aggression against Ukraine” – it was mostly down to disputes about oil pipelines Russia had treaties with Ukraine to run through the country. There are other subtleties to the whole affair, but, like most politics, it’s quite messy.

      On top of this, NATO has been expanding operations in Eastern Europe over the past few years, increasing tensions.

      Trump’s policies in that regard look more like “Re-normalize relationships with Russia” than “Screw NATO, we’re getting a bad deal”. But he’s selling the latter idea to the US public, not the former.

      • dragnubbit says:

        Attributing subtlety to Trump on foreign policy is assuming far too much. I will say it is more likely he is just applying sales-positioning techniques to world geopolitics like a neophyte, and when his short-term behavior (appease Russia) matches that of some wing of wonks they are just happy to have someone finally agree with them, even though the foundations of his analysis are no deeper than trying to win at mind games.

      • ThirteenthLetter says:

        it was mostly down to disputes about oil pipelines Russia had treaties with Ukraine to run through the country.

        Once you’re sending in the little green men and shooting down civilian airliners, arguments about oil pipelines become a lot less relevant. I can see arguments that America should or should not be getting deeply involved, but come on, let’s call a spade a spade here.

  24. Christopher says:

    I’m sorry but there is NOTHING wrong with the sentence “This is what I was just about to ask you where to find.”

    • HeelBearCub says:

      I made the point that, if it was spoken by Meg Ryan in one of her rom-com’s, the intonation and stresses would do,the work of parsing the sentence.

      Especially on paper, it doesn’t really scan correctly. Compare it to “I was just about to ask you where to find this.”

      I always sub-vocalize when I read, so that might be why I found it easier to parse than some.

  25. null says:

    Is the report button gone?

  26. Carinthium says:

    Hi. I’m trying to get up to date on what was happening r.e. Jill Stein, the reasons behind her ban, and the posts being made. Could somebody give me a little help finding the correct references please? If so, thanks.

    • Sniffnoy says:

      Er, have you confused Jill Stein, the presidential candidate, with Jill, the commenter here?

    • HeelBearCub says:

      Huh?

      @Jill is not banned, only warned. Also she is not Jill Stein (unless she has said something about herself that I am unaware of).

      EDIT: Tooo slow.

      • Carinthium says:

        Oops. My mistake. I apologise. I was in kind of a rush.

        And I meant Jill the commenter. I’m reading parts of the site trying to catch up on what happened there.

        • Randy M says:

          Jill at times accuses others of being in thrall to Objectivism; Scott is trying to curb this, or at least have her justify herself in doing so.
          Her assertions often read to me as if she is attempting to redefine the Overton window by fiat, without realizing that just labeling something far-right doesn’t make everyone here look away.

          • Carinthium says:

            Thanks for this and other views. I’m also looking for Jill’s posts, but I take these kind of summary comments into account. I’ve already seen some of her references to “Saint Ayn” and her belief that it doesn’t matter what the actual Ayn Rand said because these beliefs are ultimately rooted in Ayn Rand.

            EDIT: In particular, I got and was curious about this post.
            Rand is dead and objectivists are not a powerful force in our economy or our government. I am interested in what affects all of us in huge ways every minute of our lives, in our economy and government. And the fine points of Rand’s philosophy, and the current beliefs of a tiny group of people who currently call themselves objectivists, are not that.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Carinthium:
            That’s a reference to, or pointing at, things like Paul Ryan’s treatment of Atlas Shrugged sort of like it is a bible or a touchstone. Ryan himself doesn’t qualify as an Objectivist, so the nuances of Objectivism don’t really apply.

            The critique is more one of what I would call “bumper sticker” politics.

          • Carinthium says:

            Okay then. Thanks. Noted.

    • Paul Brinkley says:

      If it helps, my comment above might provide one answer you’re looking for.

    • Anonymous says:

      Why exactly are you trying to catch up on what’s been happening with Jill, if you can’t even tell her from presidential candidate Jill Stein, and couldn’t tell that she isn’t banned?

      I confess this is a course of action which excites my curiosity.

      • Carinthium says:

        Because the idea of a commenter being outright banned seems interesting to me, especially given I know I have a problem with not knowing enough about sophisticated leftist opinions. Without seeing for myself I can’t tell one way or the other.

        EDIT: One was me not paying enough attention, the other leaves me still interested.

        • Anonymous says:

          But there are a ton of other people who were banned at the same time, including, for one week, Scott Alexander, who runs the blog. How’d you come upon the idea to ask specifically about the one who wasn’t banned?

          • Carinthium says:

            Because of the other stuff related to it. Admittedly I’m typing very quickly right now so I apologise for any imprecision, but Jill caught my attention because of the Rand references and me wondering what was going on with it.

          • Anonymous says:

            …like a character out of alice in wonderland….

  27. TMB says:

    In my opinion there aren’t enough distributionists on this forum.

    I also feel rather put-out that I’m the only serious disciple of Major C.H. Douglas, here.

    Come on, people! “He who calls for Full-Employment calls for War!… Every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid.”

    • Randy M says:

      I miss Irenicus.

    • “I also feel rather put-out that I’m the only serious disciple of Major C.H. Douglas, here.”

      Possibly the only currency crank to generate a successful political party?

      Was Heinlein a believer in Douglas Credit? I remember bits of Beyond This Horizon that suggested it.

      • Furslid says:

        Probably for the duration of one book. Heinlein didn’t really stay consistent. I love his work for introducing various nonconformist philosophies, but it was never the same philosophy.

        He either switched his beliefs really quickly or was very good at emulating philosophies to write fiction supporting them. I enjoyed Starship Troopers, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Stranger in a Strange Land. I can’t fit them in as the same philosophy. Without the byline, I’d have a hard time believing the same man wrote them.

        • LHN says:

          He either switched his beliefs really quickly or was very good at emulating philosophies to write fiction

          While his beliefs certainly evolved dramatically over his life, the latter was a big part of it.

          It’s a pretty well-known anecdote that when Ted Sturgeon was suffering writers block, Heinlein helped him out by sending him a letter full of story ideas. The letter was published online a few years back, and one thing I found striking was his description of a local figure whose political philosophy is pretty much Prof’s in Moon (I’d be very surprised if he weren’t a direct inspiration), with Heinlein taking a rather jaundiced view of it:

          We have an anarchist running a newspaper in this town, who is opposed to public roads, public schools, public anything—he maintains that it is not ethical for a majority to do anything collectively which each individual did not already have the right to do as an individual. This is an explosive notion; a corollary is that all taxation is wrong, all zoning laws are wrong, all compulsory education is wrong, all punishment by courts is wrong. In the mean time he lives in a well-policed society, his own considerable wealth protected by all these things he deplores.

          (ISTR that Heinlein may have taken Social Credit more seriously when he wrote his first unpublished novel, For Us, the Living, but was pretty well over it by the time he did Beyond This Horizon. But it’s been a while since I read his biography, and I may be misremembering.)

      • cassander says:

        the georgists count as currency cranks, don’t they?

  28. Paul Brinkley says:

    In the Voxsplaining thread, David Friedman asked:
    “Perhaps some enterprising person could try running down one or two comment threads, classifying posters as libertarian, not libertarian, or cannot tell. Ideally the result would be reported along with the list of names and classifications, so that anyone who thought he was misclassified could say so.”

    So, I had some time to kill. I grabbed that thread, put it in a text buffer. Trimmed out every line that didn’t end in “says:”. Sorted, deduped. Then for each name, I searched for their comments and attempted to assess their attitude toward libertarianism. Some self-identified; some seemed sympathetic; some I knew from other threads; some I couldn’t tell from the text.

    Disclosure: libertarianism is probably the best one-word approximation of my political views, but I feel cheerful questioning it. I chose to err on the side of classifying as many users as libertarian as I could. If I didn’t know the user by reputation, I went by the comment content, on the premise that this would address an earlier implied claim about learning the overall bias more accurately than carefully tracking each user. Some comments were brief, and very obviously impossible to infer politics from; some were long enough that I think some people might read in a different view than I did.

    I have the data in a text file, but given the way the last two political posts went, I’m loathe, but not 100% opposed, to share it. If I did share it, it would show each poster prefixed by a letter:

    upper case = self-idenfitied
    lower case = apparently sympathetic
    L=libertarian
    R=right
    F=left
    M=free-market
    O=other (I think)
    -=can’t tell
    X=unsure, but not libertarian

    I tried to distinguish users with the same name but different gravatars. (These were typically some variation on “anonymous”.)

    There may have been an error in parsing, causing some user names to be missing. There were still over 240, making 745 comments total, so I assumed this was a reasonable slice.

    If I were to do this for other threads, I would want to improve the process – faster, more accurate. Pulling out the user names is easy; classifying them is hard, but arguably improves as a database of user names is populated, particularly by sources other than my personal estimation. More ideally, there would be two classifications: one chosen by that user, one chosen by other users assessing the former.

    Total numbers in that thread:
    135 couldn’t tell
    10 left
    1 right
    69 libertarian or free-market
    25 unknown, but not libertarian
    3 other (I think)

    • HeelBearCub says:

      I honestly don’t know whether you should or should not make the data available.

      The summary data does fit neatly into my biases without causing any cognitive dissonance.

      Except … I think 1 right can’t possibly be enough, depending on what your definition is…

      • Gazeboist says:

        Deliberately erring towards classing people as “libertarian” might be eating a whole bunch of more typical left- and right-wing posters. That particular thread was unusually high in self-identified leftists.

      • Paul Brinkley says:

        That deliberate reading in of libertarianism is but one of several possible failure modes that had occurred to me while I was reading comments. Others I thought of:

        * The obvious one is that this is me making my best guess, which is still necessarily subjective, no matter how honest I tried to be.
        * Some comments I could comfortably say were non-indicative (e.g. less than 10 words, asked a non-leading question, etc.). Others might be indicative to another reader. I didn’t distinguish these.
        * Some commenters might have a reputation from other threads that wasn’t apparent in that specific thread.
        * Partway through, I realized I wasn’t disciplined to my satisfaction in distinguishing between “free-market” and “libertarian”, so some I may have sorted another way if I re-read everything. (Edit: this is why I lumped them together in my summary above.)
        * I might have different definitions for “left” and “right” than others. In a US context, they’re squishy anyway. If we define “right” as free-market + Christian family values + pro-military, then virtually no one exhibited enough of the latter two for me to say definitively, hence only one commenter getting an “r” – and a re-think leads me to re-sort them as an “other”.
        * I have had enough exposure to intra-Republican policy differences to be reluctant to sort any one with Republican sympathies as “right”, whereas my exposure to Democratic supporters, while greater, reveals only one policy disagreement (some on the left are pro-gun rights, some are not). That means I’m more confident in sorting people as “left”. However, I still distinguished between “left” and “not-libertarian”, FWIW.

        About the only reason I’d share the data is to (1) explain the numbers I ultimately arrived at and (2) give readers a chance to amend, if they care. The results above are arguably interesting in a ballpark-y way, but the failure modes I mentioned still apply, and could make a critical difference here or there.

    • Gazeboist says:

      I’d bet that the only way to classify people is to go for either self-assessment or other-human-assessment, ideally both. It would be interesting to have a quiz service that let people categorize anonymized comments. With infinite time, I’d combine that with a system for people to box recognized usernames, and claim usernames (based on being able to summon the same gravatar). That wouldn’t get you speed, though, and it would be hard to implement.

      • Paul Brinkley says:

        This seems about fair.

        The obvious question for me is the value of doing this. The comment was in response to an assertion that SSC is mostly right-wingers – itself a very subjective assertion. The strongest opposing argument I could make in terms of the numbers is that that assertion was an example of confirmation bias, at least as far as that thread goes. It seemed much more likely that most commenters were nondescript.

        One strong supporting argument I could see for that assertion is that most of the views expressed were right-wing, but again, most of the IP packets seemed to be simply libertarian or free-market, not right-wing.

        • HeelBearCub says:

          For the moment, except for the very rare left-libertarian, libertarians are right wing (and bear in mind that this is a coalitional and relative term). Libertarians frequently object to this, but the hatred for government built into libertarian thought matches current right-wing thought too well for it not to be the case.

          • Paul Brinkley says:

            Hrmmm. Well, if libertarian=right wing, then yes, my numbers suggest it was about 2-1 right-left, as advertised.

            But as you note, libertarians frequently object to this, and I’ll add that it’s a fair objection. Libertarians don’t argue with the left about how important civil rights are, because there’s no argument there. They largely argue about economic issues, which strikes me as selection bias at work.

            And I personally think this distinction is important. If an argument is about civil rights and a liberal laments that the forum is full of right-wingers, I feel a lot more sympathetic than if the argument is about affirmative action or price controls. A complaint about right-wingers bears a wholly different tenor (to me, at least).

          • The Nybbler says:

            but the hatred for government built into libertarian thought matches current right-wing thought too well for it not to be the case.

            I think you just signed up all the totalitarians to the left.

          • hlynkacg says:

            @ Nybbler

            I think we both know what HBC meant.

          • The Nybbler says:

            @hlynkacg

            Unless it was “here’s a convenient criterion I can use to sort libertarians into the right”, I really don’t.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @The Nybbler:
            “Current right wing thought”

            The word current is doing a lot of work there. Also “for the moment”. Also “coalitional” and “relative”.

            I perhaps should add “in the US” to the list of caveats as well. The coalitions in other Western first world democracies I think are fairly similar, but once you get out of the first world I don’t believe the coalitions line up in the same way.

            You, perhaps, are miffed that I used the word “hatred” because it is too pejorative. I’m amenable to that objection, but I also think the use of the word hatred is quite defendable.

            The overall RW hatred isn’t particularly logical or coherent, but it definitely exists. And Liberterians literally refer to government action as theft and enslavement. It’s hard to argue that they do not harbor enimity towards government.

          • Sandy says:

            The third world democracy I come from has coalitional arrangements quite similar in broad strokes to those in major first world democracies; there is nothing quite like libertarianism (but then libertarianism is mostly just a white American thing), but the major right-wing party is pro-free market and privatization and the major left-wing party is pro-income redistribution and government control/mediation for utilities and services. The right-wingers are nationalists and leitkultur advocates; the left-wingers are multiculturalists and diversity advocates. On the fringes (and sometimes not so fringe) you also have fascists and communists whose politics echo fascists and communists elsewhere.

            But this is a former British colony we’re talking about, so it makes sense that political alignments there would resemble those in Anglo countries. It might be worthwhile to look at political coalitions in someplace like Japan that was never colonized, but I don’t know enough to comment on the matter.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Sandy:
            If I came off as saying you don’t ever see this latter outside the US and Europe, that was may being unclear.

            I’m thinking more of places where the factions are secular/ethnic in nature or where there is mostly single-party autocratic rule, etc.

          • The Nybbler says:

            @HBC

            My objection isn’t to claiming libertarians have a ‘hatred’ of government; I could quibble over the word but that’s not the point. My objection is to making ‘hatred’ of government sufficient to being on the ‘right’.

            Coalitionally, this characteristic of libertarians means they’ll tend to align with whoever is not in power at the moment.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @TheNybbler:
            Has that actually happened? When have the libertarians been aligned with the party that favors social-welfare?

          • The Nybbler says:

            @HBC

            When the drug war was in full swing and it was the right wing that was the main threat to civil liberties.

          • gbdub says:

            If we’re limiting ourselves to economic policy and general “how powerful should the Feds be”, then I can live with putting libertarians on the right, and in a discussion on those issues classing libertarians as rightist might be useful. But is that really the motive of most people who want to lump libertarians into the right-wing?

            “The Right” in American politics is often/usually shorthand for “the Republicans and associated allies”, and that includes social conservatives, fundamentalist Christians, neocons, pro-militarists, pro-lifers, closed-borderers, nationalists (both ethnic and otherwise), etc. – all of which are things either not central to or directly opposed by libertarianism.

            So when “right” is used to mean “the board has a lot of libertarians, therefore its right-wing, therefore I can deploy general purpose anti-Republican insults” then that’s a problem. Now HeelBearCub, you don’t do this, but others have here and elsewhere so I can see why libertarian-sympathetic posters would be sensitive about it.

          • Anonymous says:

            Do our self declared libertarians spill much ink on positions where libertarians differ from conservatives?

            I don’t see many posts in the SSC comments about the drug war, prostitution, separation of church and state, or the fourth amendment. I see plenty of posts on trade and immigration, but not much full throated support for the ostensible libertarian positions on them.

            I put a similar question to David Friedman and he had a very gracious reply where he acknowledged that there was some merit to what I was saying. He also pointed at that there was a certain amount of dog that didn’t bark — while he might not post much from the libertarian perspective where the conservative and libertarians disagree, he doesn’t post at all on the conservative side of those disagreements. It was a fair point, but nonetheless, inasmuch as a given poster rarely or never disagrees with right wing positions and often agrees with some of them, I think it is quite fair to bucket them as right wing.

          • John Schilling says:

            I don’t see many posts in the SSC comments about the drug war, prostitution, separation of church and state, or the fourth amendment.

            I also don’t see many posts in the SSC comments about the virtues of college education, first-wave feminism, or breathing. If a thing is in no way controversial, there’s not much to talk about. Your list of civil-liberties issues contains nothing controversial here, even if it would in other forums, and holding one political faction to the standard of “..and you guys must constantly reaffirm your belief in our common shared values or be cast into the Outer Darkness as Unbelievers” seems unhelpful.

          • Lumifer says:

            I don’t see many posts in the SSC comments about the drug war, prostitution, separation of church and state, or the fourth amendment.

            That’s because SSC generally lacks full-blooded conservatives so there no one to argue against.

            Anyone here wants to propose that the drug war is a good thing and we need more of that? That we should apply more law enforcement resources to stamping out prostitution? That churches (but not mosques, of course) should be granted a role in, say, writing legislation?

            Anyone? Anyone..?

          • Anonymous says:

            I don’t think those topics would be nearly as uncontroversial as you claim. We have posters that think that no-fault divorce should be repealed, I very much doubt they support legalized prostitution. We have people that condemn BLM as terrorists, somehow I doubt they are also Balko fans.

            I noticed you didn’t say anything about free trade or immigration.

            Rather than there being nothing to debate, I think the self professed libertarians don’t want to debate conservatives. They’d rather join with the conservatives to talk about where they both disagree with liberals. Which makes the original grouping quite fair.

          • hlynkacg says:

            Well I could if I really wanted to but I don’t.

          • Lumifer says:

            @ anon

            I notice that the call “Anyone?” remained unanswered. I’m perfectly willing to argue with drug warriors or people who think that a divorce should be the matter of “who do I have to fuck to make it happen?”.

          • TMB says:

            Yes, I think a drug war would be a good thing… but only if it concentrates mainly on punishing middle class drug users.

            Should the church have more of a say in legislation…? Hmmmm… no… I’m not a church-person, but I don’t think it would be a bad thing to make divorce harder.

            Prostitution – hmmm… I really don’t know. I can imagine it being quite a repellent institution, but I can also imagine it as something quite positive.

            I guess if you’re going to have sex without love, then you can’t really object to prostitution too strongly.

          • Zombielicious says:

            Every time this conversation comes up, it makes me think of that Dune quote: “What do you despise? By this you are truly known.”

            If you spend most of your time hating on the left, liberals, social justice, BLM, “tumblr communists,” “statists,” whatever, you can’t really be that surprised at people for thinking you’re a conservative or “red tribe” and grouping you as such. I find it really kind of fascinating that so many people fall into that group, but apparently feel at least somewhat slighted by then being accused of being conservatives, as opposed to libertarians or whatever. Not intended as a slight either – it’s really an interesting fact about people that took me by surprise.

          • John Schilling says:

            I don’t think those topics would be nearly as uncontroversial as you claim. We have posters that think that no-fault divorce should be repealed, I very much doubt they support legalized prostitution

            That’s precisely the sort of outgroup homogeneity bias some of us are complaining about; “X holds a particular Stereotypically Right-Wing Belief, therefore X is Right-Wing and can be presumed to hold all related Right-Wing Beliefs”.

            Taking off the blinders, cultural conservative are likely to oppose both divorce and prostitution, whereas libertarians are likely to favor the government enforcing contracts whether those are “$250 for one hour” or “till death do us part”. If you know someone’s view on divorce and want to know their view on prostitution, or vice versa, you have to ask.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @John Schilling:

            virtues of college education

            Well, that is an interesting thing to put on your list.

            The fact that the most vocal on this issue are not for, but actively against the proposition that their are virtues to a college education is one of the things that pattern maps strongly to “right-wing”.

            Edit: I mean those who are most vocal on educational issues at SSC (not generally).

          • Anonymous says:

            whereas libertarians are likely to favor the government enforcing contracts whether those are “$250 for one hour” or “till death do us part”.

            Interesting.

            Enforcing how? By specific performance? Penalizing what would otherwise be efficient breach?

          • IrishDude says:

            Do our self declared libertarians spill much ink on positions where libertarians differ from conservatives?

            I don’t see many posts in the SSC comments about the drug war,

            My post from the latest links thread, where I self-declare as libertarian, addresses the drug war as government harming poor people: https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/10/04/links-1016-new-urleans/#comment-422073

            So that’s one data point.

          • Whatever Happened to Anonymous says:

            If you spend most of your time hating on the left, liberals, social justice, BLM, “tumblr communists,” “statists,” whatever, you can’t really be that surprised at people for thinking you’re a conservative or “red tribe” and grouping you as such.

            It doesn’t seem to me like these things are as clustered as you present them, nor that it’s the same people complaining about all of them.

          • Zombielicious says:

            @Whatever Happened to Anonymous:
            Yeah, if someone just has one or two issues they dwell on, they have a much better case for saying “I’m not an X, you’ve just mistaken me for one.” I mean I’ve been called a conservative several times, for defending various things, and it’s kind of laughable. It’s only when the issues that you spend all your time ranting about do cluster together, and are all issues associated with a certain side, that your official ideology starts to seem like little more than a technicality.

            Just to clarify, I’m not going to disagree that libertarianism as a philosophy is it’s own thing that doesn’t fit well into traditional “left-wing” or “right-wing” (in the sense of U.S. politics). It just seems that most of the people who currently call themselves libertarian lean strongly to the right, and the ones who don’t seem to go by “left-libertarian” a lot instead, so that for practical purposes most U.S. libertarians can be considered right-wing. If people disagree I’m not sure it’s even worth arguing about – they clearly see themselves differently than (some) others do, so maybe it’s impolite to call them that to their faces, but it’s not really convincing enough to change my opinion over.

          • dragnubbit says:

            Since libertarians do not even agree on what libertarians believe, it is no surprise to me they must hate being lumped in with ‘the right’ (as they would if it were ‘the left’). But speaking as an outsider and from a sufficiently distant remove (say one that encompasses most strands of self-identified libertarians), it is the hatred and distrust of government that seems more unifying than a dedication to protecting individual rights (because generally when those two ideals come into conflict, such as in civil rights, consumer protection or environmental legislation, libertarians seem to break to the right).

            Sure internet libs want to fight conservatives over the drug war and liberals over speech codes. Sounds fun but for some reason the punching bag doesn’t want to play.

          • Garrett says:

            Do our self declared libertarians spill much ink on positions where libertarians differ from conservatives?

            If they came up for discussion on this board we probably would. But I think that drug deregulation/legalization/whatever is more-or-less accepted here. Scott’s commented (lightly seriously) about putting antidepressants in vending machines, so it strikes me that’s already part of the core of the board.

            Several posters have come out in favor of open immigration, though that’s been a split and a much smaller topic of discussion.

            “Family Values” – not a topic of conversation here much.
            Role of the military – not a topic of conversation much here either.

            If anything, that’s a much better argument that there aren’t any posters on the Right here, now that I think about it.

          • Psmith says:

            We’ve had a fair share of honest-to-God social conservatives of one stripe or another, but they tend to insult our host or his friends at some point and catch the banhammer.

          • IrishDude says:

            One way to differentiate libertarians and conservatives is an idea put forward by Arnold Kling, that liberals, conservatives, and libertarians speak in different languages with different axes of importance:

            The idea that different political groups are speaking past each other—in different languages, even—isn’t a new one. What’s refreshing in Three Languages is that the author actually tries to identify what those languages are. However, Kling prefers to call them “axes,” bringing to mind the image of a Cartesian coordinate system with its X, Y, and Z axes which all count the same numbers but never intersect except at the origin. Kling identifies axes of interpretation for the three dominant strains of political affiliation in America today:

            For liberals, it’s the oppressor vs. oppressed axis. They’re most interested in identifying who is abusing power (bonus points if it’s undeserved), and who are the victims of that abuse.

            Conservatives align along the civilization vs. barbarism axis. They seek to identify who is defending what our forebears built, and who are the rebels trying to tear it down.

            And for libertarians, it’s about freedom vs. coercion. In other words, who is being forced to do what they’d rather not, or being prevented from doing what they’d like, by whom.

            As an example of how this can manifest itself:

            If you identify as one of those groups, Kling argues, your tend to frame issues in terms of your preferred axis. Take for example the legalization of marijuana. I can imagine a kind of dialogue:

            Liberal: The government’s War on Drugs has devastated urban poor communities. This is clearly an issue of oppression, and and if you disagree you must just be okay with oppression.

            Conservative: I don’t know what you’re talking about. This is clearly an issue about maintaining order, and if you disagree then you’re arguing for anarchy.

            Libertarian: You’re both wrong! This is about defending one’s sacred freedom to smoke whatever one likes as long as it’s not hurting anyone else. If you disagree, you must hate freedom.

            The three languages often leads to people of different political persuasions speaking past each other.

            Source for the above quotes: http://www.stevegrossi.com/on/the-three-languages-of-politics

            Edit: A nice EconTalk episode with Arnold Kling on this topic: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2013/06/kling_on_the_th.html

          • John Schilling says:

            Enforcing how? By specific performance? Penalizing what would otherwise be efficient breach?

            For the contract with the specific monetary value, the obvious enforcement mechanism is for the court to collect the disputed sum and award it to the aggrieved party. That’s obviously an imperfect solution for a faltering marriage, but alimony and child support at least ought to factor in to the analysis.

            Was much easier when there was a dowry the aggrieved groom could keep or the aggrieved bride’s family demand be returned, but I don’t think even the Death Eaters want to turn the clock that far back.

          • IrishDude says:

            @dragnubbit

            it is the hatred and distrust of government that seems more unifying than a dedication to protecting individual rights (because generally when those two ideals come into conflict, such as in civil rights, consumer protection or environmental legislation, libertarians seem to break to the right).

            It’s not always clear how best to protect individual rights given that business owners are individuals with rights too. For example, supporting business owners’ right to discriminate, in my opinion, is consistent with support for individual rights.

          • a non mouse says:

            Anyone here wants to propose that the drug war is a good thing and we need more of that? That we should apply more law enforcement resources to stamping out prostitution? That churches (but not mosques, of course) should be granted a role in, say, writing legislation?

            I would defend all of those propositions (some more seriously than others) but as this is almost exactly the one year anniversary of the reign of terror which began by banning someone who did exactly that I’ll decline.

            The reason there is no one on the right here outside of libertarians (who are only considered “on the right” in the world view of progressives who see all non-progressives as evil fascists) is because Scott keeps banning them.

            There are reasonable, well thought-out arguments in favor of each of those propositions – but you can’t read them here.

          • caethan says:

            I’m 3 for 4 on your “conservative vs. libertarian” issues.

            Yes on the drug war, yes on prosecuting prostitution, yes on church-state separation is overly stringent, no on… whatever you think conservatives think about the 4th amendment.

            I’d be happy to argue the conservative side on any of those, and I’d bet you $50 David Friedman or any other libertarian on the board would be on the other side.

          • dragnubbit says:

            @ irishdude

            I agree there is an individual rights interpretation (e.g. the right for one individual to deny services to another might exceed the right of the second individual to receive said services). But it generally comes off as motivated reasoning to me because it hides the societal component (enabling and protecting of modern markets is not achievable by individuals) when it is inconvenient to admit there might be a social contract involved, and that the cost being asked of one side of the social contract (equal treatment of all customers) is quite reasonable in context of the harm being contemplated (potential division of society along ethnic or other boundaries). But trying to argue the validity of that social contract, or any obligation a seller owes to the society at large that protects his market is an argument that cuts to the heart of libertarian philosophy so is a hard place to enter. I find it is more convenient for libs to ignore that no-go zone and pretend it is just a disinterested transaction between equal parties with no broader harms involved.

            Thus bringing the lib who defends discrimination into the same mode of thinking as conservatives seeking to preserve class/gender/whatever distinctions and privileges – that there is no valid obligation on their part on behalf of the larger society, and thus government should not aim to create one.

            PS I should get some libertarian extra credit for not invoking natural rights!

          • HeelBearCub says:

            (who are only considered “on the right” in the world view of progressives who see all non-progressives as evil fascists)

            ….

          • William O. B'Livion says:

            To the extent that Libertarians object to being labeled “right wing”, they do so for one of three reasons:

            * Generally the “Left” assumes that Fascism/Nazis are the “other extreme”, and calling Libertarians “right wingers” equates them with Nazis and Fascists. To Libertarians (to the extent that I can speak for them) Nazis and Fascists are essentially kissing cousins to Socialism and Communism (giving the latter a bit of tongue for it’s record on killing undesireables) and they really want nothing to do with either Nazis/Fascists or Socialists/Communists. I get not wanting to be associated with Nazis or Communists.

            * Some Libertarians object purely on the philosophical grounds of being stuck on a 1 dimensional axis and INSIST on that diamond shaped thingy.

            * This is Libertarians we’re talking about. Whenever you try to divide them binarialy one INSISTS he’s not in either of those buckets and makes up some crazy shit to prove you wrong. So you must include at least one bucket labeled ‘other’. This is that bucket.

            Now, I’m not officially a Libertarian at the moment, but I pretty much agree ideologically with them on most issues if you include the time axis (for example, I’m perfectly willing to stop enforcing borders IN TIME once every government big enough to do me any damage has fallen to libertarian brethren. Until then I’d prefer people who want to vote for my government to give them my money be forced to wait in line to come here, and jump through hoops to live here, and THEN have to put out effort to vote here. And that go for mexicans just as much as those border jumping Canadians).

          • David Friedman says:

            “Yes on the drug war, yes on prosecuting prostitution, yes on church-state separation is overly stringent, no on… whatever you think conservatives think about the 4th amendment.

            I’d be happy to argue the conservative side on any of those, and I’d bet you $50 David Friedman or any other libertarian on the board would be on the other side.”

            Risky. I don’t have strong views on just how stringently the church/state division should be interpreted.

            I have occasionally argued that a consistent application of current standards would make separation of church and state inconsistent with the existence of a system of public schools.

            Which, I concede, is an argument for interpreting it stringently.

          • Anonymous says:

            Was much easier when there was a dowry the aggrieved groom could keep or the aggrieved bride’s family demand be returned, but I don’t think even the Death Eaters want to turn the clock that far back.

            Why would you think so? That seems like something the Death Eaters would support – treating marriage like a serious transaction with duties and restrictions on both sides, rather than a generic, “official lovers” status.

            Hell, for some, this might be too degenerate, for its deviation from for-life-we-mean-it, with the legal option of forcing compliance on pain of jailtime/whipping/what-have-you.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            I have occasionally argued that a consistent application of current standards would make separation of church and state inconsistent with the existence of a system of public schools.

            I’d be interested in reading that argument, if you have a link.

          • David Friedman says:

            My argument on the inconsistency between public schooling and a strong reading of church/state separation is at:

            http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2010/10/separation-of-church-and-state-or.html

          • IrishDude says:

            @dragnubbit

            But it generally comes off as motivated reasoning to me because it hides the societal component (enabling and protecting of modern markets is not achievable by individuals)

            Individuals each with their own set of rights can come together voluntarily in groups to ‘enable’ and ‘protect’ markets.

            when it is inconvenient to admit there might be a social contract involved

            Is there a social contract or isn’t there? If it exists, can you describe how it was agreed to and what the parameters of the contract are?

          • “but the hatred for government built into libertarian thought …”

            I don’t know if it is evidence for or against the claim, but Murray Rothbard did complain, in print, about my failure to hate government.

            My (much later) response.

        • Gazeboist says:

          I’m just kind of intrigued by the big pile of data you could get: how people view each other, how people view themselves, how they sort into clusters of agreement (or don’t!), …

          • Paul Brinkley says:

            Oh, that. Hmm. I admit, the data collector in me would enjoy that. Pragmatically, though, I can’t help but think such an effort would be so fraught with measurement error that I wouldn’t be able to infer anything meaningful from it.

    • Anonymous Bosch says:

      I’m somewhere in that fuzzy pragmatic area between neoliberal and libertarian. I’ve experienced libertarian tribalism firsthand and while it’s smaller than blue-red tribalism it’s every bit as destructive to reason so I probably spend an inordinate amount of time criticizing libertarians for someone who wouldn’t object to being identified as one.

      • William O. B'Livion says:

        Anybody capable of looking in the mirror can criticize their own image far better than a stranger could.

  29. onyomi says:

    I had forgotten about this reason to vote for Johnson, even if you are less than impressed by his foreign policy knowledge. Arguably even Democrats might desire this outcome if it turns out to be true that a stronger LP comes more at the expense of the GOP.

    • LHN says:

      If nothing else, the entertainment value of Libertarians arguing over/having to justify to themselves taking federal campaign funds should be worth it.

      (I’m voting for Johnson and would be happy to see a stronger libertarian presence in politics. But the irony is hard to escape, no matter how easy it may be to justify on pragmatic grounds.)

      • Orphan Wilde says:

        Ayn Rand effectively addressed this decades ago: There’s nothing inconsistent about libertarians availing themselves of the same benefits the rest of society gets, given that they’re having to pay for them anyways. To demand that libertarians both pay for social benefit X, and then deny themselves the same, is demanding that libertarians punish themselves for their ideology.

        It’s fully ideologically consistent to take advantage of social benefit X while demanding that it no longer be offered. Indeed, demanding a benefit you never utilize be taken away from other people who do utilize it is a weak moral position, relative to demanding a benefit you yourself enjoy be ended for society’s greater good.

  30. onyomi says:

    Are there any good arguments for the Copenhagen interpretation of ethics?

    • BeefSnakStikR says:

      I’ve never heard of this before, so I’m going from this definition:

      The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics says that when you observe or interact with a problem in any way, you can be blamed for it. At the very least, you are to blame for not doing more. Even if you don’t make the problem worse, even if you make it slightly better, the ethical burden of the problem falls on you as soon as you observe it. In particular, if you interact with a problem and benefit from it, you are a complete monster.

      Source

      Well, if it’s purely descriptive, it seems half right. People will receive blame if they observe or participate in a situation, and won’t receive attention if they don’t observe or participate. It seems shortsighted in that people obviously receive praise–not just blame–all the time for noticing or participating in a situation.

      As something to inform your choices, I can’t imagine how that would even work. If your maxim is to achieve ignorance, people can inform you of (or show you) a situation–that’s not your choice. If your maxim is to defend yourself against blame, people can still blame you–that’s not your choice.

      At best, you could choose your social circles for what ethical demands they put on you, I guess, and that would affect your ethical decisions.

      But why would you do that unless you already knew what you wanted not to be blamed for?

      eg. Why would you avoid talking to MADD activists unless you already believed or knew (ie. observed) that they would blame you for drunk driving?

      • onyomi says:

        I mean, a prescriptive argument for why it may be good in some cases.

        To elaborate somewhat, as a libertarian, some variation on Copenhagen-style ethics seems to always pop up as the reason Why We Can’t Have Nice Things. In the discussion of immigration above, for example, people who are content with immigration and labor policies which prevent e. g. poor Haitians from coming to the US for work would no doubt be horrified and full of opprobrium if we allowed them to come here and live among us, essentially, as second-class citizens with no right to vote, receive government benefits, and able to work, e. g. at below the minimum wage (though that is actually a right they’d gain, in a sense).

        But I’m sure there are plenty of Haitians who would be thrilled to take that deal. But no, because Copenhagen ethics. Once we get involved and let them in we have to treat them with all the dignity and respect we accord our own, but if we just keep them away and don’t get involved we’re pretty much fine with them eating dirt.*

        There are many other examples: no one blames you for not starting a company or not hiring new employees, but once you start a company and hire people you have to pay them a “living wage,” etc. No doubt this is descriptively true of many, maybe most people, but I’m asking whether it is ethically defensible.

        Of course, one can’t be held morally responsible over situations where, due to lack of knowledge or ability, it was impossible to help: you might be culpable for failing to rescue a drowning child right in front of your face while not responsible at all for failing to rescue a drowning child on the other side of town. You are, of course, extra culpable if you pushed the child into a lake.

        Maybe the pro-Copenhagen argument would be that, by allowing e. g. the Haitians to come here, we are, in essence “pushing them into the lake.” We weren’t involved, but now that we got involved, we have to take responsibility for the consequences. Ditto Wal Mart or whoever it is we’re demanding pay a “living wage.” They didn’t have to hire, but once they did, they were responsible for upholding certain standards in employer-employee relations.

        The difference in my view, though, is that assuming Wal Mart isn’t holding anyone hostage and the Haitians can, if they decide they’ve made a mistake, go back to Haiti (a bigger “if,” admittedly), then there is no sense in which the employee or the immigrant is a “victim,” since they still are better off than otherwise, even if not as well off as we like to see people being in our backyard. And, of course, no one “pushes” them, either, assuming they chose to immigrate or take a job.

        There are many other areas I’m sure this applies to–“price gouging” for example, so I made the original post a bit vague, as I was hoping not to narrow the discussion just to a few areas. The above are just examples; what I want to know is, are there good arguments in favor for Copenhagen prescriptivism, if not in the above cases, then in any cases? There may well be, though not so much off the top of my head.

        *In looking for a link to a story I had previously read about Haitians being so poor they resort to eating “cookies” made primarily of dirt, I found this video claiming it is actually viewed as a kind of health food which people eat even when not desperate. Which is not to say poverty in Haiti is not a severe problem, of course.

        • FullMeta_Rationalist says:

          The last time we discussed Price Gouging, David Friedman linked to his paper Economics and Evolutionary Psychology, which included an explanation of Just Prices.

          My first reaction is “this is a solved problem, so idk why this is relevant to Copenhagen Ethics.” My second reaction is “Maybe there’s a common thread between the two, and I haven’t thought of it yet.”

        • FullMeta_Rationalist says:

          The last time we discussed Price Gouging, David Friedman linked to his paper Economics and Evolutionary Psychology which includes a section on Just Prices.

          My first reaction is “Price Gouging is a solved question, why is this relevant to Copenhagen Ethics?” My second reaction is “Perhaps the two share a common thread, and I haven’t thought of it yet.”

        • FullMeta_Rationalist says:

          The last time we discussed Price Gouging, David Friedman linked to his paper Economics and Evolutionary Psychology [0] which includes a passage on Just Prices.

          My first reaction is “Price Gouging is a solved question, why is this relevant to Copenhagen Ethics?” My second reaction is “Perhaps the two share a common thread, and I haven’t thought of it yet.”

          [0] The spam filter rejected the link. Here’s the ROT13. uggc://qnivqqsevrqzna.pbz/Npnqrzvp/rpba_naq_riby_cflpu/rpbabzvpf_naq_riby_cflpu.ugzy

          • roystgnr says:

            Price gouging is absolutely an application of Copenhagen Ethics. The price I would charge to bring generators to hurricane victims is much higher than they would be willing to pay even during the state of emergency, so I don’t bother to fill a truck full of generators to resell and “price gougers” do, so they go to jail and I don’t. Price gouging laws purport to condemn high prices, but the effect is exactly the opposite. People with low enough sell prices that they could find buyers go to jail, because at that point they’re interacting with the ethical dilemma. People with even higher sell prices, like me, aren’t tempted to interact with the problem, do nothing helpful, and so stay home scot-free.

          • Jiro says:

            That just means that the price gouging limit is set too low. If it takes 10x normal price to induce people to bring generators to a disaster area, but it doesn’t take $10000-plus-a-slavery-contract to induce people to bring generators to a disaster area, then set the gouging limit so that 10x normal price is okay, but slavery contracts aren’t.

            (And if your reply is “in that case, people selling them for slavery contracts would be outcompeted by people selling them for 10x normal price, then gouging laws shouldn’t concern you in the first place since if properly designed they shouldn’t harm anyone. Also, you’re forgetting risk aversion: the two generator salesman may not be present everywhere at exactly the same time and someone who meets one won’t know how long it will be before the other comes around, or even if there will be another.)

          • onyomi says:

            And just set minimum wage low enough that it doesn’t cause any unemployment. At which point the law is pointless.

          • Jiro says:

            People in a disaster area really aren’t in a position to be doing comparison shopping unless the dealers are all right next to each other. And unless there are so many generator sellers that they can’t each get a separate sales area, they won’t be right next to each other.

          • onyomi says:

            People making laws about what constitutes an acceptable level of “surge” pricing and what constitutes evil “price gouging” will also not be in a position to know what price level will be enough to ensure demand is met. If they set it too low, it’s harmful. Too high and, again, pointless.

          • William O. B'Livion says:

            @Jiro:
            > People in a disaster area really aren’t in a position to be
            > doing comparison shopping unless the dealers are all right next
            > to each other

            Sure they are. Up to about 24 hours before the disaster hits.

            Most of the “disaster areas” in the US are *statistically* predictable. If you live along the coast from NYC to Houston you will, every X years get it with SOME sort of hurricane or other ocean induced heavy weather.

            If you live between San Diego and the Aleutian Islands you really ought to expect the occasional hurricane.

            If you don’t expect these sorts of things, and you don’t prepare for these sorts of things you’re that limping antelope that the herd is always in front of.

            I’m not talking about being a gold hoarding prepper, just realizing that sometimes your car winds up in a ditch and you should have both health and car insurance.

          • Jiro says:

            People making laws about what constitutes an acceptable level of “surge” pricing and what constitutes evil “price gouging” will also not be in a position to know what price level will be enough to ensure demand is met.

            They can adjust the gouging law based on past disasters.

            If they set it too low, it’s harmful. Too high and, again, pointless.

            But “too low” and “too high” doesn’t cover the entire spectrum.

            If you don’t expect these sorts of things, and you don’t prepare for these sorts of things you’re that limping antelope that the herd is always in front of.

            Protecting human limping antelopes is almost the entire point of anti-gouging laws. It’s an observed fact that people act in irrational ways, and end up needing protection.

            Also, there may be cases where people need to make decisions like “should I eat today and gamble on there not being a disaster, or should I insure myself against a disaster by buying disaster insurance, and not eat?” (Note that the insurance will total to more than the non-gouge price of the generator, so it isn’t correct to say “if they can’t afford insurance they can’t afford a generator anyway”.)

          • onyomi says:

            Because past disasters are always a perfect indicator of what future disasters will be like?

            How are “too high” and “too low” not the entirety of the spectrum for a price gouging law? There’s only three possibilities: you set the limit exactly right or too high and it is pointless, you set it too low and it prevents some demand being fully met. “Protecting” people from voluntary transactions during disasters doesn’t sound like the kind of “protection” I’d want–and I have been in a disaster situation.

            You’re “double counting” the fact that people are more desperate and have less ability to comparison shop during a disaster. That’s why they’re willing to pay more than usual. Which is the incentive for producers to bring in more than usual/deal with the challenges inherent in providing something under disaster conditions.

          • Jiro says:

            How are “too high” and “too low” not the entirety of the spectrum for a price gouging law?

            They are the entirety if the world is full of rational people who all bought generator-in-disaster insurance. That is not what the world is actually like.

            You’re “double counting” the fact that people are more desperate and have less ability to comparison shop during a disaster. That’s why they’re willing to pay more than usual.

            No, I’m not. The problem is that being unable to comparison shop means that the market won’t work–you have to either accept the offer from the guy selling you water/a generator for a slavery contract, or you die. Competition won’t drive the price down if there is no ability to comparison shop.

          • onyomi says:

            “They are the entirety if the world is full of rational people who all bought generator-in-disaster insurance. That is not what the world is actually like.”

            What is the fourth possibility?

            “The problem is that being unable to comparison shop means that the market won’t work.”

            If a single seller is enticed to make goods available by the prospect of being able to charge exorbitant prices for them due to the fact that there are no other sellers, then that is an example of a market working. Having some of x available at an exorbitant price is a market improvement over having none of x available at any price.

          • Jiro says:

            Having some of x available at an exorbitant price is a market improvement over having none of x available at any price.

            That’s not true because it ignores the impact of incentives. If it is illegal to sell generators for slavery contracts but legal to sell them for 10x normal price, the person who is the sole provider of generators to the area in an emergency will be incentivized to sell them at 10x price rather than for slavery contracts.

          • Orphan Wilde says:

            Eh. Incentives work both ways.

            The nice thing about “price gouging” is that it prevents stockpiling. Rations are a largely ineffectual runner up there.

          • Skeltering Lead says:

            @Jiro:
            It sounds like you’re assuming a monopoly – if I can be confident no one else will show up to my local disaster area and I own all the generators, then yes I may charge inefficiently high prices for them (e.g. the slave contracts). However, if the price gets high enough, onyomi is going to load a U-haul full of generators, come into town and undercut me by only charging only 10x the normal price.

          • Jiro says:

            It sounds like you’re assuming a monopoly

            Correct, because onyomi thought that the inability to comparison shop wouldn’t matter, so my answer was conditional on being unable to comparison shop.

          • onyomi says:

            @Jiro

            I didn’t say inability to comparison shop doesn’t matter. But being able to choose between one greedy supplier and not buying is still more of an ability to compare than having no choice at all. From the perspective of the buyer 2 suppliers>1 supplier, but 1 supplier>0 suppliers. If crazy prices are what is necessary to attract 1 supplier when there would have been zero, then market incentives are still functioning.

            Supply increases to meet demand. The fact that demand is higher due to desperation doesn’t change that fact, and to the extent consumers are desperate, the profit incentive for suppliers will be that much higher, meaning it’s that much less likely there will be one or zero providers to choose from. Price ceilings create shortages, not only because there’s less incentive to supply, but also because there’s less incentive for consumers to economize, conserve, and substitute.

            If there is a price ceiling but no shortage that means it had no effect because supply was enough without exceeding it. If there is a price ceiling and a shortage it means some people who would have been willing to pay go without. Being in favor of any price ceiling amounts to preferring that some people willing to pay go without sooner than some people pay more than you think is reasonable. It’s substituting your judgment of how much a reasonable price is for that of a buyer who may be in desperation.

          • Jiro says:

            But being able to choose between one greedy supplier and not buying is still more of an ability to compare than having no choice at all.

            Choosing between a greedy supplier and not buying is better than having no choice, but because of incentives, banning the greedy supplier won’t lead to no choice. He’ll still come, he’ll just lower his price to something less greedy.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            How do you know he will still come? If the normal price for a generator is 100 quatloos and he figures he will come down and sell them for 110 quatloos, which we would say is entirely reasonable and not gouging at all, how does he know he won’t get arrested anyway?

          • onyomi says:

            @Jiro

            Saying that there won’t be a shortage despite a price ceiling is just to assume that you won’t set the price ceiling too low. Which you can’t be sure of in advance, because every disaster is different.

            You can guess based on previous disasters, but if you guess too low the result will be shortages. Having any ceiling whatsoever, therefore, is precisely equivalent to saying “we’d rather people willing to buy go without sooner than allow them to pay more than x.” What you are saying is not that consumers need to be protected from greedy providers under disaster circumstances, but that they need to be protected from themselves.

            And this is why I say price gouging laws, like minimum wage laws, are an example of Copenhagen ethics: the provider who never comes, because the possibility of profit wasn’t high enough to entice him, never gets blamed, but the person who gets involved and does help, but in a way we don’t approve of, is blamed, with the result that many possible win-win voluntary transactions are prevented from happening.

            Saying “people will still supply all that is needed during a disaster despite the price ceiling; they just won’t make such an undue profit” is precisely equivalent to saying “employers will still hire just as many people if we [raise the minimum wage, mandate paid family leave…], they just won’t make as much profit.” And incorrect, factually, and, in my view, ethically, for the same reason: it gives people who aren’t involved a pass while holding those who do help, but, in our opinion, not enough, to an unfair standard, resulting in preclusion of voluntary, win-win interactions.

            Another example: laws against selling organs. The only good argument I can think of here is the possibility of scary unintended consequences, like an increase in people being mugged and waking up in a bathtub of ice, or an increase in unjust application of the death penalty (as, I think, has happened in China already, to some extent). But that’s not the usual argument against it: the usual argument against it amounts to “we have to protect poor people from making deals we don’t think they should make. i. e. protect them from themselves.”

          • Jiro says:

            Saying that there won’t be a shortage despite a price ceiling is just to assume that you won’t set the price ceiling too low.

            Remember, this is conditional on the customer not being able to comparison shop. If there isn’t a price ceiling, there’s nothing to keep the seller from raising his price to 10 times the price that would incentivize him to bring in the generators, or 100X, or whatever multiplier a slavery contract is, as long as it’s something that the customer can pay at all. So you’ve got a really wide range of values in which to put your price ceiling–“1x incentivizing price” and “slavery contract” are pretty far apart.

            Having any ceiling whatsoever, therefore, is precisely equivalent to saying “we’d rather people willing to buy go without sooner than allow them to pay more than x.”

            It is a common libertarian fallacy to insist that if X is better than no-X, banning X makes people worse off. Banning X will make people worse off in the scenario where they are offered X, but it can also create incentives that reduce the frequency of that scenario in the first place.

            precisely equivalent to saying “employers will still hire just as many people if we [raise the minimum wage

            People can comparison shop for jobs. Furthermore, wages are often a significant percentage of the employer’s cash inflow, in which case the curve balancing the wage and the number of employees hired is relatively steep. The curve between how many sellers you’d get if they could just charge 10x normal price, and how many you’d get if they could charge slavery contracts is not going to be very steep.

          • onyomi says:

            @Jiro

            Slavery is already illegal in all cases independent of price gouging laws and, like the organ selling case, there are many arguments unrelated to Copenhagen ethics against it. So to keep bringing it up when I never mentioned it is muddying the waters.

            If we replace “slavery” in your example with “really, really high prices,” which is what is at issue in discussion of price gouging, there is no reason to expect a steep curve at some particular point, or that you could accurately predict where it will be.

            Where there is a very steep drop off, of course, is wherever one puts a price ceiling or floor. And the ones who fall on the wrong side of that cliff are likely to be the most needy, unfortunate, or desperate. The rest of the curve might shift up slightly due to this cutoff, but at the expense of the most desperate and probably not in the long run, since e. g. more labor regulations discourages future employers and more price ceilings discourages future suppliers.

          • Jiro says:

            Slavery is already illegal in all cases independent of price gouging laws

            That’s a matter of semantics. You could just as well describe the anti-slavery law as a price gouging law that applies both in and out of disasters.

            there are many arguments unrelated to Copenhagen ethics against it

            Copenhagen applies to slavery just as to high prices: as long as you only allow slavery when the contract is voluntarily signed, someone would only sign the contract if he would be worse off without it than with it. Objecting to this is Copenhagen ethics.

            there is no reason to expect a steep curve at some particular point, or that you could accurately predict where it will be.

            Yes, there is. In the minimum wage case, the wages are often a substantial portion of the employer’s budget. So having to pay higher wages drastically affects the relative desirability of situations that contain different numbers of employees. In the disaster scenario, you’re only going from “very very profitable” to “very profitable”. which does not drastically affect the relative desirability (to the salesmen) of situations that contain different numbers of sales. I find it implausible that in a realistic situation selling some generators at 1000x price (or slavery contracts) are much better to the salesman than selling nothing, but selling the generators at 10x price is much worse than selling nothing.

          • onyomi says:

            I agree there are Copenhagen grounds to objecting to voluntary slavery contracts, but there are also lots of other, unrelated grounds as well, which is why it confuses the issue.

            If you’d like to discuss whether or not it should be legal or ethically permissible to voluntarily sell oneself into slavery, which is an interesting but more complicated question, I’d suggest starting a new thread in a newer OT.

          • Doctor Mist says:

            @Jiro-

            But, can’t you see: The possibility that he might be able to get 100X is exactly what causes there to be more than one vendor who loads up his stuff and tries to make a killing, which is precisely what keeps the actual price closer to 10X.

            When you insist that the hypothetical is that “there is no price ceiling” but “the consumer cannot comparison shop”, you might as well be saying “the price is odd” but “the price is even”.

        • BeefSnakStikR says:

          what I want to know is, are there good arguments in favor for Copenhagen prescriptivism, if not in the above cases, then in any cases? There may well be, though not so much off the top of my head.

          I still hold that it’s impossible to choose to ignore having knowledge of things, but that it’s possible to choose to gain knowledge.

          The best a Copenhagen could hope for, I’d say, would be to choose situations that allow you to ignore things. That sounds like damning with faint praise, but I could see it being useful.

          Say someone asks you to smuggle a vial of something across a border. If you don’t know whether you’re smuggling illegal drugs or a government-suppressed cancer cure, then (A) not smuggling it is equally as moral as (B) smuggling it.

          If it’s impossible to gain more knowledge, then Copenhagen is a pretty useful justification for either action–A or B–even if it doesn’t prescribe either action.

          That’s assuming your concern is with interfering. A totally separate question whether having knowledge is ethical:

          (C) Knowing whether the vial is a drug or medicine is better than not knowing
          (D) Not knowing whether the vial is a drug or medicine is better than knowing
          (E) Knowing it’s either a drug or medicine is better than knowing which one
          (F) Knowing it’s neither a drug or medicine is better than knowing which one

          I’d say D, E, and F, contain variants of the Copenhagen interpretation. Even if common sense says C is the best, then you can still argue than one of D, E, or F is second-best. That counts for something.

    • FullMeta_Rationalist says:

      I hypothesize that it’s an extension of “With great power comes great responsibility.” If I see Alice interact with Problem_X, this proves to me that Alice has power over Problem_X. Therefore she is responsible for solving Problem_X. If I don’t see Alice interact with Problem_X, then Plausible Deniability acquits her of the suspicion that she might be deliberately ignoring Problem_X.

      Perhaps it makes Tragedies Of The Commons more soluble. E.g. I remember some news article which was surprised that the Japanese section of the (idk, FIFA World Cup?) stadium was uniquely devoid of litter. Like, maybe the threat of blame (or sense of duty) motivated them to pick up the litter in their vicinity.

      The downside is that individuals are more likely to ignore a problem entirely, if they can get away with it. I bet it’s one of those things that worked well in forager bands, but doesn’t scale as well in today’s world. Because “problems” were more obvious and tangible in those days, and therefore more difficult to plausibly ignore.

      But since the modern world’s problems are often abstract, false-negatives (wrt “dereliction detection”) occur with increased frequency and therefore bear a larger societal-cost (e.g. the costs of our immigration policy to Haitians), which might warrant a more fit ethical-strategy.

      • Jiro says:

        One rebuttal to the Copenhagen Interpretation of ethics

        (Also note that he doesn’t say this, but this is equivalent to precommitment.)

        • Anonymous says:

          just to be clear: this is a rebuttal to the essay by that title, not to CI itself; rather it is a defense of the CI.

        • Held in Escrow says:

          That’s not a particularly good argument; he’s got the seeds of one (ish) but goes off on a tangent and only returns to this at the very end. There are two main issues; first, that moral approval is binary. It’s not; people care less if you help one person tab if you help 10 than if you help 10000.

          Second, the idea that this is an ultimatum game is wrong. It feels like this should be the right metaphor, as people are rejecting Pareto Improvements, but the comparison doesn’t hold up. The offerer doesn’t get either their offer accepted or nothing because they can choose not to play and keep the money they would have invested.

          Rather, in defense of CI, let’s move from the bargaining chip idea into having this be a full trade metaphor. Public society puts a price on moral approval. You must pay us at least X, to make up for what are effectively transaction costs, before we give you approval. Attempts to make an end run around this are met with automatic disapproval, such as PETA’s where they weren’t actually bargaining for moral approval but trying to skip right past it to getting their result. A poison pill strategy.

          This still doesn’t actually explain the other examples. In fact the “market structure” argument falls flat against the Uber surge pricing because that’s a case where market structures are actually being used to close the gap.

          The simple explaination is that people dislike those who see slimy and willing to obviously take advantage of bad situations because it’s defecting in the collective action problem called life. If they’re willing to be so obviously self centered in a crisis (as people don’t think about those that don’t get involved) as to spin the crisis to being about them then they probably act terribly outside of crisis.

        • onyomi says:

          That rebuttal actually just made me more anti-Copenhagen because it spent most of the time describing a good reason why it exists, but not why it should exist (though the author promises more; has that been written yet?).

          It may be true in some evolutionary sense that people give out moral approval and disapproval like bargaining chips in a game designed to incentivize altruistic behavior. But there’s also a good evolutionary reason to expect this mechanism to have a huge blindspot for people not in our own “tribe.”

          In the evolutionary past, the heuristic for who counts as “tribe” or “band,” probably went something like “anyone you interact with on a cooperative basis.” It was good to be very helpful without strings attached to such people, but probably useless, if not harmful to be altruistic toward non-tribe members, who would probably just as soon take your head as a war trophy. (Note how most hunter-gatherer tribes’ word for themselves just means “people.” People outside the tribe are not really people at all).

          In other words, hunter gatherer morality only has two settings: 0 and 100. This is not appropriate for the modern world, where almost everyone has many concentric circles of association. While it does make sense that we owe more to our family and close friends than to total strangers, it doesn’t make sense to categorize everyone as either “family” or “non-person.”

          The failure mode which seems to be most common is treating total strangers in one’s home country, especially if you have any sort of business deal with them, as if they were family (too high a standard) and foreigners and people with which you have no business interaction as if they were non-persons (too low a standard). Allowing foreigners to come here, or hiring someone puts them prematurely in the “family” circle, causing an inappropriately high expectation to apply to interactions with them; the result is many potential win-win interactions are avoided altogether. I wonder if Jesus realized that one solution to “love your neighbor as yourself” is to avoid having many neighbors.

          Interestingly, I think this applies whether one is a utilitarian, deontologist, or virtue ethicist.

          • Aapje says:

            @onyomi

            I think that this is also a major reason for the disconnect between the tribes. You get advocates of refugees claiming that the country should let them in to assure their safety, but once they are in, that tribe argues that they must immediately get equal (or even greater) rights than native citizens. After all, then they are ‘family.’

            In the eyes of the other tribe, they aren’t family yet at that point. So they feel like they are lied to, where the argument is helping people, but the actual goal is to help strangers more than family.

            The problem is that you can’t really fix this, because the gap between family and stranger is too big, so you can’t find a compromise that is (grudgingly) acceptable for everyone.

          • IrishDude says:

            The failure mode which seems to be most common is treating total strangers in one’s home country, especially if you have any sort of business deal with them, as if they were family (too high a standard) and foreigners and people with which you have no business interaction as if they were non-persons (too low a standard).

            Astute observation. I was discussing my charitable giving in the links thread, noting a significant chunk goes to 3rd world poor, and one poster lamented this by characterizing my policy as “Charity begins not at home but in some far away Third World country.”

            Home for me means family, friends, neighbors, and co-workers, and charity does begin there, but I don’t characterize the other 300 million American strangers as part of my home. There’s a certain affinity for them to the extent we might have similar cultural values, but I also have an affinity for foreigners who laugh, cry, play, and work hard as well.

  31. AoxyMouseOnArgo says:

    Thoughts on some of the heuristics of religion, or at least commonly disliked conservatism.

    I was thinking on some of the *benefits* of extreme gender segregation in a pre-pill/contraceptive environment, and how it may have been impossible to have effective gender integration before that time period, and perhaps it would be irrational.

    Namely, how rational was it for such segregation to exist before the time of contraceptives? Would somebody want their daughter to work under a male boss before those and DNA testing? Or learn and socialize with other men?

    Second, on the topic of divorce, what about the Cinderella effect?

    • Maven says:

      >Would somebody want their daughter to work under a male boss before those and DNA testing?

      Of course they would! Paternity is a social construct. 😉

    • LHN says:

      I’m pretty sure most women who worked outside the home (or inside the home, for that matter, in the case of household servants) did work under a male boss. Secretaries, obviously. Teachers generally reported to male principals, nurses to doctors. Given that higher echelons were generally limited to men, it’s hard to see how it could be otherwise.

  32. Maven says:

    Could the alt right ever become an influential force in mainstream American politics? If so, will they? How would a Trump win or loss affect them?

    I think that some alt right-ish ideas are going to become more and more prominent in mainstream right wing politics, but I’m not sure if The Alt Right qua movement could ever go mainstream unless it was in the context of significant economic upheaval and civil unrest. Some more mainstream
    Conservative sources are getting more comfortable with talking about race (I’m thinking of Breitbart and fellow travelers), but the people in the far alt right seem like they’re just too extreme to ever find a big following.

    • The Nybbler says:

      There is no single movement covered under the label “the alt-right”. Which ones do you mean? Moldbug’s group? The “green frog nazis”? Stormfront? American Rennaissance? The HBDers (which have overlap with the others)?

      • Maven says:

        Ok, I think I figured out why some of my comments were getting deleted. I was referencing The Ideology Which Must Not Be Named. I wonder if the alt right will soon achieve a similar status on Scott’s blog? 🙂

        So I typed this out several times and it’s lost now, so I’ll give you the condensed version. The alt right is more unified than it appears from the outside. It’s a white nationalist movement based on a belief in biological racial differences, suffused with culture from 4chan and initiated by certain key figures like Jared Taylor and Richard Spencer. There’s pretty widespread agreement within the community over who is alt right and who is not.

        Moldbug has explicitly said he is not alt right, I believe. Green frog nazis often are. Stormfront is divided from what I understand, although many of them would be comfortable in the movement. AmRen yes, that’s Jared Taylor’s website. HBDers can be found in many ideologies, not just the alt right.

        • dndnrsn says:

          But is being able to identify who’s in and who’s out and what the central ideas they share, the same as a group being unified?

        • The Nybbler says:

          Moldbug claims not to be alt-right, but to those opposed to the movement using the term, he’s a central example for some reason.

          The group you’re talking about probably has too much of the stink of old-fashioned racism about it to become mainstream (without, as you say significant upheavall), but a Trump win would make it more acceptable for them to be heard, so it would increase their influence.

          The main way I can see the AmRen-centered group becoming mainstream is if BLM radicals get their way and actually do manage to ignite a race war, with widespread instances of blacks attacking random whites just because they’re white. I don’t see this as likely at all, however.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            Moldbug claims not to be alt-right, but to those opposed to the movement using the term, he’s a central example for some reason

            Is he?

            At some point alt-right seems to have morphed from “grab bag of non-mainstream conservative viewpoints” (compare alt-right to “fringe right-wing movements“) to something more coherent that involved some self-appellation.

            If you take that presentation as true, then Moldbug could have been fairly characterized as part of the old alt-right and not the new alt-right.

          • Maven says:

            The group you’re talking about probably has too much of the stink of old-fashioned racism about it to become mainstream (without, as you say significant upheavall)

            I think you’re underestimating the amount of racism that still exists, both explicit and latent. Racism is the least of their problems.

            I think all the stuff they believe about Jews would be a barrier to it going mainstream. I feel like there must be some sort of theorem that says that a conspiracy theory can never spread throughout a sufficiently large group. Their attitude towards women is also a major hurdle. A political movement can’t survive today without large amounts of voluntary female participation.

          • dndnrsn says:

            @Maven:

            Their attitude to women is probably the number one problem, more than anti-Semitism (consider the degree to which anti-Zionist sentiment shades into anti-Semitism on college campuses – some of it is really just a refurbished version of the old right-wing conspiracy theories) but attracting more women would probably require more than just dropping the whole Redpill shtick.

            For instance: “Women tend to express more favorable opinions of both gay men and lesbians…” So the anti-gay stuff is a factor. I would also guess that, while TERFs are the most “systematic” of transphobes, women in general have a better view of trans people than men do. Women also probably react worse to general mean-spiritedness than men do.

            Really, has any far-right movement been able to attract women since the end of WWII?

    • Vaniver says:

      Could the alt right ever become an influential force in mainstream American politics? If so, will they? How would a Trump win or loss affect them?

      I think both a Trump win and a Trump loss will cause a continuation of the current level of hatred towards the alt-right from its enemies, instead of a relaxation. If Trump loses, this is seen as a mandate to finish the job; if Trump wins, this is seen as a need to try harder and win back America.

      I think the main question with the alt-right is whether or not they’re able to create a sufficient group of intellectuals whose careers can be based on thinking alt-right thoughts. It seems to me like a Trump presidency makes that more likely, but not obviously so; Trump doesn’t seem to be a HBDer. That these people don’t already exist means that they can’t be sucked into a Trump administration from day one; one can expect that it’ll be build more by the likes of Chris Christie and Mike Pence.

      • Maven says:

        >I think the main question with the alt-right is whether or not they’re able to create a sufficient group of intellectuals whose careers can be based on thinking alt-right thoughts.

        Very fascinating point. Could the academy, or even a significant movement in the academy, ever return to an HBD view of race? It feels completely impossible right now. Doubly so if HBD actually turns out to be false. None of us want to see science move backwards, regardless of our political views.

        • Dr Dealgood says:

          Depends on what you mean by “the academy,” and a bit on what you mean by HBD.

          If you mean science, as your last paragraph implies, in a certain sense it already has. A lot of the sillier bits of 60’s fluff in anthropology, for example, are slowly being discarded as genetic tools make them untennable. I expect most of the “social sciences” will be folded into biology eventually.

          Of course that’s more of a “ethnicity exists and correlates with certain measurable traits” HBD and less of a “Deutschland Über Alles.” More like HBD bloggers than their comment sections.

          The rest of “the academy” doesn’t have any connection to reality, so I don’t see why they would ever change their opinions.

          • Maven says:

            >If you mean science, as your last paragraph implies, in a certain sense it already has. A lot of the sillier bits of 60’s fluff in anthropology, for example, are slowly being discarded as genetic tools make them untennable.

            Sure. It’s uncontroversial, for example, to say that different races have different genetic predispositions to different diseases. But when I say “an HBD view of race”, I’m really going for the big huge toxic elephants in the room: IQ, aggression, and other assorted personality traits like impulse control and time-preference. Could a psychologist or biologist hold that there are racial differences in IQ without getting chased out of the room? (So long as we understand that “racial differences” means differences in group averages and that these averages do not causally determine the IQ of any given individual.) If they can’t, will they be able to at some point in the future?

            >Of course that’s more of a “ethnicity exists and correlates with certain measurable traits” HBD and less of a “Deutschland Über Alles.” More like HBD bloggers than their comment sections.

            Yes, of course. Assuming HBD has any merit at all, one of the hurdles that needs to be overcome before it becomes a mainstream view is the need to show that HBD does not have to lead to ethnic violence.

            >The rest of “the academy” doesn’t have any connection to reality, so I don’t see why they would ever change their opinions.

            Well, let’s be charitable here. Social scientists are generally open to empirical evidence. They just wear their ideological biases on their sleeves (and, frustratingly, refuse to admit this, unless they know they’re in friendly company…)

            Certain other departments like English are purely factories for implements of ideology, so they might be said to be disconnected from reality. But I can’t say this really bothers me. They’re free to do their own thing.

          • Cheese says:

            @Maven.

            Probably a bit late to reply but you may see this.

            In my experience in academic research (Neuroscience and more generally molecular biology) if you sat down with someone in-field an had that discussion re: things like IQ and personality traits then no one would really bat much of an eyelid. As long as you qualified everything correctly and drew on various pieces of evidence to back you up.

            If you start proposing what we could probably say would be discriminatory, in the strict dictionary sense of the word rather than it’s colloquial meaning, social policy as a result of it… well that’s where you’re going to get into trouble. As you say. Outside of a few select blogs and discussions in scientific articles i’ve not really seen a lot of discussion of it that hasn’t strayed into those territories. Anyway that’s by the by to what you’re asking. Edit- actually no it’s not. It’s probably the reason behind why one would get chased out of a room.

            My feeling is that this might be different if you strayed into a Psych department. I don’t know though. My limited contact with psych academics has suggested to me that they are mostly pretty reasonable and open minded people but as to the specific topic I can’t say. But in the areas of I guess ‘harder’ biology i’ve worked in it’d not really be amazingly controversial in the way you define it (i.e. qualified correctly).

            Another area that strikes me that you’d find a pretty welcoming reception would be in diet/weight loss research – especially anyone who studies molecular genetics in that field. A couple i’ve encountered have been very much on the HBD train as it were.

          • David Friedman says:

            “If you start proposing what we could probably say would be discriminatory, in the strict dictionary sense of the word rather than it’s colloquial meaning, social policy as a result of it… well that’s where you’re going to get into trouble. ”

            What if you criticize interpretations of statistical evidence that depend on assuming the absence of biological diversity? The argument from the existence of outcomes that are on average different by race or gender to the existence of discrimination depends on the unstated and implausible assumption that there are no differences in the distribution of relevant innate characteristics.

            Someone takes the shortage of female math professors at Harvard or the lower average wage of blacks as proof of discrimination. You point out the error in the argument. Do you get into trouble?

          • Anonymous says:

            Do you get into trouble?

            Summers got into trouble for calling for research to be done.

          • Vaniver says:

            The argument from the existence of outcomes that are on average different by race or gender to the existence of discrimination depends on the unstated and implausible assumption that there are no differences in the distribution of relevant innate characteristics.

            I have read a number of judicial opinions where the judge explicitly states this assumption.

          • Kevin C. says:

            @Maven

            Yes, of course. Assuming HBD has any merit at all, one of the hurdles that needs to be overcome before it becomes a mainstream view is the need to show that HBD does not have to lead to ethnic violence.

            The interesting thing to consider here, though, is the position like that taken by Rod Dreher. Which is to say, what if:
            1. HBD is true, and is likely to become more obviously so as genetic science improves
            2. HBD, or, that is to say, widespread acceptance of HBD, does “have to lead to ethnic violence”.

            In short, what if humanity, in the words of Colonel Jessup, “can’t handle the truth”? Do you say “fiat veritas ruat caelum”? Or do you defend the “noble lie”?

        • dndnrsn says:

          Back in the days when racism was the popular view in the universities, was “HBD” the norm? You’ll find HBD types claiming that the Ashkenazim have an average IQ of 115, or that East Asians have an average IQ of 105, versus the European average of 100.

          You do indeed have Death Eater types welcoming our future Jewish-Chinese overlords (all hail Sophia and Louisa Chua-Rubenfeld!) but I think few old-school 19th century racists would support that view.

          Hell, you’ll even find HBD’ers putting the Igbo at a 103 IQ, a few points ahead the average of any European nation, so…

        • Butler says:

          > None of us want to see science move backwards, regardless of our political views.

          I do.
          In the sense that science textbooks are the first thing I’d throw onto the book bonfire in a desperate attempt to avoid the creation of unfriendly AI.

          But I don’t post very often, so I can see how you would fail to notice my strand of thought.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            name checks out.

          • Matt C says:

            I haven’t before now, but I’m glad to see it.

            This seems like an obvious position for people genuinely worried about AI risk. But I don’t see many of them acknowledging it, much less taking it up. I draw somewhat cynical conclusions from this. Nice to see an exception.

          • Butler says:

            @FacelessCraven
            You have identified the eponymy correctly!

    • Dr Dealgood says:

      A year ago, I would have confidently said no. I still think the answer is no but I’m much less confident.

      Trump himself has done little for the AltRight. His positions aren’t actually that outré, just conspiciously “white trash.” But since the media has been throwing everything against the Wall and seeing what sticks, the AltRight got a huge bump.

      My guess is that what happens next will depend how how the media responds to Trump’s loss in November. If they go full No Platform and memory hole the AltRight then they’ll go back to relative internet obscurity. On the other hand, Pepe might be too attractive of a boogeyman to ignore in which case the genie is out of the bottle.

      Any attention is good news for the AltRight right now. That’s doubly true if they can continue to position themselves opposite highly disliked people and institutions: drawing sustained fire from the media, Hillary and congress would make them look a lot better by comparison.

    • Nyx says:

      In the short term, if Trump were to win, it would prove one thing; the electoral viability of candidates that play to the alt-right. As a result, there could be more such candidates emerging in the Republican party at the state and local level. This could gradually result in a party more sympathetic to the alt-right and more alt-right policies being implemented. This might result in long-term payoff since the Republican Party is holding the right edge of the Overton Window. But while holding the presidency offers opportunities (people like winners better than losers), but also presents challenges, because holding such a position opens you up to scrutiny and criticism. Since Americans seem to be, broadly speaking, very pessimistic and contentious, this might lead to a weaker right-wing in the medium term. Reference Obama’s victory in 2008 leading to huge defeats for Democrats in mid-term elections. If Trump manages to actually implement alt-right policies, this will likely just lead to renewed challenge of those positions when they fail to cure cancer, resolve the Israel-Palestine crisis and reduce entropy in a closed system. Even now, Trump is viewed very unfavorably. That is sure to intensify once he is actually in power and his ambiguity about his policies will end.

      But I don’t know much about the alt-right, their preferred policies, if they even have preferred policies, or if Trump agrees with them on a lot. My inclination is that although Trump is happy to cultivate alt-right support, he wouldn’t actually implement alt-right policies, and that left and right alike are projecting their atavistic fears and desires on to him. If this happens, it might “defuse” the alt-right by turning them away from mainstream politics, just as many on the far left are disenchanted by Democratic centrism.

      If Trump loses, mainstream Republicans will reassert their control of the party and likely erect barriers to prevent another such debacle. And even if he wins, alt-right hopes rest on a guy that strikes me as erratic and incompetent and is deeply unpopular even within his own party. At best, the alt-right might achieve greater influence within the GOP. But I don’t think they could without making the GOP unelectable. So things don’t look good for the alt-right.

      (I’d point out, as well, that the “alt-right” has a lot of internal variation from sedevacantists to monarchists to ancaps. I don’t know if it’s even that meaningful to talk about the possibility of the alt-right having political influence; would that mean a monarchy, or the abolition of universities, or the repeal of the 14th Amendment? Certainly, they seem to think that Trump aligns with their values, but they seem to be more united by their distaste for the left than by any coherent programme.)

      • Maven says:

        I tried to write a similar comment higher up in the thread but it didn’t go through, let’s see if this works better…

        A lot of people are lumping various new-right groups under the heading “alt-right”, but there’s actually relatively little disagreement within the alt-right and around its borders over who is alt-right and who is not, so the movement is more unified right now than one might think. It’s a white nationalist movement based on a belief in biological racial differences. Garden-variety Trump supporters do not qualify. Policy positions beyond that are sketchy, though they all tend to lean authoritarian on whatever question you could care to pose. Ancaps would almost certainly not feel welcome in the alt right, because the alt right is rather concerned with policing social “degeneracy”. Monarchists might feel more comfortable, as long as they’re white, but then someone would have to work out exactly what the differences between monarchism and fascism are. I would be very interested in seeing such a conversation, because I think a lot of these people haven’t given much thought to the political ideologies they claim to endorse…

        • dndnrsn says:

          One of the basic differences between monarchy and fascism is very easy to see: fascism has popular sovereignty. Monarchy doesn’t. Plenty of European monarchies were multicultural, multiethnic, etc. Look at the Austro-Hungarians. They weren’t united by a common ethnicity, race, culture, language, or whatever. They were united by whoever ruled them. Plenty of rulers have spoken different languages than their subjects.

    • dndnrsn says:

      I think – and I believe we’ve discussed this before, if I’m remembering your avatar right – that there are some “BernieBros” who will stumble into the alt-right.

      To me, the core of the alt-right is this: most people, right or left, when accused of racism, sexism, homophobia, etc (I would say transphobia, but sadly trans people still get shit on most anywhere that isn’t a left-wing university campus) will either back down, or try to defend themselves (which is often followed by backing down). The alt-right says, to quote noted right-winger Zack de la Rocha, “fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me”. Other than this, the “alt-right” is so diffuse as to be nonexistent. What does it have to hold it together? Pictures of a frog? Feels Man? Greentexting?

      So, you’ve got economic left-wingers, who didn’t care so much for social left issues, who got slammed with the charge that they were a bunch of privileged cishet white boys trying to bamboozle everyone else into thinking that economic issues were the only important thing. The “BernieBros”. Even though plenty of them were neither male nor white (Bernie was a youth candidate, not a young-white-man candidate), the image stuck.

      Some percentage of the “BernieBros” actually are cishet white boys. Some percentage of those are going to react to the attacks against them by refusing to grant their accusers jurisdiction, so to speak. And, once they’ve done that, the alt-right is a hop, skip, and a jump away. Just one lily pad over.

      • Maven says:

        Yes, you are remembering my avatar correctly!

        >To me, the core of the alt-right is this: most people, right or left, when accused of racism, sexism, homophobia, etc (I would say transphobia, but sadly trans people still get shit on most anywhere that isn’t a left-wing university campus) will either back down, or try to defend themselves (which is often followed by backing down).

        Yes, I would definitely agree that this is one of the main impetuses behind it.

        >Other than this, the “alt-right” is so diffuse as to be nonexistent.

        It’s only diffuse if you lump various new right groups under the heading of “alt-right”: NRx, ancaps, garden-variety anti-SJWs like Milo, etc. But none of these people consider themselves alt right and the alt right doesn’t consider them alt right. The alt right is a white nationalist movement based on a belief in biological racial differences, roughly organized around sites like The Daily Stormer, The Right Stuff, Radix Journal, and American Renaissance. Most of the people who use the term to mean something different than that are mainstream media journalists who are just stumbling into the whole thing for the first time. You could argue over whether those guys “really” deserve a monopoly on the term “alt right”, but no one else really wants it and they’re very concerned with keeping the term as pure as possible, so why not let them have it? The probability of internal fractures as the movement grows is high, but right now it’s relatively unified.

        >Some percentage of the “BernieBros” actually are cishet white boys. Some percentage of those are going to react to the attacks against them by refusing to grant their accusers jurisdiction, so to speak. And, once they’ve done that, the alt-right is a hop, skip, and a jump away. Just one lily pad over.

        See, I’m a cishet white guy who’s broadly sympathetic with the alt right’s views on race, but I’ll never consider myself a part of that ideology and they would never accept me, since I’m a social libertarian and they are decidedly not. Disillusioned leftists will have their own challenges as they wander rightward. The average Bernie Bro would have a tough time integrating into alt right circles once he realized that he had to be comfortable with people saying the word “faggot” every other sentence.

        Will there be a broad coalition of whites who move to defend themselves against (or happily accept) accusations of racism? Possibly. Will it take the form of The Alt Right as we know it? Probably not, it’s just too niche.

        I do understand that your comment was probably based on a separate definition of “alt right” though.

      • HeelBearCub says:

        Yeah, but how many of them will stick there? And what will their beliefs be when they do?

        Doing what you have been accused of to “show them” certainly happens, but that can’t constitute any sort of coherent movement. To the extent that the so called alt-right becomes more coherent, it will do so around some set of beliefs. Trump has shown there is a rump in the Republican Party that is white, xenophobic, and populist, so if the alt-right truly coalesces on something, I think it is likely to be that.

        • dndnrsn says:

          Oh, I agree that it’s not a huge number of people who will fall to that – but there’s a chance that there’s a decent chunk of people on the left side of the Democrats who might get horseshoe-theoried into being on the right. If the only people who care about poor white people are crypto-fascists, then only crypto-fascists care about poor white people.

          Plus – I don’t think the alt-right is a coherent movement.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            I was agreeing with you (or attempting to without being very clear) that some disaffected Bernie voters will end up interested in and perhaps promoting the ideas and orgs that are floating around under the alt-right banner. I also agree that this the horshoe-theory in action.

            I was then “going on” (although this is where I started) to ask the next question, the one I think is truly relevant, what would it take for significant numbers to stay there? Basically I’m begging the question of whether it’s currently coherent, and asking, instead, what it look like if it becomes coherent and a new identified base of power inside the GOP?

          • Maven says:

            Plus – I don’t think the alt-right is a coherent movement

            It’s actually quite coherent from the inside. It’s a white nationalist movement based on a belief in HBD that’s currently organized around a few central hubs like Daily Stormer, The Right Stuff, and Radix Journal. It only looks like a fractured, amorphous movement if you read about it in the mainstream media. Some people think that Milo Yiannopolous qualifies as alt right, for example, but he has never called himself alt right and the broader community is quite hostile to him.

          • dndnrsn says:

            @HeelBearCub: I probably wasn’t being very clear either, looking back.

            What would it take for them to stay there? Either them being willing to put up with outright bigotry – likely adjusting their views bit by bit rather than just swallowing it all at once – or them joining it and changing it entryist style (of course, new people joining something almost always changes it), or some combination of the two.

            Or, they might hover around long enough to pick up the ideas that are tolerable to them, then go and do their own thing. That could be as simple as a switch from a stance on the economic left from “the economic left is the real left and people are just mistaken to dissipate their energies elsewhere” to a more aggressive accusation of that energy being intentionally redirected and siphoned off – a more conspiratorial way of looking at things, perhaps.

            @Maven: I’ll adjust my statement – coherent, maybe, but not unified. The mainstream media would probably like to represent the alt-right as a unified group – it’s a more dramatic story, and actual Nazis are scarier than Milo Yiannopoulos. What does it say that outsiders trying to find a movement’s spokesperson or leader usually identify people who are considered to be neither by members of that movement, and often do not present themselves as being members, let alone spokespeople or leaders?

      • pku says:

        I agree with the actual content of what you said, but Bernie supporters actually were very disproportionately white, not just disproportionately young (and as young people are more diverse than general, if Bernie supporters were as diverse as general democrats they’d still be disproportionately white after adjusting for their youth).

        • dndnrsn says:

          Were they disproportionately white, or otherwise? I haven’t seen any accurate statistics, one way or the other.

          • pku says:

            Yeah, see for example this. More generally, she won states with a significant minority vote and lost or tied states that were disproportionately white (like Iowa or NH).

        • Aapje says:

          @pku

          but Bernie supporters actually were very disproportionately white

          Or Clinton supporters were disproportionately black. You can’t judge whether black voters pulled to Clinton or were pushed away from Sanders, merely based on the voting statistics.

      • Aapje says:

        @dndnrsn

        I would say transphobia, but sadly trans people still get shit on most anywhere that isn’t a left-wing university campus

        Not even there, as I’m sure that any left-wing university campus will include some TERFs.

      • Maven says:

        You are remembering my avatar correctly!

        > To me, the core of the alt-right is this: most people, right or left, when accused of racism, sexism, homophobia, etc (I would say transphobia, but sadly trans people still get shit on most anywhere that isn’t a left-wing university campus) will either back down, or try to defend themselves (which is often followed by backing down).

        Yes, this is definitely one of the major impetuses behind it.

        > Some percentage of the “BernieBros” actually are cishet white boys. Some percentage of those are going to react to the attacks against them by refusing to grant their accusers jurisdiction, so to speak. And, once they’ve done that, the alt-right is a hop, skip, and a jump away.

        I know you’re probably using a very broad definition of “alt right” here, but I just wanted to try and clarify things a bit. The core alt right currently holds very conservative and authoritarian social views, so it would be hard for Bernie Bros and libertarians to wander into the alt right just because they’re looking for a response to white privilege. I’m a social libertarian, for example, and I could never truly be a part of their movement and they would never accept me, even though I’m broadly sympathetic with their views on race. Disillusioned leftists will have their own challenges as they wander rightwards. It’s hard to imagine a Bernie Bro being comfortable in alt right circles once he realizes that he has to deal with people saying the word “faggot” every other sentence.

        Alt right-ish ideas could become appealing to a broad coalition of whites, but The Alt Right itself will probably remain quite niche.

        • dndnrsn says:

          I am probably using a broad definition, and additionally I think that the diffusion of ideas out from a group is a success for that group. Maybe not the same level of success as people actually joining them. To give an example from the other side of the political spectrum: the Fabian Society only has 7,000 members, but much of what they wanted has come to pass.

          I also think that people can kind of drift into things, political ideologies, hobbies, whatever. I can see someone telling themselves “oh they’re just being edgy, and most of them don’t really believe xyz”. To give a nonpolitical example – far more people start out lifting a bit of weight to stay in shape, and then bit by bit turn into someone who keeps a protein shake next to their bed for when they wake up to go to the washroom at night, than go from zero to a hundred quickly.

          I think that some of the ideas that are associated with the alt-right are hardly limited to appeal to white people. I could see, for instance, East Asians embracing HBD ideas about IQ, and Chinese Christians tend to be fairly socially conservative by North American standards. I could see Indians of old stock high-caste backgrounds embracing Computer Programmers for Monarchy ideas. Etc.

          • Maven says:

            Oh, yes, certainly HBD can be appealing to non-whites. In fact I would love it if more non-whites started to openly discuss HBD, both inside the US and outside, since that would do a faster job of moving it back into the Overton Window.

      • Lumifer says:

        the core of the alt-right is this: most people, right or left, when accused of racism, sexism, homophobia, etc … will either back down, or try to defend themselves. The alt-right says … “fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me”

        I am a big fan of the fuck-YOU response to accusations of wrongthink, but I don’t fit into alt-right at all.

    • cassander says:

      While I agree with what The Nybbler says about alt right not being a lot of different things, HBD is a pretty big part of most of those strains. responses to HBD vary wildly, but it’s as close to universal as you get (which is not to claim that the alt-right is racist or motivated by racism, just that it is made up, in large part, by people who accept HBD)

      As genetics gets better, a lot of what currently passes for publically acceptable positions (which is way to the left of current mainstream biology and psychology) on race and biology is going to get empirically disproven in ways that are basically inarguable, e.g., “Intelligence isn’t heritable you say? Well all these genetically engineered kids are 3 grade levels ahead of yours….” The extent to and speed at which this happens are going to have vastly greater impacts on mainstreaming of the alt-right than anything any politician does between now and then. I don’t claim to have any ability to proclaim how this conflict will play out, but it’s going to get very ugly.

  33. Scott says:

    Reposting from the last open thread since I got in at the very tail end:

    I’m looking for a post in the wider lesswrong-blog-o-sphere that I remember reading a while ago and would appreciate any help in tracking it down.

    The gist of it was that the bar for people to receive government grants to conduct various experiments and projects in education/healthcare/social services/etc. was very low. For example, many educational grants measure the success of their computer-upgrade program not by positive effect on the students, but just by whether they actually bought computers at all and brought them into schools.

    It then urged members of the wider rationality community to look into this as an alternative to a standard job, because (a) the government wants to give out this money for use, (b) you don’t have to sacrifice and can pay yourself an upper-middle class salary, and (c) pretty much anything can do good better than most of what’s going on right now.

    Does this ring a bell to anyone? Douglas Knight suggested this post, but that wasn’t it. I remember it was on a 3rd party blog.

  34. Perpetually Inquisitive says:

    Without wanting to sound to negative, is the site (in particular the comments section) previously unusable on mobile for other people? I’m using Chrome on Android.

    • Perpetually Inquisitive says:

      Err…can’t seem to edit my typos on mobile. Apologies for the reply post instead.

      *too
      ** practically [unusable]

    • Aegeus says:

      Chrome on Android is usable for me, although the margins go unreadably narrow for a while until it’s finished loading.

      My only complaint is that the formatting buttons get hidden or cover the comment field when the field resizes. So typing out long comments is a bit awkward.

      • Perpetually Inquisitive says:

        Yeah, I’ve had the margins go narrow as the page is loading.

        The problem for me though is that the page seems to take forever to load, and a lot of the comments section isn’t even rendered, and I can’t scroll around to see different comments. They just kinda half-load.

        Seems like an issue with memory being used up or the Javascript thread locking up the UI thread or something. /shrug

    • brad says:

      In IOS (mobile safari) any post that has an embedded video crashes the browser when I click the comments link. Other than that, if there are a lot of unread comments it is pretty hard to use the unread comments widget, but the site is otherwise usable.

  35. Jill says:

    I didn’t know there were Libertarian Social Justice Warriors.

    We’re all stressed because of this crazy election. Maybe that’s what it took to give birth to the Libertarian Social Justice Warrior movement.

    • sards says:

      I must be out of the loop. Who are the Libertarian Social Justice Warriors?

      • Fahundo says:

        I think it roughly translates to “Libertarians who don’t want non-libertarians to enter their safe space and disparage or fail to pay proper respects to Ayn Rand”

      • Sniffnoy says:

        I have no idea who Jill might be referring to, but Ozy at least is a libertarian SJer.

    • Sniffnoy says:

      …what…?

      OK, firstly, there is no “Social Justice Warrior movement”, because “Social Justice Warrior” is a disparaging term, so for the most part they don’t call themselves that (some do in a “reclamatory” sense).

      Secondly, while I’m not going to go to the trouble of finding explicit earlier examples of libertarian SJers (perhaps one might call on Ozy for that, if they’re willing to show up here), like… left-libertarianism goes back quite a ways, as does libertarian feminism, as do general libertarian arguments for why libertarianism will in fact help the poor or marginalized. It would be quite surprising if none of that yielded libertarian SJ prior to now.

      (On that note, here’s a good essay on libertarian feminism from 2005, H/T Ozy)

      And like… why would “the stress of because of this crazy election” be at all relevant? This sounds like Bulverism, where you’re just trying to say that such a political position is clearly crazy and thereby dismiss it.

      I am really getting the feeling here that you’re not familiar with any politics outside the mainstream and that can’t be fit into a “left/right” (whatever that means) axis.

      • I’m trying to think about whether there have been patterns in the libertarian movement that it would make sense to describe as SJW within that movement, as opposed to someone who is both an SJW in the normal sense and a libertarian.

        Nozick got a little flack within the movement for something he wrote, I think saying that under some circumstances he could favor a draft, but not a lot. I’ve been attacked by Rothbard and, more recently, some of his followers for my failure to hate the state. But I can’t think of any case within the movement of some libertarians trying to raise serious social pressure against other libertarians in response to the latter holding heretical views.

        • Sniffnoy says:

          Right, this is where the “what do we mean by SJW” question comes in. Do we mean the, y’know, illiberal equivocating guiltmongers? Or do we just mean the SJers more broadly? The latter certainly exist. The former existing in any substantial numbers would be more surprising. I assumed Jill meant the latter, but I’ll admit I don’t know.

          • The Nybbler says:

            Who are the “SJers” more broadly? I know of the academics, who write papers full of what I consider to be nonsense, and the SJWs (including the “allies”), who take those papers and weaponize them using motte-and-bailey and other tactics. I guess there are other people who just kind of nod along and agree but don’t go on the offensive themselves, but they’re harder to notice.

            There are certainly other fights involving the same kind of tactics the SJWs use (they’re often specifically compared to the worst of the religious right by their opponents, after all), but calling those other people SJWs is, IMO, a misnomer, and often an attempt to muddle the issue.

          • Sniffnoy says:

            I mean, there are people who agree with object-level SJ positions, and may refer to themselves as being on the side of Social Justice, but stay away from the awful meta-level illiberalism and destructiveness we normally associate with people who do the first two; Ozy would be an example here.

            It would be nice if we could just use “SJW” to refer to the people who do do such things, but as Ozy points out, the term is used too variously for that to be generally understood.

            It would be nice to have a new, unambiguous term for such people — ideally one that gets more directly at the problem — but I don’t know of one. People talk about the “illiberal left”, and that’s a good term, but it’s a little broader, I think. I like to talk about “illiberal equivocating guiltmongers” to directly point out what is wrong with them, but that’s not very catchy. Perhaps one could simply say “illiberal SJ” or “motte-and-bailey SJ”. Or perhaps “illiberal left” suffices despite the lack of specificity. I dunno.

          • onyomi says:

            “PC Police”? I feel like that’s what people often mean when they use SJW too broadly.

          • Fahundo says:

            How about “racists disguised as progressives”?

          • HeelBearCub says:

            … and now we have jumped the shark.

          • Sniffnoy says:

            Fahundo: No, because that completely fails to get at the point here — that they destroy civil discussion wherein people might actually attempt to get at the right answer (which they do by means of social pressure and motte-and-bailey tactics). Again, the point here is not their object-level positions; I disagree with those too, but those can be debated in the ordinary way when sensible norms of discourse are present.

          • Sniffnoy says:

            Onyomi: I was asking about terms for the narrow sense of “SJW”.

          • onyomi says:

            “Onyomi: I was asking about terms for the narrow sense of “SJW”.”

            Well, if you had a different term for the overly broad way in which SJW has come to be used, you could call the people to whom the narrow definition applies “SJWs” with less confusion.

          • Going back to the question of social justice and libertarians, the Bleeding Heart Libertarians (Zwolinski et. al.) say positive things about social justice.

          • The Nybbler says:

            Going back to the question of social justice and libertarians, the Bleeding Heart Libertarians (Zwolinski et. al.) say positive things about social justice.

            That’s the older social justice, though, not the current one.

    • Gobbobobble says:

      Why do you think this is helpful? You come into this community with a chip on your shoulder, demonstrate little but antagonism toward its members, refuse to engage with them in good faith… and are then confused and hurt when people don’t fall in line with your crusade to convert them to the Correct of Center Tribe?

      • FacelessCraven says:

        Why do you think this sort of response will be helpful? No offense meant, this is the first time I’ve ever seen you post, and I hope you hang around, but there are already more than a dozen posts in the last hour or so attempting to make this point to Jill. What does this one add?

        • Gobbobobble says:

          Fair point. I forgot to refresh before posting so didn’t realize Sniffnoy had already done it better. I’ve been lurking here for a couple years now but have only posted occasionally partially because usually (as in this case) someone else will make the point I agree with better than I could. With an unfortunate side-effect of when I *do* post, it has a higher probability of me being rather frustrated…

          Honestly, I’ve learned to just minimize most Jill threads now since goodwill from all sides of those conversations has been running pretty low. This post was just a particularly poor-sporting snipe, and before Sniffnoy posted it had gone unchallenged. Apologies for any dogpiling.

        • Stefan Drinic says:

          Huh, commendable. Much respect.

  36. Anthony says:

    Jill, you are not yet banned, but you are forbidden to reference Ayn Rand, accuse other people of worshipping Ayn Rand, attribute everything you dislike to a conspiracy centered around Ayn Rand, or use Ayn Rand as a metonymy for any view you disagree with. I will lift this restriction if you read and post a book report on Atlas Shrugged.

    Reading Scott Alexander makes me understand how a guy like Jesus could come along and just have such consistently solid and context-appropriate advice that an entire people would attempt to record and standardize every punishment they’d ever meted. It’s also obvious why that attempt would fail, miserably, but Hey! It’s great when the charismatic leader is alive, anyways!

  37. Deiseach says:

    I will lift this restriction if you read and post a book report on Atlas Shrugged.

    Now, that is cruel and unusual punishment! 🙂

    (I can’t read Rand. I’ve tried, and every time I want to set fire to the character who is soliloquising – you can’t call it ‘talking’, they don’t converse, they lecture at one another).

    • Julian says:

      You could try “We the Living”. It quite different from Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged. This is her first Novel length work. She wrote it very shortly after coming to America and was writing in her second language. In that light the writing quality is quite an accomplishment. Its set in post revolution Russia and is much more character driven.

      There arent long monologues (that I can remember), but you may have other problems with it (as much as I agree with her, I understand her writing is not the best). Its much more of a romance, so that may not interest you.

      Also its not 800 pages! Only about 300, much more of a normal novel length.

    • Autolykos says:

      Yup, her writing is legitimately horrible, and she really seems to like beating very thoroughly dead horses. OTOH, for some of these horses, you’d have to take off and nuke them from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.

      What I find most ironic about her books is how many of her prominent admirers are a lot more similar to her villains than to her heroes. If you have read Atlas Shrugged and are still a Neocon, you did not understand it.

      • Jill says:

        And if you have read it, and are not then converted to becoming Libertarian or otherwise Right of Center, then Right of Center people will assume that you must not have read it. This just happened to me.

        • Stefan Drinic says:

          Ooh. The book report is due soon, I take it?

        • Fahundo says:

          Right of Center people

          Such as Scott?

          • Jill says:

            Yes.

            He is what people refer to as Left Libertarian. But that looks to be Right of Center to me.

          • Sniffnoy says:

            Jill, when dealing with a view like left-libertarianism, why would you think it at all helpful to try to fit it onto a one-dimensional axis?

            (Edit: Although I’m not sure you’re using “left-libertarian” in the standard sense. Also, repeat my above comment for basically every political philosophy that’s discussed here, including libertarianism in general; with I guess the exception of Democrat-ism and Republican-ism, both of which are not exactly coherent.)

          • @ Sniffnoy:

            “Left-libertarian” actually has a number of different meanings, which I discussed in an old blog post. One (left anarchist) is conventionally thought of as left. The other two combine elements favored by people on left and right.

          • Sniffnoy says:

            Interesting, thanks! #2 that you discuss I’ve heard referred to as “libertarian socialism”, though I don’t know how standard that term is.

          • “Geolibertarianism” is the term I’m familiar with for it, from Henry George.

            Calling it libertarian socialism seems a bit odd, since all means of production other than the land are still privately owned and the land is privately owned but with site value taxed away.

          • Sniffnoy says:

            Sorry, to be clear, I didn’t mean geolibertarianism specifically; rather I meant the more general position of “The government should be doing very little — except redistributing wealth”. But yeah, I guess that name doesn’t make a lot of sense regardless.

      • Jill says:

        And if you have read it, and you’re a crony capitalist welfare queen, or a supporter of such, well then you are the typical reader of it in the U.S. today. And you are like anyone who has read any popular religious or ideological text, and who sees how it could be used as a tool for your cause. The fact that you are far more similar to the villains in the story than to the heroes is not going to matter to you in the least. If it works to get you what you want, you don’t fix it.

        • Jill says:

          To me, it’s as if I disagreed with the Christian Right on various issues, and commented on some of the ways in which they use the Bible and Jesus and religion, to justify their political beliefs. And then someone demanded that I read the entire Bible (as if I had no familiarity with it to begin with, even though I have read it) and give a book report on it. That person being quite sure that if I HAD read it, I would certainly have adopted most or all of the political beliefs of the Christian Right.

          When the actual case is that the fact that I HAVE read the Bible is part of why I disagree with the Christian Right.

          Politics is very tribal nowadays. Everyone is sure that “If only the other side read what I read, experienced what I experienced, then they would totally agree with me.”

          When Will The Idiots On The Other End Of The Political Spectrum Wake Up And Have Every One Of My Life Circumstances, Daily Interactions, And Upbringing?
          http://www.theonion.com/blogpost/when-will-idiots-other-end-political-spectrum-wake-53482

          • LHN says:

            I’d say it would be more like that if the other people here frequently quoted or referenced the Bible, or in this case Rand, in support of their arguments or positions. If that’s been happening here, I haven’t seen it. Of course it’s possible I’ve missed posts.

            Personally I ran aground during the long radio speech in Atlas Shrugged, which is the only Rand work I ever tried.

            (Well, I saw the Gary Cooper film adaptation of “The Fountainhead”, but that’s because I’m a Turner Classic Movies fan. ISTR she wasn’t particularly fond of the adaptation in any case.)

          • Skef says:

            Jill –

            The difference is that to the extent anyone takes arguments made by Rand as justifying their political or ethical beliefs they also take those arguments as standing on their own. Newton put lots of clever stuff into his writings but his points can be made without any appeal to those writings. Christianity is grounded in part in certain historical facts that the new testament is taken to record, with other records being spotty at best.

            Your continuing references to Rand as opposed to Libertarian or Objectivist theory suggest there’s something about all this you’re not groking.

          • caethan says:

            It feels a lot more to me as if you were arguing with a Muslim while convinced based on a reading of the Bible that he was a Christian. One God, there’s this Jesus guy, lots of laws, blah blah blah. Same thing, right? The guy you’re arguing with doesn’t think you’re going to be an Objectivist if only you read the book, he’s sick of you pretending he’s an Objectivist when it’s obvious to anyone who’s read the damn book that he’s not.

          • Paul Brinkley says:

            I interpreted Scott’s homework assignment as more likely a response to comments like this one, in which Jill misinterprets Objectivism, mocks them on the basis of her misinterpretation, and then resists active correction.

            The analogy here would be closer to Jill having read the Bible and then declaring that one of her disagreements with Christians is that they think human sacrifice is a virtue. And when someone tries to correct that, she dismisses their correction as being ultimately rooted in tribalism.

            Jill, I don’t like attacking people by default, but this is a specific mistake I see you making here.

          • “That person being quite sure that if I HAD read it, I would certainly have adopted most or all of the political beliefs of the Christian Right. ”

            Since Scott is obviously not an Objectivist, I don’t think the analogy works.

            It’s more as if you blamed everything you didn’t like, from Islamic terrorism to Objectivism, on the Bible and showed no evidence of knowing what it said. Even an atheist might suggest that you either read the book or stop blaming it for things.

          • Aapje says:

            @LHN

            I also saw the “The Fountainhead” movie and apparently, the horrible plot was faithful to the book:

            It’s OK to be a terrorist and destroy another person’s property that didn’t follow the design faithfully, despite the fact that the builder never actually dealt with the designer, nor had a contract with him to be faithful to the design. Also, after arguing that common people never respect geniuses and always prosecute them, the terrorist is promptly let go by a jury of common people, which undermines the argument put forward.

            So it makes zero sense from a libertarian or a propaganda point of view.

          • onyomi says:

            @Aapje

            One of Rand’s arguably less libertarian positions was being an intellectual property extremist. She not only believed in intellectual property, which many libertarians do not, she actually believed it was more central to the notion of property than tangible land and goods (perhaps uncoincidentally, her intellectual property was by far the most valuable thing she owned).

            I do, however, always bring up The Fountainhead in response to the common strawman of Rand suggesting that making money by whatever means possible is the highest virtue. Her protagonist in that book continually turns down money-making opportunities, even destroying property, for the sake of some notion of artistic integrity.

            I think it makes sense in that she arrives at her libertarianism in a different way than most; most libertarians come to it through having strong assumptions about the importance or sanctity of private property, in tangible property and in one’s person.

            But Rand is coming at instead from a perspective where the product of one’s mind is even more important than any tangible good or instance of a service. On her view everyone has an absolute right to the fruits of his or her ideas.

          • Aapje says:

            @onyomi

            Yeah, but it doesn’t even make sense from a pro-intellectual property point of view. Roarke doesn’t publicly claim ownership of the design and instead engages an agent to represent him covertly. When the agent refuses to translate his agreement with Roarke to a solid contract with the builder, Roarke legally merely has a beef with his agent, but instead he goes after a builder, who has no legal obligation to Roarke or even knows that it was his design. This fundamentally goes against contract law (being held to rules that you never agreed to with a party that you don’t know you had any obligation to), so I don’t see how this is consistent with libertarianism.

            Her defense of artistic integrity is also deeply hypocritical. The agent and builder created a derived work (where the builder didn’t know that the agent wasn’t the designer of the original plan), so the attack on the final building is an attack on the artistic integrity of the builder + agent.

            So her plot depends on the idea that her protagonist deserves artistic integrity, yet it is fine to deny the same to the antagonist.

          • Virbie says:

            You’re consistent enough that I’m pretty sure you’re not a troll account, but occasionally you say something that strains credulity: you can’t possibly think that Scott wants you to read Atlas Shrugged because he thinks it’s actually useful. Not everyone takes such a dull, humorless approach to every comment. He wants you to read it because “derp everyone who agrees with me is a randtard” stops being cute and starts being wearying, and he was poking gentle fun at you with something he knows would be annoying for you (most of the libertarian friends I have don’t think very highly of AS or even Rand). The fact that he’d probably honor his promise if you posted a book report only makes the joke funnier.

      • William O. B'Livion says:

        A lot of business books are like this.

        A lot of books for people in the middle to the left of the bell curve are like this.

        A lot of books for people who aren’t intellectuals are like this.

        Edited to add: I’m responding to the first paragraph. To respond adequately to the second I’d have to know what the poster means by “NeoCon”.

    • Matt M says:

      I’m a huge fan of Rand, love Atlas Shrugged, and consider reading it to have been a pivotal moment in my life.

      But even I think this is too much. It’s fine to suggest people read something from their ideological opponents – but 1,000 pages? Come on!

      • LHN says:

        I’d strongly guess that the underlying goal is deterrence– though I’d be interested in seeing the book report if those frequent Rand references really are that important.

        If anything, the restriction is less comprehensive than most of the tabooed terms here, where a similar alternative isn’t offered. (Not that there are any I can think of that I’d personally read a thousand pages to be able to use the term.)

      • Jill says:

        I suspect this might not have been Scott’s idea, but the idea of someone else who was offended by something I said– unless Scott is more a fan of the author than I thought he was. I don’t know how long ago it was, that I mentioned this TABOO FOR ME ONLY author, but it wasn’t on Scott’s last post. I don’t think it was on the one before either. Perhaps some friend of Scott’s here, was stewing over some comment I made a week or 2 ago, and those stewed thoughts finally reached the emotional eruption point.

        Anyway, I thought before that this board had the potential for being inclusive of more varied points of view than it currently has. I no longer think so. I now see more clearly the reasons what it is what it is.

        • Julian says:

          As Scott said, he was going through old reported comments.

          I believe his point in having your prove you have read the book is not for you to change your opinion in some miraculous flip flop, but to have you demonstrate that you have understood Rand’s arguments and can debate them in good faith.

          • Jill says:

            I’m not actually interested in that author in particular, but only as a symbol and a tool of modern propagandists and politicians. I can use other terms to communicate what I mean, so I will, if I do continue to post here.

            Right now I’m in the position Scott would be in, if his Freudian supervisor assigned him and only him 1000 extra pages of readings of Freud’s work, plus a book report on that– after he’d already read numerous works by Freud plus commentaries by other authors about them. It’s the supervisor’s practicum class, so it’s within his rights. Just like it’s Scott’s board. He can manage it as he likes.

            It’s an excessive demand. But I am certainly used to people on this board making excessive demands on me, which I am not willing to accede to, because there is no point for me in doing so.

            I’m not usually necessarily interested in proving to anyone that I understand things that they want me to prove I understand, unless there is some point, for me, in doing so. I’m not a college student any more and don’t intend to act like one.

            People misunderstand each other constantly. I sometimes care if someone understands me, or can see what I know or understand. And sometimes it just doesn’t matter to me. I don’t spend a lot of time dancing for other people’s entertainment– at least not when it isn’t enjoyable for me, but rather would be a great deal of pointless work for me.

            Some of the “dialogue” I’ve been invited into on this board has been good. Other instances of it fall into a category that I mentioned once before.

            “For me, it’s like arguing with the Bible toting missionaries at my door who have come to convert me. No one would expect me to waste my time in discussions with those people, in person. But on the Internet, when the fundamentalism is political rather than religious, many people think this is different. It’s not.”

          • Anonymous says:

            I’m not usually necessarily interested in proving to anyone that I understand things that they want me to prove I understand, unless there is some point, for me, in doing so.

            The point, for you, in doing so is to show that you do understand the 101’s of the topic. This should be really easy if, for example, the following sentence is true:

            Right now I’m in the position Scott would be in, if his Freudian supervisor assigned him and only him 1000 extra pages of readings of Freud’s work, plus a book report on that– after he’d already read numerous works by Freud plus commentaries by other authors about them

            In my dealings with you, you’ve claimed to have read “hundreds of pages” on how our foreign signals intelligence authorities work. I asked you a basic question that is easily answerable by anyone who has done even a small portion of that legwork. The fact that you disappeared and are now retreating to positions like, “I’m just not interested,” is evidence that you’re flatly lying about your knowledge base. Please stop complaining that everyone else is delusional due to propaganda when you literally cannot show basic knowledge of 101s.

          • Jill says:

            Anoonymous, you are one of the rudest commenters on the board. I am not under any obligation to engage with a person as rude as you are. And I do do not care in the least what the rudest most insulting commenters on the board think of me.

            I must say, I am astounded that you have no awareness of how rude and insulting you are. Some people don’t care when people are rude, but many people find it irritating. Demanding that people engage and dialogue with you after you have insulted them and irritated them– well, I guess some people must give in to such demands, or else you wouldn’t have gotten in the habit of doing this. But I certainly never will.

          • Anonymous says:

            I will refrain from linking a whole bunch of my comments that aren’t the least bit insulting and which have been genuinely positively received (I think I’ve done this before for you when you recklessly insulted me). I understand that no one tracks Anon gravitars.

            That said, I consider a person incredibly rude when they barrel into a conversation, accusing everyone of being a brainwashed partisan at the mercy of propaganda, while demonstrating not even a 101-level understanding of basic issues. I respond to these people in kind. I engage very differently when I feel they are entering the conversation honestly. You have literally all of the power to change this. If you show a basic level of competence when people challenge your experience with a particular subject, I guarantee the tenor of the conversation will change. It certainly will with me.

          • Jill says:

            Well, perhaps you have behaved in a civil manner towards some people, but you have not towards me.

            Anonymous thinks: Why won’t Jill dialogue with me? I’ve gone to great efforts to insult and irritate her. What could the problem possibly be?

          • Anonymous says:

            Anonymous thinks: Why won’t Jill dialogue with me? I’ve gone to great efforts to insult and irritate her. What could the problem possibly be?

            Look, I never go out of my way to be insulting… but if you’re going to make my mental state the focus of the inquiry, I’ll give it to you unfiltered. “Ohhh, a response to my comment! Goody! Oh. Jill thinks I’ve been tricked by right-wing propaganda. And then she… what the what. That doesn’t even make sense! Doesn’t she know the first thing abo… IT GOT WORSE! AHHHH!!!!! Ok, Mr. Anon… how are you going to respond? I mean, you can’t just let such a ridiculous statement just stand there. But it’s sooooo outside of the realm of any serious discourse… how?! I mean, maybe she’s trying to tap into a complaint that is legitimate… but it’s just shrouded in soo much nonsense. Ok. I guess we’ll see if we can walk her through 101. Maybe she’ll actually read [a statute; an opinion; an academic article; …], and we could have an interesting, productive conversation. Let’s see if she’s willing to at least try.”

            If you then state that you’re not interested in trying, a lot of us are going to give up on you. We’ll ignore you, or we’ll just insult your lack of effort and move on to serious interlocutors. For me, this is not a “Jill on SSC”-specific situation. I argue for pro-government positions wrt SIGINT on r/tech. People there are soooo into Greenwald/EFF/Schneier/Wyden-land that they can’t hardly comprehend my perspective. The problem is that I’ve read most of the relevant documents about the issue, while they haven’t the faintest clue. I see the same five talking points every other week. My goal is not always to engage in a conversation, anymore. Often times, my goal is just to get people to go read the documents! If I can get them to try to prove me wrong from the relevant documents, it’s a win! That’s about where I am with you. If I can get you to even read [a statute; an opinion; an academic article; …], I’d consider that a successful conversation. Otherwise, I think it’s mostly pointless. Honestly, being rude and pissing people off seems more likely to cause them to go try to prove me wrong from the relevant documents…

          • Gazeboist says:

            @anon:

            Could you post a top-level comment on SIGINT at some point? That sounds like an interesting conversation. For reference, I’m pretty pro-privacy and therefore not of the “information wants to be free” set, but I’m also not especially inclined to be charitable towards most government defenses of secrecy, and while I accept the claim that there at least might exist some secrets that ought to stay so, it seems to me that the government is usually excessive in its secrecy.

          • ThirteenthLetter says:

            @Anon: Ditto what Gazeboist said, I’d really enjoy hearing a different approach to the topic.

          • Lysenko says:

            @GreenAnon

            I’d also like that discussion, and if time allows I may try to get it started on this OT Post or the next.

            The last time I stated my personal feelings on Manning and Snowden, I lost some acquaintances.

          • AnonBosch says:

            It seems patently obvious to me that Snowden is currently an FSB asset. I think he started out as a genuine whistleblower, and I definitely think some of the programs he exposed were excessive. They were probably “legal” in the sense that some NSA lawyer wrote some memo with a tortured interpretation of a secret FISC precedent, and so I can respect that he felt the need to go outside the system.

            But regardless of what intentions he started with, I’m not so naive as to think those weeks he spent holed up at Sheremetyevo were spent watching pay-per-view movies, and his appearance as a live prop in a Putin “town hall” sealed it. Russians likely don’t have compunctions about rubber hose cryptography. I find the theory that Wikileaks sold him out to be persuasive, since he seems like the kind of naive libertarian who might genuinely buy into the Assange myth.

          • hlynkacg says:

            ^ Pretty much

          • The Nybbler says:

            If you want to get information out of Snowden, why use a rubber hose when you’ve got hot, hot agents with cold, cold eyes? You can attract more files with honeys than you can with an inquisitor…

          • John Schilling says:

            If you want to get information out of Snowden, why use a rubber hose when you’ve got hot, hot agents with cold, cold eyes?

            Unfortunately, Scarlet Johansson defected to SHIELD years ago, leaving the KGB retreads with nothing better than… Oh God No. Rule 34 escapes the internet.

          • Lumifer says:

            It seems patently obvious to me that Snowden is currently an FSB asset.

            In the same way that Soviet defectors during the cold war were CIA assets?

          • CatCube says:

            @Lumifer

            In the same way that Soviet defectors during the cold war were CIA assets?

            …Yes? How is that in question?

          • Anonymous says:

            @Gazeboist et al.

            I will put together a thorough comment. It won’t be on the currently new open thread (60.25), because I am traveling, but I will do it.

        • Zombielicious says:

          Well, one month prior to a presidential election is kind of Peak Flamewar for the entire U.S. internet demographic. I’ve seen people stop talking to each other completely over it. Plus it looks like a few of the most consistently offensive partisan commenters have recently been given the boot, so hopefully things will cool down a bit soon (starting mid-to-late November, if not sooner).

        • Paul Brinkley says:

          “I thought before that this board had the potential for being inclusive of more varied points of view than it currently has. I no longer think so.”

          I think it largely is.* More to the point, there are several commenters here, such as Earthly Knight and HeelBearCub and herbert herbertson, who not only share many of your views, but they get actively engaged and discussed by people who disagree, when they express them.

          *Technically, there exists a banned viewpoint, but the only one I know of to receive that treatment is a view on the right, not the left.

      • Matt M says:

        BTW Jill, if you’re curious, I offer you a more reasonable compromise. This is a pretty brief excerpt from my personal favorite speech in Atlas Shrugged. And this one is the second. Maybe at least read them 🙂

        Note that the term “brief” is incredibly relative!

        • cassander says:

          if you like that, you’ll like my favorite spech from neal stephenson’s baroque cycle. It espouses the opposite view, from the mouth of a fanatical jesuit no less, and in doing so perfectly sums up what rand loved about money.

          “Money, and all that comes with it, disgusts me.” said Father Edouard de Gex … “Within living memory, men and women of noble birth did not even have to think about it. Oh, there were rich nobles and poor, just as there were tall and short, beautiful and ugly. But it would never have entered the mind of even a peasant to phant’sy that a penniless Duke was any less a Duke, or that a rich whore ought to be made a Duchess. … To nobles, clerics, and peasants–the only people needed or wanted in a decent Christian Realm–coins were as alien, eldritch, inexplicable as communion wafers to a Hindoo. … But what has happened of late is monstrous. The money-cult has spread faster across what used to be Christendom than the faith of Mahomet did across Araby. I did not grasp the enormity of it until you came to Versailles as an infamous Dutch whore, a plaything of diseased bankers, and shortly were ennobled–made into a Countess, complete with a fabricated pedigree–and why? Because you had noble qualities? No. Only because you were Good with Money–a high sorceress of the coin-cult–and so were adored by the same sort of degraded Versailles court-fops who would gather in abandoned churches at midnight to recite the Black Mass.”

          there is more here:

  38. Anonymous says:

    I read these statistics and I’d like to discuss them, but I’m worried it would violate the Open Thread topic injunctions. Can someone help me out with that meta question? Don’t touch the actual topic until that’s sorted, I beg.

    • Stefan Drinic says:

      You’re fine, topic-wise, as long as you can manage to stay charitable.

    • Lambert says:

      Can Scott ban people whilst he himself is banned? He can’t comment answer that meta-meta question, though.

    • Aapje says:

      My take on those statistics:
      – Studies tend to find a considerable gap between ‘identifying as LGB’ vs having had same-gender sex, suggesting quite a bit of experimenting and/or bisexual people not identifying as such because they have a dominant attraction and/or repressed sexuality
      – The difference in age suggest that young people are either very uncertain and/or their sexuality has not stabilized
      – Even the region with the highest percentage of LGB has only 2.6%. Despite this, I’ve frequently heard it claimed that 10% of people are LGB.

      • Anonymous says:

        Even the region with the highest percentage of LGB has only 2.6%. Despite this, I’ve frequently heard it claimed that 10% of people are LGB.

        This specifically is what I wanted to discuss – I’ve been fed the 10% line my entire life, including in school, and now it turns out that 2%’s probably pushing it? (Notably, “the region with the highest percentage” is London, and the writiers of the report are trying really hard to not just say “it’s because gay people move there”, even though that trend’s pretty much SF-level and clearly responsible for the inflation.)

        Where did the 10% estimate even come from? Were people just pushing a benignant lie to make us friendlier toward GLB people? I mean, on the one hand I think that’s really shady, but on the other hand I have to admit that if authority figures had told my generation that GLB incidence was about 2%, we might (as a group) never have been persuaded to care about their rights or acceptance or anything. But then on the third hand, maybe that means we shouldn’t have?

        I don’t know, the whole thing troubles me. In any case, I was also surprised to find the percentage was so low! That was my main takeaway.

        • radm says:

          10% comes from Kinsey’s survey of behaviors in 1947, covering the last few years. A similar survey of diet in Europe at that time would have found a lot of vegetarians.

        • Mazirian says:

          Some early work by Kinsey and others suggested a high prevalence because of sampling bias, but 2-4% is a pretty typical result in modern surveys in different countries. There are some studies suggesting higher figures though.

        • Skef says:

          The numbers jump to around 10% when actors in lesbian porn scenes are included.

          • Fahundo says:

            Why wouldn’t that count? Based on random polling of my heterosexual friends, I conclude that not even a million dollars is sufficient payment to engage in sex acts that go against one’s preferences.

          • Winter Shaker says:

            I conclude that not even a million dollars is sufficient payment to engage in sex acts that go against one’s preferences

            Okay, but the demographic of ‘people who are already having sex on camera for money’ is likely to be quite different from your sample.

          • The Nybbler says:

            @Fahundo

            You can’t tell about the million dollars unless you make a credible offer.

          • Fahundo says:

            It was a joke, but the point is, I suspect at least, if he said gay porn instead of lesbian, the assertion that they aren’t really gay would be far more controversial.

            And also people in my bubble place way too much value on their straightness.

          • John Schilling says:

            On the off chance that this is in any way serious, A: the market for actors in porn is I believe almost entirely demand-driven, with no shortage of willing sellers for any combination of gender and orientation, and B: the demand for girl-on-girl porn is a combination of actual lesbians and straight men who don’t want to see other men’s penises anywhere in their erotic fantasies.

          • Fahundo says:

            Yes, a joke.

            The humor (to me anyway) comes from the fact that there is no shortage of straight guys who claim they wouldn’t go near a penis for even a million dollars, and anyone who would is totally gay; juxtaposed with the fact that there are indeed people working in porn who engage in sex outside their own preferences for a lot less than a million dollars.

          • Anon. says:

            >I suspect at least, if he said gay porn instead of lesbian, the assertion that they aren’t really gay would be far more controversial.

            There’s even a wikipedia article on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay-for-pay

          • dndnrsn says:

            @Fahundo/Anon.

            I’ve sometimes wondered if there actually are a significant number of gay porn performers who are heterosexual, or if it’s (as the article notes) something marketed towards gay men who find straight men attractive for one reason or another (usually in the same way that some straight/bi men find the idea of “converting” a lesbian appealing).

          • Aapje says:

            @Fahundo

            Research shows pretty conclusively that women are far more open to same-gender sex than men, although it’s not really possible to determine the reason (biological differences or conditioning or both).

        • Aapje says:

          Were people just pushing a benignant lie to make us friendlier toward GLB people?

          It’s probably more a combination of echo chambers, outlier research that fits the group bias & thus is valued over other evidence and a small group of actual liars for whom the ends justify the means.

          But as we all know, we only use 10% of our brains, so I might be wrong about this. 🙂

          I mean, on the one hand I think that’s really shady, but on the other hand I have to admit that if authority figures had told my generation that GLB incidence was about 2%, we might (as a group) never have been persuaded to care about their rights or acceptance or anything.

          No. LGB rights didn’t forge a breakthrough because people realized (or misunderstood) how prevalent they are, but rather, that they realized that LGBs can be respectable people.

          In repressive societies, the most ‘normal’ people will hide their status, so the common person will mainly see the excesses and little evidence that most of these people are respectable and not actually that weird. For people who perceive gay people as pedophiles, being told that 10% of the population is LGB, rather than 2-5% will just make them more upset, not more sympathetic to LGB people.

          The trick is to change this perception. I believe that the main breakthrough was that LGB people formed communities in places like SF and NY & demonstrated that they could be respectable (through people like Harvey Milk).

          • Anonymous says:

            No. LGB rights didn’t forge a breakthrough because people realized (or misunderstood) how prevalent they are, but rather, that they realized that LGBs can be respectable people.

            My personal experience does not match this; especially from school. It was very much the case that teachers and others sought to convince, and it seemed to me did convince, mainly using the argument “there are lots of gay people, one of your friends is probably gay, if you have ten friends it’s basically guaranteed, would you really hate one of your friends?”

            Especially to a school child at the impressionable age, I don’t think “respectable” is even an operative category, and the closest thing to respectable is “non-deviator from the norm”, thus pretty much definitionally disqualifying all GLB people.

          • Matt M says:

            I had the same experience as Anon. At least once in school I was specifically told that 10% of people are gay, and there were 30 of us in the class (high school health I believe) so statistically we probably had three gay students who were horribly oppressed and forced to remain closeted because bigotry.

            That anecdote probably has a lot less power if the teacher says 2% of people are gay and therefore it is more likely than not that there isn’t a single gay person in the room.

          • Anonymous says:

            No. LGB rights didn’t forge a breakthrough because . . .

            Just in case you are trying to model the causes for increased LGB support in the last few decades . . . for me, it had to do with neither respectability nor numbers. If anything, it was that I came to find anti-LGB positions unjustifiable. This was in the early 1990s, before it was cool (and contra “The Cathedral”).

          • Aapje says:

            Anon & Matt,

            My argument is more historical, before it became popular on the left.

            The ‘they could be your X’ argument only works if you don’t already regard them as evil. Imagine someone arguing: “there are lots of terrorists, your neighbor could be one” That doesn’t work, because there is not a belief that these people won’t hurt you.

            So that wouldn’t work.

            Don’t forget that even in 1977 anti-gay activists scored a great victory in Miami-Dade. During the last presidential elections they voted 2/3s for Obama. So even in a fairly lefty area (unless the demographics changed a lot), a scare campaign worked not so long ago.

          • Matt M says:

            You’re correct that it won’t work for a group you already hate – but I could see it being effective on bringing someone from “neutral” to “approval.”

            The average non-churchgoing pre-teen probably hasn’t given a whole lot of thought as to whether or not homosexuality is good or bad or what have you. I could see the “one of your friends is probably secretly gay and you don’t even know it” argument influencing someone to think positively about a group they otherwise wouldn’t care about either way.

        • Nyx says:

          Well, when people first started trying to figure out exactly what proportion of the population was gay, it was obviously pretty difficult given that so many people were closeted, and most of the estimates had to rely on assumptions and guesses and surveys, which introduces lots of potential for misleading statistics.

          Of course, I think it’s always unfair to blame scientists too much for this sort of thing when it is almost always the media that cherry picks the largest and most exciting number and repeats it ad nauseum. Likely, you did not hear “10%” from a researcher directly; you read it in a newspaper or on the internet, or heard it from some other secondary source.

          • Anonymous says:

            Of course, I think it’s always unfair to blame scientists too much for this sort of thing when it is almost always the media that cherry picks the largest and most exciting number and repeats it ad nauseum. Likely, you did not hear “10%” from a researcher directly; you read it in a newspaper or on the internet, or heard it from some other secondary source.

            To be clear, I’ve never blamed scientists (although I’m prepared to blame Kinsey if it’s true that he’s the ultimate origin of the figure, because his methods were truly terrible), and I’m sorry if it came off that way.

            What troubles me is that during my upbringing the 10% figure was quoted by the media, by “informative speakers” from foundations for tolerance, by teachers – in short, by everyone trying to teach us kids to be okay with GLB people – not as a possible figure, not as an estimate, but as a settled fact. Now it turns out to have been off by an order of magnitude.

            That’s something that makes me very uncomfortable, even if it was done for the very best of ideological reasons.

          • “That’s something that makes me very uncomfortable, even if it was done for the very best of ideological reasons.”

            It is something that ought to make you generally suspicious of orthodox factoids.

          • Deiseach says:

            What troubles me is that during my upbringing the 10% figure was quoted by the media, by “informative speakers” from foundations for tolerance, by teachers – in short, by everyone trying to teach us kids to be okay with GLB people – not as a possible figure, not as an estimate, but as a settled fact.

            Well, yeah. Politics and making it personal to get people to be sympathetic and thinking about “gay rights for my family and friends”, not “some small crowd living in the big city down south/out east that have nothing to do with me or mine”. Nobody is going to be too bothered about being a sympathetic ally if there are only the likelihood of a few people that you’re hardly likely to meet in that category; make it 10% and shove figures at people that say “So that means if you know fifty people, at least X of them are gay, even if you don’t know it – and if those X people are your family, your friends, your co-workers? Then won’t you change your mind?” Activist groups put out the 10% figure in educational and promotional materials, question their numbers and you’re one of the homophobic persecutors, so teachers etc. just regurgitate the publicity material they’ve been given.

            I also always thought there was some conflating going on, as in “If 1.6% are gay men and 1.4% are lesbians and this many are bi and those many are trans, add it all up and round it off and we can say at least 10% of the population are LGBT”.

          • Aapje says:

            @Anonymous

            What troubles me is that during my upbringing the 10% figure was quoted by the media, by “informative speakers” from foundations for tolerance, by teachers – in short, by everyone trying to teach us kids to be okay with GLB people – not as a possible figure, not as an estimate, but as a settled fact. Now it turns out to have been off by an order of magnitude.

            My current assumption is that any advocacy group will pick the most charitable statistic, which is usually an outlier. They can’t help themselves.

            If other people use the same number, this is then an indication of lack of critical thinking. Especially in culture war issues, the media & teachers tend to pick a side, rather than figure out the truth (which is usually not where either part of the culture war claims it is). Teachers are usually not equipped for critical thinking and the media tends to consists of people too dumb for a proper job (aside from a small minority) and thus easily manipulated.

          • Aapje says:

            @Deiseach

            I’ve also wondered if there is some bad math in there. If they take the ‘had same-gender sex’ figures you get to roughly 5% of men and 5% of women. Perhaps they just assumed 5% gays + 5% lesbians = 10%.

          • lvlln says:

            To me, this phenomenon looks so similar to the 1-in-5 or 1-in-4 rape victimization rate that get thrown out whenever people talk about rape in colleges (to the point that there’s even an organization called One In Four). I imagine the original stat from which the shockingly high number came is just as inapplicable to current reality. And I imagine the stat persists in popular culture for similar reasons, mainly that people aren’t incentivized to scrutinize it, since coming up with a lower, but more accurate, number is considered indicative of being bigoted or against acknowledging the problem.

          • Aapje says:

            In that case it is more a matter of just expanding the definition until many of the women about whom the researcher claimed that they were raped, refused that labeling themselves.

            That particular researcher also happens to be a huge bigot who refuses to ever call it rape if a woman has intercourse with a men who doesn’t want that or cannot give consent.

        • Skef says:

          The .1 figure has played a rhetorical role. UW Madison’s group is still called the “Ten Percent Society”. But as noted it was come by honestly, if mistakenly, by way of Kinsey.

          The change in statistics may (ironically?) partly reflect the loss of taboo status. People in earlier times may have used an equivalent of the one-drop rule, where doing something out of boredom or desperation with a friend would push you a column over.

        • Nicholas says:

          How did Kinsey operationalize queerness in his studies? Because if you said something like “We’re going to call every person who’s ever had even a single sexual observation about a member of their gender queer” then I can imagine you might find something approaching 10%.

        • TheAncientGeek says:

          I’ve never really got the idea that a minority has t reach a certain thresshold to get rights.

      • vV_Vv says:

        Despite this, I’ve frequently heard it claimed that 10% of people are LGB.

        I’ve always heard it was 2-3%, 5% max.

        • Anonymous says:

          I’d always heard 4-2%. (I’d also come across the 10% figure occasionally, but it seemed obviously unreliable.)

        • Zombielicious says:

          That explains a lot. I’d always heard 10% as well, and it seemed too high, unless I’ve either known a lot of people keeping it a secret, or they’re counting everyone remotely bisexual, down to every pair of girls who ever made out in a bar. I’d guessed it was more of the latter, though.

      • Nyx says:

        > Even the region with the highest percentage of LGB has only 2.6%. Despite this, I’ve frequently heard it claimed that 10% of people are LGB.

        That’s a pretty absurd claim and always has been. My inclination is that the true value is somewhere around 3% or 4% at most, which assumes that some proportion of “don’t knows” or “refused to answers” is LGB.

      • Bassicallyboss says:

        One thing you missed mentioning which I usually consider for statistics like these: This is a survey about identity, not about behavior or experience. The generational difference may affect how people choose to identify identical feelings. For example, I expect that young people who experience attraction to both sexes are more likely to identify as bisexual than older people.

    • Lambert says:

      I don’t think you can infer much when LGB makes 1.7% and refused to say / unknown makes 4.6%. The data will be measuring how many people are willing to positively state they are LGB as much as the distribution of the underlying LGB population. (And that’s ignoring Lizardman’s constant)

      • eyeballfrog says:

        Even so, it strongly suggests the population of LGB people is a single-digit percentage, and probably not larger than 5%. This is significantly lower than public perception, which tends to be more like 10-15%.

        • Anon. says:

          >This is significantly lower than public perception, which tends to be more like 10-15%.

          Actually over 20%: http://www.gallup.com/poll/183383/americans-greatly-overestimate-percent-gay-lesbian.aspx

          • eyeballfrog says:

            It’s weird, because it seems obvious that must be false. In the US, for example, there are clearly more black people than gay people. But blacks are only 12% of the population, and for it to be clear that there are fewer gays it would require their frequency to be significantly less. So logically the frequency of gays must be in the single digits (and, as it turns out, it is).

          • Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

            Maybe people also overestimate the % of black people in the US?

          • Anonymous says:

            Maybe because gays and lesbians are overrepresented in entertainment?

          • Vaniver says:

            eyeballfrog, when you ask people in surveys like the above, they typically estimate that about a third of the US is black.

          • Stefan Drinic says:

            People can and do overestimate the amount of X minorities a country has, just as Vaniver states. My country had a survey taken where people estimated the % of people who were muslim; the end result came out with an average of 25%, where the real amount is somewhere between 4 and 5.

          • Matt M says:

            Yeah, over-representation in the media (both of real life celebrities and fictional characters) probably has a huge impact on this. Same with estimates of Jewish populations. I’ve always heard that most people over-estimate the Jewish population of America by a factor of 10.

            I assume that a lot of people would under-shoot estimates of Asian and possibly Hispanic populations though.

          • Nicholas says:

            I saw a study once that suggested that if more than 1/5th of a group of people were women, people would remember the group as “about half female” even though 30% is nowhere near half. It’s possible that there’s some sort of salience bias where people assume that any group they know actual members of must be some huge proportion.

        • TheWorst says:

          I saw a study once that suggested that if more than 1/5th of a group of people were women, people would remember the group as “about half female” even though 30% is nowhere near half. It’s possible that there’s some sort of salience bias where people assume that any group they know actual members of must be some huge proportion.

          That same study struck me as being proof of something I’d long suspected, but I think I heard (on this blog, maybe?) that it’d failed to replicate.

          Edit: Wrong place.

      • Anonymous says:

        I don’t think you can infer much when LGB makes 1.7% and refused to say / unknown makes 4.6%.

        On the contrary, I think you can infer a great deal. Not only can you infer an absolute max at 6.3% (much as eyeballfrog said) if every person who refuses to say is GLB, but you can also make some fairly simple estimations of what proportion of those 4.6% are likely to be GLB, with reference to a few other statistics.

        For instance, last I saw about 18% of all British people identify as feminists of some stripe (almost all who do so are women, incidentally). That’s almost exactly an order of magnitude more than the number of “out” GLB people; if we assume that the gender doctrine that it’s wrong to label sexuality is proportionately widespread among both groups, that implies that ninety per cent of those who refuse to say are just feminist ideologues, and ten per cent of refusers, or an additional .46% of people, are GLB. This is simplified, of course; but it gestures at a proportion, namely, that any trend against disclosure among straights will rapidly overwhelm any genuine closeting among GLB individuals.

        I think we can also infer that the real figure is very unlikely to be above 3% for the simple reason that, to anyone who actually lives in the UK, the idea that even as much as half of all homo- and bisexual persons are afraid to tell anybody, let alone a (surely anonymized!) statistical survey, seems fully ridiculous. They’ve had the right to marry for over six years, for Pete’s sake. When the law was changed the feeling that it was high time was so unanimous that it was the Conservative party that legalized it. There’s just no blinking way that a mere quarter of all homosexuals are out.

        • Aapje says:

          I assume that there are some people who are LGB but deny it (sometimes even to themselves) and would identify as hetero.

          You’d expect that more among conservatives. The last big study (2006) in the Netherlands found 7.1% of GB and 5.9% of LB. That is very high compared to other countries which indicates a lot of acceptance (and also probably some migration from less accepting places). Fairly few Dutch people are conservative, so I’d expect no more than 1% to consist of denialist. So that gives an upper bound of 7-8%.

          That is actually much close to 10% then I expected when I started to research this comment.

          But again, I expect that the gay-friendly of Amsterdam has resulted in a decent amount of LGB immigration.

        • sweeneyrod says:

          You seem to be taking the fact that since all the non-closeted gay people you know are non-closeted, all gay people must be non-closeted. Do you not see a flaw in that? Regarding your penultimate sentence, about 50% of Conservative MPs voted against the Marriage Act, a figure which roughly reflected public opinion at the time. The balance has changed somewhat since then, but gay marriage is still opposed by 25% or so of the population.

    • JayT says:

      One thing that I find interesting is that it was always assumed that being gay would be under-reported due to social stigma, but as being gay has become more and more acceptable it seems like the percentages haven’t really changed. I wonder why that is.

    • dndnrsn says:

      Kind of related:

      I figure you can define sexuality in three ways: inclination, experience, and identity. Let’s take bisexual men as an example. There are more men who are bisexual in the sense that they are attracted to both men and women (in whatever “ratio”) than there are men who have had sexual experiences with both sexes than there are men who will identify themselves as bisexual.

      That we describe all three as someone’s sexuality just confuses things terribly.

      • Randy M says:

        There are more men who are bisexual in the sense that they are attracted to both men and women (in whatever “ratio”) than there are men who have had sexual experiences with both sexes

        Though likely true, this is not a logical certainty unless perhaps you add willing, and even then prison might make it kind of questionable.

    • James says:

      What sort of education did you receive that propagated 10%?

      I have spread the 2% number around as trivia and most people are shocked. Is the 10% a product of public education?

      Edit: oh media, got it.

  39. Forlorn Hopes says:

    I found and enjoyed this article about the realignment of politics (Brexit, Trump, Corbyn, etc) yesterday.

    It’s central thesis is that Theresa May is the first truly post-Thatcher Prime Minister in the United Kingdom because she has realized that the last few years of economic uncertainty means the public want to have a stronger state.

  40. Richard says:

    An outsiders one-paragraph summary of the current election:

    If you think the United States and the world in general is heading vaguely in the right direction, you vote Clinton. If you think the USA and the entire western civilisation is hanging on to the precipice by it’s metaphorical fingernails, you vote Trump.

    This explains a lot of things, among others why Clinton supporters seem lukewarm and Trumpers to be rather rabid.

    It also implies that the thing to worry about is not who wins the election, but why almost half the country seem willing to prefer Trump to the abyss and what can and should be done to fix this.

    • The Nybbler says:

      It also implies that the thing to worry about is not who wins the election, but why almost half the country seem willing to prefer Trump to the abyss and what can and should be done to fix this.

      It goes back to the same refrain we’ve heard all along. The problems of that half of the country have been ignored and the people with the problems denigrated for some time. Case in point: Hillary supporters like to boast that not a single major newspaper has endorsed Trump. But isn’t that extraordinary? Why is it that 40+% of the country has no representation on newspaper editorial boards?

      • Alejandro says:

        I don’t think “40+% of the country has no representation on newspaper editorial boards” is the right way to describe the situation. A lot of those 40% are conventional Republicans who are supporting Trump out of conventional Republican reasons (e.g. lower taxes or pro-life judges), and these voters found themselves represented in newspaper endorsements when Romney, McCain or Bush were running.

        Consider the following ultra-simplified model: Politics is a single axis from 0 to 100 (Right to Left), and newspapers are clustered at the middle, say from 40 to 60. When both candidates nominate centrist-ish candidates, the newspaper opinion is divided as well. Now the Dems have nominated a 60 candidate and the GOP a 20 candidate. This makes all the newpapers endorse the former while 40% of the country supports the latter. The situation would be reversed if the candidates were, say, Jill Stein and Huntsman.

        Of course, there are multiple axes to consider (as well as non-ideological stuff like “temperament” and “experience”), and even on a single axis model I agree that neewspaper opinion skews left relative to the country – but not by as much as your argument implies.

        • Alex Zavoluk says:

          “newspapers are clustered at the middle, say from 40 to 60.”

          They aren’t, though. They’re clustered between 60 and 80.

          • Alejandro says:

            I conceded in the end that the left skew exists, but it can’t be that much or Romney, Bush, etc wouldn’t have had any endorsements.

          • Earthly Knight says:

            This is one of those cases where you should wait for actual data rather than trusting your hunches.

            –In 2008, newspapers overwhelmingly favored Obama, 64% to 36%
            –In 2004, newspapers were almost evenly split between Kerry and Bush, 51% to 49%
            –In 2000, newspapers favored Bush over Gore by a large margin, 61% to 39%

            It is true, however, that newspapers with larger circulations tend to favor democrats while newspapers with smaller circulations tend to favor republicans.

          • Alex Zavoluk says:

            If you’re going to be an asshole like that, it might be a better idea to make sure there isn’t any data the other person could possibly have used to come to their conclusion first. For example: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/GrosecloseMilyo.pdf

            From the conclusion, “Most of the mainstream media outlets that we examined (ie all those besides Drudge Report and Fox News’ Special Report) were closer to the average Democrat in Congress than they were to the median member of the House. ”

            Looking at the tables and charts near the end, most of the outlets other than Fox and Drudge were > 60. None were near 80 (so I was wrong there) but basically none were < 55.

            I'll wait over here for the apology.

          • Earthly Knight says:

            We were discussing the ideological bent of newspaper editorial boards. The study you link to deals with the ideological bent of news reports from various media outlets (it includes only three newspapers).

            The study’s methodology is also kind of nuts. It yields the conclusions that the ACLU is conservative, and the Drudge Report left-of-center!

      • Buckyballas says:

        Here’s the updated list of newspaper endorsements on wiki, in case anyone’s interested. The comments in the “Notes” column are pretty interesting. For example, “The Enquirer had not endorsed a Democrat for president since 1916 (Woodrow Wilson)”, “This was the first time in the Republic’s 126-year history that the paper had endorsed a Democrat for president”, and “This is The Atlantic’s third presidential endorsement in the magazine’s 159-year history. Their two previous endorsements were for Abraham Lincoln in 1860 and Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964.”

        Conor Friedersdorf had a nice article 2 weeks ago about distinguishing between the “liberal mainstream media” and local newspapers.

      • sweeneyrod says:

        How many of Trump’s 40+% are strong supporters, and how many are lukewarm ones whose preference for a Republican president barely overcomes their dislike of Trump? The second group might hold similar views to the papers that endorsed Romney, but dislike Trump slightly more than Hillary.

        • Richard says:

          The point that I was trying to make seems not to have been picked up on, so I’ll try again.

          – From the outside, Trump seems like an extreme candidate
          – If you’re lukewarm republican you do like Bush and vote Clinton
          – Unless you think the Nation is in dire enough straits that any change, even Trump, is bound to be for the better.

          Therefore my estimate is that ALL the 40% believes America is headed for some version of the apocalypse.

          The fact that such a large number is that worried should raise a bigger alarm than who will sit in the oval office for the next 4 year.

          I hope that was clearer.

          EDIT; also, it doesn’t really matter if it’s 30 or 40%, it’s far too large in any case.

          • Sly says:

            It is nowhere near 40%. Large portions of that 40% are just tribal affiliation.

          • Buckyballas says:

            Maybe consider that you might be setting up a false dichotomy between apocalyptic and non-apocalyptic. Opposition to Hillary does not necessarily have to stem from a concern that America is headed towards the apocalypse. Consider the following:

            “The Supreme Court Argument”: This argument is advanced by both evangelical Christians and strict-Constitutionalists. There are a large number of potential vacancies which will be filled this term. Trump is more likely than Hillary to nominate judges who advance my beliefs about what is best for the country. Therefore, I will vote for Trump.

            “The Hillary is Bad at Foreign Affairs Argument”: Hillary has a track record of misadventures in Libya and a more-hawkish-than-Obama stance on arming Syrian rebels. Trump is less likely than Hillary to get into messy foreign conflicts. Therefore, I will vote for Trump.

            “The Anti-Big-Government Argument”: More regulations = bad for America. Trump is less likely to increase regulations and more likely to reduce regulations than Hillary. Therefore, I will vote for Trump.

            These are just 3 examples. I am sure there are more, some of which have been posted in this comment space. As you can see, none of them are the “America is about to fall off a cliff” argument you are attributing to all Trump supporters. It is clear that a vocal fraction of his supporters agree with it, but I am not clear on if it is a sizable fraction or not.

            I am voting for Hillary, but I am sympathetic to the Supreme Court argument (not so much the other 2).

          • Kevin C. says:

            The fact that such a large number is that worried should raise a bigger alarm than who will sit in the oval office for the next 4 year.

            I hope that was clearer.

            EDIT; also, it doesn’t really matter if it’s 30 or 40%, it’s far too large in any case.

            Why should it “raise an alarm”? And why are the numbers “too large”? After all, if we’re right about that whole “apocalypse/abyss” thing, 30-40% is too low.

          • Skef says:

            Kevin C. –

            If 30% of the population mistakenly thinks the end is nigh, that’s cause for alarm. People who feel they have nothing to lose are prone to rash acts.

            If the end is actually nigh, that’s cause for alarm. It prompts goodbyes to loved-ones and other end-appropriate acts.

          • Fahundo says:

            After all, if we’re right

            If the doomsayers are right, it should be raising even more alarms.

          • Richard says:

            Exactly what skef said.

          • dragnubbit says:

            But it likely is nowhere near 30% once you factor in loyalty to party/tribe, rationalizing that Trump will let Ryan/Pence run things while he watches himself on TV, and general belief that one’s vote does not really matter so why not have fun with it.

            People that are ‘rationally’ choosing Trump to avert an apocalypse are a small minority of his support. There are plenty of other more accessible rationalizations to vote for him.

      • Anonymous says:

        It goes back to the same refrain we’ve heard all along. The problems of that half of the country have been ignored and the people with the problems denigrated for some time.

        There are worse things than being ignored. After watching 30-40% of the country loudly denigrate me and mine and trying to burn down the country out of spite, I’m going all in on trying to destroy their culture so they can never come this close again.

        The AWB is a dumb law that doesn’t save any lives. Doesn’t matter, I’m all for it now. I had nothing in particular against RFRA and the mini-RFRAs, if bakers don’t want to cater a wedding, what do I care? Now I am going to support all those laws, let those Trump supporting bakers lose their life savings and go out of business. Don’t want transgender people in your bathrooms — too bad, sucks to be you.

        I wonder if we can get a law passed to ban high school football, given the manifest harm those concussions are causing to those precious children …

        • baconbacon says:

          So in return for Trump supporters trying to burn down the country, you are out of spite going to support burning down the country?

          • FacelessCraven says:

            It’s a win/win, as both sides get what they want.

          • hlynkacg says:

            It would seem so.

          • Anonymous says:

            I very much expect us to win and there to be very little collateral damage against people that haven’t come out and very vocally claimed to hate me and mine. I very much don’t want to burn down the country, much of it is quite nice.

          • hlynkacg says:

            Ahh. I remember the days when I was young, cocky, and utterly convinced of my own infallibility. Feels good man.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @Anonymous – “I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed, but no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops! -uh depending on the breaks.”

          • Anonymous says:

            We’ll see won’t we? My money is on internet tough guys staying that way.

          • hlynkacg says:

            My money is on internet tough guys staying that way.

            What a coincidence, that’s exactly where my money is. 😉

          • Zombielicious says:

            I didn’t see anything in the items listed that qualified as “burn down the country” level, so much as “really piss off a certain demographic” level.

            It gets back to another point though, which is that if you see your country as gradually being “taken over” by immigrants, and becoming non-white, non-religious, non-1950’s-Idyllic-whatever, and recognize to some extent that this is basically inevitable… is fighting tooth and nail to the last man really the best strategy? Do you really want the soon-to-be-majority to remember your soon-to-be-minority for the worst sorts of attacks on them? Do you want the same attacks you level at them to one day be leveled against you? It makes a lot of the alt-right rhetoric extra annoying, especially if you think there’s a chance that stuff will one day be held against a much broader group than the ones who actually participated in it, not unsimilar to blaming all Muslims for terrorism, all blacks for inner city crime, or all men for rape, sexism, and domestic abuse.

          • hlynkacg says:

            @ Zombielicious

            I think you misunderstand. It’s not so much see your country gradually ‘taken over’ (though it certainly plays a part) its the sense that that there is no longer a common American culture / identity.

            You see, in the absence of that shared culture / identity a question must be asked. What allegiance (if any) do rural, socially conservative folk, owe the rest of the country?

            Progressives like to talk about how toxic nationalism is but they don’t seem to have given much thought to how ugly things were before it, or what will happen after it’s gone.

          • Fahundo says:

            You see, in the absence of that shared culture / identity the question must be asked. What allegiance, if any, do rural social conservatives owe the rest of the country?

            Maybe I’m just too naïve.

            I’d like to believe that people can empathize with their neighbors without feeling they owe anyone any allegiance.

            is but they don’t seem to have given much thought to how ugly things were before it or what will happen after it’s gone.

            Before nationalism existed, the world was a lot different from today in more ways than just the one.

          • hlynkacg says:

            I’d like to believe that people can empathize with their neighbors without feeling they owe anyone any allegiance.

            Empathy is easy. Sacrifice? not so much.

          • Fahundo says:

            If the cause you’re sacrificing for is worth more than the sacrifice itself, it shouldn’t matter which group demanded the sacrifice, should it?

            And if it’s not worth more, I’d rather not feel pressured to make needless sacrifices due to group affiliation.

          • hlynkacg says:

            First off you’re assuming that everyone is a strict utilitarian. Secondly you’re assuming the presence of a distinct cause.

            I don’t think that either of these assumptions are justified.

          • Anonymous says:

            Who is asking rural social conservatives to sacrifice anything? On the contrary they are always demanding things from the rest of us. (Like subsidized telephony — somehow that didn’t get a pithy name like Obamaphones.)

          • Zombielicious says:

            @hlynkacg:
            I’m kind of not seeing how it’s reasonable to claim there’ll be no common American culture or identity, so much as that it won’t be exactly the one they desire. This may be rehashing old debates that have been had here before, and I can’t remember exactly how they turned out, but the U.S. has a ridiculously long history of immigration and demographic change, with the cultural identity of the U.S. undergoing continual change the entire time – most of it opposed by social conservatives at some time or another. See the scares around communists, beatniks, hippies, etc – yet here we are.

            The rhetoric on both sides is frequently literally stated as “we need to take our country back.” From who? The other 200 million people who live here? I guess I fail to understand how I can even charitably take it that they’re concerned about the need for a unified national identity, rather than not wanting any outside influences modifying that identity.

          • Cerebral Paul Z. says:

            Usually when I hear someone say “We need to take our country back,” my mind fills in the continuation, “…and demand a refund.”

          • Jill says:

            How could there be any common American culture or identity when people don’t even agree on basic facts about our government and our leaders, like where our president was born, whether he started ISIS, what the unemployment rate is, whether Russia is our friend, our enemy, or our frenemy, whether Hillary Clinton had almost 100 people murdered etc. People are not just fed different opinions by their “news sources.” They are fed totally different “facts.”

          • Fahundo says:

            First off you’re assuming that everyone is a strict utilitarian.

            I don’t think it requires strict utilitarianism. I’m fine with the cause being based on preferences and not justified by trying to measure how many stubbed toes are worth one leg amputation or some such. And I’m not even saying anything about whether you should place the same amount of importance on every single individual on the planet. I just don’t see why I, or anyone, should feel pressured to align those preferences to match those of a group that was chosen for me. I don’t consider myself utilitarian, at any rate.

            Secondly you’re assuming the presence of a distinct cause.

            If there’s no distinct cause, why make a sacrifice at all? I don’t want to be routinely pressured to make sacrifices for no reason by the group I owe allegiance to.

          • hlynkacg says:

            @ Anonymous

            Call me when the I-95 corridor starts growing it’s own food, generating it’s own electricity, and seeing to it’s own defense.

            In the mean time, try Googling Obamaphone.

            @ Zombielicious

            I’m saying that the common culture is already fading, hence the fractured state of the electorate. There is a comment below asking whether or not the US government should privilege the interests of US citizens over non-citizens? I think the fact that this is even a question ought to be illustrative. At the very least Trump’s primary success showed us that the Red and Blue tribes are far closer to true status independence than anyone had previously recognized.

            @ Fahundo

            I’m confused by your response “why make a sacrifice at all?” Is the question I ought to be asking you. IE why should someone in Missouri for instance accept a decrease in their quality of life to help someone from New York or Dubai? Why care about people you will never meet never mind enduring hardships on their behalf. Is the fireman who runs into a burning building to save a child not his own a “sucker” in your eyes?

          • Lumifer says:

            @ Fahundo

            I’d like to believe that people can empathize with their neighbors

            Neighbors? Sure. That’s something on the order of Dunbar’s number, so we’re talking about hundreds of people at most.

          • Fahundo says:

            @hlynkacg

            Eh, I was more arguing against being too loyal to cultural groups rather than regional ones. Actually, not even that, I was more arguing against feeling compelled to be loyal to the cultural group you happened to be born into. If you like your group and want to support them, fine, but your “shared culture/identity” sounds to me like coerced conformity.

            Is the fireman who runs into a burning building to save a child not his own a “sucker”

            No

            @ Lumifer:

            There are two Lumifer posts with that gravatar, and about 4 others with a different one. What are you trying to pull?

            Even hundreds of people sounds like too many to me, honestly.

          • Lumifer says:

            @ Fahundo

            It’s my evil twin : -P

          • hlynkacg says:

            One man’s coerced conformity is another man’s social capital. My point is that once you remove regional and cultural affiliations from the equation, as many people seem to be advocating, how do you organize any group larger than immediate acquaintances?

            I still find it incredibly weird that you seem to lack an instinctual sense of teamwork / tribal loyalty.

            No

            Why not? At the very least they are making an extremely poor decision.

          • Fahundo says:

            There are a lot of things that can only be accomplished through cooperation. If you want to accomplish one of those things, you have to. If you don’t, don’t, I guess.

            And I do value teamwork; I just don’t see it as intrinsically tied to tribal loyalty.

          • hlynkacg says:

            That just brings us back to my earlier question,

            Why would you expect someone in Missouri to endure hardship to improve the lot of someone in New York or Dubai?

            Why do you think people do stupid shit like “risk orphaning their own kids” for someone they’ve never met if not out of some sort of tribal or cultural affinity? They sure as hell aren’t doing it out of rational self interest.

          • dndnrsn says:

            @hlynkacg:

            This is something I’ve been pondering lately, largely because I have nothing better to do. Civic nationalism needs some sort of struggle to authenticate itself.

            Ethnic and cultural nationalism get condemned – but those condemning them usually provide no better alternative.

            This is somewhere where the communists are ahead – they provide something to rally around.

          • hlynkacg says:

            I don’t think it has to be a struggle, but I defiantly think you need some sort of common goal, religion, or something.

            My chief grievance with modern liberalism / convention wisdom is that they spend so much time undermining or dismissing these common threads, sports promote violence, nationalism is toxic, X Y and Z are cultural appropriation, and the constitution was written for dead white guys, etc.. For good measure they then go one to point out that the various ethnicities and sub tribes have legitimate reasons to hate each other…

            …and people are shocked, shocked to find ethnic strife in their neighborhoods. Well no shit guys what did you expect?

          • dndnrsn says:

            @hlynkacg:

            I don’t know how you can have anything “common” without some kind of struggle to hold it together. Not “let’s go out and conquer the world” but even “oh no Professor Smith gave me a B fuck that guy”. Adversity ties people together in a way prosperity doesn’t.

          • a non mouse says:

            …and people are shocked, SHOCKED to find ethnic strife in their neighborhoods. Well no shit guys what did you expect?

            They expected that they could keep the hate focused on one group – white men – until their coalition was big enough that the fighting within it wouldn’t matter. They might still be right.

            Lack of ethnic strife was never in the plans.

          • Fahundo says:

            Why would you expect someone in Missouri to endure hardship to improve the lot of someone in New York or Dubai?

            I really don’t get why this question comes up. I’m not telling you that you have to give up everything to support someone in New York. Why might it happen? I dunno, lots of reasons. Maybe the guy in Missouri really liked a book written by a guy in Dubai so he bought 10 copies and started passing them out.

            Why do you think people do stupid shit like “risk orphaning their own kids” for someone they’ve never met if not out of some sort of tribal or cultural affinity? They sure as hell aren’t doing it out of rational self interest.

            Why are tribal loyalty and rational self interest treated as the only two options? He could be some kind of narcissist who craves the attention. Or maybe, he just decided rescuing children is worth more to him than the relative safety of doing nothing.

            Do you think the Good Samaritan made the wrong choice in his story?

          • Anonymous says:

            @hlynkacg
            It must really get your goat that diamonds are more valuable than water. Don’t worry, I’m sure any day now the world as we know it is going to end and the effete elitists will get what’s coming to them. In the meanwhile you can continue to whine for crop subsidies and lie to yourself that isn’t welfare.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            @ hlynkacg:

            I still find it incredibly weird that you seem to lack an instinctual sense of teamwork / tribal loyalty.

            In my experience, everybody has a tribe, even if they don’t consciously recognise it. Generally speaking, people who think that national identity is silly tend to form a tribe based on common political views. Hence, for example, the phenomenon of bien pensants who imagine themselves to be open-minded “global citizens”, and then turn around and talk about their compatriots like a Victorian explorer describing some weird tribe of barbarians off in darkest Africa.

          • hlynkacg says:

            @ Fahundo

            No you’re not telling any one that, but that wasn’t the question either. The question was why would you expect people to cooperate in the first place if the current incentives and motivation were removed? What allegiance (if any) do rural, socially conservative folk, owe the rest of the country, if the rest of the country is not going to look out for their interests?

            @ Anon

            It actually doesn’t “get my goat” at all. You see water does this weird thing where it occasionally falls from the sky, crazy no? That said, it’s always fun watching ya’ll scramble in the face of inclement weather. Meanwhile in Florida

            @ The original Mr. X

            Same here. That’s why I find Fahundo’s prior assertions to this effect, and answers that appear to be consistent with such, to so weird.

          • Fahundo says:

            The question was why would you expect people to cooperate in the first place if the current incentives and motivation were removed?

            “Current incentives” being cultural unity? That was never my experience growing up in America. I don’t see them as the current incentives.

            What allegiance (if any) do rural, socially conservative folk, owe the rest of the country, if the rest of the country is not going to look out for their interests?

            No one owes anyone any allegiance. All people, all institutions, all governments, and all communities will let you down.

            Generally speaking, people who think that national identity is silly tend to form a tribe based on common political views.

            A tribe that you get to choose is automatically superior to one that was chosen for you, in my view.

        • At a slight tangent …

          I wonder how much of the effect being described is due to people being badly off and feeling the elite ignore their problems and how much to people who are not particularly badly off feeling that the elite despises them? Status is an important human motivator.

          I take the emotional punch of “flyover country” to be not that the relevant areas can or cannot be neglected by policy but that they don’t matter.

          It reminds me of an old song about little houses made of ticky tacky.

          • Anonymous says:

            The point is that the elites don’t despise them. People you despise aren’t the butt of mean-spirited but ultimately lighthearted jokes and are actively harmed rather than just have their interests ignored.

            We coastal types don’t have very much respect for them. Respect is earned, not given, and from our perspective they haven’t earned it. For that slight we get back hate. Well fuck it, it is time to return hate for hate.

          • Jiro says:

            “I don’t despise you. It’s just that I don’t respect you.” is indistinguishable from actually despising someone and having other things to do than immediately stomping on them.

            mean-spirited but ultimately lighthearted joke

            Is that like “quickly but slowly”?

          • hlynkacg says:

            Respect is earned, not given, and from our perspective they haven’t earned it.

            The same could be said of loyalty, and in either case that knife cuts both ways. Aside from making mean-spirited jokes what have you done to earn your opposite number’s respect?

            @ Jiro

            Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.

          • Anonymous says:

            “I don’t despise you. It’s just that I don’t respect you.” is indistinguishable from actually despising someone and having other things to do than immediately stomping on them.

            Do you think you are entitled to our respect? Our love?

            People like you have been despising city slickers for a very long time and in all that time we haven’t managed to find the time to go from lack of respect to despise. You all should have left well enough alone.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            Odd, I definitely seem to recall the “coastal elite” types imposing abortion and gay marriage on the country as a whole, and deliberately making it harder for people to avoid helping/participating in such things. So no, I don’t really buy this whole “But we’ve done nothing to hurt your culture!” BS Anon is currently spouting.

            Even setting this aside, though, culpable neglect is still a thing. If somebody’s bleeding to death on your doorstep and you don’t care enough to do anything, you’re a selfish a-hole, and “I’m not actively trying to hurt him, I just don’t give a sh*t about his problems” isn’t an adequate defence. Similarly, if large stretches of your country are suffering due to persistent poverty and lack of jobs and you as the political elite don’t do anything to alleviate that, you aren’t doing your job as a political elite, and it’s quite reasonable for the people you’re neglecting to want new rulers, regardless of whether your neglect is based on malice or selfishness.

          • Anonymous says:

            Similarly, if large stretches of your country are suffering due to persistent poverty and lack of jobs and you as the political elite don’t do anything to alleviate that

            This is such bullshit. First of all they aren’t suffering. In the ranks of all those human beings alive right no with no competitive advantage* they are right near the top in terms of income.

            There are some in that category that are doing better — they are in countries, mostly in Europe, that have the policies those dastardly elitists want to bring here but are blocked from doing so by the very politicians elected by these allegedly suffering people.

            What they really want isn’t more goods and services from the rest of us — that’s on offer and they reject it over and over again. What they want is something that is impossible — for someone to wave a magic wand and for the world to change into one where the meager skills and talents they possess are highly valued. Building a wall, pulling out of NAFTA, none of that is going to change the fact that we don’t have a huge need for manual or very low skilled labor.

            How are we possibly going to respect people mewling all the time about “good jobs” when what that means is that want everyone to pretend that their make-work is really terrible valuable and a huge contribution to society?

            *i.e. the ability to produce goods or services their fellow human being want in an efficient manner

          • a non mouse says:

            Building a wall, pulling out of NAFTA, none of that is going to change the fact that we don’t have a huge need for manual or very low skilled labor.

            So by all means keep importing millions of third worlders who can only perform manual or low skilled labor … why again? Just to spite the people who can’t afford to move away from them? Oh, and to make sure that those inbred hicks can never win another election again! Right?

          • Jiro says:

            First of all they aren’t suffering. In the ranks of all those human beings alive right no with no competitive advantage* they are right near the top in terms of income.

            Most people are not utilitarians or EAs and don’t consider themselves to have equal responsibility towards people in all countries. Their own country is in a special position. And these people are suffering compared to others in the country, even if they are doing better than other living human beings in third world countries.

          • hlynkacg says:

            First of all they aren’t suffering…

            Tell that to the city fathers of Carthage

          • Anonymous says:

            And these people are suffering compared to others in the country, even if they are doing better than other living human beings in third world countries.

            By that metric someone is always going to be suffering. I didn’t take you for a communist.

            In any event, as I pointed out but you conveniently failed to address, the people that want to give them more goods and services, despite the fact they have so little to offer the world, are the very people they despise. The people blocking that are their own politicians.

          • Anonymous says:

            So by all means keep importing millions of third worlders who can only perform manual or low skilled labor … why again?

            Unfortunately for the coherence of Trump supporters this hasn’t actually been happening. Mexican immigrants are on net leaving the country because there isn’t much demand for their labor here.

          • “If somebody’s bleeding to death on your doorstep and you don’t care enough to do anything, you’re a selfish a-hole, and “I’m not actively trying to hurt him, I just don’t give a sh*t about his problems” isn’t an adequate defence.”

            Doesn’t that cut the wrong way for the immigration arguments associated with the position you appear to be arguing? Mexico is on our doorstep. Should we give substantial weight to the welfare of Mexicans–who are on average considerably poorer than rural Americans?

            And why does the doorstep matter anyway? Following your line of argument, isn’t failing to help people who are in desperate circumstances when you could do so at some cost to yourself the sort of thing you think makes someone a selfish A-hole? Why does it only count if they are inside the same national boundary?

          • Jiro says:

            Multiple person reply:

            By that metric someone is always going to be suffering.

            No, you can be concerned with suffering that is more than a certain distance below the median. It may be possible for few people to be below that distance. (Note that a small number of rich people don’t affect the median by much.)

            Another possibility is being concerned with how groups are treated. If the number of people whose concerns are ignored stays the same, but the distribution of such people is evenly distributed and not skewed towards flyover country, there would be less resentment.

            Mexican immigrants are on net leaving the country because there isn’t much demand for their labor here.

            Immigrants have children who are citizens, so a net immigration of zero Mexicans means that the number of people who are of Mexican origin is actually going up.

            Mexico is on our doorstep. Should we give substantial weight to the welfare of Mexicans–who are on average considerably poorer than rural Americans?

            Your neighbor is not on your doorstep, even if the two properties are adjoining, because your neighbor’s house is not owned by you and you have no control over conditions in it. “On your doorstep” implies “in a position where you ultimately control what happens to them”; if your neighbor’s kids are starving, that’s your neighbor’s responsibility, not yours.

            And most people who are kind to people on their doorstep would not take well to attempts to take advantage of this by repeatedly moving needy people to their doorstep just to trigger the obligation to take care of them.

          • Anonymous says:

            Original quote:

            Building a wall, pulling out of NAFTA, none of that is going to change the fact that we don’t have a huge need for manual or very low skilled labor.

            Reply:

            So by all means keep importing millions of third worlders who can only perform manual or low skilled labor … why again? Just to spite the people who can’t afford to move away from them? Oh, and to make sure that those inbred hicks can never win another election again! Right?

            re-reply:

            Unfortunately for the coherence of Trump supporters this hasn’t actually been happening. Mexican immigrants are on net leaving the country because there isn’t much demand for their labor here.

            Then comes your non sequitur about Americans of Mexican decent.

            Immigrants have children who are citizens, so a net immigration of zero Mexicans means that the number of people who are of Mexican origin is actually going up.

            It has fuck-all to do with the conversation at hand. It seems to be yet another insertion of your bigotry against hispanics, whom you hate because they don’t vote in sufficient numbers for your beloved GOP.

            You like to go on and on about how the government should only be for citizens and about how “most people” (by which you mean yourself and only yourself) care so much about their fellow citizens. But it seems that in your mind certain citizens are more equal than others.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            And why does the doorstep matter anyway?

            It doesn’t. I could equally have said “Say you’re out driving and you pass the site of a car crash” or “Say you’re out jogging and you come across a guy bleeding to death in the middle of the path” or “Say you’re at the pub and the guy sitting next to you suddenly collapses.”

            Following your line of argument, isn’t failing to help people who are in desperate circumstances when you could do so at some cost to yourself the sort of thing you think makes someone a selfish A-hole? Why does it only count if they are inside the same national boundary?

            The purpose of a government is to govern a particular territory, and not to govern the whole world. Accordingly, yes, I do think that governments have duties to their citizens that they don’t have towards citizens of other countries, and that governing elites, qua governing elites, ought to help their own citizens, and not foreigners.

          • Jiro says:

            It has fuck-all to do with the conversation at hand.

            It certainly does. If you’re going to point to Mexican immigrants “on net leaving the country”, then I can point out that “on net leaving the country” really isn’t on net leaving the country unless you account for birthright citizenship.

          • Anonymous says:

            I pointed that out as part of a discussion on how much demand there was for manual and low skilled labor. Infants aren’t participating in the labor market.

            I guess it must have triggered you and you couldn’t help but blurt out your bigoted views regarding US citizens of Mexican decent, even though they had nothing to do with the discussion at hand.

            Sorry, next time I’ll try to remember to put in a trigger warning.

            Apropos nothing, weren’t you the guy that was complaining about “internet aspergers”?

          • Fahundo says:

            Infants aren’t participating in the labor market.

            And what a lazy, entitled, ambitionless generation it is.

          • Jiro says:

            People at age X participate in the labor market. A portion of the children of immigrants transition from age X-1 to age X each year.

          • Anonymous says:

            And therefore? Do they all or most grow up to have few or no marketable skills?

            If not, then again this is totally irrelevant.

          • a non mouse says:

            And therefore? Do they all or most grow up to have few or no marketable skills?

            Orwell would be proud Anonymous.

            Borderers – useless low skill, low intelligence eaters who inherit this genetic and cultural disposition from their parents.

            Imported Mexicans – low skill immigrants whose children can be and do anything because they’re humans and all humans have unlimited potential!

          • BLA says:

            The children of people that undertook difficult and uncertain travel from their homelands to a foreign land where they didn’t speak the language and faced social and legal restrictions. All to make a better life for themselves and their posterity.

            versus

            The heirs to 200 years of degeneracy in the hills and hollows of Appalachia, whose chief industry today is government benefit fraud, and heretofore was bootleg whiskey.

            My money is on the Mexican-American kids.

          • cassander says:

            >The children of people that undertook difficult and uncertain travel from their homelands to a foreign land where they didn’t speak the language and faced social and legal restrictions. All to make a better life for themselves and their posterity.

            In what world do you live in where immigrants face legal and social restrictions in the US?

          • BLA says:

            Planet Earth. I suggest you leave Planet Fox News and visit some time.

          • David Friedman says:

            You are talking about legal immigrants?

            What legal restrictions do they face?

          • sweeneyrod says:

            @David Friedman
            The relevant legal restrictions legal immigrants face are the ones they overcome to get into a country (showing some degree of skill at penetrating bureaucracy, not committing crimes etc.). Any legal restrictions they may face inside their new country are a point against them from the perspective of expecting them to do better than natives.

          • Anonymous says:

            You are talking about legal immigrants?

            Not exclusively.

            What legal restrictions do they face?

            Even if we limit ourselves to legal immigrants, H4s for example, can’t work.

        • The original Mr. X says:

          That kind of attitude is fine, if you want to start a civil war. Not so much if you want to live in a peaceful, reasonably-well-functioning country.

        • The Nybbler says:

          There are worse things than being ignored. After watching 30-40% of the country loudly denigrate me and mine and trying to burn down the country out of spite, I’m going all in on trying to destroy their culture so they can never come this close again.

          You and yours were doing that _anyway_.

          I wonder if we can get a law passed to ban high school football, given the manifest harm those concussions are causing to those precious children …

          And now we’re into Poe’s Law territory, since of course this idea has already been floated.

        • Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

          So are you actually like, Obama or something, or is this a context appropriate version of a “What the fuck did you just fucking say about me” pasta?

    • AoxyMouseOnArgo says:

      A significant amount of the American Religious right, while disliking trump, believes that the Clintons are basically spawn of satan tier, while Trump is a more recognizable money-power figure that dosen’t try and deceive people.

  41. fly on the wall says:

    Jill, you are not yet banned, but you are forbidden to reference Ayn Rand, accuse other people of worshipping Ayn Rand, attribute everything you dislike to a conspiracy centered around Ayn Rand, or use Ayn Rand as a metonymy for any view you disagree with. I will lift this restriction if you read and post a book report on Atlas Shrugged.

    This is p rabbinical, 10/10

  42. Levantine says:

    I’ve come here just after leaving my e-mail account, where I see my mother … _completely_ ignoring the question I put to her, viz, what are her impressions of a certain person. Instead of that, she talked exclusively about the minutiae of the meaning of what that person said, a topic apparently without any immediate connection to our lives, and I can’t think of how it could become relevant to me or her.

    And that made me recall one thing about her: she has always shown signs of autism in some mild form.

    And then I turned to myself: What a curse is this, that I’m both living in a socioeconomic system that disregards / marginalizes human beings, and have a close one that does the same. [Edit: come to think of it, it’s not just her]
    Is that a pure coincidence?

    Could the epidemic of autism be a response – an *indirect* response – to the circumstances of modern life (e.g. urbanization, dominance of employers over employees…)?

    Just a thought.

    • Stefan Drinic says:

      Are you sure there even is an autism epidemic?

    • Lambert says:

      Employers were a lot more dominant back when they literally owned you.

    • Fahundo says:

      So your evidence that your mother has autism…is that, when asked what she thinks of someone, she considers what the person said? Or is it because instead of just spitting out an answer, she tried explaining how she arrived at the answer? Is listening to what people say rather than making snap judgments the same as marginalizing them?

      Also, what Stefan said. It’s my understanding that the term “autism” was redefined to cover a wider range of disorders, and that’s where the supposed epidemic comes from.

      • Douglas Knight says:

        Actually the autism “epidemic” is due to more carefully examining children who would previously have been labeled “retarded” and now labeling them “autistic and retarded.” The total number labeled either autistic or retarded did not change. It is true that some statistics include asperger’s, but most of the time (until very recently) people making secular claims usually made apples-to-apples comparisons.

    • Aapje says:

      Could the epidemic of autism be a response – an *indirect* response – to the circumstances of modern life (e.g. urbanization, dominance of employers over employees…)?

      I’d argue that modern people are more likely to mate with psychologically similar people than in the past, which probably increases the prevalence of genetic issues that express themselves psychologically, like autism.

      I’d also argue that we are increasingly creating a single track for people to (semi-succeed) in life, where everyone needs a lot of formal education and plenty of people skills. This leads us to pathologize and try to fix everything that makes people fail at these things, where in the past, there were often more options to live a sheltered life. If Bob could not deal with a lot of strangers and wanted to do the same thing again and again, they would find him a quiet job where he could do the same thing again and again.

    • Deiseach says:

      Levantine, you sound as if you and your mother have two different ways of interacting with people, and to be blunt, I don’t understand what you are getting at. When you asked for “impressions”, what do you mean? Did you want her to say “I like this person/I don’t like this person/they seem really nice/they seem like they’d cut your throat for a sixpence” – what? If your mother is explaining to you “I think this based upon my understanding of what they meant when they said that”, I think that’s pretty normal, to be honest.

      As for an “epidemic” of autism, I think in large part it’s just that there are better diagnostics and more knowledge of the possiblity nowadays. In my day, a child who was perceived to be backwards or odd was considered exactly that, or mentally retarded, depending on severity of symptoms – today, we have evaluations for children who are not hitting developmental milestones and early intervention services to help them.

      It’s not that there’s an epidemic, it’s that we’re now realising “Oh hey, when little Johnny or Susie does that, we should send them for a psychological assessment instead of writing them off as stupid!”

      • Dr Dealgood says:

        I wouldn’t be surprised if there really was more autism these days, for demographic reasons if nothing else.

        Autism has a paternal age effect. Older fathers are much more likely to contribute rare de novo mutations that are linked to autism, for reasons that are interesting but not extremely important.

        Given that people are having kids much later it makes sense that we would see a real increase in autism frequency even after taking better diagnoses into account.

    • maas says:

      I think Scott has posted about this a little before. In a links thread. About De-institutionalization?

      This is/was a somewhat popular view, among anti-psychiatry folk, and among some leftists. (i.e. mental illness is a result of capitalism) I don’t know much about the topic, but I believe treatment based on this idea has largely been a failure.

      You might like “Madness and Civilization” by Focault. Some sections that claim to be history may not be factual. Still a very influential book.

  43. Fate Amenable To Change says:

    Would a convinced many-worlder even have a problem with your solution? Try this solution here, that solution over there, let the Many Worlds find the best universe (which by definition will have an immortal Yudowski running it.)

  44. Anon for the obvious reasons says:

    Would love to hear the host give post ssri sexual dysfunction some thoughts…

  45. Timothy says:

    The USA Doesn’t Exist –

    Lately there’s been not a shift, but a crystallization of my thinking, that I do not believe in the existence of countries. To explain by analogy, I do not believe in the existence of God, but I believe in the existence of the Catholic Church. Similarly, I do not believe in the existence of the USA, but I certainly believe in the existence of the United States Government, an organization having dominion over certain territories and subjects. The Church promulgates the myth (to my view) of God, and the Government promulgates the myth of the USA. (I’m actually a bit more charitable to the religious side – I think it’s more likely that I’m wrong about the non-existence of some kind of God, and I think the Pope at least believes his own myth.) This has the effect of rendering things like “Love your country, not your government” absurd.

    There seems to be a bit of consideration of the ontology of the state around, and I have to look at that a bit, but from a brief glance a lot of it looks to start by assuming they need to find some reason the damn thing exists.

    I have crossed the continent on land from East to West, and I saw a lot of countryside, and some properties and agents of the government, but I didn’t see any “country.” Like the Easy Rider poster says, “A man went looking for America. And couldn’t find it anywhere…”

    It makes it a little difficult to talk about international politics because it requires using “the Mexican Government” all the time if there’s not a convenient “the USG” or “the Kremlin” shorthand to use.

    • Earthly Knight says:

      You are drastically underestimating the number of entities we traffic in which are as or more dubious than countries. Dennett has a nice collection here. Have you ever wondered what a sake or a behalf was? What about cahoots, or smithereens, so degenerate that they cannot even take the singular? And what of holes, voices, the New York Giants, Mammalia, the equator, average incomes, centers of gravity? The ontological netherworlds where countries reside are much more populous than we naively expect.

      • James says:

        God, Dennett’s so great. That list is really good.

      • Deiseach says:

        Dennett is incorrect in that you can have one smithereen, although you’d need to go back to the originating language to do so:

        Although no one is entirely positive about its precise origins, scholars think that smithereens likely developed from the Irish word smidiríní, which means “little bits.” That Irish word is the diminutive of smiodar, meaning “fragment.” Written record of the use of smithereen dates back to 1829.

        So – smiodar (1st declension masculine noun), “broken piece, fragment”; diminutive smidírín, pl. smidiríní

        And it’s not degeneracy that means you usually have multiple smithereens; it is that we tend to say something was broken “into pieces” not “into a piece” (e.g “he made smithereens of that jug when he knocked it off the dresser”).

    • SamChevre says:

      Have you read Dan Davies On Not Believing in Canada?

      Because you definitely should; it’s hilarious.

    • Anonymous says:

      I don’t see how disbelieving the existence of countries helps crystallise one’s thinking in any way. You can define “USA” as either “the United States government” as you call it (an organisation that claims authority over some territory), or as the tribe which treats the former as their rallying flag. In this sense, a quite uncontroversial one, countries certainly exist. And your thinking will be indistinguishable from an average person’s.

      Or do you mean to say that countries are a social construct and aren’t intrinsic to the Universe in any way? Because in that case, duh!

      • Timothy says:

        “Crystallization” was just inward-looking – that I’d been basically thinking this way for years, but out of inertia if you’d asked me if the USA exists I would have answered yes.

        “Country” as a synonym for “government” is fine enough – but things like “Love your country, not your government” still don’t make sense if we do that.

        • Alliteration says:

          I think “Love your country, not your government” means “Value the happiness and well being of your fellow citizens more than other humans* even if your current government is not optimal.”

          *And/or, the symbols and holy sites of your nation’s civil religion.

      • TheAncientGeek says:

        I don’t see how disbelieving the existence of countries helps crystallise one’s thinking in any way.

        Disbelieving in contries can help you disbelieve in other claims, such the intrinsic superiority of your nonexistent thing to everyone else’s.

    • cypher says:

      A country isn’t the buildings, or the people, or the land, or the institutions, or the resources.

      A country is the wave. All those other things are the water.

      And if you’re going to be that reductionist, why even believe in the US Government itself? It’s just a collection of people and procedures, after all.

      • Randy M says:

        And what’s a procedure, anyway? Just an encoded prediction of where certain atoms are likely to move based on the movement of other certain atoms and the various vibrations in air that ensue. Ephemera, all.

      • Timothy says:

        I think the existence of waves, or of a US Government, explains things, but what can we explain with the existence of a USA that we can’t explain with the existence of a USG + a myth? Myths exist in a certain sense, Spiderman exists as a story, but Spiderman doe not exist as a guy.

        • Alliteration says:

          The nation of the USA explains the feelings of patriotism Republicans have even when the Democrats run everything.

          • Timothy says:

            That’s the myth in action. Let’s assume atheism is correct, God’s a myth – religious fervor is still real.

    • Incurian says:

      Agreed. Incidentally, Snow Crash is a good book.

    • FullMeta_Rationalist says:

      http://lesswrong.com/lw/on/reductionism/

      Ontologies are just labels. But if we’re gonna go full reductionism, the Catholic Church doesn’t exist either. It’s just a soup of quarks and leptons.

  46. HelloTruman says:

    Can someone convince me there’s a point to existence? I used to think we’d figure out immortality and so consciousness would exist forever. That seems worthwhile.

    But then someone pointed out that eventually the Universe will collapse back in on itself, and no one will ever remember anything about humanity.

    I want there to be a point to all this… please help persuade me!

    • Timothy says:

      I cannot help you find a point to existence but if you are willing to consider alternatives perhaps this helpful image will help shift your mindset.

    • For what it’s worth, the collapse of the Universe is many billions of years away. Earth will become completely lifeless much sooner, in just a few tens of millions of years, as the sun gets hotter.

      • M.C. Escherichia says:

        That’s a very pessimistic attitude. We may be able to move the Earth to a cooler orbit. (Also, it’s more like 500-1000 million years, or so.)

        • HelloTruman says:

          Yes I also assumed if we achieved immortality we’d also certainly figure out a way to get off the earth to live on other planets.

    • SilasLock says:

      Mate, we’re all in the same boat. If it were easy to figure out the point to existence, it would be common knowledge by now. =P

      Here are my thoughts.

      When you say “point to existence,” you mean telos; some kind of purpose or meaning to the world. I don’t really think telos is a thing. It’s a pre-scientific idea along with Aristotle’s animus and Aquinas’s divine law. So basically you’re searching for something that’s not real.

      What matters is that you DO exist, in the here and now. You’ve got friends and family, political and ethical views, dreams and ambitions. There’s not really any objective point to these things, but they sure are important. And they’re yours.

      I think the novel The Little Prince puts it best. The Prince has a very special (sentient) rose who lives on his tiny planet in the middle of space. In a broad sense, the rose is no different than any other; there’s no objective reason why the Prince should love his rose over any other rose. But he loves her anyway. In choosing his rose over others, he makes her special. The act of choosing something, arbitrarily, separates it from the pack. Kind of like how the people you call your friends are probably no different from the people in another country who share your interests and values, but you care about your close friends more.

      It’s hard to explain, and the book does a better job than I do.

      But the same principle applies to the point of existence. Pick something and then make it important. Because its yours, darnit.

      • madaco says:

        “It’s a pre-scientific idea” “something that’s not real” , I don’t see why something being pre-scientific should imply it being not real, but maybe that isn’t what you were implying?

        I say, assign 0 probability to anything that would imply that no option is better than any other option. It is no worse than the alternative.

        I would endorse the idea of there being some sort of purpose, in some sense. Or there being something real which is at least similar to purpose.

        Some of what you describe seems to be like some types of(?) existentialism. Would you agree?

        I appreciate what I’ve read of (actually, mostly summaries of/commentary on) Soren Kierkegaard’s writings.

        Perhaps HelloTruman might also find them useful?

        • HelloTruman says:

          Thank you for this… any summaries of Kierkegaard’s work that you can recommend me reading first?

      • HelloTruman says:

        I’ve definitely thought about this… it seems somewhat similar to existentialism (i.e. “your life’s meaning is what you choose to make of it”). I think this is the best shot I have at feeling purpose, but it still usually feels inconsequential.

        (That said, a smart part of me thinks that I’m just using the purposelessness of life to be lazy. “Nothing matters anyway, why even go through the suffering of trying things?” etc.)

    • tumteetum says:

      There isnt one. The only meaning is that which we create. On the flipside we are free to create that meaning, so create!

      • HelloTruman says:

        “We are free to create that meaning.”

        What do you mean… can you give examples of “possible meanings”?

    • Anonymous says:

      Life is short and philosophical progress is slow. In the meantime:

      My advice for your reading list is Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search For Meaning. He’s not a philosopher, he’s a psychiatrist (well, was, he’s dead now); he may not have answers to philosophical questions about the ultimate meaning of things, but in terms of how to face life with courage and dignity, he knows a few things about that.

      Try looking for things that are of value right now – as in, not things that one day will bear fruit, but things which are worthwhile in and off themselves right now. If something only has value in so far as it helps bring about a better future (or prevents the future being worse)… then when you get to that future, the only “better” to be had is things that bring about a better future future, and so ad infinitum. Being able to look at something, and say, yes, this is good, with no more needing to be done, avoids this issue. Being able to look at the past and say, yes, this was good, is another one.

      The other thing to think about: there are two senses of the word “eternal” – eternal as in everlasting, and eternal as in timeless. Try pondering the second.

    • Two McMillion says:

      No, you’re quite right. Unless something lies outside the universe, nothing inside the universe matters.

      • Furslid says:

        If nothing matters in the universe in isolation, then nothing matters. I don’t see how adding something outside the universe changes this.

        Even God doesn’t change this. Whatever argument you use to claim that nothing in the universe matters can also be applied to the Universe + God system. Then nothing in the universe matters and God doesn’t matter either.

        This seems more like a concept of ‘something that matters’ that can have no instantiation. This concept should be abandoned.

        • Jill says:

          Interesting. To me, mattering is a highly personalized thing.

          De gustibus non est disputandum

          I’ve read Atlas Shrugged and very little of it mattered to me, except the aspects that have to do with how people use it as a tool and a symbol today politically. I can’t imagine it would matter if I read it again, so I won’t. But here is something that matters to me– jazz music with horns. My body automatically starts dancing. This is my favorite jazz song.

          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4rXEKtC8iY

          I love my dear husband, and the night sky with the stars and planets, and the beach, and shows by certain comedians.

          What matters to you in this world?

          • Jiro says:

            If it doesn’t matter to you, then don’t talk about it. If it matters enough for you to talk about it, it matters enough for you to not misrepresent it.

          • Salem says:

            Don’t flout your ban, Jill.

          • TheWorst says:

            Funny thing? If Jill did write a book report on Atlas Shrugged, I’d absolutely read it.

          • Seconded, I think a Jill book report on any Ayn Rand novel would be a fun read.

            Jill, if you wrote this book report and used it as a launching point to start a blog reviewing various other political writings, I think it would be an interesting read. I disagree with you on many topics but I do find your writing style strangely endearing.

        • Two McMillion says:

          Even God doesn’t change this. Whatever argument you use to claim that nothing in the universe matters can also be applied to the Universe + God system. Then nothing in the universe matters and God doesn’t matter either.

          This is only true if God can’t provide self-authenticating meaning, just as there’s no real knowledge unless there’s self-authenticating knowledge. But the Christian God- the God I worship- does provide self-authenticating meaning. The reason is because God is complete in himself. He has no needs and does not change. He has himself, and the members of the Trinity enjoy perfect harmony and community with each other. God may choose to share this community with people like you and me, which gives us meaning.

          What this means is that God can’t provide meaning, purpose, or goodness outside himself because those things don’t exist except in reference to him. This is why you cannot really have them unless you repent, believe, and obey him.

          • Montfort says:

            But the Christian God- the God I worship- does provide self-authenticating meaning. The reason is because God is complete in himself.

            I’m not really following the connection here. I mean no offense, but it looks like a non sequitur to me. Would you mind expanding or pointing me to reference material?

          • Two McMillion says:

            I don’t know if I’m expressing it well. Think for a minute about what nihilists do. For them, there’s no meaning in the universe at large, so all their meaning is self-constructed and self-imposed. The problem with this, of course, is that any such meaning can only be as large as the person constructing and imposing it. It might be large enough for the purposes of the person constructing it, but it can’t necessarily be applied outside that person.

            What I’m trying to say is that what the nihilist attempts to do, God succeeds in doing. He can make* a meaning, and because he is infinite that meaning can also be infinite. When I say that he’s complete in himself, I mean… look, when a person becomes self-centered, we see a lot of bad things that happen as a result, right? They become less responsive to other’s needs and focused more on their own purposes and pleasure. Well, this happens because the importance a person gives themselves becomes larger than their real importance. Thus the ultimate problem with self-centeredness is that it is a failure to see the world truly. But if there existed someone who was genuinely that important, for them, self-centeredness would be a virtue, not a vice. Seeing themselves as important would, for such a person, only mean recognizing the truth.

            Making your own purpose in life is a form of self-centeredness. It means you set yourself up as the ultimate arbiter of how you judge your life. But quite frankly, no human can handle that job. It’s too big for us. You cannot make a purpose big enough to encompass the universe when you yourself are too small to encompass the universe. But what we fail to do, God succeeds in doing, and he can impart what he has to us.

            * “Make” shouldn’t be taken to imply that God once lacked purpose and then invented it; part of what I mean when I say God is complete in himself is that he never changes or has to devote thought to things; everything good is already expressed at maximum capacity in him.

          • Aapje says:

            @Two McMillion

            If God is made up by man, can he still be infinite?

          • Two McMillion says:

            If God is made up by man, can he still be infinite?

            If God is made up by man, then he isn’t infinite, obviously. But of course I don’t think that humans invented the idea of God. Or is there something else to this statement I’m missing?

          • Aapje says:

            @Two McMillion

            My point was that your entire argument hinges on the assumption that God (as you define him) exists, which is unprovable; and on the assumption that you know what that God wants from you (and that his desires are good for you). If you cannot even prove that God exists, how can we believe that you know what God wants? And how can we know that his desires are good for us?

            There is an inconsistency in believing that God is so advanced that his perspective is very different from ours, yet that you can be sure that his goals favor us. Perhaps we are the guinea pigs of his civilization and he experiments on us in ways that hurt us, but that provide utilitarian benefits to others, who greatly outnumber us and/or are considered more important (just like we accept some suffering in guinea pigs, so that we have better medicine). If so, his goals may be ‘good’ overall, but yet won’t benefit us in any way or provide us any guidance to live our own lives. We will just be manipulated to do the experiments right and the rest of what we do is meaningless.

            How is your story more believable than my alternative possibility?

          • Montfort says:

            Two McMillion,

            Thank you for the valiant attempt, but I think the inferential distance between us is too vast to be spanned in this thread.

          • Two McMillion says:

            Aapje:

            Your question seems to be asking me to demonstrate that I’m not privileging the hypothesis of God as I see it; in other words, asking me why I believe the certain things that I do about God and metaphysics and not other things which might fit the data equally well. That’s a fair question, albeit one not well suited to a blog’s comment section. But I’ll try to give a cliff notes version. What is boils down to is- I think the evidence supports the idea that a man in Palestine a few thousand years ago claimed to be God and rose from the dead.

            You said in your post that God “can’t be proved”, and this is true, but a number of propositions close to the proposition “God exists” can be proved. I think it can be proved, for instance, that the New Testament documents were written very close to the events they record, that the writers of those documents believed those events really happened, and that the documents have been accurately transmitted to us from them. If the Jesus written about in the gospels is taken to be accurate, than the rest of the Bible is affirmed, and the rest, as they say, is history.

            As I said, that’s a cliff notes version. It’s goal is to show you the chain, and that my idea of God was not simply pulled out of thin air. Obviously, there is much worth discussing at each step.

          • Aapje says:

            There have been many prophets in history. It seems more sensible to me to argue that 100% of these were delusional, than 99%, which you must believe if Jesus was the exception.

            I see no reason why Muhammed would be substantially less believable as the ‘real one’ than Jesus.

            However, even if Jesus was the prophet, the bible was inspired by God, etc; the problem remains that there are 100% competing interpretations of the words of Jesus, which makes your interpretation (whatever it is) little more than an opinion. Most Christians fail to observe rather clear instructions* by Jesus for example, which indicates to me that their interpretation is more a projection of what they seek onto the Bible, than that they truly follow it.

            * Just then a man came up to Jesus and asked, “Teacher, what good thing must I do to get eternal life?”
            […]
            Jesus answered, “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”

            When the young man heard this, he went away sad, because he had great wealth.

            Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Truly I tell you, it is hard for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”

            Yet I know no Christians who gave away their wealth, even though Westerners are all undeniably rich compared to most of the world.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            I see no reason why Muhammed would be substantially less believable as the ‘real one’ than Jesus.

            Muhammad’s signs are, basically, a book (which anyone can write or dictate), a his/his followers’ success in war (which lots of people can boast of). Neither really compares to raising someone from the dead.

            However, even if Jesus was the prophet, the bible was inspired by God, etc; the problem remains that there are 100% competing interpretations of the words of Jesus, which makes your interpretation (whatever it is) little more than an opinion.

            That’s why Christ established a Church with authority to issue binding interpretations of his teachings.

          • sweeneyrod says:

            @The original Mr. X
            Yes, if you believe that Jesus performed miracles then the argument for Christianity is quite convincing. But I don’t think there is any more evidence for Jesus’ raising of the dead than for Muhammad’s splitting of the moon.

          • David Friedman says:

            “Muhammad’s signs are, basically, a book (which anyone can write or dictate), a his/his followers’ success in war (which lots of people can boast of). Neither really compares to raising someone from the dead.”

            On the other hand, the evidence that his followers were extraordinarily successful in war is much more certain than the evidence that Jesus raised someone from the dead. I like to describe the early Islamic expansion as roughly equivalent to a religious movement in Mexico starting in 1950 which resulted in Mexico conquering all of the U.S. and half the USSR by 2000.

            I don’t read Arabic, but it is claimed that the Koran is extraordinary poetry. That again would be more easily checked, and is at least weak support for the claim that it was divinely dictated.

          • Aapje says:

            @The original Mr. X

            Neither really compares to raising someone from the dead.

            There have been many cases where people were assumed to be dead, yet turned out to be alive. Those people usually do not get regarded as prophets. Given sufficient evidence of that possibility and no solid evidence of people being raised from the dead, I favor the better supported possibility.

            Crucifixion is often a slow death, where the condemned is slowly drained of health. Such circumstances would surely greatly increase the chance that the condemned would be falsely declared dead, after his life signs diminished sufficiently (note that there would have not been a doctor in attendance, merely a few soldiers with no medical training and not even a stethoscope).

            There is some evidence that the soldiers would often use violence to hasten and/or ensure the death of the condemned. In the case of Jesus, his popularity as a prophet might have held back the soldiers, which would have maximized the chance of him being falsely declared dead.

            That’s why Christ established a Church with authority to issue binding interpretations of his teachings.

            That is the silly way that the Catholic church justifies its authority, despite the church in Jesus’s time being completely different from the Catholic institution.

            There is no reliable historical evidence that Peter was bishop of Rome or even ever visited Rome. There is no evidence that Jesus or Peter believed that Peter’s “keys of the kingdom” could be transferred by Peter.

            There are also some tough questions you have to answer:
            – If the power to choose a successor goes from one pope to the next, then doesn’t the Catholic church violate this by having papal elections, rather than let the pope choose his successor?
            – If each pope has this divine understanding of Jesus’s teachings, how do you explain the conflicts between popes, like Stephen VI vs Formosus. Which of these was true to Jesus? How do we know that the proper successor was picked to succeed Stephen VI and not a false pope?
            – When Benedict IX sold the papacy, was this according to God’s will? When he deposed the successor, was that God’s will? What about when he sold it again? What about when he was himself deposed?

            Anyway, I could go on about many sordid events in papal history, but I think you get the idea. The claim that such messy and clearly very human history is ‘God’s will’ undermines your argument severely and makes me regard them as rationalizations to defend your chosen faith.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            @David Friedman:

            On the other hand, the evidence that his followers were extraordinarily successful in war is much more certain than the evidence that Jesus raised someone from the dead. I like to describe the early Islamic expansion as roughly equivalent to a religious movement in Mexico starting in 1950 which resulted in Mexico conquering all of the U.S. and half the USSR by 2000.

            Alexander the Great was also extraordinarily successful in war. So was Genghis Khan. So were the ancient Romans. So was the British Empire.

            Plus, note that the Muslim conquests ended up petering out, the Muslim world ended up falling further and further behind Christian Europe, many of the Muslim conquests in Europe were reversed, and that it was Christian Spain, Portugal, France and England that managed to form world-spanning empires, not the Ottomans or Mamelukes. If you’re going to claim that Islam’s military success is evidence for its truth, the evidence seems mixed, at best.

            I don’t read Arabic, but it is claimed that the Koran is extraordinary poetry. That again would be more easily checked, and is at least weak support for the claim that it was divinely dictated.

            Again, lots of people have written extraordinary poetry in lots of different languages. So what?

          • The original Mr. X says:

            @Aapje:

            There have been many cases where people were assumed to be dead, yet turned out to be alive. Those people usually do not get regarded as prophets. Given sufficient evidence of that possibility and no solid evidence of people being raised from the dead, I favor the better supported possibility.
            Crucifixion is often a slow death, where the condemned is slowly drained of health. Such circumstances would surely greatly increase the chance that the condemned would be falsely declared dead, after his life signs diminished sufficiently (note that there would have not been a doctor in attendance, merely a few soldiers with no medical training and not even a stethoscope).
            There is some evidence that the soldiers would often use violence to hasten and/or ensure the death of the condemned. In the case of Jesus, his popularity as a prophet might have held back the soldiers, which would have maximized the chance of him being falsely declared dead.

            So, let’s see… Jesus gets scourged, crucified, and stabbed. He then gets taken down from the cross, wrapped up, and left for three days in a tomb. Somehow, instead of dying from shock, blood-loss, cold, hunger, and lack of water, he manages to revive, and somehow manages to disentangle himself from the grave clothes he’s been wrapped in. He then folds these in a neat little pile, and somehow manages to push aside the very big, very heavy rock blocking the entrance to his tomb. He then walks across Jerusalem — despite the fact that his feet have recently had giant nails hammered through them — apparently without anybody noticing him and taking him off to get help. He turns up at the place where the disciples are staying — and they promptly decide that this pitiful, bloodied, emaciated, half-dead creature is their risen Lord and Saviour, gloriously triumphant over death.

            No, sorry, not buying it.

            That is the silly way that the Catholic church justifies its authority, despite the church in Jesus’s time being completely different from the Catholic institution.

            America nowadays is very different to America in the Founding Fathers’ time. It’s still the same country, though.

            There is no reliable historical evidence that Peter was bishop of Rome or even ever visited Rome. There is no evidence that Jesus or Peter believed that Peter’s “keys of the kingdom” could be transferred by Peter.

            These ideas were certainly present by the time of Clement I in the 90s AD — well within living memory of Peter’s death. Maybe you’d like to explain (a) how such a series of big mistakes could crop up just thirty years after Peter was around, and (b) why we should even believe that these were mistakes, given that there’s no evidence people before Clement thought any differently.

            – If the power to choose a successor goes from one pope to the next, then doesn’t the Catholic church violate this by having papal elections, rather than let the pope choose his successor?

            Erm, the doctrine is that Peter’s successors have that power, not that Peter personally chooses his successor (and his successors personally choose theirs, etc.). So you’re just complaining about a straw man here.

            – If each pope has this divine understanding of Jesus’s teachings, how do you explain the conflicts between popes, like Stephen VI vs Formosus. Which of these was true to Jesus? How do we know that the proper successor was picked to succeed Stephen VI and not a false pope?

            The Pope is protected from ever officially teaching falsehood as dogma, meaning that the faithful are never going to have to choose between heresy and schism. Nobody’s ever claimed that the Pope is guaranteed to be perfect and to do everything right.

            – When Benedict IX sold the papacy, was this according to God’s will? When he deposed the successor, was that God’s will? What about when he sold it again? What about when he was himself deposed?

            “If a religion which claims that ‘all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God’ (Rom. 3.23) is true, how come this person sinned and fell short of the glory of God?”

          • Mr Mind says:

            @sweenyrod

            Yes, if you believe that Jesus performed miracles then the argument for Christianity is quite convincing.

            Well, my prior probability for a god is so low that I would begin to believe that Jesus was an alien before I start believing in a Christian deity. So no, miracles don’t even start to catch up.

            @Two McMillion

            But those attribute aren’t just as applicable to a non-personal universe: the universe is complete, has no needs, is in perfect harmony, and almost necessarily so.

          • Two McMillion says:

            Aapje:

            There have been many prophets in history. It seems more sensible to me to argue that 100% of these were delusional, than 99%, which you must believe if Jesus was the exception.

            Why do you think it more reasonable?

            It’s true that people have many interpretations of the Bible, as they do of any widely read text. But some interpretations are more reasonable than others. Reading The Lord of the Rings as a metaphor for WWII might be defensible; reading it as a metaphor for how to make a peanut butter sandwich is far less defensible. Do you think LOTR is silly because fans can’t agree on if Balrogs have wings or not?

            Your quotation of the story of the rich man has an ellipsis in it. But the part the ellipsis represents is actually very important. Here’s the quote:

            And behold, a man came up to him, saying, “Teacher, what good deed must I do to have eternal life?” And he said to him, “Why do you ask me about what is good? There is only one who is good. If you would enter life, keep the commandments.” He said to him, “Which ones?” And Jesus said, “You shall not murder, You shall not commit adultery, You shall not steal, You shall not bear false witness, Honor your father and mother, and, You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” The young man said to him, “All these I have kept. What do I still lack?” Jesus said to him, “If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.” When the young man heard this he went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions.

            Do you recognize the list of commands Jesus gives the young man? It’s loosely from the ten commandments- but only the second part of them. The first part of the ten commandments talks about our relationship with God. The second part is about our relationship with other people. Our relationship with people- our obedience to the second part- flows from our relationship with God as governed by the first part. (Which Jesus just talked about in the previous chapter! Context matters!) And what does the man say? “I’ve done all that.”

            Really? He’s really done all those things all the time without failing? No, of course he hasn’t. He’s fooling himself.

            Consider something else Jesus said:

            Then Jesus told His disciples, “If anyone would come after Me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow Me.

            In other words, Jesus requires of his followers ultimate commitment, even to the point of death. Now, you said that you don’t know of any Christians who’ve given away their wealth. Well, I do know of some, but that isn’t the point. It’s not about the dollar values. It’s about the total commitment. Jesus laid his finger on the young man’s wealth because that was the thing the young man wasn’t willing to give up to follow him. But Joseph of Arimathea was also wealthy, and he wasn’t told to give it up. To be generous, yes, but the size of your bank account isn’t the problem. Every one of us has something that is as important to us as that man’s wealth was to him. And every single person who is a Christian has given it up for the sake of Christ. We don’t all give up money, but we all give up something. We all make the sacrifice Jesus asked of that man, even if it looks different.

            There have been many cases where people were assumed to be dead, yet turned out to be alive. Those people usually do not get regarded as prophets. Given sufficient evidence of that possibility and no solid evidence of people being raised from the dead, I favor the better supported possibility.

            This is actually an argument against believing in anything unusual, where “unusual” is determined by your opinion of its likelihood.

            Mr. X discusses this below in detail. But the simplest question reply is- why would Jesus’ followers have invented the story of the resurrection, if that had happened?

            Think carefully, now. The resurrection story shows up very soon after Jesus’ death. We know this because references to it are in the very early letter to the Corinthians, older than any of the gospels. Jesus’ followers were all Jews. Now the Jews believed that resurrections could occur- they thought that God could do miracles. And they believed in prophets- they recognized several in their religion. But they in no way expected the suffering/dying/rising prophet that Jesus claimed to be. The combination appears to not have occurred to anyone before Jesus brought it up. Nothing in their culture or shared stories made them expect a resurrection. If Jesus had survived crucifixion, they might have called it a miracle like Shadrach surviving the firing furnace, but they would have called it what it was. That people survived being crucified was known; Josephus talks about some examples. The only reason for them to say that he rose from the dead was if they thought he really had.

            Surviving crucifixion, even by miracle, was something already without their religious paradigm. Actually dying and coming back was completely outside it. If Jesus’ disciples were religiously biased, they were religiously biased into believing exactly the wrong things to create a resurrection story out of Jesus surviving crucifixion.

            But those attribute aren’t just as applicable to a non-personal universe: the universe is complete, has no needs, is in perfect harmony, and almost necessarily so.

            I’m not sure what you mean; do you mean “are” instead of “aren’t”?

            My interpretation of this can be phrased as follows: in what sense is God “complete” in a way that provides purpose that the universe is not?

            I think the answer is that “purpose”, in the context of the foregoing discussion, is meant in terms of human desire for meaning, for there to be more to life, etc.

            Could you use the universe to derive a self-authenticating purpose? Possibly, but I don’t think it would match the usual human conception of purpose very well. In fact, I think the evidence favors this view- nihilists typically create their own meaning and purpose from themselves and their own values and embrace the fact that these are not authenticated by the universe. So my answer is: when nihilists speak about purpose, they have a specific idea about what purpose is. The universe as we know it is incomplete for the use of establishing that that thing. You could base other things purely on the universe and call them purpose- but those things aren’t what we want, or are looking for. I mean that God is complete for establishing the kind of purpose most people seem to actually want; the universe is probably complete for establishing a different kind, but that isn’t what we’re looking for.

          • Aapje says:

            @The original Mr. X

            Somehow, instead of dying from shock, blood-loss, cold, hunger, and lack of water, he manages to revive, and somehow manages to disentangle himself from the grave clothes he’s been wrapped in.

            – Being placed in a cool tomb out of the sun would help with recovery.
            – Minimum temperatures in Israel on April 23rd are currently 13-15 degrees Celsius on average, those aren’t temperatures that cause death by hypothermia.
            – The human body uses blood clotting to stop blood loss. Humans are especially resilient to superficial wounds like those produced by whipping. There is no reason to believe that the stab wound would have necessarily pierced a vital organ and/or have been lethal (there have been cases where victims lived a long time after being stabbed dozens of times).
            – You don’t die from being hungry for 3 days (more like 30).
            – Lack of water is your best argument, however, the cool temperatures in a tomb would greatly reduce water loss. Furthermore, the common practice was to leave fragrant oils near the body. This may have been/included scented water, which Jesus could have drunk from.
            – I don’t see why taking off a death shroud would be so hard to require a miracle. I frequently undress myself without being aided by God.

            He […] somehow manages to push aside the very big, very heavy rock blocking the entrance to his tomb. He then walks across Jerusalem — despite the fact that his feet have recently had giant nails hammered through them — apparently without anybody noticing him and taking him off to get help.

            Why wouldn’t he have gotten help? He was a popular figure. It’s highly likely that there would have been people visiting his tomb. Perhaps Jesus shouted, they opened the tomb and carried him off.

            Note that the Bible itself says that there was a man in the Tomb (Mark 16). This is consistent with a bunch of people helping him and then one of them going back to relay a message. In Matthew you can see the embellishments happening already where this guy becomes an angel, btw.

            So your argument about ‘nobody noticing him’ contradicts the Bible, which clearly claims that he was noticed sufficiently for someone to tell the women where Jesus went.

            He turns up at the place where the disciples are staying — and they promptly decide that this pitiful, bloodied, emaciated, half-dead creature is their risen Lord and Saviour, gloriously triumphant over death.

            The Bible says that the disciples have trouble recognizing him (Luke 24:16). This supports my theory a lot better than the idea that God resurrected him to what he was before.

            No, sorry, not buying it.

            You are clearly seeking arguments to support your beliefs, rather than looking for ways that the story may have embellished the truth. Most of your arguments about how Jesus couldn’t have survived are belied by a great many medical examples of humans surviving rather extreme injuries for a long time.

            Now, as your statements suggest that you are Catholic and the Catholic church frequently calls these miracles, you might not consider this convincing. However, I would argue that it’s not very reasonable to simply declare that certain events are impossible to have happened without divine intervention, when that is merely based on beliefs about what the human body ought to be able to endure, with no hard evidence to support that.

            America nowadays is very different to America in the Founding Fathers’ time. It’s still the same country, though.

            But if two people give two conflicting interpretations of the Christ’s message, it cannot be true that they are both giving us the same unchanging and correct interpretation.

            Maybe you’d like to explain (a) how such a series of big mistakes could crop up just thirty years after Peter was around, and (b) why we should even believe that these were mistakes, given that there’s no evidence people before Clement thought any differently.

            1. Mark and Matthew have been written close together and we already see huge discrepancies, like in the resurrection stories.
            2. Clement had an obvious motive to gain more support and power
            3. A lack of evidence that people thought any different is not evidence that they thought the same.

            Erm, the doctrine is that Peter’s successors have that power, not that Peter personally chooses his successor (and his successors personally choose theirs, etc.). So you’re just complaining about a straw man here.

            It’s still an absurd argument. The Pope is supposedly divinely inspired to he can interpret the gospel, right? Yet a successor is chosen by the cardinals, who don’t normally have the same divine inspiration as the pope, right? So do they temporarily get divine inspiration just during the conclave?

            It’s all so obviously a rationalization of established practice.

            The Pope is protected from ever officially teaching falsehood as dogma, meaning that the faithful are never going to have to choose between heresy and schism.

            That in itself is a later invention….

            “If a religion which claims that ‘all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God’ (Rom. 3.23) is true, how come this person sinned and fell short of the glory of God?”

            Yet somehow we have to believe that in some situations, the person becomes perfect….

          • Glen Raphael says:

            Jesus gets scourged, crucified, and stabbed. He then gets taken down from the cross, wrapped up, and left for three days in a tomb…

            A more likely interpretation (given the premise that this isn’t all just a story somebody made up) is that there was a case of mistaken identity. The bit about Judas needing to point out which guy was Jesus tells us the Romans didn’t know what he looked like. Thus, the guy on the cross could have been literally anybody. So either Judas fingered the wrong guy right at the beginning, or somebody was bribed to make a switch later.

            In which case perhaps the person who was stabbed and put on the cross was seriously harmed or killed…but wasn’t Jesus. Jesus could then come out of hiding, show up miraculously unharmed, then run away to avoid actual capture.

            Given the apparent miracle, people retelling the story would tend to remember/invent/repeat confirming details such as the body disappearing even if they didn’t have political reasons to want to do that.

            On a related note: Teller (of Penn & Teller) has been visibly killed before large crowds many hundreds of times. Including television broadcasts, his deaths have been witnessed by millions of people. Should we consider him a prophet? 🙂

          • Two McMillion says:

            You are clearly seeking arguments to support your beliefs, rather than looking for ways that the story may have embellished the truth.

            Since it is your belief that the story embellished the truth, would not looking for ways the story was embellished be the same error you are accusing Mr. X of?

          • Two McMillion says:

            In which case perhaps the person who was stabbed and put on the cross was seriously harmed or killed…but wasn’t Jesus. Jesus could then come out of hiding, show up miraculously unharmed, then run away to avoid actual capture.

            Given the apparent miracle, people retelling the story would tend to remember/invent/repeat confirming details such as the body disappearing even if they didn’t have political reasons to want to do that.

            The problem is that there’s no reason for a resurrection story to be invented in that case. What in the world is wrong with simply saying, “The Romans tried to crucify our leader, but he escaped and now lives in the desert where they can’t find him?” Sure, maybe some people would have made that mistake. The Jewish enemies of Jesus wouldn’t. And when they demanded that the early Christians stop preaching the resurrection of Christ, those early Christians could simply have replied, “You’re right, he didn’t rise, he just lives in India now.”

            Remember, we have to explain how we got Christianity from the events that happened in Palestine 2000 years ago. You can postulate that Jesus didn’t die all you want, but then you have to explain literally everything else about early Christianity somehow.

          • Glen Raphael says:

            The problem is that there’s no reason for a resurrection story to be invented in that case. What in the world is wrong with simply saying, “The Romans tried to crucify our leader, but he escaped and now lives in the desert where they can’t find him?”

            What we learn from all the other miracle stories is that Jesus (and the people around him) gained status from pretending he had magic powers. If “our leader can turn water into wine” is a story the telling of which helped these guys gain converts, power, respect, groupies – whatever it was they got out of the arrangement – then surely “our leader came back from the dead” is an even better story in this regard.

            A good magician/scam artist is always on the lookout for coincidences they can take credit for, exaggerate and capitalize on. Suppose that Jesus is well and truly gone. His cohort/collaborators can either pack it in, give up all the status they had as His storytellers-to-the-masses and get a real job…or they can pick a suitable punchline to end the story on a high note, and keep telling it. Which would you pick?

          • Fahundo says:

            What we learn from all the other miracle stories is that Jesus (and the people around him) gained status from pretending he had magic powers. If “our leader can turn water into wine” is a story the telling of which helped these guys gain converts, power, respect, groupies – whatever it was they got out of the arrangement – then surely “our leader came back from the dead” is an even better story in this regard.

            Another thing to consider is that a lot of guys claimed to be the messiah, were killed or driven away by the Romans, and then were quickly forgotten. If you want your guy to be remembered, you have to break that cycle somehow.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            @ Aapje:

            – Being placed in a cool tomb out of the sun would help with recovery.
            – Minimum temperatures in Israel on April 23rd are currently 13-15 degrees Celsius on average, those aren’t temperatures that cause death by hypothermia.
            – The human body uses blood clotting to stop blood loss. Humans are especially resilient to superficial wounds like those produced by whipping. There is no reason to believe that the stab wound would have necessarily pierced a vital organ and/or have been lethal (there have been cases where victims lived a long time after being stabbed dozens of times).
            – You don’t die from being hungry for 3 days (more like 30).
            – Lack of water is your best argument, however, the cool temperatures in a tomb would greatly reduce water loss. Furthermore, the common practice was to leave fragrant oils near the body. This may have been/included scented water, which Jesus could have drunk from.
            – I don’t see why taking off a death shroud would be so hard to require a miracle. I frequently undress myself without being aided by God.

            Sure, if you only look at each thing in isolation, none of them is sufficient to guarantee death. If you take all of them together, though, the chances of survival are very slim.

            Although, some of your specific points are dubious. For example:

            The human body uses blood clotting to stop blood loss. Humans are especially resilient to superficial wounds like those produced by whipping.

            Scourging, not whipping. The two are different. According to Wikipedia:

            In the Roman Empire, flagellation was often used as a prelude to crucifixion, and in this context is sometimes referred to as scourging. Whips with small pieces of metal or bone at the tips were commonly used. Such a device could easily cause disfigurement and serious trauma, such as ripping pieces of flesh from the body or loss of an eye. In addition to causing severe pain, the victim would approach a state of hypovolemic shock due to loss of blood.
            The Romans reserved this treatment for non-citizens, as stated in the lex Porcia and lex Sempronia, dating from 195 and 123 BC. The poet Horace refers to the horribile flagellum (horrible whip) in his Satires. Typically, the one to be punished was stripped naked and bound to a low pillar so that he could bend over it, or chained to an upright pillar so as to be stretched out. Two lictors (some reports indicate scourgings with four or six lictors) alternated blows from the bare shoulders down the body to the soles of the feet. There was no limit to the number of blows inflicted—this was left to the lictors to decide, though they were normally not supposed to kill the victim. Nonetheless, Livy, Suetonius and Josephus report cases of flagellation where victims died while still bound to the post. Flagellation was referred to as “half death” by some authors, as many victims died shortly thereafter. Cicero reports in In Verrem, “pro mortuo sublatus brevi postea mortuus” (“taken away for a dead man, shortly thereafter he was dead”).

            So no, it’s simply a few superficial cuts from a light birching, it’s pieces of skin and flesh being torn off as part of a punishment which was often enough to induce to death even without any other punishment being applied.

            You don’t die from being hungry for 3 days (more like 30).

            No, but if you’re trying to recover from a scourging, crucifixion and stabbing, going without food isn’t exactly going to help your chances of survival.

            I don’t see why taking off a death shroud would be so hard to require a miracle. I frequently undress myself without being aided by God

            Do you frequently undress yourself when your back is a bloody, wound-covered mess, you’ve been without food or drink for three days, and you’ve recently had nails driven through your hands and feet?

            Why wouldn’t he have gotten help? He was a popular figure. It’s highly likely that there would have been people visiting his tomb. Perhaps Jesus shouted, they opened the tomb and carried him off.

            Because it was the Sabbath, and hence going to tend to a dead body would be against Jewish law. Plus, if Two McMillion said, if somebody did go and find Jesus still alive, the likely response would be “Wow, the Lord has miraculously preserved this man from death!”, not “Wow, this man was dead and has been resurrected (even though such an idea goes against our entire belief system)!”

            The Bible says that the disciples have trouble recognizing him (Luke 24:16). This supports my theory a lot better than the idea that God resurrected him to what he was before.

            The Bible also says that the disciples proclaim Christ as their risen Lord, gloriously triumphant over death. That’s most definitely not supported by your theory, according to which Jesus post-crucifixion would be a bloody, emaciated, half-dead mess who would be more likely to excite pity than worship.

            Most of your arguments about how Jesus couldn’t have survived are belied by a great many medical examples of humans surviving rather extreme injuries for a long time.

            I’m guessing that most people who survived the sort of injuries Jesus suffered were taken away to receive medical attention, not left in a tomb for three days. Also that nobody mistook them for God after seeing them in their injured state.

            But if two people give two conflicting interpretations of the Christ’s message, it cannot be true that they are both giving us the same unchanging and correct interpretation.

            Yeah, but so what? People disagree about things all the time, but that doesn’t cause us to throw up our hands and say “I guess we just have no idea what happened!” Does the fact that some people support evolution and some support creationism mean that biology is a sham? Should we junk the study of history because some people think the pyramids were built by aliens, and others give credit to the Egyptians?

            1. Mark and Matthew have been written close together and we already see huge discrepancies, like in the resurrection stories.

            Eyewitnesses to events often disagree, sometimes wildly, on the details of what happened. If Mark based his account on one disciple’s report, and Matthew on another’s, we’d expect to find disagreements over details but agreement over the central point (that Jesus came back and appeared to his disciples) — which is what we’ve got.

            2. Clement had an obvious motive to gain more support and power

            And other people had an obvious motive to point out if he was BS-ing. And yet, as far as we know, no-one did.

            3. A lack of evidence that people thought any different is not evidence that they thought the same.

            So we should all agree with your baseless speculation because…?

            It’s still an absurd argument. The Pope is supposedly divinely inspired to he can interpret the gospel, right? Yet a successor is chosen by the cardinals, who don’t normally have the same divine inspiration as the pope, right? So do they temporarily get divine inspiration just during the conclave?

            Why would they need it? The Pope is “supposedly divinely inspired” from the time when he becomes Pope; this applies to whomever is made Pope. It’s not as if some individual gets divine inspiration and the Cardinals have to try and guess who’s got it, which is what you seem to be imagining.

            That in itself is a later invention….

            So maybe you could tell us when exactly it was invented.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            @ Glen:

            A more likely interpretation (given the premise that this isn’t all just a story somebody made up) is that there was a case of mistaken identity. The bit about Judas needing to point out which guy was Jesus tells us the Romans didn’t know what he looked like. Thus, the guy on the cross could have been literally anybody. So either Judas fingered the wrong guy right at the beginning, or somebody was bribed to make a switch later.

            An interesting theory. So what are we to make of all the people who saw Jesus actually on the cross? People who included several of his female disciples and the Virgin Mary, who, one would presume, knew her own son well enough to distinguish him from a complete stranger who’d somehow gotten switched.

            What we learn from all the other miracle stories is that Jesus (and the people around him) gained status from pretending he had magic powers. If “our leader can turn water into wine” is a story the telling of which helped these guys gain converts, power, respect, groupies – whatever it was they got out of the arrangement – then surely “our leader came back from the dead” is an even better story in this regard.
            A good magician/scam artist is always on the lookout for coincidences they can take credit for, exaggerate and capitalize on. Suppose that Jesus is well and truly gone. His cohort/collaborators can either pack it in, give up all the status they had as His storytellers-to-the-masses and get a real job…or they can pick a suitable punchline to end the story on a high note, and keep telling it. Which would you pick?

            I think this video gives a good response to this line of reasoning:

            “Alright, so I’m guessing that we tell people that, since Jesus rose from the dead, they can too if they give us lots of money?”
            “No, we’re not going to get rich off of this.”
            “We’re not? Well, do I at least get lots of chicks or something? How is this conspiracy going to make my life better?”
            “It’s not. In fact, your life is going to be way worse.”
            “What?”
            “Yes, you’re going to leave your home and job and be really poor and everybody is going to hate you and then people are probably going to crucify you upside-down.” […]
            “So we’re going to start a fake religion that gives us absolutely no monetary or social or psychological or physical benefit whatsoever?”
            “Right.”
            “And then we’re going to die for preaching the same resurrection story that we know is a total lie because we made it up?”
            “Yes. Oh, and also, we’re going to need to find like eleven more guys to do the same thing.”
            “Dude, the only way a bunch of people are going to flush their lives down the toilet and die horrible deaths for preaching the resurrection is if they actually saw it happen.”
            “Yeah, I know. That’s why it’s going to be the best conspiracy ever.”

          • Glen Raphael says:

            @The original Mr. X

            So what are we to make of all the people who saw Jesus actually on the cross? People who included several of his female disciples and the Virgin Mary

            You’re not thinking like a magician.

            (1) A substitute might easily look like him, especially one who is wounded and seen at a distance.

            (2) Being able to say “I was there and I saw it myself!” is exciting enough that – especially in a storytelling culture – you’d expect to get some people claiming it (even thinking they’re telling the truth!) to gain reflected status. Like all the extra people who claim to have been at Woodstock because they misremembered hearing about Woodstock and feel like they should have been there.

            (3) When we discussed the water-to-wine thing ages ago my conclusion was that Mary was in on it – she was the magician’s assistant who did the sneaky stuff that makes the trick work. Mary gains status from having an impressive son; she tends to say and do things that make him look more impressive. So Mary’s presence at the scene makes any other testimony less credible. If she went there and said “yep, that’s totally him!” this would fool anybody else into concluding it’s him; her role in the determination would be forgotten.

            Given a choice between concluding either:
            (a) Mary was sneaky, or
            (b) Jesus had godlike powers,
            I have to go with (a).

            As for your video, it seems based on the notion that everybody was in on it. My hypothesis is that only a few people were explicitly in on it; both then and now most were merely fooled into believing crazy things. It was a more gullible era. And Mary herself doesn’t seem to have ended up “hated” or “crucified” for her part in it, right? As far as we know?

          • The original Mr. X says:

            You’re not thinking like a magician.
            (1) A substitute might easily look like him, especially one who is wounded and seen at a distance.
            (2) Being able to say “I was there and I saw it myself!” is exciting enough that you’d expect to get some people claiming it (and thinking they’re telling the truth!) to gain reflected status. (Like all the extra people who claim to have been at Woodstock because they misremembered hearing about Woodstock and feel like they should have been there.)
            (3) when we discussed the water-to-wine thing ages ago my conclusion was that Mary was in on it – she was the magician’s assistant who did the sneaky stuff that makes the trick work. Mary gains status from having an impressive son; she says things that make him look more impressive.

            (1) People were seeing him from the foot of the cross. He’d be a few feet in the air, but not exactly a long distance.

            (2) & (3) Sure, being able to say that you knew a guy who rose from the dead is cool, as is being able to say that your son is the Son of God. You know what else is cool? Not getting persecuted, stoned, beaten, exiled or crucified because of the religion you’re preaching. A conspiracy of people knowingly faking a resurrection is possible; a conspiracy of people knowingly faking a resurrection, and then unanimously sticking to the story ever in the face of hideous execution, strains credulity so much that people only ever appeal to the idea when trying to avoid admitting the truth of the Resurrection.

            Not to mention, Jesus seems to have done remarkably little to capitalise on his success in the resurrection scam. So he successfully fakes his own death and then stages a miraculous resurrection, gets hailed as the Messiah and the Son of God, and then… buggers off after a couple of months? Seriously? Don’t you think a man who’d gone to all these lengths to make a name for himself would hang around to enjoy his new-found fame?

          • Glen Raphael says:

            So he successfully fakes his own death and then stages a miraculous resurrection, gets hailed as the Messiah and the Son of God, and then… buggers off after a couple of months? Seriously?

            I figure he died shortly thereafter. Could be the Romans got him for real or it could have been unrelated. An accident while traveling, a disease, who knows. Given poor medicine and poor information propagation technology it could have been just about anything. The timing seems coincidental, but coincidences do happen. Certainly they happen more than people turning out to have been gods, however pathetic and ineffectual ones.

            Come to think of it, your story has a bigger problem than mine. By my story, Jesus is just some random dude. Random dudes ignominiously die all the time leaving a mess for others to clean up. Random dudes can just trip and crack their head, or get mugged, or get stabbed in an alley by some bad guys and that’s just the way life works.

            But by your story, Jesus was a god. Who, having been killed, comes back from the dead only just so he can say “Hey guys! Look! I came back from the dead!” but then never does anything ELSE with his amazing now-death-conquering powers? It’s bizarre! If he wanted to convincingly spread the word, why not stick around a while longer? Why isn’t he STILL around today, even? Why not pop up in other parts of the world? Or confront the Romans head-on and give them what-for? Or write burning letters in the sky for all to see instead of letting word-of-mouth tell his story? Why skulk around in secret so just a few people can see him here and there?

            An actual god would be smart enough to realize this story isn’t convincing and powerful enough to make it more so.

            TL;DR: An immortal being disappearing from the pages of history in his 30s needs more explanation than a mortal one does.

          • Jiro says:

            Wouldn’t all those explanations of why Jesus rising from the dead can’t be fake equally apply to all Muhammed’s miracles?

          • David Friedman says:

            “Alexander the Great was also extraordinarily successful in war. So was Genghis Khan. So were the ancient Romans. So was the British Empire.”

            Alexander and Genghis Khan are comparably striking. The expansion of the Roman Republic was a much slower and less extraordinary event, and similarly for the British Empire.

            When Mohammed died, the two great powers in the region were the Byzantine and the Sassanid Empire and the Arabs were bit players.

            Twenty years later, all of the Sassanid Empire and a large chunk of the Byzantine had been conquered and annexed by the Arabs.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            @ Glen:

            I figure he died shortly thereafter. Could be the Romans got him for real or it could have been unrelated. An accident while traveling, a disease, who knows. Given poor medicine and poor information propagation technology it could have been just about anything. The timing seems coincidental, but coincidences do happen. Certainly they happen more than people turning out to have been gods, however pathetic and ineffectual ones.

            This is all getting extremely convoluted and ad-hoc, but you’re still dancing around the main problem with your theory, which is why the disciples would choose to play the elaborate resurrection hoax simply in order to lead lives of poverty, persecution and eventual death, and why not a single one of these fraudsters ever ‘fessed up, even when faced with a rather nasty array of tortures.

            An actual god would be smart enough to realize this story isn’t convincing and powerful enough to make it more so.

            Given that Christianity is the world’s largest and most wide-spread religion by some margin, maybe God is smarter than you give him credit for.

            @ Jiro:

            Wouldn’t all those explanations of why Jesus rising from the dead can’t be fake equally apply to all Muhammed’s miracles?

            No, because (a) Muhammad and his followers did far better in worldly terms out of their religion than Jesus and his, and so have more incentive to fabricate stuff; (b) several of the miracles have only Muhammad to testify to them (e.g., the night journey to Heaven), and so are less reliable than a resurrected man appearing to multiple individuals; (c) several of the miracles are easily explicable in non-miraculous terms (lots of people write books and win battles without needing miraculous help), whereas coming back from the dead isn’t; and (d) a greater amount of time elapsed between the life of Muhammad and the writing down of the hadiths than elapsed between the life of Jesus and the first accounts thereof, so there would have been more occasion for stories to get changed or corrupted in the telling.

            @ David:

            Alexander and Genghis Khan are comparably striking. The expansion of the Roman Republic was a much slower and less extraordinary event, and similarly for the British Empire.

            So if Alexander and Genghis are “comparably striking”, why exactly would the conquests of Muhammad and his successors be taken as evidence for the truth of Islam? Plus, why did the Muslim conquests end up petering out, and why was the Muslim world overtaken militarily by the Christian west? Did Allah change his mind half-way through and decide he preferred Christianity instead?

          • Glen Raphael says:

            This is all getting extremely convoluted and ad-hoc

            He doesn’t have to have died. He could have just stopped being sufficiently notable. But how is “he died” a convoluted explanation? Especially given that you also think he died around that time. Is “a man-god ascended bodily into heaven” really less convoluted an explanation than “a man died anonymously”?

            you’re still dancing around the main problem with your theory, which is why the disciples would choose to play the elaborate resurrection hoax simply in order to lead lives of poverty, persecution and eventual death, and why not a single one of these fraudsters ever ‘fessed up, even when faced with a rather nasty array of tortures.

            It was a late edit so you might have missed it but my ad-hoc theory is that Mary was the chief fraudster. What is the evidence that Mary was “faced with a rather nasty array of tortures”? Or for that matter poverty and persecution? Wasn’t the poverty part pretty normal for that time and place? (Were Mary and the disciples guaranteed wealth if they converted? If so, how?)

            Wasn’t the persecution part pretty common too? Are you familiar with the economic concept of a commitment strategy? The fact that a strategy doesn’t work out well doesn’t mean it was a bad idea from the beginning. Maybe it could have made them rich but didn’t. Or maybe the ones who got tortured weren’t the ones who knew about the scam. Or (given that this stuff wasn’t written down until decades later) maybe the torture part was dramatic license added by the storytellers. Or maybe under torture some did recant, but weren’t believed. Or the recantation was left out of the histories. In short, there are oodles of possible explanations.

            (As for eventual death, that still happens to everyone even today. Near as I’m aware, Mary is assumed to have died of old age, which is the best outcome one can reasonably hope for.)

            Incidentally, given that your theory has a literal “…and then a miracle happened” step, that factor alone would seem to make it less likely than any number of coincidences or odd behavior patterns implied by mine. Right?

          • Aapje says:

            @Two McMillion

            Sorry that I missed your comment yesterday.

            Why do you think it more reasonable?

            If many people make different claims about being divinely inspired, then it’s obvious that the claim of divine inspiration is often false. Then if each of these people lacks objective evidence of sufficient quality to prove their case, I find it irrational to pick the least silly claim (especially since all that I studied a bit are quite silly, with claims that we know are false). It makes much more sense to me to consider each of these claims to be made up by man, rather than 99% of them.

            Even if this is not the case, there is no rational way to determine the (mostly) right one anyway. So even if God exists, one of the stories is somewhat correct and I pick a faith to believe in, the chance of picking the wrong one is still very high. The fact that religious people overwhelmingly believe in the faith of their culture/parents strongly suggests that they have no special ability to pick the right faith either and just pick the one they are most familiar with.

            We don’t all give up money, but we all give up something. We all make the sacrifice Jesus asked of that man, even if it looks different.

            You are right that you can more or less read the chapter this way, if you lawyer the shit out of it. It is very convenient though, because you can just define the sacrifice as something that looks major, but that doesn’t actually effect you very much. It’s pretty much a defense of virtue signaling (to yourself or others).

            However, the problem with your interpretation is still that Jesus explicitly states that the burden on the rich is much greater (“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”), so divorcing the sacrifice from wealth appears to conflict with this.

            This is actually an argument against believing in anything unusual, where “unusual” is determined by your opinion of its likelihood.

            No, I very much believe in unusual things. I merely don’t believe that rarity is proof that ‘God did it.’

            The history of science vs (fundamentalist) religion is one where the latter claims that something is too unusual to be explainable by natural, rather than supernatural explanations, followed by science proving the opposite. Then the goal posts get moved to something that science cannot yet prove, repeat ad infinitum.

            Given this pattern and the fact that a lack of proof for X is not proof for not-X, I find claims of supernatural intervention (miracles) to be unconvincing.

            But the simplest question reply is- why would Jesus’ followers have invented the story of the resurrection, if that had happened?

            – Because they didn’t know the full truth and made wrong inferences.
            – Because they expected a miracle to happen and interpreted reality to be more consistent with their expectations
            – Because they were activists and all activists suffer from bias, as the process of convincing others leads to the reinforcement and embellishment of memories that are convincing and the suppression of memories that are unconvincing.
            – Because they greatly admired Jesus and people tend to interpret information about people they admire much differently from people they are neutral about; or dislike (see the way that followers and opponents interpret the actions of Trump & Clinton).
            – Because the story got recalled and retold many times. Science has given strong evidence that every recall involves ‘filling in the blanks’ and forgetting certain details; and that the changed memory is then stored (see how the story differs between Mark and Matthew).
            – Etc, etc, etc.

            It’s easily explained by errors in thinking and the limitations of human memory that are very common in humans and often observed for all kinds of topics (not just religion).

            Now the Jews believed that resurrections could occur – they thought that God could do miracles.

            This weakens the claim that it actually happened, because they would obviously be looking for miracles to happen to their prophet.

            But they in no way expected the suffering/dying/rising prophet that Jesus claimed to be. The combination appears to not have occurred to anyone before Jesus brought it up.

            If Jesus was the first prophet to be falsely declared dead, then it makes perfect sense that he was the first prophet to have a resurrection story.

            If Jesus had survived crucifixion, they might have called it a miracle like Shadrach surviving the firing furnace, but they would have called it what it was.

            We know that people have out of body experiences, yet Yogi followers believe that they really fly during them. Your assertion is not very believable.

            Surviving crucifixion, even by miracle, was something already without their religious paradigm. Actually dying and coming back was completely outside it.

            Resurrection is part of the Torah (1 Kings 17:17-24, 2 Kings 4:32-37 and 2 Kings 13:21), so your statement is false.

            PS. The last part of your post actually quotes Mr Mind without proper attribution.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            He doesn’t have to have died. He could have just stopped being sufficiently notable. But how is “he died” a convoluted explanation? Especially given that you also think he died around that time. Is “a man-god ascended bodily into heaven” really less convoluted an explanation than “a man died anonymously”?

            It’s “convoluted” because you just bolted it on to patch up an obvious (but, apparently, unnoticed) problem with your theory. Having to do so is generally considered a sign that a theory isn’t very good or very well-thought-through.

            It was a late edit so you might have missed it but my ad-hoc theory is that Mary was the chief fraudster. What is the evidence that Mary was “faced with a rather nasty array of tortures”? Or for that matter poverty and persecution?

            The Jewish (and, later, Roman) authorities persecuted Christians, which would include Mary, if she was going around saying that her son was the Messiah.

            Plus, Mary would need accomplices of some kind — a scam like you’re describing is too complex for a single peasant woman to pull off. So whom would she involve? The people who might most expect to benefit from the conspiracy would be the Apostles, who ended up in leadership roles in the new Church. Unfortunately, this also required them to embrace lives of poverty, persecution, and death. Which brings us onto the next set of points:

            Wasn’t the poverty part pretty normal for that time and place?

            There are different degrees of poverty. A fisherman in Galilee might not be rich, but he was certainly better-off financially than an itinerant preacher might expect to be.

            Wasn’t the persecution part pretty common too?

            Erm, no? The early disciples were all Jews, living in a Jewish country, under the rule of an empire which generally allowed Jews freedom to practise their religious observances. If they’d kept their heads down and not gone around preaching the Resurrection, of course they wouldn’t have been persecuted.

            Maybe it could have made them rich but didn’t.

            Maybe we’d expect at least some of them to quit if they were just in it for the money.

            Or maybe the ones who got tortured weren’t the ones who knew about the scam.

            As mentioned above, the most plausible ringleaders would be the Apostles, all of whom ended up getting tortured at least once (and all but one of whom ended up getting executed as well).

            Or (given that this stuff wasn’t written down until decades later) maybe the torture part was dramatic license added by the storytellers.

            We know the MO of the Roman state, and they definitely used torture on subversives.

            Or maybe under torture some did recant, but weren’t believed.

            Why not? Neither the Romans nor the Jewish authorities believed in this Jesus-is-the-Son-of-God stuff. Surely someone recanting and admitting they made it all up would exactly confirm their expectations?

            Or the recantation was left out of the histories.

            Why? The Romans and Jews were both trying to stamp out Christianity, being able to point to one of Jesus’ alleged followers who’d now confessed to fabricating the whole thing would be something of a propaganda coup for them. Why wouldn’t they go around telling everybody they could of this? And then of course we’d expect non-Christian historians (Tacitus, Josephus) to mention this, and we’d also expect Christian authors to write rebuttals.

            (As for eventual death, that still happens to everyone even today.

            It was obvious from the context that I wasn’t talking about natural death.

            Incidentally, given that your theory has a literal “…and then a miracle happened” step, that factor alone would seem to make it less likely than any number of coincidences or odd behavior patterns implied by mine. Right?

            No, and you’re going to need an argument for that, not just a bald assertion and a tag question.

          • Aapje says:

            @Two McMillion

            Since it is your belief that the story embellished the truth, would not looking for ways the story was embellished be the same error you are accusing Mr. X of?

            I’m not looking for embellishments, I observed that the Bible has conflicting stories. Embellishment is the most likely reason for this, IMO.

            Of course, it’s theoretically be possible that Mary Magdalene witnessed an angel descending from heaven, but then later changed her story to just have a man in white sitting in the empty tomb. However, it would be quite amazing for a human to forget such a detail.

            Anyway, the actual explanation for the discrepancy is not really that important, as the discrepancy itself already greatly undermines the value of the Bible as evidence.

          • Aapje says:

            @The original Mr. X

            Sure, if you only look at each thing in isolation, none of them is sufficient to guarantee death. If you take all of them together, though, the chances of survival are very slim.

            That’s like arguing that we must all be dead, because we don’t ingest just one poison during our lives, but a multitude of them (arsenic, lead, mercury, etc). While it is true that a cumulative effect exists, several different non-lethal injuries can easily add up to something that is non-lethal.

            Your statement is also extremely speculative, since you have zero idea of the actual facts of the case. You don’t actually know hold cold it was. You don’t know where he was stabbed. You don’t know how dehydrated he was. Etc. Etc.
            You are just assuming that these things were bad because that fits your theory.

            So no, it’s simply a few superficial cuts from a light birching, it’s pieces of skin and flesh being torn off as part of a punishment which was often enough to induce to death even without any other punishment being applied.

            That is a possible outcome of scourging, but there is no actual evidence of how badly he was scourged. We do know that your dramatic account (often enough to induce to death even without any other punishment) is false as he was alive after it.

            Because it was the Sabbath, and hence going to tend to a dead body would be against Jewish law.

            1. People may have visited his tomb on the Sabbath to pray in front of it and then heard him. The argument is not that the people who found him would have intended to tend to the body.
            2. All the Bible says is that he was gone when the women went to the tomb and that this was after Sabbath. It’s perfectly conceivable that this was not 1 minute after the Sabbath ended and that there was time after Sabbath and before the women went to the grave, where other people could have been there.

            according to which Jesus post-crucifixion would be a bloody, emaciated, half-dead mess who would be more likely to excite pity than worship.

            That is just your subjective belief of what people would do.

            I’m guessing that most people who survived the sort of injuries Jesus suffered were taken away to receive medical attention, not left in a tomb for three days.

            Nobody entered the tomb for those 3 days (the Romans put a seal on the stone to ensure that it would not be entered), so how would they have known?

            Does the fact that some people support evolution and some support creationism mean that biology is a sham?

            No, because the evolutionists made verifiable predictions, which were found to be true, but cannot be explained by creationism.

            Eyewitnesses to events often disagree, sometimes wildly, on the details of what happened. If Mark based his account on one disciple’s report, and Matthew on another’s, we’d expect to find disagreements over details but agreement over the central point (that Jesus came back and appeared to his disciples) — which is what we’ve got.

            My possible explanation also matches this central point (that Jesus came back and appeared to his disciples). So my explanation is just as valid according to your reasoning. Why do you reject it as a possibility?

            So we should all agree with your baseless speculation because…?

            I’m not claiming my theory is true, I’m arguing that it fits the evidence sufficiently to be regarded as a possibility.

            The Pope is “supposedly divinely inspired” from the time when he becomes Pope; this applies to whomever is made Pope.

            Why do they even have elections then?

            I’m sorry, but this ‘a person gets divine inspiration when it is convenient for us’ story fails to convince me.

            So maybe you could tell us when exactly it was invented.

            The basic idea of papal infallibility seems to have been a believed by some and rejected by others during most of Catholic history. In 1793, the Catholic church accepted that Catholics in Ireland spoke an oath that stated: “It is not an article of the Catholic Faith, neither am I thereby required to believe or profess that the Pope is infallible.”

            Papal infallibility was formally defined in 1870 and this is when it became an article of faith. So this is where the concept of dogma as being a crucial part of Catholocism was established.

            The church then retroactively declared what is dogma and what isn’t, which is a very convenient form of retconning. It is not the case that historically, popes declared what was dogma and what wasn’t, as they made their statements. Even then, it is unclear right now which pre-1870 decisions are part of dogma, as the Catholic church refuses to provide a definite list of the current valid dogma.

            So…at best you can argue that for 1800 years the Catholic church failed to establish dogma and thus failed to guide the catholic people properly and merely did so relatively recently, which doesn’t speak well of the confidence one can have in the church (if it takes 1800 years to nail down something that you consider so crucial).

          • The original Mr. X says:

            @ Aapje:

            That’s like arguing that we must all be dead, because we don’t ingest just one poison during our lives, but a multitude of them (arsenic, lead, mercury, etc). While it is true that a cumulative effect exists, several different non-lethal injuries can easily add up to something that is non-lethal.

            Your statement is also extremely speculative, since you have zero idea of the actual facts of the case. You don’t actually know hold cold it was. You don’t know where he was stabbed. You don’t know how dehydrated he was. Etc. Etc.
            You are just assuming that these things were bad because that fits your theory.

            That’s a pretty isolated demand for an awful lot of rigour you’re got going there.

            You don’t know where he was stabbed.

            In the heart, to see if he was dead. The blood and water coming out were taken as a sign that he was dead already.

            Incidentally, even a wound of a couple of inches or so is usually enough to cause death unless the patient is hurried to hospital, which of course Jesus wouldn’t. So even if he wasn’t dead already, a spear wound in the side would probably be enough to kill him all by itself.

            Oh, and incidentally: Josephus on surviving crucifixion victims:

            I saw many captives crucified, and remembered three of them as my former acquaintance. I was very sorry at this in my mind, and went with tears in my eyes to Titus, and told him of them; so he immediately commanded them to be taken down, and to have the greatest care taken of them, in order to their recovery; yet two of them died under the physician’s hands, while the third recovered.

            So, even when their crucifixion was finished early and they were given the best medical attention available, two out of the three died anyway. The odds of somebody crucified until either dead or close enough to death to appear dead and then abandoned in a tomb surviving would have been slim indeed.

            That is a possible outcome of scourging, but there is no actual evidence of how badly he was scourged. We do know that your dramatic account (often enough to induce to death even without any other punishment) is false as he was alive after it.

            Lots of the people who died after scourging did so a couple of days afterwards, usually due to infection of the wounds. Accordingly you can’t conclude that the scourging was non-fatal based solely on the fact that the victim didn’t drop dead immediately.

            1. People may have visited his tomb on the Sabbath to pray in front of it and then heard him. The argument is not that the people who found him would have intended to tend to the body.
            2. All the Bible says is that he was gone when the women went to the tomb and that this was after Sabbath. It’s perfectly conceivable that this was not 1 minute after the Sabbath ended and that there was time after Sabbath and before the women went to the grave, where other people could have been there.

            So why did these anonymous benefactors never say “Hey, we found this guy half-dead in the tomb, and then revived him with our medical care”? Surely they could have expected some sort of reward or recognition, or even to stop this silly “Christ is risen!” story doing the rounds. Why did they never come forwards?

            That is just your subjective belief of what people would do.

            Yes, it is my belief that a dozen or more people don’t see a half-dead torture victim covered in horrific wounds and immediately conclude that this person is dead. Do you really want to dispute this?

            Nobody entered the tomb for those 3 days (the Romans put a seal on the stone to ensure that it would not be entered), so how would they have known?

            Known what?

            No, because the evolutionists made verifiable predictions, which were found to be true, but cannot be explained by creationism.

            Not really. You can explain anything if you’re willing to add enough epicycles to your theory.

            My possible explanation also matches this central point (that Jesus came back and appeared to his disciples). So my explanation is just as valid according to your reasoning. Why do you reject it as a possibility?

            Because your proposed explanation doesn’t match the central point, it relies on wild conjecture and goes against everything we know about human psychology.

            I’m not claiming my theory is true, I’m arguing that it fits the evidence sufficiently to be regarded as a possibility.

            The theory that there’s an invisible unicorn sitting behind me also fits the evidence, maybe we should start considering that possibility?

            Why do they even have elections then?

            Erm, to choose a new Pope?

            You seem to be relying on an unstated premise that “The Pope is protected from teaching heresy as dogma” and “The Pope is elected” are contradictory, but I really don’t see the contradiction here.

            Papal infallibility was formally defined in 1870 and this is when it became an article of faith.

            I was speaking somewhat loosely; I should have said, “The infallibility of the Church at Rome, of which the Pope was head, and the authority of the Pope over other dioceses.”

            So this is where the concept of dogma as being a crucial part of Catholocism was established.

            No, this is when the concept of the Pope settling disputes ex cathedra was formalised. The concept of dogma is different, and has been around for somewhat longer.

          • Aapje says:

            @The original Mr. X

            That’s a pretty isolated demand for an awful lot of rigour you’re got going there.

            Your claim is that you know for sure that Jesus couldn’t have survived his injuries for 3 days (or more, but after that he could have gotten medical help). In my eyes such a strong claim requires at minimum that you can demonstrate a lack of medical cases where people survived injuries of somewhat the same severity for similar periods. As there is no real evidence of the severity of Jesus’ injuries, you cannot do that exercise, so you cannot base your opinion on objective evidence. In short, I believe that your claims are way beyond the evidence that you have.

            My challenges to you aren’t intended to make you provide evidence (which I’m pretty sure doesn’t exist), but rather, to get you to admit the weakness of your argument and for you to reduce the extent of your claims (or at least admit that those claims are not supported by objective evidence).

            In the heart, to see if he was dead.

            The bible doesn’t state that, it uses a greek word that can mean side and/or rib. So your claim seems quite unsupported by evidence and more of a popular myth.

            It’s perfectly possible to have bleeding under the skin, so even a mere piercing of the skin could have resulted in the observed effect, without any major arteries or organs being hit.

            Incidentally, even a wound of a couple of inches or so is usually enough to cause death unless the patient is hurried to hospital

            Nonsense. Having the skin pierced is unpleasant and unhygienic, but far from lethal in most cases. It’s actually even quite hard to commit suicide by slitting your wrists as the blood will clot (this is why best practice is to do it in the bathtub).

            The odds of somebody crucified until either dead or close enough to death to appear dead and then abandoned in a tomb surviving would have been slim indeed.

            It a fallacy to look at odds when discounting a possibility. By that reasoning no one ever wins the lottery.

            Accordingly you can’t conclude that the scourging was non-fatal based solely on the fact that the victim didn’t drop dead immediately.

            I’m not arguing that Jesus didn’t die of his wounds later. He seems to have lived for 40 days after the claimed resurrection, which would then surely have been related.

            So why did these anonymous benefactors never say “Hey, we found this guy half-dead in the tomb, and then revived him with our medical care”?

            Perhaps Jesus liked the myth and asked them not to? As prophet, he had motive to do so.

            Surely they could have expected some sort of reward or recognition, or even to stop this silly “Christ is risen!” story doing the rounds.

            If they were followers, they also had motive to boost Jesus’ street cred.

            Yes, it is my belief that a dozen or more people don’t see a half-dead torture victim covered in horrific wounds and immediately conclude that this person is dead.

            I don’t understand this sentence.

            Known what?

            Your claim seems to have been that they would have seen that Jesus was dead as they tended to the body. My point was that they only saw the body directly after it was taken down from the cross and entombed (when he could have been falsely seen as dead, due to being unconscious and having a low heart rate and no visible breathing). Jesus was alone in the tomb for the next 3 days and could have been visibly alive and no one would have seen it.

            Because your proposed explanation doesn’t match the central point

            It does match what you claimed was the central point. You are correct in that it doesn’t match your real central point (a miracle must have happened, because your faith says so).

            Erm, to choose a new Pope?

            If God seeks out the new pope and gives him divine inspiration anyway, they could choose a random person.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            Your claim is that you know for sure that Jesus couldn’t have survived his injuries for 3 days (or more, but after that he could have gotten medical help). In my eyes such a strong claim requires at minimum that you can demonstrate a lack of medical cases where people survived injuries of somewhat the same severity for similar periods. As there is no real evidence of the severity of Jesus’ injuries, you cannot do that exercise, so you cannot base your opinion on objective evidence. In short, I believe that your claims are way beyond the evidence that you have.

            Not true. We actually know quite a bit about the process of crucifixion and the physiological effects it has, so we can be pretty certain of the sort of trauma Jesus would be suffering.

            For example, modern studies have suggested that the most common form of death would actually be asphyxiation, as the weight of the body suspended from the wrists would stretch the chest so much as to make breathing impossible. The only way around this was for the victim to push himself up with his ankles so as to reduce the pressure on the chest; this is why soldiers trying to hasten death would break the person’s legs. Now for Jesus to be mistaken for dead, his legs would have to have gone slack, as a person pushing themselves up would obviously still be alive. But if that were the case, then he’d have been killed by the asphyxiation anyway. So the idea that someone on the cross could have been mistaken for dead goes against what medical science tells us.

            The bible doesn’t state that, it uses a greek word that can mean side and/or rib. So your claim seems quite unsupported by evidence and more of a popular myth.

            It’s perfectly possible to have bleeding under the skin, so even a mere piercing of the skin could have resulted in the observed effect, without any major arteries or organs being hit.

            The most likely explanation for the “water” coming out of Jesus’ side is that it was pericardial fluid, which, as the name suggests, is found around the heart. So any spear-thrust would have to have been deep enough to get to the heart, at least.

            Nonsense. Having the skin pierced is unpleasant and unhygienic, but far from lethal in most cases. It’s actually even quite hard to commit suicide by slitting your wrists as the blood will clot (this is why best practice is to do it in the bathtub).

            Pay attention to what you’re disagreeing with. I specifically referred to wounds “of a couple of inches or so”, which is somewhat more than just piercing the skin. Incidentally, if you slit your wrists to a depth of two inches, yes, you’re a gonner, unless you receive some very quick medical attention.

            I’m not arguing that Jesus didn’t die of his wounds later. He seems to have lived for 40 days after the claimed resurrection, which would then surely have been related.

            Again, you need to explain how a half-dead torture victim who ends up succumbing to his wounds a month or so later could be mistaken for God by so many different people.

            I don’t understand this sentence.

            I meant “God”, not “dead”. Remember, you were claiming the idea that people don’t generally mistake half-dead torture victims for resurrected deities is “just your subjective opinion”.

            Your claim seems to have been that they would have seen that Jesus was dead as they tended to the body. My point was that they only saw the body directly after it was taken down from the cross and entombed (when he could have been falsely seen as dead, due to being unconscious and having a low heart rate and no visible breathing). Jesus was alone in the tomb for the next 3 days and could have been visibly alive and no one would have seen it.

            My claim was, as I said, that “most people who survived the sort of injuries Jesus suffered were taken away to receive medical attention, not left in a tomb for three days”. I’m not sure why you’d have difficulty understanding it.

            It does match what you claimed was the central point.

            The theory that “God made fossils as a prank to confuse us” matches the “central point” of palaeontology, I guess you think these two theories are on an epistemic par?

            If God seeks out the new pope and gives him divine inspiration anyway, they could choose a random person.

            It would be good if you’d actually familiarise yourself with what you’re criticising. The Pope, and the Roman Church in general, is protected from officially teaching heresy as doctrine. That doesn’t mean that the Pope becomes some sort of divine marionette completely controlled by God in all things, so the personal qualities of the person being chosen still matter to how good a Pope he’ll make.

          • Glen Raphael says:

            Mary would need accomplices of some kind — a scam like you’re describing is too complex for a single peasant woman to pull off.

            What makes you think so? The attitude you’re displaying here is exactly why it would work – nobody thinks a “simple peasant woman” could fool them.

            But even as recently as Houdini’s time it was common for an unschooled and apparently simple peasant woman to fool her whole town into thinking, for instance, that people can talk to the dead. Some of these women worked alone, others in very small family groupings – just a couple of people.

            For instance, the Fox Sisters fooled their own husbands, family members – even their own mother – and many scientists and intellectuals including Arthur Conan Doyle – into thinking they were connected with mystical powers. The Fox Sisters were successful because they started their scam as teenagers in a time when people wanted to believe. They pandered to that desire and made a point of seeming too young and innocent and ignorant to be so cunning.

            If Jesus’s “miracles” were that sort of scam, there’s no reason to think any of the Apostles would have been in on it. The Apostles would have been the primary people most fooled by the deception.

            You have no evidence at all that Mary was tortured or punished or that she even kept preaching once the jig was up. Any “evidence” you present that the Apostles wouldn’t want to keep the secret just suggests they weren’t in on it. Like the victims of the Fox Sisters, the Apostles wanted to believe in evidence of miracles and did honestly believe they saw such evidence. That doesn’t mean we should take what they say as, well, gospel. 🙂

          • The original Mr. X says:

            What makes you think so?

            Well, at the very least she’d require either (a) Judas’ collaboration, to make sure he fingers the wrong guy (incidentally, I’d like to hear the sales pitch there — “Hey, Judas, come join my conspiracy so you can be hated by everyone and your very name become a byword for treachery”?), or (b) some other guy to switch for Jesus (and I’d *really* like to hear the sales pitch there). Plus, there were the disciples who actually saw Jesus being crucified, who’d presumably also have to be involved somehow, otherwise they’d just go back to the others saying “Hey, guess what, guys, the Romans got the wrong man”.

          • Glen Raphael says:

            Well, at the very least she’d require either (a) Judas’ collaboration…

            Not necessarily. You keep making the same mistake which is to assume X happened, therefore people at the time must have deliberately planned for X to happen in precisely that way.

            You’re not leaving room for the possibility Mary got lucky and improvised, taking advantage of such situations as happened to come up.

            It’s like applying the anthropic principle. We can tell from the fact that X happened that it was possible for X to happen, but not that it was certain to. It was theoretically possible for the Romans to capture the right man, but for some reason they didn’t. Mary capitalized on that opportunity, and the rest is history.

            Come to think of it, pretty much any mom would have the same instinct – if you hear your son has been captured, go to look, and see it’s not him, what mom would say “Hey you! Romans! This man you’ve punished is not my boy! My boy must still be in hiding – you should go back and try harder to find him. Did you check under the bed?” No, pretending the guy on the cross is your son/friend/whatever is obviously the right play even if you’re NOT a scammer.

          • David Friedman says:

            “It was theoretically possible for the Romans to capture the right man, but for some reason they didn’t. ”

            This is, of course, the conventional Muslim account. The reason being that Issus was born off to heaven and his appearance put upon … .

          • The original Mr. X says:

            @ Glen:

            It was theoretically possible for the Romans to capture the right man, but for some reason they didn’t.

            The whole point of getting Judas to point him out was precisely to make sure that they got the right man.

            Plus, Jesus was arrested whilst out and about with his other disciples. So apparently you think that for some reason Jesus wasn’t actually with his disciples for some reason, but that a doppelganger was who looked so similar that Judas, a guy who’d lived with and studied under Jesus for the past three years, couldn’t tell the difference; and that this guy never tried to save himself by pointing out that he wasn’t, as a matter of fact, Jesus; that none of the disciples said “No, you’ve got the wrong man, Jesus is off somewhere else, we don’t know where”; and that none of the disciples who saw him being tried or crucified told anybody “No, they’ve got the wrong man, Jesus is still out there.”

            Come to think of it, pretty much any mom would have the same instinct – if you hear your son has been captured, go to look, and see it’s not him, what mom would say “Hey you! Romans! This man you’ve punished is not my boy! My boy must still be in hiding – you should go back and try harder to find him. Did you check under the bed?” No, pretending the guy on the cross is your son/friend/whatever is obviously the right play even if you’re NOT a scammer.

            (a) I’m not talking about Mary, I’m talking about the other people who saw Jesus being crucified.

            (b) I’m not saying they’d tell the Romans, I’m saying they’d tell the other disciples. If some of your friends are feeling devastated because their beloved teacher has just been killed and you happen to discover that he’s actually fine, it was all a case of mistaken identity, wouldn’t you go and tell those friends the good news?

            @ David:

            This is, of course, the conventional Muslim account. The reason being that Issus was born off to heaven and his appearance put upon … .

            Several Gnostic sects said the same thing. Which, come to think of it, is another strike against Glen’s theory — if the idea of God himself dying was apparently so shocking and “Oh no, God didn’t die, he just made an optical illusion so people thought they’d killed him” much less so, it would seem more likely that Mary (or whoever) would make up the latter story, rather than the former.

          • Aapje says:

            @The original Mr. X

            Not true. We actually know quite a bit about the process of crucifixion and the physiological effects it has, so we can be pretty certain of the sort of trauma Jesus would be suffering.

            1. The sources tell us that there was some variance
            2. It’s explicitly stated in the Bible that Jesus was treated differently from normal (his bones were not broken)
            3. There is a big difference between ‘the sort of trauma’ vs ‘this exact trauma’.

            For example, modern studies have suggested that the most common form of death would actually be asphyxiation, as the weight of the body suspended from the wrists would stretch the chest so much as to make breathing impossible.

            Pierre Barbet claimed this. Frederick Zugibe did experiments where the subjects had no trouble breathing when suspended in this way. So this seems to be false.

            The most likely explanation for the “water” coming out of Jesus’ side is that it was pericardial fluid, which, as the name suggests, is found around the heart.

            “Pleural effusion, also called “water on the lung,” is an excessive buildup of fluid in the space between your lungs and chest cavity.” “Pleural effusions are common, with approximately 1.5 million cases diagnosed in the United States every year, according to the American Thoracic Society.”

            “Blood also can build up in the pleural space. This condition is called a hemothorax”

            A combination of pleural effusion and hemothorax would explain the blood + water coming out of the wound, without any major organs or blood vessels being hit. Hemothorax is not even necessary, as the blood can have come from the stabbing by the spear.

            The spear merely needed to penetrate into the pleural space, causing minimal damage.

            Treatment of pleural effusion is to drain the liquids, so the stabbing with the spear might actually have been accidental medical treatment.

            I specifically referred to wounds “of a couple of inches or so”, which is somewhat more than just piercing the skin.

            Were you talking ‘wide’ or ‘deep’? Your word choice is highly ambiguous. A shallow wound of a couple of inches is normally highly survivable. I assumed that you were talking about this since I don’t see how scourging would lead to wounds of a couple of inches deep, unless fairly big knives were tied to the whip.

            Deep wounds of a couple of inches can also be quite survivable, but that depends highly on what is hit. However, there is no reason to believe that Jesus suffered wounds like that.

            Again, you need to explain how a half-dead torture victim who ends up succumbing to his wounds a month or so later could be mistaken for God by so many different people.

            Your request makes no sense to me. He wasn’t ‘mistaken for God.’ People saw him, didn’t recognize that he was Jesus at first, but did when he talked to them.

            This is completely consistent with Jesus being almost unrecognizable due to his bad treatment. I don’t see how this part of the Bible helps us distinguish between my scenario and yours, at all. After a resurrection, Jesus would look very bad, assuming that the resurrection process doesn’t heal him completely. Similarly, he would look very bad if he never died and semi-recovered in the tomb (enough to shout for help and get medical treatment).

            The Pope, and the Roman Church in general, is protected from officially teaching heresy as doctrine.

            The concept of doctrine has historically been fluid, so your statement is merely true if you accept the retconning that the Catholic church has done (like reinterpreting statements in the past, regardless of whether this makes any logical sense). An example is that “There is no salvation outside the Church” was doctrine for 500 years until Dominus Iesus argued that non-Catholics have a ‘mysterious relationship to the Church.’

            I don’t see how any non-biased person can see the Dominus Iesus’ argument as anything but a way to reverse past doctrine by making an argument that would make the earlier statement (that life eternal can only be achieved through the Catholic church) an absurd one to make; or how Dominus Iesus’ argument makes any sense itself (as a person who doesn’t even know that the Catholic church exists would still have a connection with it, by his reasoning).

            Finally, it is a fact that the Catholic church has told it’s followers that they could be absolved of their sins by buying indulgences. Even if you want to argue that this practice was not part of doctrine/dogma, it was still Catholic teaching that the Catholics of the time believed. The idea that the Catholic church is not guilty of teaching heretics, as long as you can define the teachings as non-dogmatic, seems to be a purely theoretical exercise to defend the church; ignoring the actual effect on Catholics.

            And remember, this thread started with the claim that religious teachings can guide people to do the right thing. If only a small portion of religious teachings are considered 100% correct, then what about the rest?

          • The original Mr. X says:

            1. The sources tell us that there was some variance
            2. It’s explicitly stated in the Bible that Jesus was treated differently from normal (his bones were not broken)
            3. There is a big difference between ‘the sort of trauma’ vs ‘this exact trauma’.

            We know that crucifixion resulted in death – that’s why it was considered a method of execution, after all – and the (few) instances of people surviving involved the victims being taken down when they were still clearly alive and being given immediate medical attention, neither of which applied to Jesus.

            Your entire argument here is just special pleading. Sure, maybe Jesus was the only person in history to survive a crucifixion! Or maybe you’re just being disingenuous, applying an absurdly high standard of proof to avoid entertaining a conclusion you dislike.

            Pierre Barbet claimed this. Frederick Zugibe did experiments where the subjects had no trouble breathing when suspended in this way. So this seems to be false.

            Wikipedia is your friend here:

            A theory attributed to Pierre Barbet holds that, when the whole body weight was supported by the stretched arms, the typical cause of death was asphyxiation.[51] He wrote that the condemned would have severe difficulty inhaling, due to hyper-expansion of the chest muscles and lungs. The condemned would therefore have to draw himself up by his arms, leading to exhaustion, or have his feet supported by tying or by a wood block. When no longer able to lift himself, the condemned would die within a few minutes. Some scholars, including Frederick Zugibe, posit other causes of death. Zugibe suspended test subjects with their arms at 60° to 70° from the vertical. The test subjects had no difficulty breathing during experiments, but did suffer rapidly increasing pain,[52][53] which is consistent with the Roman use of crucifixion to achieve a prolonged, agonizing death. However, Zugibe’s positioning of the test subjects’ feet are not supported by any archaeological or historical evidence.[54]

            Were you talking ‘wide’ or ‘deep’? Your word choice is highly ambiguous. A shallow wound of a couple of inches is normally highly survivable. I assumed that you were talking about this since I don’t see how scourging would lead to wounds of a couple of inches deep, unless fairly big knives were tied to the whip.

            We were taking specifically about Jesus being stabbed, not scourged. So, no ambiguity here.

            Your request makes no sense to me. He wasn’t ‘mistaken for God.’ People saw him, didn’t recognize that he was Jesus at first, but did when he talked to them.

            Oh, FFS. People took the Resurrection as evidence that Jesus was God, so clearly he looked at least sufficiently God-like for people to think this.

            Plus, whilst it’s true that some of the disciples didn’t recognise Jesus at first, note that their reaction was never “Oh my goodness, what’s happened to you, and why are you so covered in blood and wounds?” So even in his unrecognisable form, Jesus was clearly not the bloodied mess he would be if he’d been recently crucified.

            Also, note that on all of the occasions when Jesus was seen but not initially recognised, he was out and about on his own. Now, somebody who’d been tortured and crucified a mere three days earlier would surely be inside recuperating, or at the least he’d need to have somebody present to support him as he hobbled around (his ankles would still be damaged form being nailed to a piece of wood, remember?). For Jesus to have recovered so completely in so short a time from such severe injuries would run contrary to everything we know about medicine… In fact, it would itself require a miracle.

            The concept of doctrine has historically been fluid, so your statement is merely true if you accept the retconning that the Catholic church has done (like reinterpreting statements in the past, regardless of whether this makes any logical sense). An example is that “There is no salvation outside the Church” was doctrine for 500 years until Dominus Iesus argued that non-Catholics have a ‘mysterious relationship to the Church.’

            People have been teaching this (“that non-Catholics have a ‘mysterious relationship to the Church’”) since the time of the Church Fathers. Perhaps try cracking open a book of Catholic theology before lecturing about how self-contradictory it is?

            And remember, this thread started with the claim that religious teachings can guide people to do the right thing.

            A quick scrolling-up is enough to show that it didn’t.

          • Aapje says:

            @The original Mr. X

            We know that crucifixion resulted in death – that’s why it was considered a method of execution

            It was actually a rather poor method of execution, which is why it often required additional violence to finish the job (like breaking bones). The method wasn’t chosen for it efficacy, but rather for it’s lack of it (extra suffering being a (potential) deterrent to criminals).

            the (few) instances of people surviving involved the victims being taken down when they were still clearly alive and being given immediate medical attention, neither of which applied to Jesus.

            If Jesus was falsely declared dead, then he was taken down while alive. I don’t understand why one would have to be ‘clearly alive’ to survive it, that makes no logical sense. On the contrary, not being ‘clearly alive’ would have been the thing that saved him, as the Roman soldiers would then have taken him down as they thought him to be dead, saving him from further suffering.

            You have also offered no reason to believe that he couldn’t have survived his injuries for three days, except asserting it.

            Your entire argument here is just special pleading.

            No, your argument is a claim that exceptions cannot exist. People who are falsely declared dead is rare, but it happens. So the chance that this happened to Jesus is > 0. His injuries may very well have been survivable, so the chance that he survived for those three days is > 0.

            Ergo, the chance that my scenario happened is > 0. Ergo, your certainty that it couldn’t have happened is irrational.

            Sure, maybe Jesus was the only person in history to survive a crucifixion!

            You yourself provided evidence that someone survived it, it’s hard to debate if you contradict yourself after 5 sentences.

            Secondly, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

            Thirdly, as I said before, Jesus was treated differently from others who were crucified. It’s perfectly logical to claim that someone who is crucified in a less damaging way, is much more likely to survive. However, you choose to ignore the Bible when it favors my argument…

            Or maybe you’re just being disingenuous, applying an absurdly high standard of proof to avoid entertaining a conclusion you dislike.

            When you claim 100% certainty that Jesus was resurrected, you set yourself up to be challenged for 100% proof. My claim is merely that the chance is > 0 that Jesus was falsely declared dead and never resurrected by God. As my claim is much weaker, I merely have to offer a story with non-zero probabilities. You have to offer a story with 100% probabilities.

            If you change your claim from 100% certainty to less, I will reduce the burden of proof on you appropriately.

            However, Zugibe’s positioning of the test subjects’ feet are not supported by any archaeological or historical evidence.

            Which leaves us at:
            – No experiments that show that being suspended like that causes asphyxiation.
            – 1 possibly imperfect experiment that shows no sign of asphyxiation.

            That still leaves no evidence for the asphyxiation theory and moderate evidence that it is false.

            We were taking specifically about Jesus being stabbed, not scourged. So, no ambiguity here.

            OK, but the Bible provides no evidence about the depth of the stab-wound. So you are just speculating here (just like when you speculated that he was stabbed in the heart).

            Oh, FFS. People took the Resurrection as evidence that Jesus was God, so clearly he looked at least sufficiently God-like for people to think this.

            That makes no sense. They thought him to be dead. He showed up non-dead. Those two things by themselves are sufficient for people to declare that a miracle happened.

            The idea that Jesus had to look unscathed before they would accept this miracle as evidence of him being Godly is presumably part of your belief system, that you project on what Jesus’ followers had to believe. There is no reason to assume this is the case.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            It was actually a rather poor method of execution, which is why it often required additional violence to finish the job (like breaking bones). The method wasn’t chosen for it efficacy, but rather for it’s lack of it (extra suffering being a (potential) deterrent to criminals).

            “This is a slow method of execution” =/= “people have a high chance of surviving this method of execution”.

            If Jesus was falsely declared dead, then he was taken down while alive. I don’t understand why one would have to be ‘clearly alive’ to survive it, that makes no logical sense.

            Because if you’re clearly alive, you’re going to be much less injured than somebody who’s so far gone than he looks dead. Being less injured when taken down is obviously going to increase your survival chances.

            No, your argument is a claim that exceptions cannot exist.

            No, my argument is simply a claim that we need a reason to suppose that something was an exception before asserting it was exception. Just raising the theoretical possibility isn’t enough.

            You yourself provided evidence that someone survived it,

            The example I gave involved people who were taken down whilst still far from death and immediately given the best medical attention available, so that’s not a valid parallel.

            it’s hard to debate if you contradict yourself after 5 sentences.

            It’s also hard to debate if your interlocutor interprets statements in the most uncharitably literalistic way, but here we are.

            When you claim 100% certainty that Jesus was resurrected,

            Quote me claiming that, please.

            Which leaves us at:
            – No experiments that show that being suspended like that causes asphyxiation.
            – 1 possibly imperfect experiment that shows no sign of asphyxiation.
            That still leaves no evidence for the asphyxiation theory and moderate evidence that it is false.

            “Possibly imperfect” here meaning “invalid, and hence not actually providing evidence at all”.

            OK, but the Bible provides no evidence about the depth of the stab-wound. So you are just speculating here (just like when you speculated that he was stabbed in the heart).

            Stabbing people in the side was a way of making sure that the victim was actually dead. Since it would take more than just a few-millimetre-deep skin wound to achieve this, it’s reasonable to assume that the stabbing would, in fact, have been pretty deep, certainly deep enough to kill someone who had to go three days without medical attention.

            That makes no sense. They thought him to be dead. He showed up non-dead. Those two things by themselves are sufficient for people to declare that a miracle happened.

            If he was clearly still suffering from his crucifixion wounds, the natural response would be to assume he’d survived his wounds, not that he’d come back with a new, glorified body. Another natural response would be to get him a doctor, which, incidentally, none of the disciples did.

            Still waiting for an answer to my other two points, by the way. Here, I’ll quote them again, to save you the trouble of having to scroll up and look for them:

            Plus, whilst it’s true that some of the disciples didn’t recognise Jesus at first, note that their reaction was never “Oh my goodness, what’s happened to you, and why are you so covered in blood and wounds?” So even in his unrecognisable form, Jesus was clearly not the bloodied mess he would be if he’d been recently crucified.

            Also, note that on all of the occasions when Jesus was seen but not initially recognised, he was out and about on his own. Now, somebody who’d been tortured and crucified a mere three days earlier would surely be inside recuperating, or at the least he’d need to have somebody present to support him as he hobbled around (his ankles would still be damaged form being nailed to a piece of wood, remember?). For Jesus to have recovered so completely in so short a time from such severe injuries would run contrary to everything we know about medicine… In fact, it would itself require a miracle.

          • Glen Raphael says:

            that this guy never tried to save himself by pointing out that he wasn’t, as a matter of fact, Jesus

            Maybe everyone the Romans nab claim “You got the wrong guy!”. Or maybe the substitution happened later. (I’m sure if you applied half this effort to coming up with a normal non-miraculous scenario you could do it.)

            I’m not talking about Mary, I’m talking about the other people who saw Jesus being crucified.

            Who exactly were these “other people”? Mathew, Luke and Mark all agree that it was a bunch of women some distance away. Among that bunch of women, if Mary (the mom) claimed to recognize her (unrecognizably tortured) son on the cross, who would object?

            Only John claims anybody was “near the cross” or that Jesus spoke from the cross. Being as how he’s the odd one out, I feel free to disregard that account. I admit that if we credit John, I have trouble explaining how Jesus spoke from the cross to followers near the cross without them realizing it’s not him.

            A bigger problem with that section is how the nearby stone cracked and a bunch of holy men spontaneously rose from their graves – my best explanation for much of that section is that the writer was on drugs. 🙂

          • The original Mr. X says:

            Or maybe the substitution happened later.

            The Romans thought Jesus was a traitor and a leader of anti-Roman rebels. They wouldn’t just leave him around somewhere where he could wander off.

            Plus, how would the idea of “substitution” fit in with the idea that this was all just a case of mistaken identity which Mary took advantage off? Are you arguing that somehow this prisoner held under guard (a) got confused with some random other person, and (b) was able to just wander off out of the heart of the dungeons?

            Who exactly were these “other people”? Mathew, Luke and Mark all agree that it was a bunch of women some distance away. Among that bunch of women, if Mary (the mom) claimed to recognize her (unrecognizably tortured) son on the cross, who would object?
            Only John claims anybody was “near the cross” or that Jesus spoke from the cross. Being as how he’s the odd one out, I feel free to disregard that account. I admit that if we credit John, I have trouble explaining how Jesus spoke from the cross to followers near the cross without them realizing it’s not him.

            The Synoptic Gospels all report Jesus’ conversation with the two thieves, so apparently someone was close enough to overhear that.

            Plus, there’s the fact that after the crucifixion they took down Jesus’ body to bury it. You’d have thought that they might have realised it wasn’t him, either when taking the body away, or when washing it and preparing it for burial.

          • Glen Raphael says:

            The Synoptic Gospels all report Jesus’ conversation with the two thieves, so apparently someone was close enough to overhear that.

            Or the first teller of the tale made up that detail. To me, the fact that nobody would have been in a position to overhear some conversation suggests artistic license was taken; to you it suggests somebody must have been been close enough to overhear. That kind of sums it up for me.

            Plus, there’s the fact that after the crucifixion they took down Jesus’ body to bury it. You’d have thought that they might have realised it wasn’t him, either when taking the body away, or when washing it and preparing it for burial.

            Dead bodies look very different from live bodies and dead tortured bodies look even MORE different.

            So depending on how similar they looked it’s possible somebody could have spotted the error while preparing the body, but there’s no reason to think it especially likely unless they had some prior reason to be suspicious that it wasn’t him.

            And with that…I give up. You and I are playing a different game with different rules. I take it for granted that writers – even biblical ones – can be unreliable narrators. When I think about how magic tricks look different in memory than in the moment, much of the old testament seems to fit the mold pretty well.

            If our choices are:
            (a) “miracles” actually happened
            (b) writers at some point in the chain between then and now invented “miracles” out of whole cloth
            (c) Witnesses of the time were fooled into thinking they perceived miracles (and retroactively remembered details supporting it)

            To me, (c) feels like a generously charitable interpretation that is surprisingly defensible. If we can’t make (c) work, (b) is the fallback next-best option. (a) is Right Out if our goal is to rank based on how likely some scenario was.

            If your preferred interpretation is that something happened which had never happened before in the entire history of humanity, you’re…not really well-positioned to be claiming some alternate option seems a little unlikely.

          • John Schilling says:

            The Romans thought Jesus was a traitor and a leader of anti-Roman rebels. They wouldn’t just leave him around somewhere where he could wander off.

            Say what?

            “Behold, nothing deserving death has been done by him; I will therefore chastise and release him”. Luke 23:15

            Less explicitly, Mark 15:14, Matthew 27:23, and John 19:12. Per the only source material we have on any of this, the Romans rather clearly wanted Jesus to wander off and not bother them any more.

          • Agronomous says:

            @Glen:

            Near as I’m aware, Mary is assumed to have died of old age….

            So you’re making an assumption about assumptions about The Assumption?

          • The original Mr. X says:

            @ Glen:

            Or the first teller of the tale made up that detail. To me, the fact that nobody would have been in a position to overhear some conversation suggests artistic license was taken; to you it suggests somebody must have been been close enough to overhear. That kind of sums it up for me.

            You haven’t actually shown this even *is* a fact. Ruling out counter-evidence on the grounds that it conflicts with your unproven theory is bad rationality.

            Dead bodies look very different from live bodies and dead tortured bodies look even MORE different.

            Dead bodies look at least somewhat similar to live bodies, because people are able to identify whose they are. As for torture, Jesus had been scourged (which was generally done to the back), made to wear a crown of thorns (on the forehead) and crucified (nails through the wrists and ankles). His face would no doubt have been fairly bloodied from the thorns, but that would have been washed off when they were preparing the body for burial, and there’s no reason to think that his face would have been more notably disfigured than most other dead bodies’ are.

            (a) is Right Out if our goal is to rank based on how likely some scenario was.

            I’ve asked you before to justify why we should investigate the Crucifixion with an assumption that materialism is correct, and you pointedly refused to answer. I don’t expect you’ll give an answer now, either. But, for the benefit of anybody reading this, I would like to point out that this *is* just an unargued-for assumption, that materialism has a variety of well-known intellectual difficulties, that at least a significant minority, and possibly a majority, of philosophers aren’t naturalists, and that assuming naturalism a priori is, therefore, no more than begging the question in favour of your case.

            @ John:

            “Behold, nothing deserving death has been done by him; I will therefore chastise and release him”. Luke 23:15
            Less explicitly, Mark 15:14, Matthew 27:23, and John 19:12. Per the only source material we have on any of this, the Romans rather clearly wanted Jesus to wander off and not bother them any more.

            Pilate personally wasn’t convinced, but once he’d handed over Jesus to be executed, is there any reason to think that Jesus wouldn’t be treated like any other condemned traitor?

          • Agronomous says:

            Slightly on-topic:

            Conductos Lavabit Manus Tradito Messiam.

            —Sign in Pilate’s bathroom

          • Mary says:

            “Wouldn’t all those explanations of why Jesus rising from the dead can’t be fake equally apply to all Muhammed’s miracles?”

            Saying you believed Muhammed’s miracles got you power and loot — lots of loot.

            It did not get you fed to a lion.

    • Skef says:

      “We thought of life by analogy with a journey, with a pilgrimage which had a serious purpose at the end and the thing was to get to that end. Success or whatever it is, or maybe heaven after you’re dead. But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played.”

      Watts is referring most directly to an individual life here, but his point can be writ larger. The perspective you’re leaving accepts the limited time of an individual as long as the contribution of an individual is to something eternal. You’ve realized that adjustment doesn’t make much sense.

      The Point is the secular god — the part of the psychological function of god that’s hardest to give up on. It sits in the center of our culture necessarily unanalyzed; its there not so much to give direction to your efforts but to keep questions about direction from arising.

      As Timothy’s image illustrates, movie nihilism doesn’t make philosophical sense. If nothing Matters, capital-M, there are no materials out of which to construct something to be so sad about. But that sadness does make sense as a kind of mourning. It’s natural to be sad at the loss of something important to you, even when that loss takes the form of realizing you never had it.

      But a sense of loss usually fades with time and you’re left much like you’ve always been, with the same moods and urges and problems. And you realize, or remember, that you’ve never had that much control over what you are and are not OK with, and how that changes over time. And in that thought is a kind of peace that’s enough.

    • Deiseach says:

      All I can do for you is quote a poem:

      ‘Days’

      Philip Larkin

      What are days for?
      Days are where we live.
      They come, they wake us
      Time and time over.
      They are to be happy in:
      Where can we live but days?
      Ah, solving that question
      Brings the priest and the doctor
      In their long coats
      Running over the fields.

    • onyomi says:

      If 1-90 years of life have no inherent meaning, then where would the meaning arise in n years? Is any sub-infinite lifespan meaningless? Assuming it were possible, what would be the meaning of a literally infinite lifespan which could not be found in a finite life span? One could conceivably argue that an infinite lifespan is meaningless compared to a finite one, since, if there is meaning in experiencing life, it seems it must be experienced moment-to-moment. In an infinite lifespan, seemingly, the significance of any given moment would go to 0.

      • Bassicallyboss says:

        I’ve given some thought to this exact question in the past, because I used to consider that an infinite lifespan would be meaningful while a finite one would not be. I don’t know whether HelloTruman thinks in the same direction as I used to, but I’ll give the justification anyway: My reasoning at the time was that in order for life or existence to have meaning, it must make some essential difference for it to have happened–that is, the life produces a change in the universe around the one who lives. In a finitely long-lived universe, the effects of this change would persist (however faintly) until the end of time. However, if the future is infinitely long, then any changes would eventually be wiped out by the cumulative effect of other changes. In fact, no changes would persist for more than a finite time, which means that any effect I could have would be of measure 0. This seems essentially the same as making no change at all. Since I believe the future to be infinite in duration, any life whose span is finite in length would therefore be meaningless.

        I no longer believe this–partly because I came up with a similar argument to that you give, and was not able to tell which argument was less flawed; and partly because my understanding of “meaningfulness” now has more to do with narrative context, and hence does not require a life to have duration of equal infinitude to the universe’s.

        Might have been something in the hormones, too. There’s plenty of social reasons for young adults to fall into nihilism, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there were biochemical contributing factors especially active around that time.

    • TGP says:

      There is certainly a point to your existence. It’s trivially easy to describe. But you won’t like it as it isn’t satisfying in the way you want it to be.

      You are a machine constructed by DNA for the sole purpose of copying that DNA. A human is a machine created to copy the particular set of DNA they hold. Just as a slug is a machine created to copy that slugs DNA. It is for this purpose your DNA constructed YOU, all of you. Including that over sized brain you are using to worry about the meaning of it all.

      This is, without doubt, the answer science has discovered concerning why you exist and within the parameters of science it is the only correct answer.

      You are under no obligation to serve the purpose you were created for, and many do not, but it is without doubt the reason why you are in existence, it is what you are here for. It is what you were built to do.

      So. That’s the “point” of your “existence”. Copying your DNA.

      In the same way the point of a hammers existence is to drive nails, or the point of a drill is to create holes. You may use those items to do other things, but that is what they are created for… and although you may do other things with your life you were created to copy DNA. Nothing more, nothing less.

      Told you that you wouldn’t like the answer.

      • ThrustVectoring says:

        DNA doesn’t have a point, either. We happen to live in a world where, over time, we wind up with more of the things that copy themselves better. Using DNA to build meat puppets is a thing that sort of just happened to fill an environmental niche.

        • TGP says:

          Well, yes if you keep looking at lower and lower granularities eventually it’s all atoms randomly banging against each other.

          But aggregates higher up the chain than that nevertheless have purpose. A hammer is just atoms banging together too… but it has a reason for its existence.

          Same with us. The DNA is mindless atom banging but, nevertheless, the outcome has been the building of a meat puppet with a defined purpose. That meat puppet was constructed to perform a very singular task.

          So, as I told our depressed nihilist…. YOU have a purpose… YOU have a reason for your existence… you may not like it much, I suspect it’s very unsatisfying for many, but it IS the answer as to “the purpose of your existence”. I’m guessing any putative “intelligent hammers” may be similarly unsatisfied.

          The universe is under no requirement to make the correct answer satisfying to human psyches. “You were created by a mindless process to perpetuate that mindless process” isn’t satisfying, but it is the reason for your existence.

          At least in this well defined area science has given a final answer. Now we have to live with it.

    • arbitrary_greay says:

      I recommend reading the Discworld novels. In particular, Hogfather, and then Reaper Man.

    • Two McMillion says:

      The purpose of your existence is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.

    • Anonymous says:

      I agree with SilasLock in that you are never going to arrive at anything like a convincing Telos so long as you insist on strict materialism (assuming this is your position). I think you ultimately need to either accept some “pre-scientific” axioms about the nature of reality, or just try to enjoy the atoms crashing together as best you can.

    • FullMeta_Rationalist says:

      I went through the Nihilism phase. Never got out of it either.

      Teleology only exists within a moral-framework. I.e. any given goal (aka “point”) is entirely subjective. Did my commenting on SSC have a goal? Yes — I commented because I like participating. Does the universe’s existence have a goal? Nay — the universe doesn’t have any goals because the universe is an inanimate object. Does the universe care that I commented on SSC? Nay — the universe doesn’t care because the universe is an inanimate object.

      God is dead and we have killed him. But don’t let the universe’s lack of divine purpose keep you from doing things you value. You do you. Or to quote our glorious host, “They’re my values, and I’ll defend them.”

      http://www.willamette.edu/~mjaneba/cycling/Bike_Zen_Koan.html

      A Zen Teacher saw five of his students return from the market, riding their bicycles. When they had dismounted, the teacher asked the students, “Why are you riding your bicycles?”

      The first student replied, “The bicycle is carrying this sack of potatoes. I am glad that I do not have to carry them on my back!” The teacher praised the student, saying, “You are a smart boy. When you grow old, you will not walk hunched over, as I do.”

      The second student replied, “I love to watch the trees and fields pass by as I roll down the path.” The teacher commended the student, “Your eyes are open and you see the world.”

      The third student replied, “When I ride my bicycle, I am content to chant, nam myoho renge kyo.” The teacher gave praise to the third student, “Your mind will roll with the ease of a newly trued wheel.”

      The fourth student answered, “Riding my bicycle, I live in harmony with all beings.” The teacher was pleased and said, “You are riding on the golden path of non-harming.”

      The fifth student replied, “I ride my bicycle to ride my bicycle.” The teacher went and sat at the feet of the fifth student, and said, “I am your disciple.”

      If you have time, Three Worlds Collide (which jaimeastorga2000 posted) is also a relevant read.

    • Incurian says:

      It can be nice sometimes.

  47. Nostradamus says:

    Hi, long time reader here venturing into the comments for the first time. Quick question- how do accounts on this site work? It seems as though anyone can easily impersonate anyone else, unless I am missing something?

    • Bakkot says:

      Using someone else’s username is trivial, but matching their avatar is (somewhat) less so. But… you know, don’t. I don’t think it’s been a problem.

      • Svejk says:

        My gravatar has changed at least once. Either that or the multiverses are leaking again.

        • Fahundo says:

          Everyone’s gravatar changed. What’s weird is I can still see the old gravatars if I browse at work or on my phone.

    • Nostradamus says:

      Nobody is ever impersonated here.

    • Robert Liguori says:

      There’s a service that hashes your attached email address to produce the colorful avatar icon to the left of posts. Since you are keeping your email address private, in theory, you should be the only one who can post with that fractal-rotaty-star-y lavender pattern.

      Also, now you can actually register a specific account to post here, or login through WordPress, from the Meta link above.

      I have zero idea how this interacts with the current system, other than it’s possible to post just fine both logged in and logged out.

    • John Schilling says:

      Malicious impersonation doesn’t seem to be a thing that happens here. It could, as you note, be trivially done by anyone who doesn’t guard against it. But it can be readily countered by either A: creating a unique and memorable image to link to your email address at gravatar.com, or B: upon noticing a malicious impersonator using your name, explain the situation to our host and wait for the banhammer to smite the wicked. Impersonation to the level of hijacking a custom gravatar and confounding the guy with access to the IP logs would be technically feasible but challenging, almost certainly not worth the bother for scoring a few cheap status points here, and would raise the question of how much technical expertise this community could gather to respond to such an attack.

  48. Sandy says:

    I don’t know if there’s been much discussion about Bryan Caplan’s argument in favor of open borders here; I suspect there probably has been and I just wasn’t around. I went back and read through it again yesterday after that speech transcript came out where Hillary talked about her dream of an open borders world.

    There is a conspicuous paucity of any analysis relating to the political and cultural effects of open borders immigration. I felt that the few arguments Caplan put forward in this regard were shockingly inadequate; well below the standard one would expect from an influential and highly regarded public intellectual. I am not sure whether this is because he does not think they are serious issues or whether he is (or he feels that he is) not as fluent on such subjects as he would be on the economic aspects of open borders immigration. Alternatively, it might be because my priors and assessments are deeply flawed.

    For instance, there is a large demographic of low-education foreigners that Caplan calls “worryingly authoritarian” in some of their political preferences, such as restrictions on the freedom of speech. He notes that the foreign-born in general are less supportive of free speech than the native population, but that the gap in disapproval of freedom of speech spikes sharply as you go down the ladder of educational attainment. Caplan thinks this could be a problem, but no one should worry about it because these people don’t vote anyway.

    When immigrants finally gain the right to vote, they often fail to show up: Migrants and their descendants have lower voter turnout than natives. The worryingly authoritarian less educated foreigners are especially abstentious. In the 2008 presidential election, for example, only 25% of eligible foreign-born high school dropouts chose to vote.

    I don’t know if Caplan thinks it’s a good state of affairs when a growing section of the American populace is increasingly indifferent to electoral politics or feels disengaged from the polity; I don’t even know if that really is a bad state of affairs, although my gut thinks that it is. My main issue with this line of thinking is that it presumes the only way to affect politics or culture is the voting process. I don’t think that’s true. There is some furor about rising antisemitism in Western European politics, which some have attributed to the increased involvement of Muslim immigrants in the political process. But Western Europe has a very small number of elected Muslim officials; there are notable examples in places like Britain and Sweden, but for the most part there is very little in the way of formal representation for Muslims in European politics. The people pushing “Muslim issues” are not necessarily Muslim immigrants looking to gain an audience in the public square, but leftist European politicians like George Galloway, who goes into these constituencies and tells immigrants that a vote for him is a blow against the Zionist empire. Galloway is admittedly an extreme example and always has been; I cite him because he is helpfully open about his views while most other politicians of the Corbyn/Walker/Livingstone variety embroiled in this antisemitism mess tend to dance around the subject a lot.

    The point is that it is not necessary for immigrants to fight to push their political preferences; it is really only necessary to find sympathetic politicians who want to fight for them and feel like pushing some of these preferences, in some form or the other, is a good way to do it. And while the numbers who turn out at the polling booth are significant, sheer numbers in general can be influential too. The town of Brentwood, New York has a heavy concentration of immigrants from El Salvador; as a result, it has its own branch of Mara Salvatrucha. Gang violence in Brentwood is bad enough that the school superintendent has warned local children not to wear the color blue, or clothes with the Salvadoran flag on them. I think that is an example of a negative cultural change that is not easily resolved at the polling booth. Similarly, on a semi-regular basis you hear ridiculous stories coming out of Germany of the government’s attempts to tackle sexual assault by Arab migrants; anti-rape tattoos and mandatory sex ed and so and so forth. I think that if you had 10,000 migrants, it would have been relatively easy to expect assimilation into German norms regarding sexuality simply out of the pressure resulting from being surrounded by German culture and isolated from their own. With over a million migrants and counting, such pressure is not so easy to exert and authorities have to do ridiculous things to accommodate.

    Every now and then, somebody writes something about the sleeping Latino giant and how he continues to remain asleep. I think this is an example of how the size of a community can be politically influential even when that community has low voter turnout. Everyone wants to appeal to Latinos because of how many of them there are. They tailor their policies to try and appeal to the sleeping giant, even if he continues to remain asleep, because on the off-chance that he ever wakes up, they don’t want to run the risk that he decides against them.

    • SilasLock says:

      I think Caplan’s pretty cool, but his analysis of open borders is necessarily constrained by a lack of empirical data. We simply don’t know the effects of free immigration/emigration if adopted by a single country.

      We can guess, of course. We have data on effects similar to those of open borders; immigrant voting habits, cultural externalities, labor market disruptions, etc. But nothing quite like the real thing.

      I’m personally in favor of open borders combined with a slowly decreasing immigration (and emigration) tax, to make the change as smooth as possible. But that’s just me. I’d love to see an SSC discussion about open borders in general!

      • Sandy says:

        I don’t know if Caplan’s said so, but I’ve seen open borders advocates argue that there is empirical data: up until about 1921, America had open borders and most people can agree that America is more or less a good place to live today.

        Another quibble I had that I didn’t remember before posting was Caplan’s “If you’re so worried about the voting decisions these immigrants make, just deny them the right to vote because the right to work and live here is the really important bit”. Which, I mean, come on….. sooner or later, some of these immigrants are going to demand the right to vote, more likely some of the native-born bleeding hearts are going to condemn such a policy, and you will never be able to uphold it because it goes against your moral and political tradition, the same one Caplan is sure won’t be affected by immigration. It’s an idiotic idea and Caplan is smart enough to know it’s an idiotic idea.

        • Jiro says:

          up until about 1921, America had open borders and most people can agree that America is more or less a good place to live today.

          America had open borders under different circumstances that we have today. There were no social services for them to use up, and their home country was across the ocean (which also means more when there’s no Internet or cheap phones).

          • Not all were from across the country. Mexico was adjacent to the U.S. then too.

            During the period just before and after WWI the U.S. was receiving about a million immigrants a year into a population of about a hundred million, so equivalent to three million a year now.

            Current immigration is a little over a million a year.

            I agree that the existence of a welfare state poses problems for open borders. My preferred solution is that new immigrants should not be eligible for welfare for a considerable period of time–and should get a discount on their taxes to reflect the fact that they are not eligible for one of the services those taxes pay for.

          • The Nybbler says:

            My preferred solution is that new immigrants should not be eligible for welfare for a considerable period of time–and should get a discount on their taxes to reflect the fact that they are not eligible for one of the services those taxes pay for.

            But under this rule, because they’re paying less taxes (substantially less, if we have our current welfare state), they can afford to undercut native workers on wages. Which leads us back to where we are.

          • Philosophisticat says:

            @TheNybbler Though there are costs to displaced workers, it seems to me that it is not overall it is not a bad thing, for the same reason that it is not a bad thing that textile production or the building of electronics is outsourced elsewhere where labor costs are cheaper. The problem David’s proposal addresses is with the incentives created for immigration by a heavily redistributive welfare state.

          • Aapje says:

            @Philosophisticat

            I bet that you’d have a different opinion if your job was the one being displaced.

          • onyomi says:

            “…and should get a discount on their taxes to reflect the fact that they are not eligible for one of the services those taxes pay for.”

            Can I become an immigrant to my own country?

          • Philosophisticat says:

            @Aapje – Yes, I would probably be much more susceptible to the cognitive bias that comes with being personally negatively affected, and overlook the benefits to others. I’m glad we agree.

            This is one of my least favorite types of bad reasoning, by the way. “I bet you’d feel very differently about [the dangers of terrorism/the threat of gun violence/the politics of sexual assault/criminal justice reform/loosening FDA regulations] if [you/your son/your daughter] had been [killed by a suicide bomber/shot in a school massacre/raped in college/killed by a violent criminal paroled early/born defective due to thalidomyde].”

          • NEWTONIAN ETHICIST says:

            How is voting in one’s self interest a cognitive bias…

            Everytime I see some intellectual try and handwave the downsides of free trade or open borders they frame it as a failing of reason on the part of the working class that opposes them.

            Yes, you benefit from free trade more than you are hurt. You were never going to go into a career in manufacturing, or manual labor. You benefit more from cheaper goods and services than you are hurt by lowered wages for unskilled labor.

            But don’t sit their and pretend that the reason people disagree with you is a failing of rationality.

            It is entirely rational to be born to a lower class family, in a dead town and notice the glaringly obvious fact that you are getting fucked, and cheap disposable goods don’t make quality lube.

          • Philosophisticat says:

            @Newtonian Ethicist – I didn’t say voting for your self interest was a cognitive bias. It’s morally reprehensible (and stupid, incidentally, given the insignificant influence of a single vote on a single person’s welfare), but that’s a different thing.

            What’s a cognitive bias, here, is having one’s judgment of the effects, social value, or moral correctness of some proposed policy disproportionately influenced by one’s own acute experiences.

            Also, if you want to say that I’m not giving lower class people enough credit, there’s something a bit odd about doing it in a way that implies they are evil.

          • baconbacon says:

            It is entirely rational to be born to a lower class family, in a dead town and notice the glaringly obvious fact that you are getting fucked, and cheap disposable goods don’t make quality lube.

            It is not rational to look at something, jump to a wild conclusion, and then jump to another wild conclusion. Saying “Look our town has gone downhill and manufacturing has moved to another county, therefore Free Trade fucked us” isn’t rational, its anger jumping on any semi plausible explanation for their bad luck. Further saying “fuck Free Trade, if we get rid of it manufacturing will come back and give us a better life” is also a wild jump.

          • NEWTONIAN ETHICIST says:

            What’s a cognitive bias, here, is having one’s judgment of the effects, social value, or moral correctness of some proposed policy disproportionately influenced by one’s own acute experiences.

            That word is doing far too much work in that sentence.

            I didn’t say voting for your self interest was a cognitive bias. It’s morally reprehensible (and stupid, incidentally, given the insignificant influence of a single vote on a single person’s welfare), but that’s a different thing.

            Can you tell me how I would differentiate the intellectual class voting based on naked self interest on the side of open borders and free trade vs a less “morally reprehensible” reason?

            It seems to me a group of people who accrue all of the benefits of these policies while never having to suffer any of the downsides (In fact they rarely spend even a small fraction of their time acknowledging there are any.) need to do at least a little bit of work to justify holding the moral high ground.

          • NEWTONIAN ETHICIST says:

            @baconbacon

            It is not rational to look at something, jump to a wild conclusion, and then jump to another wild conclusion. Saying “Look our town has gone downhill and manufacturing has moved to another county, therefore Free Trade fucked us” isn’t rational, its anger jumping on any semi plausible explanation for their bad luck.

            Free trade may not be the only reason for the decline of the American working class, but it is certainly a reason.

            Working class Americans have been besieged by at least 3 sides. On one front you have American jobs being out sourced to other countries, on another you have illegal immigrants driving wages through the floor for unskilled work, and finally you have automation.

            Is it any wonder that Trumps platform which focuses strongly on 2 of these (when no one else will) gets support from exactly the people harmed?

            Further saying “fuck Free Trade, if we get rid of it manufacturing will come back and give us a better life” is also a wild jump.

            No argument here, those jobs are gone for good. There will be no unfucking for the working class, it won’t get better. Their best hope of eeking out an existence in their post fucked world is probably a UBI.

          • Philosophisticat says:

            @Newtonian Ethicist

            You’re focusing on something tangential, because my reference to cognitive bias was only meant to illustrate the general lousiness of addressing a question of policy by imagining yourself in the position of the person most directly harmed and asking what you’d think then.

            But if you want to continue on this digression – I’m not the one who thinks that people vote on self-interest – you are. I have more respect for them than that. I think people typically vote according to what they think is right and just, as decent people should, but that their opinions about what is right and just are colored by biases of various sorts. This is true of the poor and the rich alike. You seem to think I’m doing something asymmetrical, but I wasn’t arguing for open borders by asking anyone to imagine what they would think if they were well-off. That’s just a bad way to decide things.

            The case for immigration I find compelling is all the stuff that economists will tell you about how much greater the benefits are to others than the costs to those who are negatively affected. Maybe you don’t agree with those reasons. Fine. But I hope you can understand that there can be policies that are justified by their positive effects on others even if they make some people worse off.

          • Jiro says:

            Mexico was adjacent to the U.S. then too.

            But the immigrants that people mean when they say “look at all those successfully integrated immigrants from the 1920’s” are mostly not from Mexico and their countries really are far from the US.

            A quick Google shows that according to https://blogs.loc.gov/kluge/2015/03/the-history-of-mexican-immigration-to-the-u-s-in-the-early-20th-century/ there were about 20000 immigrants from Mexico per year in the 1910s and 50000-100000 during the 1920’s. If the US was receiving a million total per year, that amounts to 2% during the 1910’s and 5-10% during the 1920’s. Also, a lot of them returned during the Depression. (No social services, remember?)

          • Alex Zavoluk says:

            “Not paying taxes for services you don’t use”, while appealing to me, would seem to defeat the entire point of having government services and taxes.

            Maybe that’s your goal? Get more and more of the population accustomed to the idea of lower taxes and independence from government?

          • NEWTONIAN ETHICIST says:

            @Philosophisticat

            I apologize for dragging you into this, you ended up being a target for my frustration with a group of people that sound like you rather than anything you yourself have said or done.

            It just gets my hackles up when I see it implied or often even outright stated that opposition to open borders and/or free trade are an intellectual or moral failing rather than what seems clearly to me like a rational stance based on self preservation, or even empathy for one’s countrymen.

            It seems to me that when discussing the cost and benefits of a policy for a country, those of that country who will be tasked with bearing the costs should have a say. Rather than being lectured to by those that will reap the benefits.

            It just so happens that the people in a position to have a voice on these matters in our society are the ones for whom, there truly is no downside to these policies. Then they have the audacity to paint themselves as paragons of virtue willing to sacrifice (other people’s) livelihoods for the common good of mankind (and much larger profits for the richest people in the world).

            End of ranting, sorry for jumping down your throat.

          • ““Not paying taxes for services you don’t use”, while appealing to me, would seem to defeat the entire point of having government services and taxes. ”

            What I was proposing was not paying taxes for services you ware not allowed to use.

            But not paying taxes for things you don’t use is not all that odd an idea–consider the gasoline tax, for instance. One argument for taxation is to deal with problems of market failure, such as a public good problem due to the transaction cost of charging for the use of all highways. If that’s the idea, then you want the nearest you can get to charging for use.

            A different argument is the desirability of redistribution.

          • baconbacon says:

            Free trade may not be the only reason for the decline of the American working class, but it is certainly a reason.

            Working class Americans have been besieged by at least 3 sides. On one front you have American jobs being out sourced to other countries, on another you have illegal immigrants driving wages through the floor for unskilled work, and finally you have automation.

            This is going to come across as lecturing, but whatever.

            The major problems with this position are as follows. The first is that industries in the US were largely built on free trade*, arguing that those hurt by free trade now should be protected is basically saying “free trade when it benefits me, protectionism when it doesn’t”, if that is your position you have no claim to rail against those who aren’t hurt now as they are expressing basically the same viewpoint, but that is small potatoes.

            The big problem is that there really isn’t much evidence for you view of what is happening to this economic class. The free, or freest, periods of immigration to this country coincided with manufacturing booms, and (not perfectly coincident) increasing wages. Wages also did not collapse after WW2 when large numbers of women remained in the workforce. If there is a correlation between free entry into the workforce it is that many manufacturing centers started falling when immigration into the country became harder, the explanation that follows isn’t rigorous, and isn’t meant to make you go “oh, this guy is clearly correct”, but to highlight how complicated economic relationships are in reality and how counter intuitive results are common.

            Manufacturing is highly capital intensive, building a plant isn’t like starting a farm, if you build an assembly line for cars and go bust a large amount of the value has to be stripped away to repurpose your machines and your space. If you grow strawberries on your farm and go bust there is still a good chance that another crop could work for the person who buys it. Manufacturing plants (or at least companies) have long lives, so ensuring a continual labor supply is very valuable. Ford discovered that paying employees more (to a point) was better than churning employees, virtually every (every?) manufacturer takes this as fact these days. The difference between illegal and legal immigration in this context is large. Legal immigration allows for longer term upside, a company can reasonably look toward growth and expansion without exploding labor costs, while illegal immigration is frequently transitory. You don’t want to show up one mooring with a federal agency asking questions, or to find that a portion of your experienced employees were deported. The more capital intensive an industry is the more these concerns limit your willingness to invest.

            There is a decent to good case that restrictions on legal immigration were a part of the decline in manufacturing jobs in the US, and the same logic applies to automation. Its damn expensive, and restricting the labor pool has the adverse effect of moving companies in that direction, good in the short term for those who keep their jobs, bad in the short and long term for everyone else.

            These relationships are not easily untangled at all, but the three sides that you think are besetting you could probably be rephrased as “protectionism of pro union laws, protectionism against free immigration and protectionism against competition” with as much or more evidence.

          • baconbacon says:

            It seems to me that when discussing the cost and benefits of a policy for a country, those of that country who will be tasked with bearing the costs should have a say

            If someone demonstrated that women in the workforce was lowering mens wages and employment opportunities, would you expect people to listen to men who griped that women should be banned from working?

          • LHN says:

            @baconbacon I wouldn’t personally support such a policy, but that was pretty much the post-WWII response to Rosie the Riveter: “Thanks! Now go home so that a returning veteran can have your job.”

          • onyomi says:

            A serious, non-rhetorical question: which would be better for the people who are already US citizens now:

            a. US companies continue to outsource everything to foreign countries with cheap labor, wasting money, essentially, by sending raw materials out of the country, dealing with the logistics of doing things thousands of miles away, and then shipping it back to the US to sell it to Americans

            b. US government relaxes immigration and labor restrictions enough that it stops being worth the increased logistical and transportation costs to produce things sold in the US outside of the US. Supply of cheap labor skyrockets, but so does demand for local US land, goods, and services, as does the tax base which may be drawn upon to pay the US citizens unemployment, welfare, subsidized insurance…

            I think everyone assumes A is better for current US citizens, especially blue collar citizens, albeit probably not better in a world-utilitarian sense, but I think even that is actually kind of non-obvious?

            I mean, what is optimal about producing things in Vietnam which could be produced here merely because the government basically won’t allow the people willing to do the work for the low pay, many of whom would probably love to come here and put up with a standard of living most Americans would consider unacceptably low, to come here and do it? We wouldn’t even need to pay to fly people from Vietnam. In Haiti, for example, we have a much nearer population of desperately poor people who’d love the opportunity to produce stuff in a US factory for US consumers at wages most Americans would consider “criminal” or “exploitative.” But just not letting them come at all isn’t criminal somehow.

          • Skef says:

            onyomi:

            I think the those jobs aren’t coming back point is germane to your question. Globalism isn’t just about hunting for cheap labor, it’s also about centralizing functions. It’s organizationally simpler and allows for economies of scale to have the (higher-level) design countries and then the sophisticated manufacturing countries and then the lower-level manufacturing countries. The garment industry keeps chasing the cheap labor but not so much tech manufacturing. It’s probably not worth lowering standards for the jobs that would move back.

          • JayT says:

            @NEWTONIAN ETHICIST
            Couldn’t it be viewed as immoral when you’re complaining about free trade when the effect it has on you is that instead of making $50K a year you’re making $30K, but in exchange many people are lifted out of abject poverty? It’s not like these people that don’t have manufacturing jobs are starving to death. They just have a lower quality of life than they want, but it’s still better than the majority of the world.

            It’s a very common view that the rich should pay “their fair share”. Why does that end at an imaginary line in the dirt?

          • Jiro says:

            What I was proposing was not paying taxes for services you ware not allowed to use.

            That allows gerrymandering the reference class. “Yeah, I know we don’t allow use of minority scholarships by Asians. But you are allowed to use at least some of the items in the category “scholarships”, so you have to pay taxes for that category.”

            It also allows a loophole where the service is pretty much only used by one group even though technically it is permitted to anyone. The government could subsidize gay porn, for instance, or Communion services, and make everyone pay for it according to your rule.

          • Eccdogg says:

            I’d be fine with open borders and an immigrant minimum per capita tax (say 10k/year) combined with zero welfare or voting rights. Government spending at all levels is about 20k/person but a bunch of that goes to SS/Medicare/Medicaid/Welfare etc which the immigrants would not be eligible for and another sizable chunk goes to defense where I don’t think immigration increases cost on the margin.

            Pay 10k get a one year worker visa. The cost of the visa is then a non-refundable credit on your income taxes. Then make it nearly impossible to do anything here unless you had a visa or proof of citizenship.

          • NEWTONIAN ETHICIST says:

            @JayT

            It’s a very common view that the rich should pay “their fair share”. Why does that end at an imaginary line in the dirt?

            When someone says the rich should pay their fair share in the context of government tax policy, the implication is:

            “These people have benefited greatly from our society and they have an obligation to help their fellow citizens, in order to have a stable and prosperous society”

            Nobody is asking Wang Jianlin to contribute his fair share to the American people, it would be an absurdity.

            Couldn’t it be viewed as immoral when you’re complaining about free trade when the effect it has on you is that instead of making $50K a year you’re making $30K, but in exchange many people are lifted out of abject poverty? It’s not like these people that don’t have manufacturing jobs are starving to death. They just have a lower quality of life than they want, but it’s still better than the majority of the world.

            I personally am not a Universalist Utilitarian so I would be confused, and angry if the Government of my country were making decisions about economic policy that sacrifice the interests of citizens for the sake of foreigners. Lucky they aren’t doing that, it is simply a case of cheap labour being extremely lucrative for the people with power in the country.

            If a government doesn’t privilege the wellbeing of its citizens over everyone else in the world, in what sense do you even have a country?

          • Aapje says:

            @Eccdogg

            And tax businesses where they operate, so they can’t cherry pick (sell their products in one place, ‘pay’ tax elsewhere).

          • Aapje says:

            @NEWTONIAN ETHICIST

            I personally am not a Universalist Utilitarian so I would be confused, and angry if the Government of my country were making decisions about economic policy that sacrifice the interests of citizens for the sake of foreigners. Lucky they aren’t doing that, it is simply a case of cheap labour being extremely lucrative for the people with power in the country.

            It’s actually getting remarkably close to that as the 1% is globalist and often spends a lot of time abroad and if not; away from anything resembling normal life for other citizens. So for the majority of citizens, they could as well be foreigners.

          • JayT says:

            @NEWTONIAN ETHICIST

            I’m not talking about what a government should do or what is proper policy. I’m just talking about whether or not it is moral to be against something that has such massive benefits for so many just because you want to be really rich on the global scale instead of just rich.

          • Randy M says:

            If a government doesn’t privilege the wellbeing of its citizens over everyone else in the world, in what sense do you even have a country?

            You’ve pretty much just described the political question of the year perfectly.

          • NEWTONIAN ETHICIST says:

            @baconbacon

            If someone demonstrated that women in the workforce was lowering mens wages and employment opportunities, would you expect people to listen to men who griped that women should be banned from working?

            That analogy might work if women weren’t already citizens of the country that the government has a duty to work in the interests of.

            Do you think that the United States government has a responsibility to put the interests of its citizens before non citizens, or should theoretical future immigrants to America be given equal weight?

            I have no problem with someone making the argument that on the balance free movement of goods and people is a net win. Infact I actually believe that in a global sense.

            Where I disagree is that it is a net win for America, and I don’t think the government should be in the business of improving the world while harming the country.

            When these issues are framed in an honest way acknowledging that there are tradeoffs being made here, that there are winners and losers in this, I have no problem.

            Put the truth before the American people and let them decide if they want to sacrifice their standard of living for the very rich and the very poor to benefit.

            The problem I have is until recently you couldn’t even get economists to admit that there were tradeoffs being made. They would spin some bullshit about how low skilled American workers were suddenly going to find new exciting opportunities in Silicon Valley or some other such nonsense.

            Now I could be wrong, and it might be worth throwing a large chunk of the American electorate under the bus in the name of economic efficiency.

            However don’t be surprised when you end up with Donald Trump having a real shot at being President when you hold to this course of action.

          • Alex Zavoluk says:

            @David Friedman

            “What I was proposing was not paying taxes for services you ware not allowed to use.”

            I am not allowed to use a great many government services. I am not old, or disabled, or a student, or poor, or someone with kids, for example.

            “But not paying taxes for things you don’t use is not all that odd an idea–consider the gasoline tax, for instance. One argument for taxation is to deal with problems of market failure, such as a public good problem due to the transaction cost of charging for the use of all highways. If that’s the idea, then you want the nearest you can get to charging for use.”

            That’s true. Dealing with externalities is a reason to tax only the users of a good or service. However, that’s not what welfare or similar programs are. It would make no sense to fund welfare solely from a tax on welfare users!

          • NEWTONIAN ETHICIST says:

            @JayT

            I’m not talking about what a government should do or what is proper policy. I’m just talking about whether or not it is moral to be against something that has such massive benefits for so many just because you want to be really rich on the global scale instead of just rich.

            I could make a decent argument that going from subsistence farming to sweat shop work isn’t an increase in well being even if they are making more money, but I’m too lazy for that and it would border on being disingenuous.

            The problem when this gets turned into a moral argument is that it is always someone in a class of people unaffected by the downsides of these policies preening about how morally superior they are to make the heroic choice to sacrifice the livelihoods of other people in their society, never their own.

            How many economists would favor free trade if it put them out of work?

            How many journalists would favor open borders if suddenly there were millions of Mexican reporters flooding in ready and willing to do their jobs for $6 an hour?

            Please by all means put up refugees in your home. Give your job to a poor third worlder. Then you can take the moral high ground, I’ll be the first to praise you for your charity.

          • Anonymous says:

            The problem I have is until recently you couldn’t even get economists to admit that there were tradeoffs being made.

            Economists have long acknowledged this. Kaldor and Hicks wrote their famous papers before WWII. Your ignorance isn’t the economics profession’s fault.

          • JayT says:

            I never said I was moral 😉

          • baconbacon says:

            When these issues are framed in an honest way acknowledging that there are tradeoffs being made here, that there are winners and losers in this, I have no problem

            Framed in an honest way, and framed in the way you see it, are not synonyms. Saying there are winners and losers from free trade accepts a static model of the world that doesn’t match reality. Those manufacturing jobs only existed due to free (isn) trade practices in the US, and they declined with the decline of free trade.

          • “The problem I have is until recently you couldn’t even get economists to admit that there were tradeoffs being made. They would spin some bullshit about how low skilled American workers were suddenly going to find new exciting opportunities in Silicon Valley or some other such nonsense.”

            Conveniently enough, you have an economist present. In arguing for free immigration in a book published more than forty years ago, I wrote:

            “The new immigrants will drive down the wages of unskilled labor, hurting some of the present poor. At the same time, the presence of millions of foreigners will make the most elementary acculturation, even the ability to speak English, a marketable skill; some of the poor will be able to leave their present unskilled jobs to find employment as foremen of
            ‘foreign’ work gangs or front men for ‘foreign’ enterprises.”

            I don’t think that is consistent with your claim about what you couldn’t get economists to admit.

          • Skef says:

            David Friedman:

            Your reading of that point strikes me as over-literal to the point of being uncharitable. Wouldn’t you say that it was conventional wisdom in the public-facing rhetoric of economics that free trade would benefit not just the economy but U.S. workers?

          • I think the common belief was and is that immigration will provide net benefits to Americans in the usual (Marshall or Kaldor Hicks) sense, as well as benefits to the immigrants. But the positive sum will include some negative terms, as with most economic changes. As I said in the quoted bit from my old books, one would expect some low skill workers to have lower wages as a result.

          • John Nerst says:

            “Benefit” is a bit of a slippery word. Cheaper goods would be a benefit available to everyone, so you can indeed say it benefits everyone if by that you mean “there will be benefits that everyone can take advantage of”.

            If policy X has both benefits and costs to group Y, there are two possible intepretations of “X benefits Y”:

            1. The benefits are greater than the costs.

            2. The benefits exist.

            Often in the “free trade benefits everyone, even the working class in manufacturing” case, there seems to be an equivocation between them, with 2 and 1 being in a motte and bailey position, respectively.

          • NEWTONIAN ETHICIST says:

            @John Nerst
            @Skref

            Basically said it better than I could.

            I jumped into this comment chain because I saw something that was similar to an all too common position on public discourse in this area.

            That resistance to having your livelihood destroyed is a moral or intellectual failing rather than perfectly rational point of view to hold.

            The mendaciousness of this argument is so infuriating because the people who benefit from these policies are rarely in a position of honest discourse with the public.

            If only the working class truly knew how much better their life is from cheaper walmart products and how much better the lives of third worlders are in sweatshops, surely this tiny misunderstanding would go away and they would be all for economic efficiency! (/s incase this is somehow needed)

            You can be all for fucking a large part of the American population. However, when they complain about it, you have to be a really special type of scum to gaslight them and pretend their lives really are better, and if they can’t see that they are just too stupid or evil.

            I have a lot of respect for you Dr. Friedman, but the people negatively impacted by these policies and the people that read your books have basically 0 overlap.

          • Anonymous says:

            That resistance to having your livelihood destroyed is a moral or intellectual failing rather than perfectly rational point of view to hold.

            What does that livelihood consist of exactly? Forcing other people to buy from them at above market prices? How is that different from what the mafia does? How can anyone delude himself into thinking that’s a good honest living?

          • hlynkacg says:

            The irony of someone who complains about the “entitlement” of the lower classes turning around and making that argument is quite rich.

          • Anonymous says:

            Entitlement is exactly what it is. Not only are they demanding we pay them above market rate for their marginal skills, they are also demanding we collectively help them lie to themselves.

            Jobs that only exist because of trade barriers aren’t real jobs. They are thinly disguised, highly inefficient, make-work welfare.

          • hlynkacg says:

            Even if I conceded the premise, your argument would still boil down to “other people’s sense of entitlement is impinging on my entitlement! Boo entitlement!”

            Like I said, that’s pretty rich.

          • Anonymous says:

            Feeling entitled to the use violence to prevent other people from trading consensually and feeling entitled to not be violently prevented from trading consensually are not symmetric situations.

            Although maybe the “virtue” of tribal loyalty makes them look the same.

          • hlynkacg says:

            So you support the repeal of all trade subsidies and restrictions along with heavy curtailment of federal authority over local production then?

            After all, it’s kind of hypocritical to complain about being prevented from trading consensually when you and yours are imposing those same restrictions on others.

          • Anonymous says:

            Sure. You’re barking up the wrong tree with the union stuff. That’s exactly the type of extortion I’m talking about.

          • Furslid says:

            @Alex Zavoluk

            “I am not allowed to use a great many government services. I am not old, or disabled, or a student, or poor, or someone with kids, for example.”

            The obvious response to this is that you are a potential user of these services. If you become disabled, you can apply for and get disability. If a barred immigrant got disabled, they couldn’t. Welfare isn’t funded by taxing current welfare recipients. Welfare is funded by taxing potential future recipients.

          • John Schilling says:

            Pretty sure I’m never going to be a user of paid maternity leave; can I at least opt out of that one? Ooh, and I am past enlistment age, so no fair using my taxes to pay for Veterans’ benefits, right?

            (Answer: No, but you’re going to need a better argument than saying that everybody is a potential recipient of all of these services)

        • nimim. k.m. says:

          >I’ve seen open borders advocates argue that there is empirical data: up until about 1921, America had open borders and most people can agree that America is more or less a good place to live today.

          I’m sorry to be captain obvious, but doesn’t that empirical data has a period of not-open-borders for almost a century (from 1921 to 2016)?

          • John Schilling says:

            More than a century; prior to 1921, border control was implemented at the state rather than federal level. It is surprisingly difficult to get good information on the details; I seem to recall Dr. Friedman and I trying to dig into that in another forum some decades ago and finding hazy references to at least informal border controls back to 1885 or so. If you’re looking for truly open borders, you’re going to have to go back a century and a half I think, with implications for both the quality and the relevance of the empirical data you find.

            Better than nothing, though. Things were pretty good for white citizens during much of that era, so “open borders just means immigrants mess things up for us Real Americans” is going to be a hard sell.

    • Blue says:

      Regardless of all of the other points in this comment, a class of people who don’t vote can be incredibly destablizing. Voting is one way of letting steam out your frustration at society. People violently rebel when they feel they have no other options. If you never consider any intermediate options (voting, writing letters to your representative, volunteering for campaigns) then you can jump straight from sitting on the couch to rioting in the streets.

      • pku says:

        One of the counterarguments I use for people who want to outlaw the Israeli Arab parties.

        • Wow, is there actual discussion of that? I think most Arabs already believe that Israel discriminates against its native Arabs; I guess that is a way to prove them right.

          • Sandy says:

            I think most Arabs are going to have a bad opinion of Israel whether or not Israel discriminates against its native Arabs; outlawing Arab political parties isn’t going to cause some radical shift in their opinions. I believe the main argument put forward for outlawing the Israeli Arab parties is that Israel is intended to be a Jewish ethnostate, while the Arab parties are committed to eliminating that distinction.

          • pku says:

            Israel does discriminate against native arabs in some ways: At best, it’s defined as a Jewish state that tries to treat non-Jewish citizens fairly (and “and you will also get fair treatment” is never quite ideal for someone in the country they were born in). At worst, all arabs are suspected of being potential terrorists (not entirely unfairly: while most aren’t, their ingroup is probably more the palestinians than Israeli jews, and some of them do actively hate Israel.
            The main argument for outlawing Arab parties is that they are constitutionally opposed to Israel (they have at least one MP who’s openly pro-terrorism, for example, though it’s questionable how representative she is). Trump got significant support for banning muslims despite terrorist attacks being comparatively rare here; imagine the kind of support that kind of statement would get if they were considered a fact of life.

      • Nyx says:

        Classical Athens had “metics”, which covered immigrants and the children of immigrants. They were in practice second-class, with no political rights and higher tax obligations and yet nearly half the population of Athens were metics. So I think there is no barrier against the concept of a lower class except for our own prejudice against it.

        • AlphaGamma says:

          I wonder if there’s any data on how many metics had citizenship in other cities.

          • My impression is that most metics did not have citizenship elsewhere.

            But metics were not “nearly half the population.” They might have been nearly half the free population, but slaves were a large part, very possibly half or more, of the Athenian population.

    • Jiro says:

      When people say that immigrants don’t vote, always keep in mind Evenwel v. Abbott. (This applies both to immigrants who can vote but don’t, and immigrants who can’t vote.)

    • baconbacon says:

      I don’t know if Caplan thinks it’s a good state of affairs when a growing section of the American populace is increasingly indifferent to electoral politics or feels disengaged from the polity; I don’t even know if that really is a bad state of affairs, although my gut thinks that it is. My main issue with this line of thinking is that it presumes the only way to affect politics or culture is the voting process.

      Caplan is mostly arguing from the moral position, so he basically doesn’t care about this. Imagine if taking the lock off the gate to your yard would allow a dozen people to cut through your property to get to work faster, and that would allow them to rearrange their lives in ways that allowed them to escape poverty. If you rejected that argument with “those trespassers would break into my house and rape my wife, kill my dog and burn down everything I hold dear”, Caplan’s point is that they probably won’t do those things, and that the rejoinder of “well they would almost certainly step on my flowers, and I really like my petunias” is unconvincing since we are talking about allowing people to pull themselves out of poverty compared to you having EXACTLY what you want in life, and not just approximately. (I know I know, I kind of said that it is fine to violate a persons property rights for the benefit of others, its an analogy and is imperfect).

      Caplan is not arguing that the US would be exactly the same, or even exactly as good or better with mass immigration, just that the worst case scenarios of 100 million Muslims showing up and voting for Sharia law and totally destroying the US as we know it isn’t a valid concern, and the much more modest “our culture will change somewhat” claims just aren’t strong enough to justify denying people entrance.

      • onyomi says:

        “(I know I know, I kind of said that it is fine to violate a persons property rights for the benefit of others, its an analogy and is imperfect).”

        Also, the sense in which all the geographic territory of the US is the “property” US citizens is not the same in which your backyard is your property.

        I like a slightly different version: Imagine someone wants to come to the marketplace in your town to sell things he’s made and buy things from people there. You are in charge of entry and exit to the marketplace. You say, “sorry, I can’t let you in here because I have a policy of providing free gifts and a vote on the marketplace council to anyone who comes here; I don’t want to give you free gifts or a say in the decisions of the marketplace council, so I can’t let you come here.”

        The logical response for the person seeking to enter would be “fine, don’t give me free gifts or a vote on the council; just let me come in and sell my stuff and buy the stuff I need to feed my family.”

        To which we say, “sorry, it’s just not realistic for me to change my policy of giving free gifts to everyone who comes into the market and if I let you come in I know you’ll start asking for them, so…”

        • Jiro says:

          The logical response for the person seeking to enter would be “fine, don’t give me free gifts or a vote on the council; just let me come in and sell my stuff and buy the stuff I need to feed my family.”

          The country is not a single “me” in this analogy. It’s made up of conflicting people with conflicting interests. It would be stupid for a single gatekeeper to say “I can’t let you in because I don’t want you to vote”, but it’s not stupid to say “I can’t let you in because the guy in charge of voting will let you vote”.

          • onyomi says:

            The reasonable response to that seems to be, “okay, well your disagreement is with the in charge of voting guy, not me.”

          • Andy says:

            I’m surprised to hear so much angst expressed over letting immigrants vote. Doesn’t the present election demonstrate that the voting bloc we should be most worried about are nativists, not immigrants?

          • Two McMillion says:

            Andy, I think that if you give some thought to what you mean by “should be most concerned about”, you’ll be able to answer your own question.

    • Kevin C. says:

      There is a conspicuous paucity of any analysis relating to the political and cultural effects of open borders immigration

      As perhaps relevant, I’d like to point here to open borders advocate Nathan Smith’s speculative analyses of the likely effects:
      How Would a Billion Immigrants Change the American Polity?
      and
      A Billion Immigrants: Continuing the Conversation

      I would tentatively envision the US experience under open borders as resembling the British and Roman cases, inasmuch as the protocols and ideals of the US polity, as well as its merely ethnic characteristics, would persist in attenuated form, but governing a much larger population would necessitate improvisational and sometimes authoritarian expedients that would cumulatively transform the polity into something quite different, even as it claimed descent from the historic constitutional polity of the United States as we know it. The illusion of continuity would deceive the subjects of the new polity, native-born and immigrant, to a considerable extent, though on the other hand there would be a good deal of lamentation and triumphalism, and only after several generations would historians be able to look back and assess the bewildering transformation in a sober, balanced way.

    • Eccdogg says:

      A thought I had on both this thread and the Trump thread above.

      Regardless of the arguments for and against. It seems to me that the immigration restrictionist have largely won.

      Given the bloodbath that occurred in the primaries for anyone who who proposed immigration reform you can bet that no Republican is going to touch the issue and with the house in Republican hands nothing will happen legislatively.

      Clinton could nibble around the edges administratively like Obama did, but she has to be careful. People fired up about immigration had her in a competitive race with a reality star as of a month ago and there has been some pressure from the Bernie Sanders left to “focus on Americans”

      On top of this Mexican immigration has been net negative since the great recession and Obama has been fairly aggressive on sending people back.

      Taking all this my base case is that the momentum for “a path to citizenship is over” and we will likely settle back into the status quo for undocumented folks perhaps with more enforcement at the boarder.

      Thoughts?

      • Sandy says:

        There was a write-up recently that argued Obama, while being generally pro-immigration, is more sympathetic to the cause of immigration restrictionists than someone like Clinton because the case for cultural cohesion, local and national identity and a general sense of belonging is one that carries more currency with him than it does with her.

        When Clinton talks about her family and her childhood, she describes a sense of deep rootedness in mainstream America. Obama, with his complicated background, doesn’t take roots for granted. In his first book, he describes learning that his father had ruined his life in part because he dismissed the ties of family and tribe as unimportant. What Obama’s father never understood, Obama’s aunt told him, was that “if everyone is family, no one is family.” Perhaps this is why Obama makes a point of saying that he understands that the desire for borders is not always, or only, racism but also a desire to belong to a group of people that is smaller and less cosmic than all mankind: in other words, to have a home. Clinton’s America, the nation that welcomes everyone from everywhere, can sound abstract: more of a political idea or a moral position than a physical place—bloodless, in ways both good and bad. And, if there seems to be no middle ground between an America-first xenophobia and a universalist abstraction, people for whom citizenship feels thicker than an idea—and there are many of them—may find the America-first xenophobia more familiar, and more attractive.

        Bitter clingers aside, I think Obama generally makes the effort to try and analyze the most charitable interpretation of an opposing view, even if he ultimately doesn’t agree with it. The article posits that Hillary is fundamentally different in this regard and thinks more in terms of abstract principles; in her view, if the pro-immigration view is the morally righteous one, then anti-immigration views are held by morally deficient people who must be defeated and marginalized. If that is accurate, I don’t think anyone can expect Hillary to replicate Obama’s “aggression” when it comes to sending people back.

        I generally have little regard for the point that Mexican immigration has been a net negative since the Great Recession; the second something bad happens in Mexico (cartels get worse, economic downturn, ethnic strife, corruption, take your pick), another exodus will quickly ensue. This will repeat endlessly for as long as migrants know it is possible to enter the United States and remain there for prolonged periods of time. Or maybe it will stop once the Southwest becomes indistinguishable from Mexico vis-a-vis gangs, corruption and ethnic strife, but there’s a big country beyond that.

      • Jiro says:

        “Net negative” can be positive because of birthright citizenship; the new citizens don’t get counted in the immigrant figures.

        Also, even if it really is negative, that can still be bad if the ones who are already here are having an effect, since it may take a while before the negative growth reduces the population by enough not to have an effect any more.

        • Anonymous says:

          the new citizens don’t get counted in the immigrant figures.

          They aren’t counted in the figures because they are more immigrants than you are.

          • Anonymous says:

            *no more

          • Jiro says:

            When talking about whether the immigrants have an effect; the new citizens have political and social views which are atypical for other citizens, typical for immigrants, and related to the presence of immigrants, so they count as immigrants having an effect.

            By your reasoning if we just immediately gave all immigrants citizenship, immigration would have no effect at all.

        • Eccdogg says:

          Both good points, but don’t you think the tide has really shifted on this issue from pre-recession.

          At one point you had major republican candidates embracing some type of amnesty and path to citizenship. You had immigration from Mexico at several million a decade. You also had folks arguing that the only way the Republicans could survive was to court Mexican voters.

          Now I see no way there is any immigration reform going forward other than administrative tweeks and I am not sure how high a priority even that will be for Clinton. And ant least for now the flow had slowed significantly.

  49. jaimeastorga2000 says:

    The question of collective self-defense in an anarchist society is a difficult one, which is why I was interested to see how an ancap webcomic called Escape From Terra approached the issue. Spoilers below.

    In the comic, the bureaucratic, socialistic Earth government wants to annex the asteroid Ceres and to tax and regulate its ancap society. At first they try diplomacy, but when that fails they send a naval strike force seven ships strong. Ceres has no military, but individual citizens carry small arms as a matter of course and miners regularly use multi-megawatt lasers and mini-nukes in industrial operations. The invasion is stopped when a small group of citizens spontaneously and altruistically decide to use these tools to fight against the strike force, forcing them to surrender.

    Which is all well and good, except that it means Ceres is a ticking time bomb. The first time someone with a laser or a nuke decides to go postal, the place is doomed. If you build your fictional world such that a handful of random people with common industrial tools can defeat an entire military fleet, you have built a world that is hanging by a thread.

    • James says:

      Cool!

      I’d love to see how entrepreneurs solve tough problems of public good market failures.

      David Friedman’s law and courts ideas are interesting.

      The one I think about a lot is fireworks. I’ve been trying to figure out how to provide fireworks.

    • Forlorn Hopes says:

      I remember Escape from Terra – and I have to say I agree with your criticism.

      I gave up after a while when the feeling that Ceres was a Mary Suetopia and Earth a straw dystopia grew too large.

      As an alternative I recommend the TV show The Expanse. It’s not mind-blowing and it’s not trying to explore political ideas but it’s a solid piece of work. The asteroid miners aren’t exactly ancap. It’s more like the wild west – if “back east” meant England rather than the east cost of the united states.

    • Deiseach says:

      individual citizens carry small arms as a matter of course

      Not going to dig through the back-issues to find out why, but why? Are there dangerous native lifeforms (but if it’s our Ceres, that’s not going to be the case). In which case, they’re carrying them as protection from one another. Space pirates and space claim jumpers? Or simply the assumption that if you get into a fight, someone is going to start shooting, so you have to be armed?

      • John Schilling says:

        Members of the Sikh faith generally live in peaceful societies, yet carry ceremonial daggers. I can easily imagine a libertarian-ish culture adopting a similar quasi-religious custom regarding guns – particularly if there were a foundational myth from the days when their cultural survival depended on being armed against Space Pirates or whatnot.

        • baconbacon says:

          Also they would be rich, and seeking ways of establishing status.

        • bean says:

          John, how could you betray the Sensible Space Warfare side like this? Next time we have to debate stealth in space, someone will bring this up to prove that you actually secretly think space pirates are going to be a thing.

          • John Schilling says:

            Well, I didn’t say they were stealthy Space Pirates, did I?

            These are your Barbary-Coast style space pirates; there’s no question about what they are or where they are, but their homeworld is protected by the Space Ottomans and their ships are small but fast, so you just have to be ready to repel them wherever they land.

            Or pay them tribute to leave you alone, but I’m just going to close my eyes and hum real loud rather than have to contemplate a bunch of libertarians choosing a market-based solution when they could be out shooting people with their big privately-owned guns…

          • LHN says:

            As the Byzantines demonstrated, once you start paying the Danegeld, you… remain one of the most powerful polities in the region for centuries, outlasting repeated waves of different “Danes”.

            (Including actual Danes, or at least Varangians.)

            But of course fighting makes for a much better story. Constantinople standing almost alone against the final siege by the Ottomans is a lot more compelling than “and then the Emperor sent out wagons filled with tons of gold to buy off the latest group of barbarians. Again.” Even if you’d generally rather live in the city during the “buy them off with tons of gold” phase.

            Still, I’d sort of like to see a Nick van Rijn or early First Foundation-style incarnation of the libertarian Ceres colony, repelling pirate raids and conquests via its more sophisticated finances, access to capital, and understanding of the difference between glorious victory and long-term success.

          • “Still, I’d sort of like to see a Nick van Rijn or early First Foundation-style incarnation of the libertarian Ceres colony, repelling pirate raids and conquests via its more sophisticated finances, access to capital, and understanding of the difference between glorious victory and long-term success.”

            Two points:

            1. The Byzantines had the improved model of Wergeld. Pay off one set of enemies to leave you alone and attack another set.

            2. Van Rijn is your man–he understands economics. See “Margin of Profit,” which is on my very short list of works of fiction that make a correct economic point. You don’t have to make what the enemy is doing impossible, just unprofitable.

        • hyperboloid says:

          Members of the Sikh faith generally live in peaceful societies, yet carry ceremonial daggers. I can easily imagine a libertarian-ish culture adopting a similar quasi-religious custom regarding guns

          A Kirpan is one thing; but people carrying around loaded firearms in a space habitat?

          because of the “every pound counts” rule of space travel spacecraft tend to be pretty fragile things full of nasty explosive chemicals. One drunken mistake and you have depressurized your ship, or worse.

          • LHN says:

            Long-range spacecraft need to be able to withstand micrometeoroid impacts. I’d think that the necessary shielding would tend to make bullets non-disastrous, though it may depend on how it’s implemented.

            (For a hypothetical asteroid settlement, you’re presumably dug into rock and it isn’t an issue.)

          • hyperboloid says:

            Thanks to the tyranny of the rocket equation, any realistic spacecraft design is basically a flying gas can. Think of a reactor and a huge mass of fuel tanks with a tiny pressurized volume to keep the meat bags alive.

            Micrometeoroid defense is going to depend on some combination of armor and point defenses (probably lasers). Its is going to be designed to protect a ship form incoming objects and not gun fire from within So its not going to cover every part of the habitable area of the ship.

            Imagine I’m standing on the deck of my interplanetary rocket looking down, that is to say along the axis of acceleration, and I pull a Roland Pryzbylewski with my ancient earth 1911, what happens? There may be armor above and around me, but beneath my feet, where fuel tank meets habitat, the hull should be just thick enough to keep the air pressure in.

            Best case scenario the ship slowly depressurizes; worst case scenario I hit something hypergolic, and KABLAMO, there are going to be widows back on Ceres collecting life insurance.

            Unless the right to bear arms is restricted to things that don’t go bang, there is no second amendment in space.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @Hyperboloid – “Unless the right to bear arms is restricted to things that don’t go bang, there is no second amendment in space.”

            Glaser Safety Slug
            Birdshot

            Plus beanbag rounds, flechettes, and lots and lots of other neat things. Floors are going to need to be strong enough to handle the abuse of people walking on them, falling on them, dropping heavy wrenches or crates full of kit… I’m pretty sure a floor strong enough to eat non-AP isn’t too much to ask.

          • John Schilling says:

            Micrometeoroid defense is going to depend on some combination of armor and point defenses (probably lasers).

            We know how micrometeoroid protection works because we’ve been doing it for decades. It’s all armor, not lasers, and that’s not going to change. The weight of the armor is not driving the design, the sensors and fire control for the lasers are going to be chock full of unacceptable failure modes, and passive defense works just fine here.

            Also, for long-duration human spaceflight, radiation protection is going to be the driving concern, not micrometeoroids. You’re definitely not going to be shooting down cosmic rays with point-defense lasers.

            Imagine I’m standing on the deck of my interplanetary rocket looking down, that is to say along the axis of acceleration, and I [screw up] with my ancient earth 1911, what happens? There may be armor above and around me, but beneath my feet, where fuel tank meets habitat, the hull should be just thick enough to keep the air pressure in.

            We’ve been building spaceships long enough to know that this isn’t how it works either. Or if it does, you were doomed from the start by incompetent design. The fuel tank doesn’t meet the habitat at a common bulkhead; there’s at minimum two pressure hulls and a machinery bay between the two. And if there were a common bulkhead between the propellant tank and the habitat, it would have to be much stronger than necessary to keep the air pressure in, because the fuel pressure is much higher than the air pressure. I couldn’t find data on the Apollo Service Module tanks, but close modern equivalents average 2mm titanium walls or the equivalent, and that will stop .45 ACP.

            Also, if you shoot a .45-caliber hole in the side of an Apollo Command Module, you have eleven minutes to find and crudely patch the hole before the air pressure drops too low. That’s for a very large caliber pistol in a very small spacecraft, even assuming full penetration.

            It’s possible a stray bullet could hit some absolutely vital, irreparable, but fragile piece of equipment, but it turns out that people who design spaceships are really big on redundancy and fault tolerance, because Murphy’s law. The biggest danger is almost certainly that a stray bullet will hit and kill a person on the spaceship, because I can give your spaceship redundant everything but Darwin only gave you one heart.

            And that’s a danger that people have been dealing with here on Earth since guns were invented. Some people find it absolutely intolerable and attempt to purge their societies of guns, others take it entirely in stride, and there’s not much difference in the mortality statistics between the two. I imagine it will be similar in extraterrestrial societies – as on Earth, the biggest difference between the armed and disarmed societies will be that the armed societies have bloodier but not more frequent suicides.

          • houseboatonstyxb says:

            @ LHN

            (For a hypothetical asteroid settlement, you’re presumably dug into rock and it isn’t an issue.)

            Hm. Dug safely into rock … first big gunfight no damage … rock monsters appear … “You knocked? Welcome to Lithotopia. Where is your mining permit?”

          • Furslid says:

            You’re already one drunken mistake from disaster in any spacecraft. I’d be more worried about a misused wrench, welding torch, or angle grinder than a firearm.

            If your spacecraft/habitat is big enough to need firearms for self defense against people, it’s big enough to have common areas that don’t have mission critical equipment exposed. It’s also likely that any mission critical areas have highly restricted access (like in real life). So gunplay would be more likely in the laundry where anyone can walk in than the engine room where only the 12 trusted engineers can enter.

          • John Schilling says:

            You’re already one drunken mistake from disaster in any spacecraft.

            Interestingly, about half the people who have travelled into space have brought handguns, and about half the people who have travelled into space brought booze (mostly congnac, I believe), and it turns out to be mostly the same half. This has caused zero problems that I know of.

            Whether future spacefarers or -dwellers have guns, is going to be decided on the basis of cultural values and marginal utility. Anyone saying it is about the fragility of spaceships is mostly just signaling their cultural values (or their unsuitability to travel on anything but the most thoroughly nerfed spaceships, but that’s another matter).

          • LHN says:

            Interestingly, about half the people who have travelled into space have brought handguns

            And what a handgun.

            I still don’t know why I’ve never yet been offered a triple-barrel pistol that fired flares, shells, and rifle ammunition (if you didn’t want to mount the machete blade) in any space-based video game. It makes most of the weapons in, say, Mass Effect look positively tame.

            (Okay, maybe not the backpack nuke.)

          • dndnrsn says:

            @Furslid:

            As someone who has lived in university residence, I can totally imagine a huge amount of violence on a spaceship happening in the laundry room.

          • bean says:

            I think that there’s a critical distinction between “spaceship” and “space habitat”, and that will greatly affect how the design is done, and how people act in those situations. Spaceships are too mass-critical to be set up to allow people to live under anything but what we’d identify as naval/nautical discipline. (Obviously excluding liners.) A habitat, on the other hand, is stationary, and might well be on a planet/moon/asteroid. Which means thicker walls, more redundant life support systems, and a much higher tolerance for misbehavior. I could see people carrying pistols on Ceres, but leaving them in the lockbox when they get on their mining ship (or whatever). In fact, that could be very symbolic. When you have the gun on, you’re an individual. When you take it off, you’re part of a crew for whatever purpose.

          • John Schilling says:

            And what a handgun … I still don’t know why I’ve never yet been offered a triple-barrel pistol that fired flares, shells, and rifle ammunition.

            OK, I just realized we’ve found the killer app for the Gyrojet. The only really successful item from that entire product line were the distress flares and smoke rockets, which were quite good. Some of the kinetic rounds offered the sort of downrange kinetic energy you’d need to take on Siberian megafauna, which is rare in a lightweight handgun, but took enough time to build up speed that they’d be relatively harmless inside a small spaceship. The recoilless aspect would be useful if you needed to fire the thing during an EVA, to repel space pirates or lurking Chinese microsatellites or whatnot. And my references are at home but I believe MBA did offer a survival pistol variant that was packaged with several sorts of flare and kinetic rounds and had an option for a single-shot conventional firearm barrel that could presumably in this application be limited to shotshell or prefragmented rounds for close-range use.

            Alexy Leonov and Robert Mainhardt were contemporaries. If not for Cold War politics preventing their collaboration, we could have had Actual Buck Rogers Rocket Pistols, In Space.

          • John Schilling says:

            I could see people carrying pistols on Ceres, but leaving them in the lockbox when they get on their mining ship (or whatever). In fact, that could be very symbolic. When you have the gun on, you’re an individual. When you take it off, you’re part of a crew for whatever purpose.

            +1. This is the sort of sociological extrapolation I like to see in my science fiction, far more than the usual “Western in Space” or whatnot, and more than rote libertopian dreck like “Escape from Terra”. Please, science fiction writers in the audience, steal this one.

          • bean says:

            @John Schilling:
            If I’m in a proper space colony, I don’t see much reason to carry a survival weapon specced against Siberian megafauna. My survival plan involves going to the escape pod and waiting for the Space Guard to rescue me. Likewise, I don’t need a flare gun. I want the flare close to me.
            And as I’m sure you know, handgun recoil isn’t that big of a deal in zero-G. Also, I suspect that a gyrojet is going to have a greater quantity of propellant than a conventional bullet, which is bad for two reasons. First, nitrogen is expensive in space, and you want to minimize usage. Second, that’s more junk you just dumped into the environmental control system.

            Edit:
            I feel compelled to provide the canonical set of links on realistic futuristic sidearms. I’m surprised that nobody else has done so.

          • John Schilling says:

            Near term, the biggest habs are likely to be in LEO, and may take days to arrange an orbital rendezvous in LEO compared with hours to land a capsule in some vaguely-habitable location on Earth. I think we’ve got at least a generation where abort-to-Siberia still figures prominently in manned spaceflight contingency planning.

            After that, the gyrojets will be firing smart rounds, which offers an entirely new set of SFnal opportunities. If I’m putting down a riot in a mining platform off Ceres, I want the gun whose bullets can reason, “Wait – that’s the backup lithium battery pack dead ahead, BREAK RIGHT!”

          • hlynkacg says:

            This is the sort of sociological extrapolation I like to see in my science fiction, far more than the usual “Western in Space” or whatnot, and more than rote libertopian dreck like “Escape from Terra”. Please, science fiction writers in the audience, steal this one.

            Ditto and on it.

          • Lumifer says:

            I want the gun whose bullets can reason, “Wait – that’s the backup lithium battery pack dead ahead, BREAK RIGHT!”

            Or “This looks stupid, what am I doing here? OK, bye all!” X -D

            But I think you really want a knife missile.

          • bean says:

            Near term, the biggest habs are likely to be in LEO, and may take days to arrange an orbital rendezvous in LEO compared with hours to land a capsule in some vaguely-habitable location on Earth. I think we’ve got at least a generation where abort-to-Siberia still figures prominently in manned spaceflight contingency planning.

            At this point, we start getting into precise design of the escape system. I’ll grant that LEO habitats will escape to Earth, but at that point, we have lots of options. Unless your plan is either MOOSE and an immediate landing or literally landing somewhere in Russia, I’d expect that you’d stay in orbit for a few hours until you get a good window to land somewhere safe where you’re easy to rescue. Most likely on a clear patch of water with the local Coast Guard (or equivalent) standing by. Definitely not somewhere where you need serious survival skills and risk being eaten by megafauna. (If nothing else, those places tend to be hard to rescue people from.)
            That said, while we maintain something resembling our current model of manned spaceflight, it’s not implausible that the gyrojet could make a comeback.

            After that, the gyrojets will be firing smart rounds, which offers an entirely new set of SFnal opportunities. If I’m putting down a riot in a mining platform off Ceres, I want the gun whose bullets can reason, “Wait – that’s the backup lithium battery pack dead ahead, BREAK RIGHT!”

            I was going to disagree, but now that I think about it, it’s one of the easier ways of providing large, low-velocity rounds in a man-portable package.

          • John Schilling says:

            Unless your plan is literally landing somewhere in Russia, I’d expect that you’d stay in orbit for a few hours until you get a good window to land somewhere safe where you’re easy to rescue. Most likely on a clear patch of water with the local Coast Guard (or equivalent) standing by.

            Which brings us back to the “cultural values” aspect of who is going to be packing heat in space. The Russians are scared of landing on the high seas because no naval tradition, and they are scared of wolves because their wolves are historically scarier than ours, but they are OK with guns, so they are going to parachute into someplace desolate and do it properly armed. The descendants of Yankee Traders will trust their Coast Guard to fish them out of the ocean. Not sure where the Chinese fit on that spectrum, once they stop copying the Russians.

            As for literal gyrojets, I am afraid that window closed a while ago on account of they were really the passion of Robert Mainhardt, who was a Lone Mad Scientist of the old school and is now dead. If we had hooked him up with some proper wolf-fearing cosmonauts, something might have come of it, but too hard to resurrect the technology for a niche application today. And a generation from now, smart-rocket guns will neither need nor want the “gyro” feature. So we’re stuck between a kind of neat alternate history that wasn’t, and some interesting future possibilities that might become.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            Come to think of it, wouldn’t chemical weapons be a whole lot more practical in space?

          • bean says:

            @John Schilling:
            That’s more or less what I was groping towards. The Russians want to land on land because they have lots of it and don’t trust the Navy to show up and fish them out. (This is a rational fear. Russian naval deployments always include a tug for exactly the reasons you would first conclude on hearing that.) I don’t think that Americans not being OK with guns has much to do with it, except that we don’t see a need for them in practice.

            As for literal gyrojets, I am afraid that window closed a while ago on account of they were really the passion of Robert Mainhardt, who was a Lone Mad Scientist of the old school and is now dead.

            So what do we call a non-spun smart rocket-propelled bullet? I’ll bet that ‘gyrojet’ is at least a strong contender when/if that happens.

            @FacelessCraven

            Come to think of it, wouldn’t chemical weapons be a whole lot more practical in space?

            Why on (or off) Earth would that be? If you’re talking about a nutter with a tank of chlorine, then I suppose you’re right in that there’s no ‘outside’ to get to. But on the other hand, unless the life support designer is a complete and total idiot, the potential release of toxic gasses will be taken into account. If the atmosphere monitors pick up anything that they don’t recognize, the local ventilation system gets locked down and the evacuation alarms start going off. The appropriate response is to simply vent the affected compartment and wait a while. All chemical weapons are either gasses or liquids with non-zero vapor pressures.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @Bean – “Why on (or off) Earth would that be?”

            arbitrary lethality to minor wounds, was my thinking. poison darts or BBs, not necessarily grenades. Though if there was a substance that had a very short persistance, grenades might work too.

          • Lumifer says:

            If the atmosphere monitors pick up anything that they don’t recognize, the local ventilation system gets locked down and the evacuation alarms start going off.

            …after the first Mexican night at the local cafeteria everyone agreed to never every do it again…

          • bean says:

            @FacelessCraven

            arbitrary lethality to minor wounds, was my thinking. poison darts or BBs, not necessarily grenades. Though if there was a substance that had a very short persistance, grenades might work too.

            But what does being in space buy you over using poison on Earth? There’s a reason that poison isn’t widely used on weapons now. A poison dart doesn’t penetrate well, may take some time to take effect, and puts the user at risk, too. In space, the chances of light armor (space suits) being present increase significantly.

            @Lumifer:

            …after the first Mexican night at the local cafeteria everyone agreed to never every do it again…

            Actually, that’s a point of some interest. IIRC, gas-producing foods are somewhat frowned upon because the gas doesn’t separate out very well.

          • John Schilling says:

            [why chemical weapons in space?]
            Arbitrary lethality to minor wounds, was my thinking.

            But lethality is rarely an actual goal for weapons. The bit where the military supposedly prefers wounding rather than killing the enemy on account of tying up other soldiers caring for the wounded is mostly an urban legend. The reality is, the vast majority of the people who use “lethal” weapons simply don’t care whether the target dies, or if they do care they aren’t averse to e.g. cutting the other guy’s throat when he’s down. What people mostly(*) care about, when they get to shooting at each other, is whether the other guy goes down right now, before he can shoot back.

            Lots of things can do that, and almost all of them are lethal at least some of the time. Chemical weapons can’t do that, because it’s going to take a minute or more for the poison to spread from the point of injection. Maybe thirty seconds for a really high concentration of a fast-acting inhaled agent. Still enough time for the other guy to leap across a hab module and bash open your skull with a wrench, and then what good is it that you’ve killed him too?

            * #2 on the list, and sometimes #1, is scaring the crap out of the other guy so he doesn’t even try to shoot back. That’s where the instinctive fear of fire and thunder (and sharp pointiness and bloody dismemberment, etc) wins over the intellectual knowledge that the laughable tiny dart is deadly.

          • Furslid says:

            Another problem with the small weapons like darts/bbs is that people have spacesuits available. Any space suit that is rugged enough to use in EVA work would double as body armor. This suggests more powerful, more penetrating ammo would be needed than on earth guns.

          • Agronomous says:

            @hlynkacg:

            If you’re writing a story with gyrojets, I want someone to use them to propel themselves in an emergency! You could tether yourself to the rocket (how long is the exhaust plume?), fire it out of the gun, get dragged along, then repeat as needed. Could work well with being spaced out of a low-acceleration spaceship, and the bad guys not realizing you’re alive or have propulsion (maybe they sabotaged it, or drained the air tanks so they can’t be used) or can catch up.

            On another note: what if guns shot projectiles with lots of penetrating power, but that left only tiny holes when they go through rigid stuff like exterior walls? Don’t bullets do a lot of damage via shock wave, not just tumbling and fragmenting?

            Also, habitat walls will probably be designed to be self-sealing; I know I read something somewhere about inflatable habs being safer in the event of micrometeorite strikes.

          • hlynkacg says:

            @ Agro,
            It started as a setting for a D20 campaign that was essentially “Hard boiled detectives in SPAAAACE” (a lunar colony to be precise as my group has quite a few old school Heinlein and Clarke fans). It has since been expanded and fleshed out with art and stories from myself and one of the other players.

            Firearms in my setting generally come in two flavors. “HV” weapons, and “Thumpers”.

            HV rifles and pistols are basically what you describe. They fire small projectiles with lots of penetrating power, and are typically carried by military personnel, mercenaries, and other “professionals”. Their use/possession is heavily regulated by many locations in the setting.

            “Thumpers” are essentially M79 Grenade Launchers that can be loaded with a variety of custom rounds. EVA crewmembers carry them as a matter of course where they’re used as rope launchers, signal guns, etc… Thumpers loaded with “Taser” or bean-bag rounds are standard issue for station police, and your average bartender or shop-keep’s probably keeps one stashed behind the counter. Individuals looking to cause a bit more mayhem can load them with conventionally lethal rounds such as buckshot, incendiaries or explosives, but should expect some trouble with station security should they be caught with them.

            Things like laser-guns and anti-personnel missiles do exist in the setting but are generally too expensive / specialized to be encountered in day-to-day use.

            In addition hand weapons are still very much a thing with boat-hooks, halligan-tools, and good ole fashioned switchblades, readily available.

            As an aside, I’m very much enjoying The Expanse, but am kind of miffed that they “stole” some of my ideas.

    • baconbacon says:

      Which is all well and good, except that it means Ceres is a ticking time bomb. The first time someone with a laser or a nuke decides to go postal, the place is doomed. If you build your fictional world such that a handful of random people with common industrial tools can defeat an entire military fleet, you have built a world that is hanging by a thread.

      Why is it hanging by a thread?

      • Aegeus says:

        Because all it takes to kill a city is one person having a bad day. Take one of today’s mass shooters, and give them a nuclear bomb instead of a rifle.

        • bean says:

          Jon’s Law. Any interesting spacecraft drive is also a WMD.

        • baconbacon says:

          You have made a huge leap here, just because a nuclear weapon exists and can be used by a small group of people with a plan does not imply that it can be used by 1 person, on a whim.

          • Forlorn Hopes says:

            A small group of people with a plan is a rather low barrier to entry for the power to destroy your entire civilization.

          • baconbacon says:

            That isn’t the barrier- its a small group of people who have risen to the top of a free society who suddenly decide that everything they know, own and have built should be destroyed, without any of the other people in the society being able to stop them.

            How many mass shooters were well balanced, stable and rich prior to going on their rampage? How many of those people who would go on a rampage are also capable of getting into the upper echelon of a market society first?

        • bean says:

          I think you overestimate the threat of nuclear explosives, for several reasons.
          1. Mining explosives are likely to be on the order of, at most, a few hundred tons. The correct scale is ‘very large terrorist attack’, not ‘nuclear war’.
          2. People who deal with explosives have fairly strict controls. When was the last time you heard a disgruntled miner stealing explosives and blowing something up?
          Actually, I’m not even sure that nuclear mining explosives make any sort of sense. I’m aware of Operation Plowshare, but that was for heavy earthmoving work, not regular mining. There was one planned mining test, but it got cancelled.

          • Forlorn Hopes says:

            This is an asteroid colony. It’s both smaller and much more fragile than Earth based civilization.

          • bean says:

            This is an asteroid colony. It’s both smaller and much more fragile than Earth based civilization.

            Good point. For some reason, I was focused on someone snapping and going after Earth. This is why I really, really doubt the Libertarian/AnCap Utopia IN SPACE!! The environment is too hostile and the powers involved are too great for there not to be some regulation. And by ‘some regulation’, I mean that when you have to pay for the air you breathe, and you have a choice of paying the company or paying the government, I’d look really hard before choosing the company.

    • Luke the CIA stooge says:

      Use of nukes and megalasers would probably be coordinated by companies and large voluntary organisation’s. Hell an anarchocapitalist society can even have the equivalent of government s if there are strong exit rights and strong practicality to exiting over small things. Imagine if your local city was decided up that each neighborhood was it’s own jurisdiction and they didn’t coordinate to assert broader control, that would default to anarchocapitalism since at that point any “tax” is functionally just a payment for services rendered, which you can shop around for if you don’t like your current
      provider.

      ironically the reason Anarcocapitalism isn’t currently viable is that we don’t have the institutions to make it work.

    • bean says:

      If you build your fictional world such that a handful of random people with common industrial tools can defeat an entire military fleet, you have built a world that is hanging by a thread.

      Agreed. The corollary is that such things don’t actually happen. I’ve spent some time thinking about this.
      Even megawatt mining lasers aren’t likely to be useful for space warfare. The optics required to make a useful weapon are highly nontrivial, and don’t have a lot of civilian uses, unless you’re looking at beamed propulsion or something of that nature (and even then, the constraints are a bit different). As for nukes, the problem is delivering them. Unless the attackers are nearly as improvised as the defenders, they’re likely to have some sort of point defenses. (I know the comic mentions they were only set up to shoot at surface targets, but that confirms that they’re doing ideological propaganda, not serious analysis of space warfare.)
      In other words, the result of a battle between improvised and professional space forces is almost certain to be the same as the result of a battle between improvised and professional air or naval forces.

    • caethan says:

      Not even “decides to go postal”, which is admittedly pretty unlikely. We’re talking more “doesn’t take sufficiently strong safety precautions”. Whoops, that laser I just turned on was accidentally aimed at your ship! Sorry!

    • IrishDude says:

      The Asteroid is a Harsh Mistress?

    • raj says:

      Is there a standard anarcho-capitalist response to the problem of raising an army? I see how public services could be provided, but the military is a sort of all-or-nothing endeavor that requires everyone to commit, and more acutely suffers from the free-rider dilemma.

      (something something markets, shared incentives, prestige and social status?)

      • John Schilling says:

        I don’t know if it counts as a standard response, but a common one is to note that the sort of distributed armaments and institutions that would be necessary to fight domestic threats like criminal gangs would also serve as the basis for a guerilla resistance movement that would make a nation intolerably painful for an invader to truly conquer so they will either not bother to try or abandon the effort quickly.

        I suspect this plan is most favored by people who have been raised on the Disney edit of the American Revolution and have never experienced or even studied real guerilla wars / armed resistance movements, and that’s before we even consider the class of conquerers whose are fine with a bit of scorched earth or genocide if that’s what it takes.

        • bean says:

          Well said. I would add that a large portion of the job of a military is deterrence, and politicians the world over have a bad habit of seeing a place with a weak conventional military and deciding that their much stronger conventional military can take it over pretty easily. Usually, they’re right, but then run into the guerilla war. While the defender may win in the end, it’s usually an unpleasant experience for all concerned.
          And since the discussion started in space, I’d reiterate that an improvised space force stands very little chance against a regular one. The technology required is simply too esoteric.

      • David Friedman says:

        I spent one chapter in the first edition of the Machinery of Freedom (the link is to the second edition but the chapter is the same) and one chapter in the third edition on the problem.

        For a very different approach, you might look at James Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed. It’s largely about features of stateless societies in the past that made annexing them unprofitable for adjacent states.

      • David Friedman says:

        I spent one chapter in the first edition of the Machinery of Freedom (the link is actually to the second edition but the chapter is the same) and one chapter in the third edition on the problem.

        For a very different approach, you might look at James Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed. It’s largely about features of stateless societies in the past that made annexing them unprofitable for adjacent states.

      • David Friedman says:

        I spent one chapter in the first edition of the Machinery of Freedom and one chapter in the third edition on the problem. I tried posting this with links, but whatever bug it is that keeps me from posting with my webpage URL in my email also keeps me from posting links to things on my web page. Try using these links:

        Second Edition of Machinery (the chapter is the same as in the first): http://www.daviddfriedmanXXX.com/The_Machinery_of_Freedom_.pdf

        Chapter in Third Edition: http://www.daviddfriedmanXXX.com/Machinery_3d_Edition/The%20Hard%20Problem%20II.htm

        In both cases, remove the XXX

        For a very different approach, you might look at James Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed. It’s largely about features of stateless societies in the past that made annexing them unprofitable for adjacent states.

        • Skeltering Lead says:

          The mind boggles at the kind of content posted (possibly from a library terminal in The Dreaming?) at davidfriedmanXXX.com

    • Mr Mind says:

      Frome the link you posted:

      The defensibility of an anarchist society, in a military sense, is a crucial, perhaps the most crucial, question in determining the legitimacy of anarchism as viable political philosophy. Unfortunately, this is also the realm of anarchist thought where the varying schools of anarchism are the least well-developed.

      Isn’t a huge red flag of any philosophy or ideology that the most important problem is the least developed?

      • John Schilling says:

        I think we can pretty much reduce the differences between ideologies to which problems they consider most important. That being the case, the other ideologies all have huge red flags in that they don’t have well-developed solutions to what us right-thinking people all consider the most important problem.

        • Mr Mind says:

          The way I read the passage is different: the author is saying that it is the most important problem for each school, but it is also the one that they develop the least.
          Having almost zero acquaintance with AnCap I might be wrong.

          • David Friedman says:

            I don’t think national defense is the most important problem for anarcho-capitalists, although it’s an important problem. The problem of how you manage the equivalent of courts and laws without government is at least as important.

            National defense is simply the most difficult of the important problems.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @David Friedman:
            National defense, or at least border control, is going to be a huge problem for any state with a competent state nearby.

            Because otherwise you are just the lawless area where the fugitive criminals go, and that’s not likely to stand.

          • IrishDude says:

            There is law in ancap land, it’s just provided competitively instead of as a monopoly. I’d assume there would be private services the bordering country could hire to find the fugitive, as that would be an important service to have within ancap land when criminals flee an area.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @IrishDude:
            On what legal grounds would these people be removed from AnCapistan?

          • Lumifer says:

            @ IrishDude

            it’s just provided competitively instead of as a monopoly

            Right. So what you mistakenly call an “invading army” is actually just a private law-enforcement agency that I have created and hired to bring to justice offenders against my laws.

          • bean says:

            I’d assume there would be private services the bordering country could hire to find the fugitive, as that would be an important service to have within ancap land when criminals flee an area.

            Those are called bounty hunters. These days, states don’t like dealing with them. They’re messy compared to extradition treaties. The more likely result if the problem gets bad is a punitive expedition. Or a new private enforcement agency entering the game, that just happens to wear the uniforms of my army. (That’s a really good quote, Lumifer.)
            And this doesn’t even solve other problems, like cross-border coordination. How do I know that the radio stations in Ancap Land will respect ITU frequency allocation? How can I be sure that airplanes from Ancap Land won’t suddenly fall out of the sky on my citizens? How does air traffic control in Ancap Land work, anyway?

          • IrishDude says:

            @Lumifer

            So what you mistakenly call an “invading army” is actually just a private law-enforcement agency that I have created and hired to bring to justice offenders against my laws.

            If your private law-enforcement tries to enforce laws most people in ancap land don’t like, then it will be very costly for them to do so.

          • IrishDude says:

            @HeelBearCub

            On what legal grounds would these people be removed from AnCapistan?

            Canada creates reciprocating agreements with the private law enforcement agencies that stipulates extradition terms, same as is done now between countries. Any benefits or challenges that exist for extradition treaties between countries would likely exist between a country and private law enforcement agencies in ancap land.

          • Lumifer says:

            @ IrishDude

            That’s why my private law-enforcement agency has tanks and bombers : -P

          • IrishDude says:

            @bean

            How do I know that the radio stations in Ancap Land will respect ITU frequency allocation?

            How do you know the radio stations in nation-state land will respect ITU frequency allocation?

            How can I be sure that airplanes from Ancap Land won’t suddenly fall out of the sky on my citizens?

            I’m pretty sure airplane pilots and companies will have strong incentives to not have planes falling out of the sky. At the very least, it’s bad for business, and most pilots don’t want to die.

            How does air traffic control in Ancap Land work, anyway?

            It would probably start working like it does now, but there’d be more experimentation to find new and better ways to keep track of everything in the sky.

          • IrishDude says:

            The U.S. and U.S.S.R sent tanks and bombs into Afghanistan. It didn’t work out too well to take control.

            If AnCap land starts in an enclave in the U.S., I’m not too worried about Canada or Mexico invading. If AnCap land started near Russia, it would have to be much more concerned about defense.

          • Lumifer says:

            @ IrishDude

            You really think that the current-day Afghanistan is a good poster country for ancap?? Come to our AnCapistan, we’ll be just like Afghanistan!

          • IrishDude says:

            I think Afghanistan is an instructive example that just because you have tanks and bombs doesn’t mean you can take control of a place, and given how poor Afghanistan is the fact that tanks and bombs are ineffective for gaining control there provides some evidence that it would be that much more difficult to take control of a wealthier AnCap enclave. Costa Rica doesn’t even have a military and they don’t seem to be getting invaded from their neighbors. Maybe the importance of needing a military is overblown? I think defense is more important in some parts of the world than it is in others.

          • dndnrsn says:

            @Lumifer: There are various parts of the world where people live who seem to have taken that tradeoff. If, for instance, the people living in the parts of Afghanistan that foreign conquerors inevitably fail to take and hold didn’t want to be (as the stereotype goes) “fiercely independent”, presumably they’d just yield to the foreign conquerors.

            Not a great poster child for Ancapistan though – the sorts of cultures that inhabit those regions tend to be rugged, but they tend not to be individualistic – blood feuds definitely violate the NAP.

            I can imagine the sort of people who think Jack Donovan is tops taking that tradeoff, or at least saying they would.

          • IrishDude says:

            Googling on Costa Rica, I came across a wikipedia article on the Regional Security System:
            “The Regional Security System was created out of a need for collective response to security threats, which were impacting on the stability of the region in the late 1970s and early 1980s. On 29 October 1982 four members of the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States—namely, Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, St. Lucia, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines—signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Barbados to provide for “mutual assistance on request”. The signatories agreed to prepare contingency plans and assist one another, on request, in national emergencies, prevention of smuggling, search and rescue, immigration control, fishery protection, customs and excise control, maritime policing duties, protection of off-shore installations, pollution control, national and other disasters and threats to national security.”

            The Regional Security System covers a few nations without any military. I think a “mutual assistance upon request” agreement could be signed among several private rights enforcement agencies, and perhaps some existing country’s military, to cover international threats to AnCap land.

          • Lumifer says:

            @ IrishDude

            Nobody bothered to take control of Afghanistan because there is nothing there worth taking. A succession of Great Powers stuck their snout in there for “strategic” reasons and soon discovered that the natives are surly, uncooperative, and, most importantly, piss-poor. Besides, shooting at foreigners out of whatever firearms they can scrounge is their favourite form of entertainment and sport, all in one.

            Note, though, that if you want something that’s in Afghanistan (other than land), you send in a company of special forces and they just take it. If someone annoys you, why, you drone some weddings (and then some funerals) and no one can do anything about it.

            It is precisely the poverty of Afghanistan that makes it so resistant to conquest. Having nothing to lose is a very potent advantage. But if you are a rich enclave and not terribly cooperative, well, a couple of bombs into you power plant, another couple into your water filtering station, what’s that burning? oh, that’s your refinery and your oil supplies, how unfortunate… Y’know, winter is coming, what will you do to not freeze to death?

          • Lumifer says:

            @ dndnrsn

            There are various parts of the world where people live who seem to have taken that tradeoff.

            All these people are very very poor.

          • dndnrsn says:

            @IrishDude:

            The advantages that those parts of Afghanistan have in fighting off foreign conquerors are probably advantages a wealthy ancap enclave would probably not have. The conditions that make it possible to fight off foreign conquerors probably would keep those parts from becoming wealthy.

            The cities of Afghanistan, richer, are far conquerable. A wealthy ancap enclave would probably be more similar to the cities.

          • dndnrsn says:

            @Lumifer:

            Yeah, that’s a big part of the tradeoff.

            To polarize it in a fairly cartoonish fashion:

            A) Wealthy, cosmopolitan city-dwellers, but easily conquerable.
            B) Fiercely independent mountain folk, but poor.

            Choose one.

          • IrishDude says:

            @Lumifer

            Costa Rica has no military. Why haven’t they been overrun or had missiles sent into their power plants?

          • IrishDude says:

            @Lumifer

            Nobody bothered to take control of Afghanistan because there is nothing there worth taking.

            I disagree, as I think there’s a lot of mineral wealth there, and as you note, it’s geographic location has strategic importance. However, to the extent you might be referring to Afghanistan not having much in resources, an AnCap enclave in a place without natural resources wouldn’t have anything worth taking either. To the extent wealth in that place is created through creativity and ideas, like say an Apple headquarters, would it be worth it for a country to invade?

          • bean says:

            @IrishDude:

            How do you know the radio stations in nation-state land will respect ITU frequency allocation?

            Because if they don’t, their government will shut them down. How do I know the government will respect the ITU allocations? I don’t for certain, but I do know that everyone has signed it, and that I assume there are consequences for being kicked out.

            I’m pretty sure airplane pilots and companies will have strong incentives to not have planes falling out of the sky. At the very least, it’s bad for business, and most pilots don’t want to die.

            You’d be surprised what some airlines try to get away with in the name of saving money.

            It would probably start working like it does now, but there’d be more experimentation to find new and better ways to keep track of everything in the sky.

            Now you’re just being nonsensical. The ATC system works because the government enforces it. Unless you start handing out ownership of the sky, there will be nothing to stop anyone who wants to from ignoring ATC. Yes, I suppose all of the airlines could pool their money and buy a rights-enforcement agency that will go after anyone who violates their ATC system. Congratulations. You’ve just reinvented the FAA. Wait, another case in which ancaps are likely to converge on a solution that looks exactly like a government? Hmm…

            I think Afghanistan is an instructive example that just because you have tanks and bombs doesn’t mean you can take control of a place, and given how poor Afghanistan is the fact that tanks and bombs are ineffective for gaining control there provides some evidence that it would be that much more difficult to take control of a wealthier AnCap enclave.

            I think you have this backwards. The Afghans didn’t drive us off because they were rich. They drove us off because they were poor, and they liked living in a war zone more than they liked living under us. I’m pretty sure that most Americans wouldn’t make the same choice on that trade. “We’ll be able to drive them out eventually” is not a good defensive strategy for a modern country. (Lumifer and dndnrsn beat me to this one.)

            Costa Rica doesn’t even have a military and they don’t seem to be getting invaded from their neighbors.

            I believe the Rio treaty may have something to do with that. So long as Costa Rica remains nice and quiet, it will remain uninvaded. If it stopped having a government, then it would probably stop being quiet, and it would be promptly invaded by the US under the auspices of the UN. There’s more than one reason for invasion.

          • IrishDude says:

            @bean

            How do I know the government will respect the ITU allocations? I don’t for certain, but I do know that everyone has signed it

            Why did all governments sign the agreement?

            You’d be surprised what some airlines try to get away with in the name of saving money.

            Having your airplanes fall out of the sky does not save an airline money, for all sorts of reasons I’m sure you can list.

            The ATC system works because the government enforces it. Unless you start handing out ownership of the sky, there will be nothing to stop anyone who wants to from ignoring ATC. Yes, I suppose all of the airlines could pool their money and buy a rights-enforcement agency that will go after anyone who violates their ATC system. Congratulations. You’ve just reinvented the FAA.

            If coordination adds value then you’ll see cooperation on finding common standards. There’s lots of private standards that exist now: http://www.ictsd.org/bridges-news/biores/news/private-standards-and-wto-law

            Why does almost every key board have the same configuration of letter placement? Because consumers like having the same arrangement of keys, and so it pays to have manufacturers use the same standard for all their keyboards.

            Whatever process is used to ensure international air travel doesn’t turn to chaos can happen similarly in AnCap land among the various airports.

            So long as Costa Rica remains nice and quiet, it will remain uninvaded. If it stopped having a government, then it would probably stop being quiet, and it would be promptly invaded by the US under the auspices of the UN.

            In other words, don’t be a dick to others and you’ll be okay. I expect that some AnCap enclaves will be dicks and some won’t, and the ones that aren’t won’t have to worry about getting invaded.

          • Lumifer says:

            @ IrishDude

            Costa Rica is a member of the club of governments. The members are mostly polite to each other and, for the last half a century or so, try to not invade each other as war is a messy and expensive business. They are not quite successful at not invading each other, though.

            With Costa Rica, it helps that its neighbours are not too rich or powerful and tend to be preoccupied with their own problems.

            However if a Costa Rican government suddenly decided to dissolve itself and let the Ticos be free, I’m pretty sure that would be followed by Nicaragua or Panama (or both) getting quite larger.

            With respect to Apple headquarters, yes, it would make sense to grab it because there is wealth which could be taken.

          • bean says:

            @IrishDude

            Why did all governments sign the agreement?

            Because it’s required to hook up to the global telecommunications grid. Note that the internet provider in Ancap Land isn’t the same as the person who is running the radio station in question.

            Having your airplanes fall out of the sky does not save an airline money, for all sorts of reasons I’m sure you can list.

            But things which slightly increase the chances of the airplane falling out of the sky do. Yes, airlines do actually try to get around these kind of regs.

            If coordination adds value then you’ll see cooperation on finding common standards.

            I already noted that. It’s great in most cases, but we’re looking at a situation where someone not adhering to standards would put lots of people at risk. If the general rule in Ancap Land is drive on the right, someone driving on the left is still a problem. (Yes, terms of service to use the road, I know. There’s no road in the air.)
            I’m also aware of maritime rules of the road, which were enforced entirely by custom. The big difference is how fast things happen in the air and on the sea.

            Whatever process is used to ensure international air travel doesn’t turn to chaos can happen similarly in AnCap land among the various airports.

            Treaties again. And the problem is that nobody has authority to go after the guy flying out of his back yard who wants to go play in traffic.

            In other words, don’t be a dick to others and you’ll be okay. I expect that some AnCap enclaves will be dicks and some won’t, and the ones that aren’t won’t have to worry about getting invaded.

            Still not quite getting it. Costa Rica is safe because they’re seen as an upstanding global citizen, and because upstanding global citizens do not get invaded. Ancap Land is safe so long as they don’t get a reputation for being a haven for bad people. They could get this reputation because they actually are a haven for bad people, or because their neighbors crank up the propaganda and convince everyone they are a haven for bad people, with the intent of getting the UN to back their invasion. Being Ancap Land makes the propaganda part easy.
            Edit:
            I’ll second Lumifer’s bit about the Club of Governments. There are both privileges and responsibilities that come with being a member. Going Ancap forfeits both, and the rest of the members are going to be confused. The easiest way to clear up this confusion is to forcibly return the new Ancap state to the club.

      • Orphan Wilde says:

        Eh. There’s no such that as a stable government, which is in a very important sense what the defense of an anarchistic government would be about – government, like all organizations, slowly decays over time – so relax a bit about the “inevitable failure mode” bit. Everything is going to fail eventually, that’s entropy for you. Anarchy would turn into libertarianism would turn into the mess we have today anyways, as the people who remember what it was they were fighting for pass away.

        Let go of the concept of permanence, and build what matters today.

        • bean says:

          Yes, but anarchy comes with a built-in mode for short-circuiting that, and having someone else put a government in charge. If you’re lucky, it will be the US or the UN. If you’re not, it will be your neighbor, who will put their government in charge. Avoiding this and allowing your lack of government to last longer should be a pretty high priority.

        • Mr Mind says:

          “In the long run, we’ll all be dead.”
          Thanks, but I already knew that. I’m already relaxed: AnCap fascinates me but only from an intellectual point of view, if not only because it’s an incomplete political theory.
          If I were an AnCap followers, though, I would be troubled if that were indeed the state of the philosophical debate over my discipline.

          • David Friedman says:

            I did offer pointers to two chapters of mine that discuss possible solutions to the problem of national defense.

            How hard a problem it is depends in part on the environment, whether the anarchist society has powerful and aggressive neighbors. Also on social characteristics of the society. Suppose it turns out that A-C is workable for some societies but not for others. Isn’t the same true for any particular version of government?

  50. jaimeastorga2000 says:

    The question of collective self-defense in an anarchist society is a difficult one, which is why I was interested to see how an ancap webcomic called Escape From Terra approached the issue. Spoilers below.

    In the comic, the bureaucratic, socialistic Earth government wants to annex the asteroid Ceres and to tax and regulate its ancap society. At first they try diplomacy, but when that fails they send a naval strike force seven ships strong. Ceres has no military, but individual citizens carry small arms as a matter of course and miners regularly use multi-megawatt lasers and mini-nukes in industrial operations. The invasion is stopped when a small group of citizens spontaneously and altruistically decide to use these tools to fight against the strike force, forcing them to surrender.

    Which is all well and good, except that it means Ceres is a ticking time bomb. The first time someone with a laser or a nuke decides to go postal, the place is doomed. If you build your fictional world such that a handful of random people with common industrial tools can defeat an entire military fleet, you have built a world that is hanging by a thread.

  51. jaimeastorga2000 says:

    The question of collective self-defense in an anarchist society is a difficult one, which is why I was interested to see how an ancap webcomic called Escape From Terra approached the issue. Spoilers below.

    In the comic, the bureaucratic, socialistic Earth government wants to annex the asteroid Ceres and to tax and regulate its ancap society. At first they try diplomacy, but when that fails they send a naval strike force seven ships strong. Ceres has no military, but individual citizens carry small arms as a matter of course and miners regularly use multi-megawatt lasers and mini-nukes in industrial operations. The invasion is stopped when a small group of citizens spontaneously and altruistically decide to use these tools to fight against the strike force, forcing them to surrender.

    Which is all well and good, except that it means Ceres is a ticking time bomb. The first time someone with a laser or a nuke decides to go postal, the place is doomed. If you build your fictional world such that a handful of random people with common industrial tools can defeat an entire military fleet, you have built a world that is hanging by a thread.

  52. DrBeat says:

    Eirin Yagokoro created the Hourai Elixir, the ultimate medicine of immortality, making its recipient no longer intersect with death as a concept. Nothing, under any circumstances, can kill someone who has taken the Hourai Elixir. If you go back in time and kill them before they take the Elixir, it still won’t work. The two people known to have taken the Elixir — Kaguya Houraisan and Fujiwara no Mokou — will explicitly live through the heat death of the universe.

    But being alive after the heat death of the universe is going to be incredibly unpleasant as you float about in space with nothing to do. Since Kaguya and Mokou will live forever due to Eirin’s intervention, there will be a point in time at which Eirin is responsible for all of human suffering (rounded up).

    Does this make Eirin history’s greatest monster now, or do we have to wait?

    • pku says:

      Interesting question. Since you’re assuming time travel, I’d say we can just do it now, since timelessness is the way to go here.

      Also, potential solution: if you allow time-travel of this form, can we somehow put Kaguya and Fujiwara in a closed loop, so that they have finite lifespan despite being immortal?

      • Error says:

        This would have to happen eventually in some sense, I think. Assuming their respective minds have only a finite number of possible states, eventually they must repeat, even without time travel.

        • Zakharov says:

          If Kaguya and Mokou can figure out sometime between now and the end of the universe a way to enter a stable joyous loop, the Hourai Elixir becomes a source of infinite utility.

          • ThrustVectoring says:

            Still finite, IMO. You don’t get to count the same mental state twice, let alone an infinite number of times.

      • DrBeat says:

        I’m not assuming time travel, I’m saying that even if you DID, time travel would still be unable to kill them.

        • Robert Liguori says:

          That would seem to suggest that the Elixer doesn’t actually grant immortality, but is actually simply a marker indicating that the recipient is favored by acausal entities from outside the universe. (The author, to be specific.)

          Therefore, any questions of morality would need to be parsed under the understanding that there was an Author, which invalidates quite a few basic moral precepts we have about our universe.

          Plus, if this is interesting immortality, then it includes regeneration and such, which means it takes place in a universe in which our laws of thermodynamics are not absolute, so I don’t know if we can posit heat death as a possibility.

    • baconbacon says:

      Why would someone who has clearly non human characteristics count as human?

    • John Schilling says:

      But being alive after the heat death of the universe is going to be incredibly unpleasant as you float about in space with nothing to do.

      Except perhaps socially interact with the other immortals, of which there will be at least one in this scenario. We’ll assume that sometime in the next infinity years they’ll be able to handwave around the merely physical problems of communication in a post-heat-death universe; they’ve either got indestructible human bodies to throw into the solution space, or their consciousness transcends material limits.

      • baconbacon says:

        Question- how long does it take for two points to cross paths in an infinite space?

      • DrBeat says:

        Except that 1: each of them is very very small and space is very very big and, once anything (like Earth, or the Sun) explodes, they will spend very little time able to perceive each other

        and 2: Kaguya and Mokou despise each other, and I am pretty sure that their nature as beings stretched over eternity prevents them from experiencing character growth that would be necessary for them to learn to tolerate one another (though maybe I am thinking of fairies?)

      • John Schilling says:

        You guys aren’t even trying. These two, and their colleagues to come, have how many trillion years to work the problem before the stars burn out? Learn to gene-edit their immortal, indestructible, but not immutable bodies into blobs so gargantuan that they will be gravitationally bound throughout eternity even when all non-indestructible matter has succumbed to proton decay. Or jump down a black hole together, and when it vanishes in a poof of Hawking radiation it’s a poof of comingled transcendent sapient Hawking radiation permeating the universe. Or learn to take infinitely long, deep, naps, waking only for on the infinitesimal occasions when they do bump into one another, which still adds up to an infinity of shared social interaction. And duplicate the elixir, so as to recruit the companions you’d like to share eternity with.

        Above all, threaten to give the author eternal writers’ block if he doesn’t give you a happier ending.

    • Aegeus says:

      She would also be responsible for all of human happiness at the time, so I think it balances out.

      Also, Kaguya and Mokou have had a few thousand years to come to terms with their immortality, to the point that they try to kill each other for shits and giggles. Point being, I don’t think you can reliably apply the preferences of today to calculate utility a billion years from now.

      Also also, Touhou is a setting with magic. And Gensokyo is a place that defies common sense. Thermodynamics is a polite suggestion at best.

      • DrBeat says:

        Gensokyo doesn’t have common sense, but Gensokyo is still on planet Earth, and when Earth blows up Gensokyo’s lack of common sense won’t help it!

  53. AoxyMouseOnArgo says:

    Serious question that may seem silly.

    To what extent is it interesting that Tim Cook, the CEO is apple, is gay?

    Apple products are known for exquisite design, and the products are marked up oh, a good 300% with the same functionality as other products.

    Would it take a good eye to spot social trends of people, which is otherwise seen in industries like the movie and fashion industry? Stereotypically, that’s a gay male advantage.

    • Evan Þ says:

      I would guess that depends largely on how much of the design he’s responsible for, versus others. I’ve heard that Steve Jobs (who’s AFAIK perfectly straight) single-handedly directed a lot of Apple’s design during his era; has Cook followed suit? Or has he deferred it to the people whom Jobs hired to follow in his footsteps?

    • AnonBosch says:

      As far as I know Apple’s iProduct-era design and aesthetic has been mostly informed by Jonathan Ive, not Steve Jobs or Tim Cook (who I believe came from the sales side of the business).

    • SilasLock says:

      Alternatively, the stereotype could be completely wrong and gay people are just as socially conscious as other people?

      Seems like a silly premise to me. = /

    • Blue says:

      The fact that the CEO of the most profitable company in human history (non inflation adjusted) is a member of a distinct minority group still suffering oppression in many places is fascinating from _so many angles_.

    • Stationary Feast says:

      I’d say it’s not at all interesting, but Cook is kind of a boring guy 99.99% of the time he’s in public.

      Plus, as one of the other commenters pointed out, he was the supply-chain guy, not a designer like Ive or Forstall or an arbiter of taste like Jobs.

    • Deiseach says:

      My impression of them, for what it’s worth, is that Jobs was a guru and Cook is a bean counter. Gay people can be boring and ordinary, too!

  54. Bakkot says:

    The Unit of Caring now has a Patreon – see announcement.

    A lot of people respect TUoC’s writing and would like to cause there to be more of it, myself included. I’m contributing.

    I’ve checked with her about posting this in light of vitriol in response to previous requests for donations and gotten the OK, but was not specifically asked to post it. Even if you are strongly opposed to this (which… I’m not sure why you would be), please try to express your disagreement civilly and with a minimum of personal attacks.

    • Evan Þ says:

      I’m seriously considering supporting her, not so much for donations as “exchange [of] currency for goods and services.” Plus, hey, a feed of her thoughts-not-worth-blogging might be worth the price of two restaurant dinners per year.

      On the other hand, maybe first I should just join Quasi-Rationalist Tumblr to talk with her and many other interesting people…

    • Bakkot says:

      As a reminder, Scott also has one, which is per-post. It’s linked on the sidebar, but you may have overlooked it.

    • eyeballfrog says:

      I read that as “The unit of caring is now the patreon.” and wondered who decided we needed a unit to measure caring.

  55. SpoopySkellington says:

    How about that debate, lads?

    • FacelessCraven says:

      Didn’t watch it, but looking forward to hearing what people who did said.

      I’m pretty sure Trump is toast at this point, so I’d be very surprised to see this turning his numbers around. Too little too late is my guess.

    • pku says:

      I loved the guy at the end. “Say something nice about each other.” aww…
      (Seriously, it really was a decent effort at lowering the anger level in this election).

      • SilasLock says:

        Kudos to that guy. We all needed to hear a question like that asked. =)

        Too bad the candidates used it to throw underhanded insults at each other. But it’s the thought that counts.

        • Virbie says:

          Did they? Trump usually seems incapable of saying positive things about things he dislikes without slipping in an aside, but I thought his answer was (shockingly) pretty straightforwardly complimentary.

        • God Damn John Jay says:

          For the record, Trump’s statement was:

          I will say this about Hillary: She doesn’t quit. She doesn’t give up. I respect that. I tell it like it is. She’s a fighter, I disagree with much of what she’s fighting for, I do disagree with her judgment in many cases, but she does fight hard and she doesn’t quit and she doesn’t give up and I consider that to be a very good trait.

          Clinton’s was

          Well, I certainly will, because I think that’s a very fair and important question, Look I respect his children. His children are incredibly able and devoted and I think that says a lot about Donald. I don’t agree with nearly anything else he says or does, but I do respect that. And I think that is something that as a mother and a grandmother is very important to me.

          I think both of those are pretty great answers, they’re actual compliments and they are both true statements.

          • baconbacon says:

            Saying someone is devoted to a terrible person isn’t a compliment, and saying devoted children are a sign of good parenting isn’t remotely close to correct.

            “Donald, I don’t agree with anything you say or do, but the fact that your children think you are great shows good parenting” is just a bizarre statement.

          • Vaniver says:

            Trump’s “I’ll take that as a compliment” reaction to Clinton’s statement was weird, because I read Clinton as being genuine and complimentary, and Trump’s kids are a big point in his favor. It took guts for Clinton to bring it up, and so I read him as trying to trivialize or question that.

            Trump’s answer about Clinton was ‘safe’ in that it’s the sort of thing that doesn’t make people who dislike Clinton dislike her less. A tireless adversary is worse than a normal adversary!

          • baconbacon says:

            @ Vanvier

            It isn’t a compliment because the statement, in its essence, is “it is more important to me that my kids/grandkids are devoted than they use good judgement”. Compare with an alternate universe where Hillary is able to say “Your children oppose you politically, while still maintaining an apparently healthy relationship with you, this shows you have raised emotionally healthy and independent adults, and admirable combination”.

            Hillary’s actual statement is an indictment of Trump’s parenting, she may not have meant it as an insult but that is just an indictment of herself.

          • Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

            Saying someone is devoted to a terrible person isn’t a compliment, and saying devoted children are a sign of good parenting isn’t remotely close to correct.

            “Donald, I don’t agree with anything you say or do, but the fact that your children think you are great shows good parenting” is just a bizarre statement.

            You’re reading this the wrong way. Clinton is complimenting Donald Trump’s children as incredibly able (which they are), this is a compliment to Trump by proxy because:

            If you believe that parenting matters, the fact that The Donald’s children turned out great is evidence of him being a good father. Particularly, they seem to have avoided a lot of the “showbiz kid” pitfalls that so many fall in.

            Smart and competent people being devoted to someone is evidence that that someone has positive qualities, even if we can’t see them.

          • lemmy caution says:

            you have good kids isn’t really a compliment.

          • onyomi says:

            The implication of “I think that says a lot about Donald” is that the fact that he’s raised smart, mature, poised children must mean he knows how to do something right (the presumption being, if he were all bad, it would rub off on his children and they wouldn’t seem so poised, successful, etc.). It’s a vague, roundabout sort of compliment, but still a compliment.

            For example, I am a professor. If someone said about me “I don’t agree with hardly anything Professor Onyomi says, and he’s got a bad temper and he doesn’t respect women… but his students sure seem to be very smart and competent, and I think that says a lot about him.” That would still be a sort of compliment, because it implies I must be doing something right, even if the person doesn’t know what exactly it is.

          • Psmith says:

            you have good kids isn’t really a compliment.

            I’d certainly as hell take it as one.

          • baconbacon says:

            The implication of “I think that says a lot about Donald” is that the fact that he’s raised smart, mature, poised children must mean he knows how to do something right

            What if Donald’s kids were high level members of a dangerous cult? What if they were poised, mature, smart and were involved in brainwashing runaways and devoted to a Charles Manson type leader?

            It is the “devoted” that turns it from possibly being a compliment to being an insult. If you demonstrate dislike/despise/distrust for someone as much as Hillary has done during the campaign you don’t turn around and say “hey, but at least you corrupted some wonderful people in the process and blinded them against your flaws”.

          • baconbacon says:

            I’d certainly as hell take it as one.

            It all depends on who it is coming from.

          • Zombielicious says:

            It seems like a stretch to take it as a veiled attack. She has a daughter herself, which makes it seem unlikely she’d want to start attacking each other’s kids. Plus if she wanted to insult him, why not just do it directly? Just say, “I’m sorry but I can’t think of anything positive to say about this man.” Needlessly attacking his kids would just make her look petty and be bad strategy, especially since she’s going first and he can just take the high ground and make her look bad. Which seems to be what he was attempting anyway with the “I’ll choose to take it as a compliment” thing.

          • I didn’t watch the debate. But the account here of the final question makes me wonder if it had been leaked in advance to one or both participants.

            The alternatives being that it had been guessed as a possibility and prepared for or that both of them are good at thinking on their feet.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            The key words in Clinton’s answer were “and I think that says a lot about Donald.”

            If she hadn’t added that, the answer would be easy to interpret as a smarmy non-answer answer, but the clear reference to Donald as a parent saves it.

            Trump’s answer was better. He won that exchange of the debate, partially by having the advantage of going last, but mostly by simply answering the question (one of the very few times in the night he actually did that).

          • baconbacon says:

            It seems like a stretch to take it as a veiled attack. She has a daughter herself, which makes it seem unlikely she’d want to start attacking each other’s kids

            I didn’t mean to say (I assume this is directed my way given the direction) that it was an attack, I meant that it wasn’t actually a compliment even if Hillary wanted it to be one.

          • dndnrsn says:

            @David Friedman:

            I imagine they, or someone on their staff, both saw that question coming. I’ve run for meaningless student positions a few times, and questions like that are fairly common. So, they’d probably be equally or more common for positions that matter.

            Questions like that actually serve a purpose: someone who is in a leadership role needs to be able to see the positive in almost anyone, because appealing to the positive parts of a person seem to be the best way to lead them.

          • Anonymous says:

            David Friedman: congratulations on independently discovering a meme!
            http://theblacksphere.net/author/kevin/

            Everyone else: I think that complimenting Donald Trump on his child-rearing was actually meant as a compliment to his ex-wives.

            But like my suspicions that David Friedman gets a lot of his news from VDare and Breitbart, I can’t prove it!

          • “But like my suspicions that David Friedman gets a lot of his news from VDare and Breitbart, I can’t prove it!”

            What’s VDare?

            I’m not sure if I’ve ever read Breitbart. My main source for ordinary news is GoogleNews, which selects from lots of different places, and Breitbart might be one of them.

            I followed your link, didn’t notice any meme that I had independently invented.

        • Autolykos says:

          I wouldn’t call those statements strictly “true”. They agree on a whole lot more than they give each other credit for, it’s just that anything politicians agree on is a non-issue in the media (somewhat justified, but makes everything look a whole lot more divisive than it needs to be).
          For example, I guess they both agree it would be a bad idea to add a portrait of Mickey Mouse to Mt. Rushmore, or to bulldoze Washington DC, cover it in cow dung and plant Kudzu on top of it.

    • onyomi says:

      Consensus seems to be that he did well enough to pull out of his tailspin, but he’s still headed for defeat barring something unexpected. Of course, something unexpected happens every three days in this election…

      Personal subjective impression was that he started off weak (seriously, what’s with the sniffing? You’d think he was the one who recently had pneumonia? Lingering effects of a coke habit? Kind of not joking… he was rich and powerful in the 80s…) but got better as the night went on, both stylistically and in terms of stringing together coherent sentences.

      Nevertheless, the general impression I had with the last debate of “is this seriously a discussion about who is getting the most powerful job in the world??” was not changed. To the extent Trump expressed any actual policy ideas, they seemed like warmed over Paul Ryan kind of stuff. Hillary, as before, said “we’re going to take careful, substantive, well thought-out steps to make sure all the good things happen and none of the bad things happen.”

      It’s so odd how such a competitive primary process has resulted in two (four) such deeply flawed and vulnerable candidates (not that the LP and Green nominations were competitive, but I find myself unexpectedly lacking enthusiasm even to cast the quasi-protest/statement vote for Johnson I intend).

      • youzicha says:

        Towards the end of the of the debate Clinton was asked about supreme court nominees, and I was surprised to hear a sentence about her future policies. (People with prior experience as a judge. That’s an… actual objective criterion, and it would be possible to afterwards agree about whether she applied it or not.) It was an interesting contrast with the “we want more good things and less bad things” of the rest of the debate. She swiftly moved on back to negatives by complaining about the senate not acting on Garland.

        • Perhaps it was pro forma posturing, but I thought she would spurn Garland in favor of a more ideological candidate.

          On the other hand, from a pro-Garland standpoint, maybe it’s better if she acts like she’s going to nominate somebody left-wing, because it will motivate the Senate to confirm Garland immediately after the election.

          It would be unfortunate if Garland were to be cast aside (by either presidential nominee) in favor of polarizing the Court even further.

          • I don’t know anything much about Garland, but the comment I’ve seen on him from libertarians who do is that he’s the worst of both worlds–agrees with conservatives where they are wrong and with liberals where they are wrong.

            Wrong, in both cases, from a libertarian point of view.

          • Stefan Drinic says:

            If your sources are correct, they explain Garland’s being a pick of choice right there.

          • lemmy caution says:

            Game theory suggests that if she does not push through a more left wing candidate than Garland then it is a victory for the republican senate.

          • Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

            David Friedman:

            You might be thinking of this article: https://reason.com/archives/2016/03/30/merrick-garland-extremist

          • HeelBearCub says:

            Garland was picked because he is an eminently qualified judge whose jurisprudential views are similar to Obama’s, and (this is the key point) had been effusively praised by Republicans as someone they would vote to confirm because he was such a great judge.

            Obama guessed they wouldn’t actually do it, which serves to highlight their hypocrisy, while giving a good outcome if they had turned around and actually held hearings, etc.

      • CatCube says:

        It’s so odd how such a competitive primary process has resulted in two (four) such deeply flawed and vulnerable candidates

        I think it might be the competitiveness, or more specifically, the form it takes in our current media culture that explains it. Nobody who doesn’t want power so badly that they can taste it would subject themselves to the inanity and humiliation of the current electoral process. This is going to tend to drive out decent people.

        • Le Maistre Chat says:

          My prior, with apologies to Lord Macaulay, is that power corrupts not in proportion to how much you have, but how much you lust for.
          So it would be far more probable to get a good hereditary monarch than a good President.

          • Lumifer says:

            “Appetite comes with eating”.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            So it would be far more probable to get a good hereditary monarch than a good President.

            I’m quite ready to believe that that’s true; the problem comes when your hereditary line throws up a Caligula or Henry VI, and you don’t have any way to get rid of him (short of assassination/rebellion, that is).

      • The original Mr. X says:

        the quasi-protest/statement vote for Johnson I intend

        Go ahead! Throw your vote away!

    • Zombielicious says:

      I’ve watched most of it at this point (waiting on SO to have time so we can finish it together). Nothing really profound to say that hasn’t already been said, but I can’t think of another debate, at least outside of the recent Republican primaries, that came close to that level of hostility and vitriol. More so than the last, and pretty much what I was expecting would happen if it came down to Trump vs Clinton. Not that it was particularly bad compared to the baseline of global political history, but it was definitely a reflection of the current era, and a noticeable change from the “we need to work together and reach across the aisle, put an end to divisive politics” rhetoric of the 2008 election. Trump did seem better prepared this time, as he should have been for the last one, which might have made things a little less hopeless for him.

      It’s more amusing that the first question was essentially about civility and whether the debate atmosphere was making them poor role models for youth, all of which was of course promptly ignored within 30 seconds of them finishing their faux responses. Also, some props to Trump for having the balls to attempt the “vote for me if you want to see this ***** in jail” strategy.

    • Nathan says:

      Didn’t like Trump saying he would put Clinton in jail. I think a lot of the anti-Trump stuff is overblown, but I can very easily imagine him using the powers of the presidency to go after people who criticise him. That’s pretty toxic to democracy.

      Hoping for Clinton to win while Republicans hold the Senate.

      • Brad (The Other One) says:

        Didn’t like Trump saying he would put Clinton in jail.

        That was the only thing Trump said all night I liked!

      • Alex Zavoluk says:

        Unless he’s threatened to put other people in jail who have criticized him and haven’t actually violated national security policy, I wouldn’t take threatening to prosecute Clinton that way (Obama would probably pardon her anyway).

        Now, his actual statements about loosening libel laws and going after journalists, *that* is a valid reason to be concerned.

        • Randy M says:

          Obama would probably pardon her anyway

          Non-rhetorical questions:
          Can someone be pardoned before they are convicted?
          If so, can they be pardoned before they are indicted?
          If so, can they be pardoned before their crime is noticed?
          If so, can they be pardoned before their crime is committed?

          • Richard says:

            not before it’s committed it seems.

            In 1866, the Supreme Court ruled in Ex parte Garland that the pardon power “extends to every offence known to the law, and may be exercised at any time after its commission, either before legal proceedings are taken, or during their pendency, or after conviction and judgment.

          • CatCube says:

            The president can apparently grant blanket immunity, as was done with the Vietnam draft-dodgers. They had committed crimes, but many of them were either unindicted or had their crimes go unnoticed.

            Edit: This says nothing about your last question about before the crime is committed. However, a pardon can certainly be granted before indictment or even investigation for specific crimes.

          • brad says:

            One wrinkle is that the person pardoned has to accept the pardon. A pardon is considered an admission of guilt and some have refused to except them.

          • Randy M says:

            Not sure what you meant to link? I did recall that, which is why I didn’t blurt out something like “He can’t pardon her, she hasn’t been tried,” and went with an honest if lazy request for clarification.

        • Anonymous Bosch says:

          Unless he’s threatened to put other people in jail who have criticized him and haven’t actually violated national security policy

          “@SteveRattner While I think you should have gone to prison for what you did, I guess Obama saved you. But watch – I will win!”Tweet, 27 Jul 2015

          This was prompted by his appearance on Morning Joe criticizing Trump. Rattner paid a substantial settlement in 2010 in a civil lawsuit with the state AG over pay-to-play pension fund referrals but was never charged criminally.

      • Garrett says:

        powers of the presidency to go after people who criticise him

        For reference, Hillary is opposed to the Citizens United ruling. That case revolved around the distribution of movie which was specifically criticizing Hillary. Opposition to that specific decision strikes me more as trying to put opponents into jail than doing so to someone who actually broke the law (if unintendedly).

        • Chalid says:

          Since virtually every Democrat opposes Citizens United (along with a supermajority of voters), the fact that Clinton does so as well tells you virtually nothing about her.

        • Anonymous Bosch says:

          I am firmly supportive of the Citizens United ruling but believing that a neutral, bipartisan, and possibly unwise law should be reinstated is a far cry from making specific threats regarding a specific opposition figure.

    • Fahundo says:

      Couldn’t watch it because power was out due to the hurricane. And yet people will still deny the vast media conspiracy to rig this election.

      • Randy M says:

        I bet you live in a swing state too! Which way was it leaning, we’ll know who has the weather machine controls.

    • Vaniver says:

      Really liked Anderson Cooper as a moderator.

    • eyeballfrog says:

      I’m so conflicted about this election. I like what Trump represents for the Republican party: a realignment of what issues to consider important. Trying to get the party to reach out to LGBT by playing up the Islam skepticism angle was great. The greater focus on immigration policy is great. And honestly, having someone who’s not an establishment politician is pretty nice, too.

      The problem is that I just don’t like Trump. There’s no getting around it, and this debate kind of made that clear to me. I’ve had goodwill towards him, but I think most of that comes from the above and not because I think he himself would make a good leader. So in that respect I kind of want him to lose.

      But then I get concerned that if he does lose, the stuff I like about what he’s done will vanish into the aether. If he loses in a landslide, the Republicans may see those things as a losing strategy and go back to their old ways. So in that respect, I should hope that Hillary wins in a nailbiter-close election. Maybe even have a 2000-style win where Trump marginally wins the popular vote. Show that this is a winning strategy if they just pick a better candidate for 2020. This bizarrely suggests I should vote for Trump but hope he loses.

      But then I also wonder if it will be too late then. Some of these issues, like immigration, might require swift action. Will it be too late in 2020? Maybe a strong Trump showing will embolden a Republican congress to try to push some things through despite Clinton being president. How much that might depend on being able to veto override is unclear, and I don’t think they’ll take the house or senate quite that strongly.

      So, yeah. Maybe it’ll come out that Hillary actively helped ISIS form or is planning on selling part of the Southwest back to Mexico or something. Maybe it will come out that Trump really did sexually assault a bunch of women or has massive debts to the Russian mafia or something. Maybe one of them will die and obviate the whole issue (they are 70+, after all). But until then, I’m really not sure what I want from this election.

      • hlynkacg says:

        I share your consternation.

        Edit:
        Ok, that’s weird, is this post showing up as anon to anyone else?

      • Lumifer says:

        A Giant Meteor sounds better and better…

      • Eccdogg says:

        I think Trump has shown that a natavist policy stance that focuses on blue collar whites is a potential winner in lots of places that Republicans have had trouble winning (Wisconsin, Iowa, OH, PA, MI, etc). I think what is holding him back is the general package of Trump personality wise and the question of his ability to actually be the president.

        I think the next Republican integrates some of those themes with a more competent looking candidate and might be tough to beat. And the next guy will likely be running against a very unpopular sitting president. I think moving forward you will see a Republican party that is less free trade, more hard line on immigration, softer on social issues, and maybe less interventionist though I don’t know on that one.

        ETA: Kind of like how Reagan followed Goldwater.

        • dndnrsn says:

          Are the demographics there to support that, though? Are there enough blue-collar whites to elect such a candidate?

          • I think the question is whether there are enough people attracted by such policies to more than balance the loss of regular Republican voters who would be repelled by them. It doesn’t take a very large number to shift a party from a little below half to a little above half.

          • Eccdogg says:

            No, you can’t just get blue collar whites and win, you also need a good chunk of college educated whites which is why you can’t go full Trump.

            But I would point to the polls leading up to the debates as a test case. Trump was tied in CO and up in NV, NC, FL, OH, IA. 538 had the race as 55/45 Clinton and all Trump needed to do was win CO and he would have won the race. Now that all evaporated after the first debate, but it is amazing that with Trump’s faults he was that close.

            You put a guy up there who doesn’t go full Trump policy wise but goes pretty far in his direction that looks like he could actually do the job and doesn’t have Trumps personality/baggage that might be a winner. The big question is how much of Trumps support is because of his personality vs his policies.

          • Alejandro says:

            @Eccdogg: But that Trump came so close to tying Clinton was also due to her having big personal negatives of her own for a large segment of the population. Take your candidate with a Trumpian ideology and without his baggage, put him against a generic Democrat without Clinton’s baggage, and my bet is that the Democrat would win.

          • Eccdogg says:

            You maybe right. But the next Dem candidate is very likely to have Clinton’s baggage because it is very likely to be Clinton.

      • Vaniver says:

        I’ve said a few times that Trump is the elite’s Karmic punishment for no-platforming their opponents on several issues. Instead of Thilo Sarrazin, the sort of competent intellectual who could implement immigration restriction well for the right sort of reasons, we get Donald Trump, the sort of self-promoter who can win campaigns but whose ability to govern is unproven (to say the least).

        But a consequence of this is that, as far as I can tell, we don’t have a Sarrazin to replace Trump with. Maybe some will appear if it’s clear that Trump’s electoral strategy will win. (One could imagine, for example, Trump winning, many people making good on their threat to move to Canada, and then the electoral math swinging towards the Republicans.)

        (Amusingly enough, in a bit of nominative determinism, Sarrazin’s name means ‘Muslim,’ and comes from Saracen.)

      • Mr Mind says:

        But if Trump has run inside the GOP but has won with a completely different set of values, doesn’t that mean that the GOP has failed?
        To what extent a political party is defined by its values or by an empty flag under which people rally?

        • Sandy says:

          I think a lot of the pro-Trump conservatives have pointed to the popularity of his campaign (rather than just the fact that he won) as proof that the GOP has failed and in fact has been failing for quite some time — that the official party platform is the product of the preferences of country club blue bloods and Ivy League-stocked think tanks rather than what the base, the people the party expects votes from, actually wants. The repeated comparisons of the GOP to the Washington Generals, for example. Their contention is that the platform that Jeb Bush, Mitt Romney et al want is not the platform of people who actually want to win elections, but that of people who want to be the ceremonial punching bag sticking to what they consider “principled conservatism” while the left marches through the institutions and degrades everything.

          • Anonymous says:

            These people either don’t understand the median voter theorem or don’t have a strong grasp on who the median voter is. Washington conservatives are how they are because they want to win, not as part of some Colmes like plot to throw the game.

          • Eccdogg says:

            I don’t know, I think there is always some uncertainty about what types of coalitions can be formed.

            Political parties try to form a coalition of 51%, but it is not always clear what a sustainable coalition looks like and parties don’t react instantaneously.

            It sometimes takes a political entrepreneur to break out into a new equilibrium coalition. I think Trump has done that somewhat. Now it looks like he is going to lose, and maybe that makes you think that that coalition does not exist. Maybe that is right. But my hunch is that Trump’s losing has more to do with personality and competence than the themes of his campaign.

            My guess is a less flawed Republican takes look a the lessons of Trump’s campaign and incorporates them. That is just conjecture though.

          • Anonymous says:

            The thing that will determine whether or not that is viable is when we can crunch the turn-out data and find out whether Trump brings out new voters in substantial numbers. If that’s true I can see a coalition shake-up. If it isn’t — and most of the Trump phenomenon is energizing existing Republican voters plus some poaching on the margin, then I don’t see a shake-up happening.

    • jsmith says:

      While historically being strongly anti-clinton and moderately pro-trump may make me slightly biased, I thought Trump completely destroyed her, to the point where I’m 100% going to take a few hours off of work to vote for him now.

      • pku says:

        Post-debate polls had it as a (mild) Clinton victory. While they may be off, they’re probably not off by “he destroyed her” levels.

        • jsmith says:

          Well, I’m talking from my perspective obviously, since that is what will influence my vote. Polls don’t and shouldn’t do that.

          That said, he, as always, has disappointed me with some of his sidesteps, particularly on environmental issues (I don’t think Clinton’s empty rhetoric was any better), but in terms of overall performance, when the biggest complaints are that ‘he was looming over Clinton,’ that he wants to throw a criminal in jail, or that he said “acidwash” instead of “bleachbit,” [https://heavyeditorial.files.wordpress.com/2016/10/cover32.jpg?quality=65&strip=all&strip=all](keep in mind that acidwashing is a well used term in the tech industry and Trump was more or less accurate here.) I kinda have to laugh the criticisms off.

          However, for what it’s worth, I just took a look at whatever polls I could find, and your narrative seems to be a little off.

          Fox5:~65000 votes (http://fox5sandiego.com/2016/10/09/who-won-the-second-presidential-debate/)
          Trump 85%
          Clinton 13%

          BuzzFeed:~3.5m votes (https://www.buzzfeed.com/sarahburton/who-won-the-second-presidential-debate?utm_term=.mjn4vqKQg#.fiYv2NQ14)
          Trump 92%
          Clinton 2%

          Drudge:~1.1m votes (http://www.drudgereport.com/)
          Trump:73%
          Clinton:27%

          Fox6:~300k votes (http://fox6now.com/2016/10/09/hillary-clinton-or-donald-trump-who-won-the-second-presidential-debate-cast-your-vote-in-our-poll/
          )
          Trump 47%
          Clinton 53%

          Mediaite:~120k votes (http://www.mediaite.com/online/poll-so-who-won-the-second-presidential-debate/)
          Clinton 59%
          Trump 41%

          Breitbart 180k votes (http://www.breitbart.com/2016-presidential-race/2016/10/09/poll-won-presidential-debate/)
          Trump 92%
          Clinton 8%

          Politopinion: 300k votes (http://politopinion.com/2016/10/town-hall-presidential-debate-poll/)
          Trump 92%
          Clinton 8%

          q13Fox: (http://q13fox.com/2016/10/09/vote-who-won-the-2nd-presidential-debate/)
          Trump 79%
          Clinton 13%

          CNN: (no reported numbers, link to poll, or place to vote, but “CNN’s political director also cautioned that the instant poll’s sample skewed slightly Democratic.”)
          Clinton 57%
          Trump 34%
          63% said Trump performed better than expected

          PBS poll: (http://www.pbs.org/weta/washingtonweek/question/who-won-second-presidential-debate)
          Throws error if you try to vote or view results

          Admittedly places like Breitbart and Drudge skew heavily conservative in their readership, and I’m sure you can probably pull up some polls in Clinton’s favor if you tried (I just checked wapost, abc, etc but couldn’t find them), but every article I’ve seen saying Clinton won has relied on the CNN poll, which I don’t think is a good sign for her.

          Keep in mind, I’m gain nothing from saying “Trump Won,” as it will persuade literally no-one. And that most people probably made up their minds before the debates and it won’t change anyone’s mind one way or another. And that polls are typically a reflection of the sites readership and not necessarily indicative of their performance. But this is what I saw.

          • pku says:

            Instant-response polls tend to skew heavily towards Trump in general, which I think is driving most of those – in principle, I wouldn’t trust any poll that had either candidate below 20%. The CNN poll is the one I saw, which is more reliable according to 538, who (at least when it comes to poll quality) are generally pretty reliable.
            The other main indicator is the betting markets – overall, they didn’t shift much over the debate, and have since shifted slightly towards Clinton (she’s about 2% up over the last 24 hours).

            In terms of persuading people who were leaning Trump to vote for him – yeah, I believe it would do that. My personal impression was that he did a pretty good job, managing to be relaxed and possibly put the tape thing behind him. But “destroyed her” is probably wrong.

          • tgb says:

            Were those the biggest complaints you heard? From my end, coming with the opposite biases, he appeared utterly unhinged for the first half-hour or so and I have to imagine that his managers breathed a sigh of relief when the moderators forced a topic switch. He landed some blows on Clinton, but not without furthering his image as impulsive and uncontrolled. That’s not the worst, though. The worst were moments like when he was question about what would happen if Aleppo fell – and it was clear that he had no idea how to answer (I think he ended with something like “Well, it basically has fallen already”). Sure, Clinton’s answers were largely “more good things, less bad things” but at least she knows what the issues are. Is the only thing Trump knows about tax code is that one carried interest loophole? And then Clinton points out she’s also been in favor of removing it, so it’s not even an interesting talking point!

            Or moments like “RADDATZ: There are sometimes reasons the military does that. Psychological warfare. / TRUMP: I can’t think of any. I can’t think of any. And I’m pretty good at it.” Creativity is not his strong suit. Or how about “COOPER: Secretary Clinton, does Mr. Trump have the discipline to be a good leader? / CLINTON: No. / TRUMP: I’m shocked to hear that.” You want to convince us that you have the discipline to be president but do so by interrupting someone? Yeah, that’s not helping. Or his bizarre misinterpretation of the 3am twitter question – is he actually unaware the problem wasn’t that he tweeted at 3am but about what he was tweeting?

            The “looming” criticisms were ridiculous, of course. How did that become a matter of public fixture? So bizarre.

            Now, all things considered he did better than I expected. The early part looked like a steep nosedive to a breakdown, but he picked things up for the most part.

          • Johnjohn says:

            Aren’t all of those polls online polls?
            AKA completely meaningless?

            As in, literally worth less than nothing.

      • The Nybbler says:

        I think he won that debate. They started with the Access Hollywood tape; he took some damage there but put it mostly behind him. If they’d ended with it, he’d have been much worse off. His content was terrible (putting your opponent in jail is not a good idea, probably not even if she did use her own political power to avoid indictment in the first place), but it kept the focus on her weaknesses rather than his.

    • JayT says:

      The debate was essentially what I expected it to be. Though Clinton’s constant posturing on Russia was quite off-putting to me. Especially that she seems to still think a a no-fly zone in Syria is a good idea. I have been pulling for Clinton because I think she is by far the better candidate when it comes to economic issues, but her Russia hate is kind of disconcerting to me.

      • tgb says:

        That was easily the most interesting part of the debate. We just saw the likely future president basically taking every chance she could get to bad mouth a major super power that we had be cautiously getting along with. I don’t know enough to say whether it was a smart move geopolitically, but in a month we’ll be forgetting about this election but Russia will still be here.

        • On the other hand, I expect her badmouthing was aimed at American voters not Russians. So by a month after the election it may have vanished.

          • Latetotheparty says:

            People have accused Trump supporters of straining to read Trump’s outbursts in the most charitable light imaginable. This seems to me like doing the equivalent for Hillary.

            I mean, there’s no way that Russia would feel so cornered by this rhetoric coming from Hillary that they might…I don’t know…start having nationwide civil defense drills or anything….nawww…It’s not like professor emeritus on Russian history Stephen Cohen is scared to death that America and Russia might be about to blunder into WW3…I’m sure everything with Russia will be just peachy…right?

          • cassander says:

            on the other hand, she’s been consistently selling the no fly zone idea for a long time, which is frightening because it’s a really bad idea on a number of levels that she seems to genuinely think is a good idea.

          • houseboatonstyxb says:

            @ David Friedman

            I’m beginning to wonder how old some of these commentors are. In recent times I see here a lot of anti-Communist posts about famines when various old Communist leaders took over; and attacks on our own members who describe themselves as Communists; and fierce equation of certain projects with Socialism=Communism. All familiar stuff. But now suddenly no one seems to mind that the Russians are hacking our government computers and (apparantly) messing with our elections?

          • Lumifer says:

            no one seems to mind that the Russians are hacking our government computers

            Cyberwar at the moment is a free-for-all. The Russians and the Chinese are hacking us, we are hacking Russia and China, they hack each other, I’m sure the Brits and the Israelis and all the other usual suspects are not just standing there twiddling their thumbs, there are government-employed hackers, government-proxy hackers, plain old mercenary hackers, etc. etc.

            It’s the war in the shadows, the new Great Game.

          • cassander says:

            @houseboatonstyxb

            I don’t like putin, but the comparisons of him to communism, or current strife with russia to the cold war, are silly. Modern russia threatens to undermine the US global system at the edges, and that’s bad. But the USSR was an entire alternative system, and it was an alternative system build on the murder of tens of millions of its own citizens which had repeatedly demonstrated its willingness to force countries into that system and which posed a massive conventional military threat to western europe.

            Putin’s not a nice guy, but he hasn’t slaughtered millions to build up an ideological empire dedicated to global revolution, and shouldn’t be treated as such.

      • Latetotheparty says:

        Ditto here. I had pretty much written off the idea of voting for Trump when Mike Pence went all anti-Russia warmongering in the VP debate, but I was pleasantly surprised to hear Trump outright disagree with his VP over Russia and Syria last night…so now I’m back on the fence as to whether to vote for that orange fecal cesspit of a human being…if only to avoid having Killary start WW3 in Syria.

        • Jill says:

          You are assuming that saying good things about Russia will have a positive effect on relations with them and will avoid war, and that saying bad things will do the opposite. Trump has been so idolizing of Putin that there is a danger, if he were elected, that he would kowtow to Putin, perhaps in return for permission to build hotels or casinos in Russia. This could result in Putin treating the U.S. like a doormat, which would eventually result in war– once Putin crossed a certain line that the U.S. felt it had to draw e.g trying to take over a lot of Eastern Europe again, shooting down U.S. planes without provocation etc.

          • cassander says:

            the idea with anyone with an ego like trump’s kowtowing to anyone strikes me as laughable.

          • Latetotheparty says:

            I don’t understand where all of this hostility towards Russia is coming from. Jill often complains that people are so immersed in right-wing propaganda that they can’t think straight about Trump. Well, I would counter that people are so immersed in American exceptionalism that they can’t think straight about Russia.

            Is Putin a dictator? No. I would compare him to FDR, actually. He’s a strongman who took over during a time of troubles and took drastic measures to stop his country’s free-fall. Like FDR, he has been popularly re-elected to many terms for this. You can argue about whether some of his policies were counter-productive or not, but the point is, most of his policies are genuinely popular (80% approval rating, and yes, I believe those numbers). Does he lean on the scales a bit? Probably. So did FDR (attempted Supreme Court packing, illegally confiscating gold, all the other unconstitutional programs he passed). Plus, not everything that Putin wants passes. Recently Putin wanted to privatize more state-owned businesses in Russia recently. Didn’t happen. He is not some dictator with a death-grip on his country. But the Western media has so saturated people with this idea that you can’t say anything otherwise without being called a paid Russian agent.

            Now, as for foreign policy goes, here’s how I would handle Russia:

            1. Pull U.S. special forces and airstrikes out of Syria. We have no business being there. Our presence there is illegal under international law. We have not been invited by the legitimate govt. there, whereas Russia has. If we get permission from Assad to help fight ISIS, then sure, we can stay and do that, and maybe set up some civilian safe zones like Trump wants to do. Otherwise, no.

            Yes, the Syrian Civil War ain’t pretty, but the U.S. is only prolonging it the longer they continue to supply Islamist rebels to fight the Assad govt. We should be rooting for Assad to stay in power. He ain’t pretty either, but the Middle-East right now never gives you ideal options. Assad is certainly better than ISIS or Al-Nusra. And those are the alternatives (aside from the Kurds, who have an admirable experiment going on, but who would never be tolerated to rule the rest of the country). The supposed “secular” opposition is no longer an option. Their forces and influence are minuscule. The only reason the U.S. continues to hang onto the idea that there is any significant number of “moderate” rebels is to justify its arming of groups that it doesn’t want to admit are mujahideen. Arming the Taliban in Afghanistan all over again. People who have no loyalty to our ideals, and who will backstab us at the drop of a hat and use our very weapons and training against us. Insane.

            Whereas, if Assad stays in power, it won’t be the end of the world. The U.S. has put up with him for decades. Why draw the line on him now? (This is also why I don’t understand the Libya intervention either. We had put up with Ghaddafi’s antics for decades. What really fundamentally changed to make it imperative that we get rid of him RIGHT NOW? All the humanitarian arguments feel a little too convenient).

            2. Drop the Crimea issue. Let Russia have it. This is non-negotiable for Russia, there is literally no conceivable strategy for the Ukraine ever taking it back at this point short of WW3, and the only reason it belonged to Ukraine in the first place was an administrative quirk in the Soviet Union. It has been, until very very recently, a part of Russia. Let it go.

            3. Put pressure on the Ukrainian govt. to implement and abide by the Minsk II accord: the Donbass stays technically a part of the Ukraine, albeit with greater autonomy.

            4. Do not bring the Ukraine into NATO. This is their “Cuban Missile Crisis.” To Russians, this is like having nukes 90 miles off the coast from Miami. They are rightfully paranoid of Western invasion ever since Barbarossa, and they will never tolerate this final act of encirclement.

            5. Stand firm in our NATO commitment to the Baltic states and others. Ideally, I would have never brought the Baltic states into NATO, as this was the understanding that Russia had in the 1990s during what could have been the end of the Cold War and a real turning point in diplomatic relations. The U.S. and NATO tore up that understanding by inviting the Baltic states into NATO. But, what’s done is done. We have given our word, and we must stick by it. Our promises must have credibility: not just because Putin could take advantage of us, but because any other country could as well. China, North Korea, Israel…we lose leverage all around the world if we continue to appear “not-agreement-capable” as we currently do with Russia. We shouldn’t compound that by abandoning the Baltic states over quibbling about chump change (the extra billion or so that Trump wants them to pay for their own defense).

            This is one area where I’m not a fan of Trump’s rhetoric. But compared to Hillary’s crazy WW3 rhetoric (a no-fly-zone in Syria WILL start a gradually-escalating war with Russia), Trump still looks like a goddamn saint.

          • Aapje says:

            @Latetotheparty

            You can argue about whether some of his policies were counter-productive or not, but the point is, most of his policies are genuinely popular (80% approval rating, and yes, I believe those numbers).

            His policies are popular because he controls the media. Furthermore, the Russians are traumatized from when the neoliberals tried to force Russia into becoming a Western nation in a way that was way too disruptive. Due to a lack of good alternative models in their history, the Russian leaders and populace are regressing into USSR/cold war mode.

            So the popularity of these politics is more an indication that the Russian people are ignorant than that they are on a productive course.

            But the Western media has so saturated people with this idea that you can’t say anything otherwise without being called a paid Russian agent.

            That sounds more like a straw man than an accurate assessment of what people believe.

            The evidence that paid Russian commenters do exist, logically leads people to regard pro-Russia posters with suspicion and merely indicates that they are rational. However, I’ve seen plenty of people give opinions with nuance that are not seen as being a paid Russian mole.

          • Latetotheparty says:

            Is the mainstream Russian media really all that more controlled or deferential than the mainstream U.S. media is to our government? Sure, RT tows a pro-Kremlin line, for sure, but it’s not like they are the only game in town anymore. And it would probably disappoint a lot of Americans that Putin’s strongest critics are actually on the right rather than the left. Unfortunately Western-style liberals have been discredited ever since the 1990s when their ideas seemed to put Russia into a tailspin. The two next-largest parties in Russia are…the Communist Party, and the far-right LDP. Also influential is the banned neo-Nazi National Bolshevik Party.

            Putin got a lot of flak from Russian nationalists for not doing more in the Ukraine. The nationalists wanted a full-scale invasion. Putin is actually the sane compromiser. And people idealize what Russia would look like without a strong executive to keep these competing extremists at bay….

            Maybe someday Russia’s political system will look more like something that the West can identify with. But it is not this day….

          • Aapje says:

            @Latetotheparty

            Is the mainstream Russian media really all that more controlled or deferential than the mainstream U.S. media is to our government?

            Yes.

            Sure, RT tows a pro-Kremlin line, for sure, but it’s not like they are the only game in town anymore.

            Modern autocrats have realized that you don’t need 100% control over the media, but rather, you just have to marginalize the opposition. These autocrats accept small oppositional media and political parties, also as a shield against criticism, but remove them if they threaten to get too big.

            Unfortunately Western-style liberals have been discredited ever since the 1990s when their ideas seemed to put Russia into a tailspin.

            Nation-building is extremely hard, as it requires more than just new institutions. It requires a new mentality as well. As most Western politicians/bureaucrats have no understanding of how their own institutions can only function by being intertwined with their countries’ culture, they don’t have the ability to create functioning institutions effectively (except by chance, sometimes).

            The two next-largest parties in Russia are…the Communist Party, and the far-right LDP. Also influential is the banned neo-Nazi National Bolshevik Party.

            Yes, like I said: they have no good models to fall back on.

            Putin got a lot of flak from Russian nationalists for not doing more in the Ukraine. The nationalists wanted a full-scale invasion. Putin is actually the sane compromiser. And people idealize what Russia would look like without a strong executive to keep these competing extremists at bay…

            Putin is stoking the nationalism a lot to gain support from the people, so it is a bit much to declare him the savior from the flames that he helps to fan.

          • Lumifer says:

            @ Aapjie

            Modern autocrats have realized that you don’t need 100% control over the media, but rather, you just have to marginalize the opposition.

            /me looks at the current US election campaign

            /me grins

          • Manya says:

            My question for Latetotheparty is this:

            How exactly would you demonstrate your commitment to the Baltic countries and, at the same time, just abandon Ukraine to deal with Russia on its own? That seems like sending mixed messages at best.

          • John Schilling says:

            I hope I’m not late to the party, but I think one can draw a pretty solid line between nations we have signed mutual defense treaties with and nations we have not signed mutual defense treaties with. The Baltic states are part of NATO, Ukraine isn’t. If we say that, because of this, we would lament the invasion and conquest of Ukraine but wage bloody total war to prevent the conquest of Estonia, that’s a politically coherent position.

            And if there’s any doubt about our commitment to the Baltic states, we can put a battalion of American ground troops in each of them, whose flag-draped coffins would impose an intolerable political cost on any POTUS who didn’t at least avenge their deaths (and dress it up in prettier words than that, of course).

          • Salem says:

            What’s relevant is defence treaties – the mutual is irrelevant. Russia has flouted the Budapest Memorandum, and the US has done nothing about it. It certainly looks like US security guarantees are worthless.

            If you want to finesse the distinction, you have to argue that the security guarantees given to the Ukraine were never ratified by the Senate, or something of that nature. Which is going to embolden China…

          • Anonymous Bosch says:

            What’s relevant is defence treaties – the mutual is irrelevant. Russia has flouted the Budapest Memorandum

            The Budapest Memorandum was not a treaty. Treaties are ratified by the Senate and legally bind subsequent Presidents. The Budapest Memorandum was an executive agreement. A former diplomat who worked in Eastern Europe at the time explicitly stated the first Bush administration worded the agreement short of a military guarantee because we were unwilling to extend one at the time.

            You can call this a “finesse” if you want, but the difference between a treaty and an agreement is pretty well-established in US law.

          • Salem says:

            Yes, my second paragraph points out that argument is available.

            Do you really think it’s a good one? The US does not have a treaty with Taiwan.

            America has security relationships involving varying levels of implicit and explicit commitment with a large number of actors in the world. It would reverse decades of foreign policy, and greatly harm US interests, were it to announce that it is only committed to the explicit terms of ratified treaties, such as NATO.

          • Anonymous Bosch says:

            Do you really think it’s a good one? The US does not have a treaty with Taiwan.

            America has security relationships involving varying levels of implicit and explicit commitment with a large number of actors in the world. It would reverse decades of foreign policy, and greatly harm US interests, were it to announce that it is only committed to the explicit terms of ratified treaties, such as NATO.

            Well, I would not advocate military intervention in the case of a mainland Chinese invasion of Taiwan, so yes, I think it’s a pretty good distinction. This has been obvious since the abrogation of the original ROC treaty by the Carter Administration, so I don’t think an explicit announcement is necessary.

            Why do you believe this would “greatly harm US interests?” The list of countries we are currently obligated to defend is already fairly explicit. I think it’s fairly safe to include Mexico de facto, despite their absence from the Rio treaty, as we would obviously not acquiesce to the invasion of our most populous neighbor and largest trading partner, but an invasion of Mexico is a crazy hypothetical anyway.

            I am 100% down with a moratorium on NATO expansion and with the general idea that the US should not be so quick to project force around the world. Insofar as one is willing to ignore “take the oil” and other such pronouncements to take a rosy, dovish view of a Trump foreign policy, I wouldn’t object to its goals. I object to its haphazard and ambiguous methods. (I also don’t believe one should ignore “take the oil,” as it seems to be one of the few views Trump has been historically consistent with.)

          • bean says:

            America has security relationships involving varying levels of implicit and explicit commitment with a large number of actors in the world. It would reverse decades of foreign policy, and greatly harm US interests, were it to announce that it is only committed to the explicit terms of ratified treaties, such as NATO.

            This is a very important point. Once, about 60 years ago, the secretary of state made a speech in which he explicitly laid out the US defensive perimeter, excluding a country which previous had been at least arguably the beneficiary of US security guarantees. The country? South Korea. The result? 36,000 US dead over the course of three years, and troop deployments that continue to this day.
            Doubt is actually a valuable thing in international politics. Would the US intervene militarily if China tries to invade Taiwan? Maybe. Probably not. But the Chinese can’t be sure of that, and the benefits of taking over Taiwan aren’t enough to outweigh that chance. By removing doubt in Korea, Dean Acheson made Stalin confident enough to sanction the invasion. A policy where we repudiate all implicit security guarantees would remove a lot of good doubt, and conversely add a lot of bad doubt. This is particularly true because the US nuclear umbrella is largely implicit.

          • John Schilling says:

            Doubt is actually a valuable thing in international politics. Would the US intervene militarily if China tries to invade Taiwan? Maybe. Probably not. But the Chinese can’t be sure of that, and the benefits of taking over Taiwan aren’t enough to outweigh that chance.

            If you are certain of that “benefits aren’t enough…” thing being common knowledge, then there should be no harm in establishing a treaty or other formal policy committing the US to repel an invasion that will never come. If you are at all uncertain, you are allowing for the possibility of a nuclear war between two nuclear powers, desired by neither, that could be avoided by making US policy more explicit. Just as the Korean war could have been avoided by making the actual US policy, explicit common knowledge.

            In the broadest realm of international politics, there are circumstances where doubt is the best one can do because credible commitments aren’t possible. When it comes to the US defense of its allies, we have the means and we ought to have the credibility to draw all of our red lines very clearly, and we have repeatedly seen the cost of not doing so. I’m not seeing much of a case for deliberate ambiguity in that context.

          • Lumifer says:

            Being very explicit about commitments means your behaviour becomes very predictable and that’s not necessarily a good thing (consider game theory).

            The advantage of red lines is that you made things inside them safe. The disadvantage is that you made things outside of them free-for-all.

          • bean says:

            If you are certain of that “benefits aren’t enough…” thing being common knowledge, then there should be no harm in establishing a treaty or other formal policy committing the US to repel an invasion that will never come.

            You know as well as I do why we can’t do that. The diplomatic community pretends that Taiwan is somehow part of China.

            If you are at all uncertain, you are allowing for the possibility of a nuclear war between two nuclear powers, desired by neither, that could be avoided by making US policy more explicit. Just as the Korean war could have been avoided by making the actual US policy, explicit common knowledge.

            I’m not sure that the actual US policy was different from the one in the speech. I’d have to check, but I believe that Truman et al hadn’t thought much about Korea, and were conflicted over whether or not to intervene.

            In the broadest realm of international politics, there are circumstances where doubt is the best one can do because credible commitments aren’t possible. When it comes to the US defense of its allies, we have the means and we ought to have the credibility to draw all of our red lines very clearly, and we have repeatedly seen the cost of not doing so. I’m not seeing much of a case for deliberate ambiguity in that context.

            Are you arguing for isolationism, or for us signing lots of defense treaties? I’m not quite sure. There are definitely red-line cases, but in a lot of cases, people’s interests aren’t closely enough aligned with ours to make any sort of treaty really feasible. If we make explicit that we will only honor our explicit commitments, we effectively write off everything outside our explicit commitments, and then handicap ourselves when we decide to intervene outside them. I can think of quite a few cases. Kuwait. The Balkans. Panama.

    • pku says:

      The winner was, evidently, Ken Bone.

    • cassander says:

      If trump does as much better between the last debate and this one as he did between the first one and this one, hillary is in trouble.

    • Jordan D. says:

      Debate thoughts:

      1) I found it really hard to listen to. I get annoyed when people turn from substantive discussion to bash opponents over scandals. I kinda knew what I was getting into, going in, but this was real bad.

      2) I appreciate that Clinton wants to cast herself as the more gracious and reasonable person and so is apologizing for her e-mails, but she needs to adjust tack somewhat. Apologizing and saying that she could have done better is one thing, but she should also give a cogent explanation of why she didn’t commit a crime. (Whether you believe she did or not, such explanations do exist and could be re-packaged for mass consumption)

      3) On a related note, I’d call Trump’s promise to have her prosecuted and jailed for the e-mail thing one of the lowest points in presidential debates in decades. Under no possible circumstance will I vote for an executive who promises to jail his political enemies, even if you could charitably interpret this one as ‘I’m just going to have another prosecutor look at this case.’ No, no, no.

      4) The ‘Clinton laughed at the victim of a rapist she was defending’ meme is especially odious.

      5) I understand that arguing with the moderators and casting them as biased is a strategic decision, but it comes off as really petty when they’re obviously trying to be evenhanded.

      6) I’m torn on Russia- on the one hand, if the feds are right that Putin’s trying to rig this election for Trump, that’s alarming. On the other hand, this is the kind of claim which any politician could plausibly make about an opponent AND I’m not all that interested in escalating tensions with the Russians. On the whole, I did not like Clinton’s hard-line stance.

      7) If your campaign is so fractured that the presidential candidate denounces the VP’s stance a week later, can it even be called a ‘campaign’? I know some people are delighted to hear Trump swear off Pence’s aggression, but I think that this bodes poorly for the chances of a united and cohesive executive branch.

      8) Ken Bone’s sweater was magnificent.

      9) Trump kept his cool a lot better this time.

      10) I think I came out of the Obamacare question more confused than I went in. Realistically, I understand that ‘Keep the good, do away with the bad’ or ‘Replace with better thing’ are about as detailed as you can get when you’re talking about a national medical regime and you have two minutes, but wow, maybe they should have just cut that question. Also, repeatedly saying ‘lines around the states’ made me think of ‘ring around the rosie’.

      11) I’m sure there was some point to bringing in Bill Clinton’s accusers, but Trump seems to have forgotten to make whatever it was.

      12) SHAKE HANDS AT THE START OF DEBATES OR I’M CALLING THE DEBATE OFF OKAY?????

      • cassander says:

        > Under no possible circumstance will I vote for an executive who promises to jail his political enemies, even if you could charitably interpret this one as ‘I’m just going to have another prosecutor look at this case.’ No, no, no.

        So imagine nixon manages to hang on until 1976. You’d be against Carter if he ran on a platform that included prosecuting him for his crimes? Were you against the democrats that wanted to prosecute Bush for warcrimes?

        For my money, I find establishing the principle that high office is a get out of jail free card, and that this is a virtuous thing, considerably more odious than prosecuting one’s opponent for committing things that would get any ordinary citizen thrown in jail.

        • John Schilling says:

          I’m pretty skeptical of a President who runs on a platform of prosecuting any specific person, ever, for anything. That’s the Attorney General’s job, and I think it is a Really Bad Idea for any POTUS to tell the AG how to do that part of their job or use a will-prosecute-X litmus test in selecting an AG.

          • cassander says:

            The AG works for the president, full stop. And trump didn’t say he’d order the AG to investigate, but appoint a special prosecutor which gives at least some independence.

        • Anonymous Bosch says:

          So imagine nixon manages to hang on until 1976. You’d be against Carter if he ran on a platform that included prosecuting him for his crimes?

          I get what you’re saying here, but Nixon was 100% done after the smoking gun tape came out (due to a unanimous SCOTUS vote). It wasn’t a matter that could possibly be subject to interpretation. A “manages to hang on” alternative would require either a difference in his actions or a difference in the law.

          • cassander says:

            maybe he manages to get some congressional allies to drag out the proceedings and run out the clock on impeachment. or maybe we’re talking about an alternate universe where everything starts to happen a little later. the details aren’t as important as the basic idea of declaring presidents and presidential candidates above the law.

        • Jordan D. says:

          1) I can’t imagine how that would happen, but yes, I would oppose Carter running on such a platform.

          2) Yes, I was, in fact. I was also against Bernie’s ‘We will put some of those Wall Street fat cats in prison’ rhetoric.

          Look, I was being somewhat hyperbolic- for example, if Clinton came out tomorrow and announced that she planned to nuke China when elected, I would vote for Trump despite my prior claim. But I really do feel strongly about this issue.

          I’m in favor of people being prosecuted for crimes as a general rule. I’m also in favor of high officials being prosecuted for crimes they commit. I’m not in favor of politicians running on the platform that they’ll throw the other batch of crooks in jail, because that seems like a killer way to guarantee corrupt prosecutions, retaliatory imprisonment and further the decline of the public’s faith in the justice system.

          Here in America, we’ve got a pretty good thing going. You can oppose the President and people who are likely to become President as vocally as you want, and you hardly ever get arrested for it. Sometimes, presumably, the opponents of the President have taken actions which could be crimes if somebody motivated enough looked at them. I would still rather those people be free than the President go around appointing special prosecutors to just take a real hard look at that guy.

          ’cause you don’t get hired to take real hard looks at people unless you’re willing to charge them with something.

          • cassander says:

            I admire your consistency, but I still think your position is crazy. the people we’re talking about jailing aren’t being jailed for opposing the president (which has been done before), they’re being jailed for violating the laws that have nothing to do with their campaigns. If Trump or hillary murders someone on live television tomorrow, they should be jailed. to do otherwise is to abandon the notion of rule of law.

          • Jordan D. says:

            If Trump or Hillary murders someone on television tomorrow, do you expect them to walk away free? I’d expect them to be arrested and tried- just not by each other. This seems less about the notion of the rule of law and who we trust to respect it while they’re locking people up.

            I mean, let’s say that, at the next debate, Trump suddenly draws a gun and fires into the audience, right? After a period of chaos, the state police there announce that somebody was charging Trump and he shot in self-defense, so there was no crime and they won’t press charges. The cameras didn’t capture that, and a lot of Hillary’s supporters call for him to be prosecuted for the killing.

            Wouldn’t it leave a bad taste in your mouth of Clinton started suddenly insisting that she’d appoint an independent prosecutor and “lock him up!” No doubt we’d find out that his cousin or something donated to that police department once. We can’t trust them to be honest about this!

            But this is what I’m saying. If the FBI did an about-face tomorrow and decided to recommend that, on the basis of some new evidence, Clinton be prosecuted, I might not like that but I’d accept it. And a lot of that is due to the fact that Director Comey doesn’t stand to gain by throwing a show trial.

          • TheWorst says:

            I’m not sure what would happen, but it looks like creating the norm that “whoever loses the election gets arrested” either wrecks your democracy or is a sign that it’s already wrecked.

          • The Nybbler says:

            @TheWorst:

            This is true, and is the reason I oppose Trump’s plan to have Hillary investigated (If Trump wins, I would recommend Obama pardon her).

            Unfortunately, a reasonable argument can be made that if the people in power can commit real crimes and not be held accountable even after they’ve lost power, that’s bad for rule of law.

          • Randy M says:

            @The Nybbler
            I think that’s one of the strongest anti-Hillary arguments.

          • John Schilling says:

            they’re being jailed for violating the laws that have nothing to do with their campaigns

            I missed the point where Trump promised to imprison the thousands of people who have e.g. sent classified information over private email and escaped with a warning or a plea bargain because that’s actually how we usually handle that offense.

            If Hillary Clinton were to murder someone on live television tomorrow, Donald Trump wouldn’t have a chance to put her in prison because Loretta Lynch would take care of it before inauguration day. But if Hillary is jailed under President Trump for anything she has actually done to date, she’d be being jailed for her campaign against Trump, and pretending otherwise is to abandon the notion of rule of law.

          • cassander says:

            @jordan

            >If Trump or Hillary murders someone on television tomorrow, do you expect them to walk away free? I’d expect them to be arrested and tried- just not by each other.

            if you’re talking about a federal crime, ultimately the president is the prosecutor. there’s no way around that. and if trump murdered someone in a national park tomorrow, I would for damn sure call for him to be arrested

            >Wouldn’t it leave a bad taste in your mouth of Clinton started suddenly insisting that she’d appoint an independent prosecutor and “lock him up!” No doubt we’d find out that his cousin or something donated to that police department once. We can’t trust them to be honest about this!

            if she did it before the normal investigation, yes. if after the investigation, one where trump’s wife met with the AG in question in secret, where trump’s story about the shooting changed repeatedly, where he was caught repeatedly lying to the authorities, if his defense at one point relied on him saying he didn’t know how guns worked, yes, I would support a special prosecutor. I’d prefer it didn’t come to that, but I’d rather we have that then let the elite be above the law.

            @John Schilling

            >I missed the point where Trump promised to imprison the thousands of people who have e.g. sent classified information over private email and escaped with a warning or a plea bargain because that’s actually how we usually handle that offense.

            If hillary had had to plea to even a misdemeanor and pay a fine, I’d be much happier with the current state of affairs. That we couldn’t even get that much for such massive violations of the law I find deeply troubling.

            >If Hillary Clinton were to murder someone on live television tomorrow, Donald Trump wouldn’t have a chance to put her in prison because Loretta Lynch would take care of it before inauguration day. But if Hillary is jailed under President Trump for anything she has actually done to date, she’d be being jailed for her campaign against Trump, and pretending otherwise is to abandon the notion of rule of law.

            And if loretta lynch refused to prosecute her for some reason, what then? Because that is where we are now. hillary massively violated the law and the establishment is refusing to prosecute her. I would prefer that trump didn’t have to appoint a special prosecutor, but that he does is an indictment of others, not him.

            @TheWorst says:

            >I’m not sure what would happen, but it looks like creating the norm that “whoever loses the election gets arrested” either wrecks your democracy or is a sign that it’s already wrecked.

            the norm we’re establishing isn’t anyone who loses gets arrested, lots of people lost and only one of them is up for getting arrested. the norm we’re trying to establish is that running for president doesn’t get you a de facto pardon for all your crimes. Rick perry, I remind, you, got indicted, and while I disagreed with that case and thought it was political, I never argued that rick should be immune to indictment because he had run for the presidency. it’s insane to think that hillary should be so immune.

          • TheWorst says:

            Cassander, just to clarify: Hillary Clinton is almost certainly the single most-investigated person on Earth, and millions and millions of dollars have been spent on trying to find something, anything, illegal that she’s done, and it turns out there’s nothing. (If you have any reason to think this isn’t true, call Trey Gowdy, he needs to hear from you immediately.)

            Meanwhile, Trump’s demonstrably broken a great many laws, to the extent that he jokes about it (and here I mean bribery and misappropriating charity funds, not sexual assault, though he’s almost certainly done that too).

            If a guilty party announces “If I win, I’ll put my innocent opponent in jail,” then they’re declaring that the rule of law ends with their inauguration. There’s actually a decent argument to be made that running for office shouldn’t be a way to stay out of jail – they tried that in the later stages of the Roman Republic, and it turned out poorly – but that argument points in the opposite direction. Pissing off Trump by running against him isn’t a prosecutable offense in a country where the rule of law exists, and the fact that Hillary hasn’t done anything else to earn it is absurdly well-documented.

            Being unpopular with those in power is not, and should never be, a crime. Candidates who announce that they’re going to give their political opponents the Brendan Eich treatment dialed up to eleven are unlikely to be the right choice.

          • John Schilling says:

            Hillary Clinton is almost certainly the single most-investigated person on Earth, and millions and millions of dollars have been spent on trying to find something, anything, illegal that she’s done, and it turns out there’s nothing.

            Also, Al Capone was a totally honest businessman except for that one time when he forgot to report some income on his tax return.

          • cassander says:

            @TheWorst says:

            >Cassander, just to clarify: Hillary Clinton is almost certainly the single most-investigated person on Earth, and millions and millions of dollars have been spent on trying to find something, anything, illegal that she’s done, and it turns out there’s nothing. (If you have any reason to think this isn’t true, call Trey Gowdy, he needs to hear from you immediately.)

            they have found plenty. she has just avoided punishment because she is also one of hte most powerful people on earth. how does that not offend the rule of law?

            >Meanwhile, Trump’s demonstrably broken a great many laws, to the extent that he jokes about it (and here I mean bribery and misappropriating charity funds, not sexual assault, though he’s almost certainly done that too).

            the standards for public officials should be higher, not lower. I and I’ll be happy to jail trump for taking bribes ones we jail the people who took them.

            >If a guilty party announces “If I win, I’ll put my innocent opponent in jail,” then they’re declaring that the rule of law ends with their inauguration.

            It’s a good thing he didn’t say that then, but “i’ll investigate the incredibly serious allegations that have been made against her for which there are mountains of evidence.”

            >Being unpopular with those in power is not, and should never be, a crime. Candidates who announce that they’re going to give their political opponents the Brendan Eich treatment dialed up to eleven are unlikely to be the right choice.

            the problem with clinton is precisely that she isn’t unpopular with those in power, and uses her popularity to break the law with impunity. calling for her prosecution isn’t persecution of political enemies, it’s saying that the law applies even to people named clinton.

          • TheWorst says:

            Yes. They investigated Al Capone much, much less, and they found something.

            By stark contrast, on Hillary Clinton, smarter people than you or I spent decades, and more money than you or I will ever see in our lives trying to find something (anything!). And they found nothing.

            I think that distinction is significant. What evidence would it take for you to agree that Hillary Clinton isn’t a criminal?
            Do you have any evidence whatsoever that Hillary Clinton is a criminal? It seems like those are very important questions – huge red flags for motivated reasoning – that aren’t being addressed.

          • John Schilling says:

            I think that distinction is significant. What evidence would it take for you to agree that Hillary Clinton isn’t a criminal?

            That’s a genuinely good question. With regard to the most prominent (recent) criminal accusation against Hillary Clinton, an independent investigation of the text of the thirty thousand deleted emails, finding no compelling evidence of wrongdoing, would probably do it.

          • hlynkacg says:

            And they found nothing.

            The FBI’s investigation found plenty, that the DOJ declined to prosecute is a separate discussion.

          • TheWorst says:

            That’s a genuinely good question. With regard to the most prominent (recent) criminal accusation against Hillary Clinton, an independent investigation of the text of the thirty thousand deleted emails, finding no compelling evidence of wrongdoing, would probably do it.

            The problem is that’s a demand for an awful lot of rigor, and it looks extremely isolated. Do you think I’m a criminal? No independent investigation has ever gone over the text of thousands of emails I’ve deleted. Nor yours. Nor Rice’s, nor Powell’s, nor basically anyone’s. By that standard, you’re a criminal, and so am I.

            Is that really the standard you require for believing someone isn’t a criminal? If you aren’t applying this standard to anyone else, why are you choosing to apply it to Hillary Clinton?

            @houseboat

            Yep. (Well, aside from the hyperbole.)

            Yeah. But then… it felt like hyperbole at first, but can you think of any human who currently exists on Earth who’s been investigated more than Hillary Clinton? I’m not sure I can.

          • cassander says:

            @the worst

            >The problem is that’s a demand for an awful lot of rigor, and it looks extremely isolated. Do you think I’m a criminal? No independent investigation has ever gone over the text of thousands of emails I’ve deleted. Nor yours. Nor Rice’s, nor Powell’s, nor basically anyone’s. By that standard, you’re a criminal, and so am I.

            Is that really the standard you require for believing someone isn’t a criminal? If you aren’t applying this standard to anyone else, why are you choosing to apply it to Hillary Clinton?

            you haven’t destroyed evidence while under subpoena, lied to the FBI repeatedly, and been caught with classified material and thousands of official state department emails on a server in your basement. if you had been, for damned sure I would be applying the same standard to you as her.

            There is zero ambiguity here. The FBI fully admitted that hillary clinton got caught in violation of numerous laws. their, incredibly lame, excuse was that while she broke the rules, it is not typical to prosecute criminally this sort of rule breaking. that assertion is dubious, esepcially given the sheer scale of her violation.

            Since then, the information about her obstruction of justice has come out. She destroyed evidence and lied to the investigators. Martha Stewart went to jail for a hell of a lot less even if you completely ignore the classified material angle.

          • a non mouse says:

            I think that distinction is significant. What evidence would it take for you to agree that Hillary Clinton isn’t a criminal?

            A seemingly reasonable approach but, of course, unanswerable because it’s not striking at the heart of the matter. Everyone arguing against you is convinced she’s a criminal because of evidence that they’ve seen. The evidence they would need to see to agree that she’s not a criminal would be “all that old evidence was faked in an elaborate prank”. Do you think that the difference between “gross negligence” and “extreme carelessness” is something you can see evidence on? Because the difference between those two terms is the cited reason why she was “cleared” by the latest investigation.

            Do you have any evidence whatsoever that Hillary Clinton is a criminal? It seems like those are very important questions – huge red flags for motivated reasoning – that aren’t being addressed.

            Yes! Loads of it! Turning the question around – given that she did delete 30k+ subpoenaed emails and that she treated classified material with “extreme carelessness” do you have any reason that you’ve concluded she isn’t guilty of obstruction of justice and violation of the espionage act other than the report which laid out the evidence that she’s guilty but concluded that she shouldn’t be prosecuted? Is your sole defense that she’s not a criminal that she’s not in jail?

            It seems like “she’s not in jail” is your only defense against allegations that she’s a criminal and there’s a really attractive alternate explanation as to why she isn’t in jail – that she holds enough power to undermine the workings of law enforcement.

          • a non mouse says:

            I think that distinction is significant. What evidence would it take for you to agree that Hillary Clinton isn’t a criminal?

            A seemingly reasonable approach but, of course, unanswerable because it’s not striking at the heart of the matter. Everyone arguing against you is convinced she’s a criminal because of evidence that they’ve seen. The evidence they would need to see to agree that she’s not a criminal would be “all that old evidence was faked in an elaborate prank”. Do you think that the difference between “gross negligence” and “extreme carelessness” is something you can see evidence on? Because the difference between those two terms is the cited reason why she was “cleared” by the latest investigation.

            Do you have any evidence whatsoever that Hillary Clinton is a criminal? It seems like those are very important questions – huge red flags for motivated reasoning – that aren’t being addressed.

            Yes! Loads of it! Turning the question around – given that she did delete 30k+ subpoenaed emails and that she treated classified material with “extreme carelessness” do you have any reason that you’ve concluded she isn’t guilty of obstruction of justice and violation of the espionage act other than the report which laid out the evidence that she’s guilty but concluded that she shouldn’t be prosecuted? Is your sole defense that she’s not a criminal that she’s not in jail?

            It seems like “she’s not in jail” is your only defense against allegations that she’s a criminal and there’s a really attractive alternate explanation as to why she isn’t in jail – that she holds enough power to undermine the workings of law enforcement.

          • John Schilling says:

            The problem is that’s a demand for an awful lot of rigor, and it looks extremely isolated.

            Then you aren’t looking in the right places. That is absolutely standard procedure for dealing with any case where classified information is found on an unclassified system, and how we distinguish between “you were inexcusably sloppy, no more government work for you” and “this was no accident, off to jail with you”.

            At least that’s standard procedure for the little people. The only isolated rigor I’m seeing is the demand that Hillary Clinton be convicted of a crime before we follow our standard procedures for investigating that crime.

            Is that really the standard you require for believing someone isn’t a criminal?

            If one of the crimes they are accused of is mishandling classified information, and we find classified information on their personal computer, absolutely. That’s the standard for the people who work for me, it’s the standard I expect of the people I work for, it’s the standard I have signed up to be held to myself, and it is the standard to which I hold even the highest government officials.

            Particularly the ones who signed up for those rules themselves, even if they considered themselves too important to be bothered reading them.

          • David Friedman says:

            “And they found nothing.”

            I think you mean “they found nothing that they could prove clearly enough to get her tried and convicted in a court of law.”

            The cattle futures case, way back when Bill was governor, was found long ago, I think proved well enough to persuade a neutral party that she was almost certainly guilty. The recent revelations on email were found, used by her political opponents, arguably would have resulted in some legal penalties for a less prominent person.

          • houseboatonstyxb says:

            @ The Worst
            Hillary Clinton is almost certainly the single most-investigated person on Earth, and millions and millions of dollars have been spent on trying to find something, anything, illegal that she’s done, and it turns out there’s nothing.

            Yep. (Well, aside from the hyperbole.)

            The term ‘conspiracy theory’ iirc began with people saying, “A moon landing hoax would require too big a conspiracy to do it and to keep it quiet afterwards.” I don’t think all these investigations of Hillary could be called a single conspiracy, but as a set they do fall by the same criticism: too many people would have to be involved. From the cattle thing in 1979 to now is like 50 years: the early accusers must be dead by now. Each investigation by each agency in each state would require a separate operation to defuse a different group of accusers, and of course a somewhat different group of Evil Operatives.

            So in 50 years, none of them have come out with a tell-all book or even a reputable news story. If the Clintons were this powerful and/or smart, they’d have got Gore in in 2000, and Hillary in 2008, as well as a Democratic Congress through the whole 90s term. Do the current accusers think Kenneth Starr was in Bill’s pay?

          • a non mouse says:

            I don’t think all these investigations of Hillary could be called a single conspiracy, but as a set they do fall by the same criticism: too many people would have to be involved. From the cattle thing in 1979 to now is like 50 years: the early accusers must be dead by now. Each investigation by each agency in each state would require a separate operation to defuse a different group of accusers, and of course a somewhat different group of Evil Operatives.

            There are a ton of problems with this line of reasoning:

            1) You simply accept as given that a bunch of different people all separately decided there was enough basis for legal investigations into Hillary and Bill’s doings but that there was no actual basis. Either these people all separately saw enough evidence of wrongdoing to investigate or they’re all members of an anti-Clinton conspiracy. Since you also assert that there’s no basis for all these investigations you’re saying that a conspiracy to get the Clintons by lots of different people who don’t know each other and acted over a period of 50 years is likely. In my estimation, this is an extremely unlikely conspiracy – there’s no supposed ring-leader and no real motive – why pick the Clintons? The only reason Bill even got the Democratic nomination in 1992 was because the Democratic field assumed that Bush was unbeatable.

            2) Your entire argument is an appeal to authority. Taking two examples from the most recent Clinton scandal how is “gross negligence” different from “extreme carelessness” legally? Well, they were declared to be different in a report that “exonerated” Hillary. Is there an actual underlying argument other than that? Second example – she deleted and intentionally destroyed subpoenaed emails. What reason do you have to believe that isn’t obstruction of justice?

            3) The “conspiracy” that you’re positing would be the only way to explain why the Clintons keep getting off while being guilty isn’t at all implausible. It simply requires that the Clintons have an interest in avoiding penalties for wrongdoing. John Gotti wasn’t convicted of any of the numerous charges against him for years – to the extent of getting the nickname “the teflon don” – before his ultimate conviction your reasoning would lead to the conclusion that he was an honest businessman unfairly harassed by a vengeful FBI. Conspiracies to cover up profitable systemic wrongdoing occur all the time.

          • houseboatonstyxb says:

            @ a non mouse

            You seem to have read my comment, or at least the first part of it, just the opposite of what I meant. I’m sorry I was unclear, and will try to redo it when I can.

          • a non mouse says:

            @ houseboatonstyxb

            Ah, got it – we’re in agreement. The implausible conspiracy is that lots of people with no contact conspired to investigate baseless allegations about the Clintons.

            I patterned matched it for the opposite because Hillary did claim that “a vast right wing conspiracy” was out to get her.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @houseboatonstyxb:
            You and “a non mouse” are disagreeing, not agreeing.

            He is talking about how hard it would be to execute a conspiracy to attack the Clintons, you are talking about how hard it would be to execute a conspiracy to defend them.

            In point of fact, you are both right, in your own way. The attacks on the Clintons don’t need to be a long conspiracy carried out in secret behind the scenes. Rather they can merely be a common tactic for attacking one’s political enemies.

            Similarly, all of the various investigations don’t require a vast cover-up to have failed to find evidence of criminal wrong-doing . One reasonable way this occurs is that criminal wrong-doing did not occur.

          • a non mouse says:

            Similarly, all of the various investigations don’t require a vast cover-up to have failed to find evidence of criminal wrong-doing . One reasonable way this occurs is that criminal wrong-doing did not occur.

            Right. Just like innocent needlessly harassed businessman John Gotti. What’s that? He was acquitted due to multiple cases of jury tampering? Meh, that would have required a conspiracy.

          • houseboatonstyxb says:

            Just like innocent needlessly harassed businessman John Gotti. What’s that? He was acquitted due to multiple cases of jury tampering? Meh, that would have required a conspiracy.

            His jury tampering did later get found out; that’s how we know about it now. There were too many people involved; they couldn’t all be kept quiet indefinitely.

            Compare this with all the investigations of Hillary, now alleged to have been dropped by some sort of pressure. Each of these wouldn’t have involved as many people to keep quiet — but look how many investigations there have been. At least some of those, if illicit, would have been debunked by now. I mean, like with evidence — and the people involved been prosecuted themselves.

  56. Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

    So, the question that immediately comes to mind from Scott’s self imposed exile is who will impart justice in the meantime.

    Hopefully, it won’t be necessary, but if it is…

  57. Odoacer says:

    Does anyone have an informed opinion on US-Philippines relations?

    Duterte announced that they would end joint military exercises with the US. He’s also made several uncouth comments about Obama recently as well as mentioning that the Philippines won’t be a doormat for the US, and that he could create closer ties with China instead. Does this represent a huge change in the two countries’ relationship, or is Duterte just angling to get a better deal with the US?

    • cassander says:

      my opinion is unorthodox, but I think this can actually be good for the US. the philippines is strategically unimportant enough that the US can pull out without losing much, and it gives us a chance to demonstrate that we’re the guys in the white hats. then in a few years, when duterte is gone, and the philippines remember that they’re still arguing with china over who owns the south china sea, we’ll get asked back, and again, look like the good guys.

      • John Schilling says:

        Will the Phillipines still be arguing about that in 2022? It doesn’t seem to be a priority for Duterte, and China can afford to cede the fishing rights that are the only thing he really needs to take home. Six years is long enough for the facts on the ground(*) to change to the point where the argument is moot.

        * Newly constructed just to support those facts

        • cassander says:

          I guess I’m assuming that the south china dispute is more about nationalist dick waving than it is about the actual economic benefits of owning the islands, and thus is not the sort of thing that’s going to be solved by a rational settlement any time soon.

          • hlynkacg says:

            I don’t know about that. The Fishing and transit rights in question are pretty damn lucrative. Maybe not worth going to war for, but certainly worth playing hardball for.

          • cassander says:

            @hlynkacg

            I should have been less absolute. there are economic concerns, but for transit rights, clearly the optimal solution is free passage for everyone. For fishing, that’s more about protecting/creating opportunities for a domestic special interest than real economic calculation. these issues are real, but if that was all they were then the countries involved would have carved up the islands a long time ago to minimize uncertainty and maximize economic gain. the conflict continues because the nationalistic aspect makes rational economic settlement politically difficult.

          • John Schilling says:

            Duterte’s brand of nationalism, and it seems to be highly popular, seems to be more about Defending the Filipino Nation from its domestic enemies than foreign, and to the extent that it cares about foreign affairs it is about Not Letting Any Foreign Busybodies Tell Us How to Handle Business in Our Own Country. That’s not a recipe for reforming an alliance with the United States to keep the Chinese fishing fleets a few hundred miles farther over the horizon; it’s an argument for forming an alliance with China to keep the Americans from using “human rights” as an excuse to meddle in the Philippines like they have done in so many other places.

    • Montfort says:

      I’m no more informed than the next guy, but I’ll add a few articles on the Filipino defense minister’s evolving stance on the issue.
      My read is that Duterte doesn’t have an exact plan in mind, he’s just sort of pushing back in a general way and seeing where it’ll get him. From the examples above it seems evident his ministers don’t know what’s going on.

    • brad says:

      If the Philippines doesn’t want to be allies anymore, I don’t see why we shouldn’t say goodbye and good luck. The only thing the US *really* cares about in the South China sea is navigation rights. However the SCS ends up getting carved up exclusive economic zone wise doesn’t have a big impact on that. The fishing and oil rights China is trying to grab with its doesn’t-pass-the-straight-face-test nine dash line are being stolen from Malaysia, Vietnam, and the Philippines.

      • youzicha says:

        Is it really that easy? I feel the fifty-thousand American boys who died in Vietnam to keep Red China bottled up are crying out from beyond the grave, but maybe I’m just imagining things.

        • John Schilling says:

          Imagining that the Vietnam war had anything to do with China, yes. American involvement in Vietnam came long after Mao had split from Moscow, and North Vietnam was solidly in the Soviet, not Chinese, sphere of influence.

          • And the Vietnamese fought the Chinese not all that long ago, after we had stopped fighting them.

          • youzicha says:

            Yeah, in retrospect it turned out to be a bit confused, but as I understand it, the reason the U.S. fought the war was because they believed south-east Asia would otherwise fall under Chinese dominion. (I got this from McNamara’s book.)

          • cassander says:

            the Vietnamese were pretty good at playing the Chinese and Russians off against one another as long as the war lasted, and managed to get considerable Chinese aid.

  58. jaimeastorga2000 says:

    Eliezer Yudkowsky’s final solution to the Reaver question ruffled a lot of feathers in the subreddit. To be fair, he later clarified that he was joking, but damn, talk about bad optics.

    • The Most Conservative says:

      His most recent post is frustrating. It’s quite poorly written, but if you take the time to understand it, it’s not much more than a case study in smug American liberalism. (Longer response available on request.) Of course I’d rather not say anything that could be perceived as supporting Trump, or even having some glimmer of understanding of why people support Trump, under my real name. So, the Smugularity draws closer.

      I have thought of myself as a member of the “rationalist community” for a long time, but having this guy as community figurehead strongly makes me want to find a new tribe.

      • Douglas Knight says:

        I wonder if his beliefs about the 50s are molded by SF.

        • Evan Þ says:

          For what it’s worth, I’ve gotten something of the same impression about the 50’s from history books, as well. At least, it was definitely more accepting of expertise than the current era.

          I think the lack of competition to the mainstream media, and both parties being generally centrist, had a lot to do with it.

          • The Most Conservative says:

            I agree. People are willing to trust experts if they think experts are on their team. And in the 50s, the US felt like a single team. We were on a team fighting the Nazis, and we were on a team opposing the Soviet Union.

            Then the refragmentation happened. Now Trump supporters are skeptical of experts because they don’t think of the experts as being on their team. And they’re often right–in many cases, people on their team were long ago driven out from expert circles.

          • Paul Brinkley says:

            I think TMC inadvertently raised an interesting question: did the US really feel like a single team in the 50s? Or were there elements that felt sidelined from media like conservatives do today, and even less visible due to there being no Internet yet?

            For example, if I had to guess, I would guess that a lot of people in the 50s thought communism was, when you think about it, maybe a pretty good idea, but they weren’t gonna bring that up because they weren’t that keen on being like Soviets, and they also noticed the people who passionately felt it was a good idea were getting systematically whacked down by a certain Wisconsin senator, so maybe the thing to do was just ride it out and go back to their jobs at the A&P or wherever.

            Later, maybe whatever irritations they had about American-style capitalism finally grew until the late 60s.

            Of course, this guess is all reasoning post facto, so I don’t put great weight to it. That said, I think it fair to say that 1950s America didn’t feel like one team to those who had little voice in the MSM, and who moreover saw what little voice they had being driven out.

          • houseboatonstyxb says:

            @ Paul Brinkley
            did the US really feel like a single team in the 50s? Or were there elements that felt sidelined from media like conservatives do today

            Yes — the same conservatives we have today. Goldwater, National Review, George Wallace, the John Birch Society. They were sidelined or excluded by MSM and what is now called ‘the cathedral’, but I remember hearing them, with much air-time, on the radio.
            Senator McCarthy was on their side.

            He did a lot of witch-hunting, accusing various officials and celebrities of being Card Carrying Communists in the pay of the International Communist Conspiracy. If there were any real Communist Fellow-Travellers around, probably in the ‘cathedral’, I never knew about them; either because I grew up in a Red Tribe bubble, or because they were really good at conspiring.

            I don’t recall any of McCarthy’s targets, dull old guys, being involved in the 60s movements. We Hippies and Flower Children were marching for Peace, Free Love, and free marijuana.

          • Psmith says:

            If there were any real Communist Fellow-Travellers around, probably in the ‘cathedral’, I never knew about them;

            Stanton’s Blacklisted by History is a mighty interesting revisionist account of this period. The Verona project data is also a good primary source.

      • Evan Þ says:

        Thanks for the link. I read it, and it’s basically a multi-thousand-word treatise saying “Trust the experts. Really. Expertise can be real and useful.” He doesn’t interact at all with the arguments that in this case, the experts are biased and are optimizing for different things than the average person. For that matter, his argument would work just as well to say “Ignore this one Yudkowsky guy who’s yelling about how AI can kill us all.”

        I’m not sure I would’ve expected more from him, but… I was sort of hoping for more.

        • The Most Conservative says:

          For that matter, his argument would work just as well to say “Ignore this one Yudkowsky guy who’s yelling about how AI can kill us all.”

          Yeah, it’s an interesting post coming from a guy who dropped out of high school, then made a career out of telling off highly credentialed AI experts.

          Actually, I think EY is like Trump in a lot of ways. Both of them have no formal credentials in the area they claim expertise (for EY it’s AI; for Trump it’s policy). Both of them created a large following of people who also lack those credentials (most EY fans are not AI researchers; most Trump fans are not policy wonks). Both of them say outrageous things, polarize people in to fans and haters, and have somewhat miraculously survived a series of scandals. Both of them have important and true things to say if you’re able to look past the hype. Both are people who would make for terrible leaders but somehow may be given power as leaders anyway.

          • hlynkacg says:

            I would pay good money to see EY’s response to this comparison.

          • Ilya Shpitser says:

            This is sort of harsh.

            One important way in which Trump and EY are the same is their bad optics are not accidental — they are what they appear to be.

            But they are very different types of people. Trump is a sociopath and a pig. EY is a “guru.”

          • The Most Conservative says:

            “This is sort of harsh.”

            More harsh or less harsh than joking that people like me should undergo involuntary eugenics?

          • Ilya Shpitser says:

            Sorry, I don’t read EY’s stuff on fb. I think he blocked me once I accused him of “poshlost” for trolling for sex there.

          • Bassicallyboss says:

            You were the one responsible for the “Poshlost” comment? God bless you.

          • hlynkacg says:

            xaxa хорошо!

        • Tedd says:

          … What? Did we read the same post?

          That doesn’t mean you blindly trust people you can’t tell whether to trust! It means that you don’t get upset when other people are confident of questions that look balanced to you, because for all you know, they could know better and *that would be okay*. You don’t defer to them, you don’t take their estimate as your own, you go on suspending judgment yourself, because you can’t tell if they really do know better or not. But it’s okay for now that they seem more confident than you; you have also suspended judgment about whether their confidence is justified.)

          This is not only not “Trust the experts”, it is both more sophisticated than and explicitly different from that.

          • The Most Conservative says:

            EY says you should suspend judgement when you see people making a claim that seems absurd to you. But this is advice for others, not himself. His own essay on how knowing about biases can hurt people illustrates what’s going on.

            If Eliezer wanted, he could suspend judgement and investigate the absurd-seeming claim that Trump is a better choice. But he doesn’t. And no one else in the “Trump = the end of the world” camp seems to be either.

            I made a list of pro-Trump comments here that I think are at least somewhat convincing. But these people who think Trump means the end of the world haven’t found time in their schedules to respond to them. Sometimes it seems like they’re willing to do anything to get Hillary elected except engage in a polite, reasonable discussion with Trump supporters.

          • Stefan Drinic says:

            Just who do you think you are? The internet is full of people engaging in debate about your election. Why does a comment on an essay on an obscure blog warrant any special attention?

          • The Most Conservative says:

            @Stefan Drinic – I’m no one special. But this blog is special because it’s one of the few places on the internet where you’ve got some hope of having a thoughtful two-sided election discussion. (Also, it’s far from obscure.) My comment consists of data: good pro-Trump arguments that anti-Trump people could “save the world” by politely engaging with.

            Yudkowsky is definitely aware of Scott’s blog; he’s praised it very highly in the past. But his revealed preferences suggest that he’d rather write 1000+ words expounding on the unfathomable idiocy of those who disagree than, you know, actually respond to their arguments. That’s the smug style. It’s not discussion or even attempts at persuasion; it’s insular self-congratulation.

          • Stefan Drinic says:

            I’m not sure if he ever posts on this blog in the first place. If I, along with a dozen others, start posting about how awful his taste in music is today, I’m not going to expect a response either.

          • radm says:

            > I made a list of pro-Trump comments here that I think are at least somewhat convincing.

            Of those, can you pick _one_ that you feel actually has some grounding in things Trump has said and can plausibly do? Because they mostly look to me like free riffing of smart people trying very hard to find a set of 3-level-deep hypotheticals that all come together to get the desired result.

            If you find that kind of thing convincing, that seems a bad heuristic; smart people can make hard-to-disprove- complicated arguments in support of literally any position.

            Top-tier arguments are obvious, short and (preferably) true, e.g ‘Trump boasts about sexual assualt’, ‘Trump wants to have Hilary arrested on unspecified charges’, etc.

          • youzicha says:

            @The Most Conservative

            In the linked post, I don’t see Eliezer saying anything about suspending judgement whenever people make a claim that seems absurd to you. He says that if you consider it impossible to work out the fact of the matter (you already have suspended judgement, as it were), then you can not conclude that other people people cannot work it out.

            By contrast, what you are talking about is what you should do in situation when you consider it very obvious what the fact of matter is, and run into someone who also thinks it’s obvious but in the other direction. That’s quite different from thinking that you don’t know.

          • caethan says:

            @The Most Conservative:

            Be fair. One of the strongest arguments for Trump is that Hillary is a hawk who would lead us into unnecessary and potentially disastrous wars. And our illustrious host wrote a whole post trying to refute it, fairly persuasively, I think.

          • The Most Conservative says:

            Top-tier arguments are obvious, short and (preferably) true, e.g ‘Trump boasts about sexual assualt’, ‘Trump wants to have Hilary arrested on unspecified charges’, etc.

            Neither of these seem especially convincing compared to questions of foreign policy though. In the least convenient possible world, you have to wade in to the complicated-argument thicket.

        • No, no ,no, he is absolutely not saying that you should trust experts in the conventional sense of expert,, he is appealing to his own notion of one size fits all smartness…note the one dimensionality of the Level above Mine…theres no good at geography but bad at maths. And some of the people who disagree with him about MWI are experts , and he does disregard them for lacking his patented brand of smartness.

      • Gazeboist says:

        Thanks for the vox link. That was a good thing to read.

        • Sandy says:

          I read that the day it came out and thought it was a good piece. Shortly afterward, the writer was suspended from Vox for tweeting that assaulting Trump supporters in public is a perfectly legitimate political tactic.

          Now I don’t know what to think.

          • Stefan Drinic says:

            Now I don’t know what to think.

            The author thinks smug liberalism is bad, but militant liberalism is totally awesome?

          • Sandy says:

            Yeah, like how does that even work? Being smug to your political adversaries is a bad thing, better to stuff soap in a pillowcase and let ’em have it?

          • Stefan Drinic says:

            Being smug and haughty endangers your political position through making it impopular; being militant strengthens it through intimidation and a better public image(they were Bad People, anyway?)

            I’m not even sure. Does anyone have these tweets?

          • Anonymous says:

            From reading the Vox article one of his main bones to pick is that smug liberalism stops at lip service. The point isn’t to achieve anything: in fact, the point is specifically to achieve nothing while signalling virtue and intellectual superiority; the whole thing is a bourgeois status apparatus.

            With that in mind it’s pretty obvious why he might still think militancy or anything, really, is a legitimate tactic, as long as it actually goes toward smashing the system maaaaaaaan, or whatever it is he wants in specific.

          • NEWTONIAN ETHICIST says:

            I am reasonably sure that he was calling the media out on their bullshit, not calling for Trump supporters to be attacked.

            Iirc the gist of it was something along the lines of.

            A. Trump isn’t actually the rise of fascism and the 2nd coming of Hitler, and this is all political mud-slinging at an outsider populist.

            or

            B. He really is the rise of fascism and the 2nd coming of Hitler then any amount of violence against him and his base is justified.

            The Media has been doing their best to paint him as B, and then being shocked and condemning violence against his supporters as if they really believe A.

          • Gazeboist says:

            People can write good things and still be assholes. On the other hand, NEWTONIAN ETHICIST makes me want to see the actual tweet in question. On the gripping hand, twitter is where toxoplasma thrives in all its forms.

          • Douglas Knight says:

            My memory matches Newtonian Ethicist, but there were several tweets with different tones. The first two condemned journalists for condemning violence / thinking that words would work. The second two unconditionally called for violence. An hour later he made an a conditional tweet:

            Listen, if Trump is Hitler then you’ve got no business condemning rioters. If he isn’t, you’ve got no business pretending normal is better.

            …but I don’t know what that second sentence means. Probably I just saw popehat or someone commenting on it and not the actual tweet.

          • Gazeboist says:

            I think I’ll fall back to “fuck twitter”. Several of the tweets look like he’s trying to attack journalists who needlessly cry fascist and then condemn people who react as though the person they just called a fascist was, well, Hitler.

            But then there’s “Advice: If Trump comes to your town, start a riot.” (entire tweet)

            This reads like it could be a trolling manifesto: “If they call this guy Hitler, let’s react like he’s Hitler and condemn them for causing our overreaction.” Of course, because twitter, it’s not clear that this was his intent, rather than regular old anti-Trump riot incitement. And I’m not about to condone this guy for shit I condemned elsewhere in this very thread. He should have stuck to longform, where snappy headlines get a chance to explain themselves.

            (Speaking of snappy headlines that explain themselves, the article itself is seems anti-Rensin to a degree not justified by the tweets – after the tweets, it cites a bunch of articles: one blames trolls, rather than sexism, for male dominance in journalism; one is a Jew talking about being Jewish in the Jewish manner, rather than the way non-Jews sometimes expect; and the last is a condemnation of … journalists comparing Trump to Hitler. This is taken as evidence that Rensin should have been expected to advocate rioting. Somehow.)

          • Anonymous says:

            The article about how Trump is not Hitler is not by Rensin. WaPo doesn’t say it is, but just that it might have been edited by him.

        • Nelshoy says:

          I liked it to, but the tone was awfully smug for an article complaining about smugness.

      • a non mouse says:

        From that vox article:

        There is a smug style in American liberalism. It has been growing these past decades. It is a way of conducting politics, predicated on the belief that American life is not divided by moral difference or policy divergence — not really — but by the failure of half the country to know what’s good for them.

        Bullshit that that’s what’s going on with the Yudkowski post.

        He doesn’t think he knows better what’s good for boarderers – he sees them as a ethnic group that both opposes and is opposed by his ethnic group. He’s expressing outright animus to them.

        Their beliefs on what makes for a good society – mainly controlled borders (which is what Trump is emblematic of) – are anathema to what he sees as necessary for his ethnic group – open borders. He and Scott claim that the problem is that white borderers are too low IQ to understand how their vision is best for everyone but borderers aren’t a low IQ group and the groups being imported are low IQ – it’s a red herring. That post is saying “Borderers only support policies I hate because of stupidity – if they were smarter, they wouldn’t”.

        • The Most Conservative says:

          I was saying this post was an example of the smug style, not the borderer post.

          • a non mouse says:

            That wasn’t smug – that was (on the surface) the rantings of a crazy man who thinks he’s solved physics even though he’s done no physics.

            Look at that argument:

            People can’t distinguish better or worse within more than one standard deviation above their own level.

            (…)

            I get all kinds of scorn from people who want to know how I could possibly be so confident in the Many-Worlds Interpretation when, from their perspective, there are all these interpretations of quantum physics, all of which sound kinda quantumy and physicsish, and there’s this one weird guy who’s *so sure* about one of them.

            (implied premise from common knowledge)

            Actual real physicists (ya know, guys who didn’t drop out of high school) are on both sides of the many worlds interpretation debate.

            Implied conclusion- since I’ve taken a strong stand on this question in quantum mechanics it isn’t more than 1 STDV beyond me – I’m as smart as or smarter than those physicists! (Also – the scorn I get is because people aren’t as smart as I am.)

            So not the rantings of a crazy man but strategic posturing as a credential.

          • Autolykos says:

            Actual, real physicists are in many cases on both sides of the Many Worlds debate *simultaneously*. Because they recognize that the various interpretations of QM make identical predictions about anything that can currently be measured, so the whole debate is a matter of philosophy, not physics.
            As one of those actual, real physicists I agree with EY in so far as I find Many Worlds to be the most philosophically elegant and aesthetically pleasing interpretation I know (I dislike the hidden variables in Bohmian Mechanics, and think the Copenhagen Interpretation is a dog’s breakfast). But they all work, and to the best of my knowledge there isn’t even a hypothetical experiment that makes different predictions for each of these theories. And since CI is what I learned first and used most, that’s what I’d use in practice (I don’t have anything to do with QM at the moment, though).

          • The Nybbler says:

            Actual, real physicists are in many cases on both sides of the Many Worlds debate *simultaneously*.

            Because of course they are.

          • Nelshoy says:

            @autolykos

            I don’t know much physics, but I read EY’s sequence on MWI and his whole point is that until new experimental evidence comes along, MWI should be accepted as true exactly because it doesn’t postulate the existence of other rules, that it isn’t just “philosophically more elegant” compared to other solutions, but what we have to assume based on probability theory insofar as we assume anything.

            What do you think of this claim?

            Is it not true that we can make best guesses about theories that don’t differ in their experimental predictions? Also he thinks experiments that observe superposition on ever bigger scales would put the nail in the coffin for Copenhagen.

          • Gazeboist says:

            Autolykos:

            Do you have thoughts on RQM? The LW quantum mechanics sequence seemed off to me, especially at the end; I scrolled down to the comments and found people asking why Yudkowski never discussed the relational interpretation.

          • Autolykos says:

            @Nelshoy: I think that’s exactly part of EY’s beef with the scientific method for not being rigorous enough (or not being applied rigorously enough). The scientific establishment usually only throws out old theories when they’re demonstrably wrong. The new one just being slightly simpler by some standard is not enough. EY seems to argue it should be, and I agree with him in principle (in sufficiently egregious cases, even classical science agrees; see Copernicus) – so we’re pretty much only haggling about thresholds here.
            The main point in favor of higher thresholds is that new results are relatively noisy and occasionally fail to replicate. So if you change the canonical explanation too quickly, you risk teaching nonsense. If you change it too slowly, you only risk teaching slightly more complicated and inaccurate theories than necessary.

            @Gazeboist: Sorry, never heard about RQM, so I can’t tell you anything you couldn’t also find in the Wikipedia article (or possibly in the posts of the people advertising it to EY).

          • TheAncientGeek says:

            The scientific establishment usually only throws out old theories when they’re demonstrably wrong. The new one just being slightly simpler by some standard is not enough.

            By which standard? A lot of people reject MWI for extravagance, for instance.

          • Autolykos says:

            The standard is of course not applied symmetrically. That’s kinda the whole point. I’m pretty sure even many proponents of the CI would concede Eliezer’s point that in the counterfactual world where MWI came first, it would be the canonical explanation.
            But in the end, the only thing that matters is the complexity of the math – which is, as far as I’m aware, the same*. The remaining difference is mostly about what our monkey brain imagines while doing the math, and what words we use to refer to the concepts. The former point doesn’t matter at all, you could even imagine that it’s Chuck Norris glaring at superpositions until they make up their mind, if that somehow helps your intuition. For the latter point, it’s nice when everyone uses the same terminology. Which one is pretty much secondary, but rewriting textbooks is expensive.

            *Bohm’s Mechanics has somewhat different math, though (IIRC).

          • TheAncientGeek says:

            But in the end, the only thing that matters is the complexity of the math

            Says who?

            Sincere and consistent instrumentalists may exist, but I think they are rare. What is much more common is for people to compartmentalise, to take and irrealist or instrumetalist stance about things that make them feel uncomfortable, while remaining cheerfully realist about other things.

            At the end of the day, being able to predict phenomena isn’t that exciting.
            People generally do science because they want to find out about the world. And “rationaists”, internet atheists and so on generally do have ontological commitments, to the non-existence of gods and ghosts, some view about whether or not we are ina matrix and so on.

        • Maven says:

          >are anathema to what he sees as necessary for his ethnic group

          Sorry, maybe I’m missing some context, which ethnic group would that be.

          • Anonymous says:

            a non mouse doesn’t like da joooz

          • hlynkacg says:

            it’s pronounced juice

          • a non mouse says:

            a non mouse doesn’t like da joooz

            In this discussion who discussed the genetic targeting and extermination of ethnic groups that he doesn’t like? Not me.

            I guess because there’s a word for antisemitism but no word for “Jewish person who hates non-Jews” you can’t even conceive of the latter category even when a Jewish person talks about literally exterminating those he sees as his ethnic enemies.

          • Anonymous says:

            The “ethnic enemies” part is entirely in your head. Big Y’s post had nothing at all to do with him being Jewish except in your imagination.

            Steve Sailer at least makes money off being an edgelord, what do you get out of it?

          • Maven says:

            Yeah, I figured that was what this was about.

            I’d actually love to get some input from this community on the “Jewish Question”. The idea of any discernible pattern of political activity among Jews as a group is so incredibly toxic in mainstream culture that it’s basically impossible to talk about with educated, intelligent people. (There is some special rationalist word for that sort of idea, yes? An extreme version of “politics is the mind killer”?)

            Hopefully we all agree that any talk of a literal organized conspiracy is obviously nonsense. The idea that the actions of individuals Jews come together to create a pattern of pro-Jewish group behavior, though, isn’t entirely outside the realm of possibility. It’s obvious, for example, that over the past 200 years of American history, there have been many instances where whites acted to further white group interests and blacks acted to further black group interests, and the sum of these individual actions create identifiable patterns of group behavior. If Jews are indeed a separate ethnic group, there’s no reason why they wouldn’t be subject to the same analysis.

            The biggest counter-argument seems to be that Jews are small enough in number and white enough in skin color that pro-Jewish actions wouldn’t really register on a national or international scale. Many Jews probably consider themselves nothing except for white, in terms of race, and because they “pass” so well in this identity (to the point that many don’t even know they’re “passing”), we wouldn’t really expect an identifiable set of specifically Jewish interests to take shape.

            My epistemic status is that it’s conceivable that there’s something here, but whatever it is, I don’t think it’s of political consequence. The charge from the far right that certain founding documents of leftist intellectual modernity such as The Authoritarian Personality have a “Jewish character” doesn’t seem to be entirely baseless in certain cases, since Adorno comes right out and says in The Authoritarian Personality that one of his goals is fighting anti-Semitism, but I also don’t see anything wrong with this. If I was a Jew who had just fled Nazi Germany, I’m sure I would write books to try and combat anti-Semitism too.

          • The Most Conservative says:

            @Maven

            Oh boy, I’ve always wanted to have a thoughtful discussion about this. Here’s what I think is going on. During World War II, there were a bunch of German ethnonationalists (lead by a guy named Hitler) who had extermination of Jews as a core part of their platform. Ever since then, it’s been part of Jewish culture that something like the Holocaust should never be allowed to happen again. And as part of their “Holocaust immune system”, the Jews reject anything that looks vaguely like the German ethnonationalism that ended up leading to the Holocaust.

            Even though a lot of the stuff on /r/whiterights would be totally tame coming from someone of any other ethnicity (“my people have history and culture they can be proud of”), there are enough Jews who have positions of influence in the media etc. that tame statements like these get lumped in with genuine neo-Nazism. (For some reason they forget that having their faces shoved in to the dirt and feeling like “cucks” is what caused the Germans to turn to ethnonationalism in the first place.) This, in turn, leads to genuine anti-semitism on the part of otherwise harmless white ethnonationalists–they correctly notice that a lot of their critics are Jews, and make up absurd stories for why this might be the case (neglecting the obvious explanation I just described). It’s the same feedback loop that underlies many arguments.

            The whole thing is just an unfortunate case of low-level, ongoing ethnic conflict. It’d be much better if everyone sat down and came to an agreement:

            1. White people are allowed to display the same level of ethnic pride that other races do, and America is allowed to be just as xenophobic towards foreigners as Israel is

            2. White nationalists stop saying anti-Semitic stuff, and acknowledge that the Holocaust happened and it was terrible

            Unfortunately, due to the asymmetrical nature of the conflict, it’s hard to recognize as ethnic tension, and credible third parties don’t realize they need to step in and mediate.

          • “I’d actually love to get some input from this community on the “Jewish Question”. The idea of any discernible pattern of political activity among Jews as a group is so incredibly toxic in mainstream culture that it’s basically impossible to talk about with educated, intelligent people.”

            A lot of American Jews support Israel, for obvious reasons. That aside, Jews have played a large role in intellectual life on all sides of the political spectrum. Ayn Rand was Jewish. Murray Rothbard was Jewish. I’m Jewish. That’s three rather different libertarian intellectuals–all ethnically Jewish, none religiously Jewish. Barry Goldwater was ethnically (on his father’s side) but not religiously Jewish.

            Noam Chomsky is Jewish. Paul Krugman is Jewish. Lots of other people left of center.

          • brad says:

            The crazy thing is the kind of Jews these guys get obsessed about are over. The real deal guys that were members of landsman societies and spoke Yiddish are dead or in nursing homes.

            Their kids, that can at least understand Yiddish, that experienced some really nasty antisemitism when they growing up, that mostly married fellow Jews even if they were totally non-religious, whose instinct is always to ask “is it good for the Jews” — they are mostly in their sixties, some as young as their late fifties. That generation seems really powerful right now because they have all the big titles but their time is rapidly coming to end. Blakenfein is 62, how much longer you think he’s going to be able to run a major bank?

            The next generation — the 30 and 40 year olds — a lot of them were bar or bat mitzvah’ed, they know the Jewish holidays, they had some Jewish friends growing up, they maybe visited Israel once or twice but they also had non-Jewish friends, they went to colleges like Harvard or Yale or UMich or UConn where they met more non-Jews. Ditto for grad school. A lot of them also met their future spouses that in many cases aren’t Jewish. They know some Yiddish words, they like bagels, but they really don’t feel all that different from their non-Jewish friends. They have politics that might be influenced by Israel but it isn’t wagging the dog. J-street exists because of this generation.

            Their kids? Much of the time they’re only half-Jewish. Some of the spouses did a pro-forma conversion, but often not. Plenty of these families don’t go to any synagogue. Even if they do, the conservative movement is barely there anymore and the reform movement never was. They kids are learning the Disney version of Judaism.

            Do you really think they are going to grow up to form a distinct voting block? They are going to adsorb the upper middle class / upper class values of whatever suburb they grow up in. They are going to be all Jewish once a year, like the guys with two Irish great-grandparents are on St. Patrick’s Day.

            On the other hand there are the orthodox, they are still coherent and will stay that way. But they aren’t going to punch above their weight the way that those prior generations did. Too many wasted years in yeshivas that are tough to make up. Whether they end up off the derech or trying to straddle the worlds, either way they aren’t going to often end up with Nobels or as judges or running newspapers. Not after graduating from YU at best. So you’ll have a small group that does act as voting bloc but is of little interest to anyone outside of Brooklyn, the five towns, Monsey, and Lakewood.

            Finally, let’s look at the kids of those that leave the community. These might be expected to be somewhat like the second generation that were born in the US. To a certain extent they will be — in terms of religion and culture, and even genes. But in terms of politics they are going to be very different. Even though their ancestors in the US managed to maintain the Jewish religion, the Yiddish language, the European foods, and so on they haven’t maintained the intellectual environment that the Jewish immigrants from 1890s-1940s were marinated in. Didn’t even try — in many ways their culture is based on explicitly rejecting it.

            So all in all, I think there is probably a kernel of truth there, but it describes something that is going to be less and less relevant going forward.

          • hyperboloid says:

            @A non mouse

            In this discussion who discussed the genetic targeting and extermination of ethnic groups that he doesn’t like? Not me.

            But nobody ever does, do they? they just make dehumanizing insinuations. Even hardcore skinheads never explicitly come out in favor of putting children in gas chambers.

            @The Most Conservative

            Even though a lot of the stuff on /r/whiterights would be totally tame coming from someone of any other ethnicity (“my people have history and culture they can be proud of”), there are enough Jews who have positions of influence in the media etc. that tame statements like these get lumped in with genuine neo-Nazism.

            You literally can’t conceive of the idea that white nationalism would be unpopular for any other reason then malicious Jewish influence can you?

            Speaking as a white man, I am very proud of the cultural heritage of my European ancestors, The peoples of European gave birth to great civilizations that spread their culture across the globe and changed human history in unprecedented an enduring ways .

            Much of this process was of course ugly and and brutal, but even the legacy of slavery and imperialism does not in my mind detract from the invention of calculus, or democracy, or modern medicine.

            On the other hand, what I see reason to be proud of is whiteness qua whiteness. I feel no great tribal bond to a Georgian or a Bosnian, for instance, of whose culture and history I know little.

            The notion that I should, as so many white nationalists believe, forsake my loyalty to my black and mestizo friends and neighbors, who speak the language and practice the religion of my ancestors; and join instead in a shared political project with the heir to the blood stained legacy of Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky is treasonous.

            And it is not any Jewish brainwashing that leads me, or the vast majority of Americans of European descent, to reject it.

            Jews as a group of people lived for thousands of years dispersed among those not of the tribe. They, like many minority groups, have an obvious interest in maintaining cosmopolitan states where they are free to practice their religion and pass their culture on to their children.

            But when you attribute liberalism to Jewish influence you are spewing the worst kind hate mongering nonsense. It is millions of American gentiles like me who made this country a liberal democratic state, there are simply not enough Jews to account for it.

            Antisemitism is worse then bigotry it is a mental illness, a conspiratorial delusion entertained by people who can not face the fact that their fellow members of the herrenvolk reject their ugly ideology.

          • Maven says:

            Goodness, lots to go over here…

            @The Most Conservative

            >there were a bunch of German ethnonationalists (lead by a guy named Hitler) who had extermination of Jews as a core part of their platform. Ever since then, it’s been part of Jewish culture that something like the Holocaust should never be allowed to happen again. And as part of their “Holocaust immune system”, the Jews reject anything that looks vaguely like the German ethnonationalism that ended up leading to the Holocaust.

            Certainly not a bad thought at all. This is something that might consciously go through the mind of many Jews when they respond to self-consciously white political movements, and it’s an easily understandable motivation that doesn’t require recourse to any conspiracy theories.

            Folk theories of Jewish control of the banks and media have existed since before Nazi Germany though, so that’s another fact that needs to be explained. The prevalence of these ideas could implicate uniquely Jewish patterns of political behavior, or it could not. I imagine it’s for a variety of reasons that can’t be unified under one theory. (e.g., the idea that Jews gained an association with finance-sector jobs because that’s where the church herded them in the Middle Ages could be one contributing factor).

            >(For some reason they forget that having their faces shoved in to the dirt and feeling like “cucks” is what caused the Germans to turn to ethnonationalism in the first place.)

            Every news article that starts with “We need to talk about white privilege” is another grain of salt in the wound…

            >1. White people are allowed to display the same level of ethnic pride that other races do, and America is allowed to be just as xenophobic towards foreigners as Israel is

            >2. White nationalists stop saying anti-Semitic stuff, and acknowledge that the Holocaust happened and it was terrible

            Certainly two points that I can get behind. 🙂 Unfortunately, I think that it’s impossible for hardcore white nationalists to compromise on anything… the level of visceral hate they have for anything even remotely related to Judaism is absolutely surreal. Gavin McGinnes wrote an article at Taki’s Magazine where he hypothesized that a majority of the commenters at The Daily Stormer are FBI agents trying to discredit pro-white politics, which doesn’t sound entirely crazy to me.

            Also, this isn’t to counter anything you said, but this part did sound a bit strange:

            >The whole thing is just an unfortunate case of low-level, ongoing ethnic conflict.

            It’s a bit strange to call this whole situation an “ethnic conflict”. If you pulled any random person of any race off the street and asked them “what do you think about the conflict between the whites and the Jews?”, 99.99% of them would respond with “…what the hell are you talking about? Did you just step out of a time machine or something?” This all seems to be something that’s confined to fringe online discourse.

            @brad

            >The crazy thing is the kind of Jews these guys get obsessed about are over.

            Well, the image that they’re obsessed with is as follows: educated, wealthy, position of prominence in academia or the media, promotes leftist politics, has successfully “blended in” and doesn’t make overt displays of their Judaism, etc.

            @hyperboloid

            >The notion that I should, as so many white nationalists believe, forsake my loyalty to my black and mestizo friends and neighbors, who speak the language and practice the religion of my ancestors; and join instead in a shared political project with the heirs to the blood stained legacy of Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky is treasonous.

            I agree, it all does seem rather silly when you look at it like that. If there’s any value in white nationalism, it’s as a pragmatic, temporary response to current political problems in the West, and as a pragmatic response, it will necessarily lack ideological purity. I see no value in making “whites only” one of your founding ethical axioms, and indeed, I see plenty of reasons not to hold that belief at all.

            >Antisemitism is worse then bigotry it is a
            mental illness, a conspiratorial delusion entertained by people who can not face the fact that their fellow members of the herrenvolk reject their ugly ideology.

            To be charitable, the more sane members of the WN movement have tried to remove the explicitly conspiratorial aspect, instead replacing it with a story about evolutionary group selection and intra-group competition (Kevin MacDonald’s “Culture of Critique”).

          • Elephant says:

            @ hyperboloid : very well put!

          • The Most Conservative says:

            @hyperboloid

            You literally can’t conceive of the idea that white nationalism would be unpopular for any other reason then malicious Jewish influence can you?

            Is Japanese nationalism verboten in Japan? Do Muslims apologize for the military success of Mohammed? Present-day Mongols glorify Genghis Khan, one of the most bloodthirsty conquerers in history. Contrast with British conquerers who abolished slavery in their territories. I do think there is something weird about white self-hate.

            The notion that I should, as so many white nationalists believe, forsake my loyalty to my black and mestizo friends and neighbors, who speak the language and practice the religion of my ancestors; and join instead in a shared political project with the heir to the blood stained legacy of Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky is treasonous.

            There you go, lumping me in with the Far Right as soon as I take a single step outside the Overton Window.

            If someone created the white version of La Raza, call it “White People Weekly”, would that be treasonous? (I don’t even think someone should do this; I’m just trying to figure out what is treasonous.)

            Antisemitism is worse then bigotry it is a mental illness, a conspiratorial delusion entertained by people who can not face the fact that their fellow members of the herrenvolk reject their ugly ideology.

            Well, that escalated quickly.

            I’m not a white nationalist. I don’t consider myself antisemitic. I’m trying to answer the question: if it’s true that you frequently see Jews promoting open borders and multiculturalism for America, while they promote closed borders and ethnonationalism for Israel, why might this be?

            I agree with you that Jews are not the main cause of liberalism in the US. The simplest proof is the popularity of anti-Zionism on the American left. When it comes to the willingness of white people to “commit cultural suicide”, I put more weight on the explanation offered by many HBD bloggers: white people often come from outbred stock, and they are compassionate and self-critical to a fault.

          • brad says:

            Maven:

            Well, the image that they’re obsessed with is as follows: educated, wealthy, position of prominence in academia or the media, promotes leftist politics, has successfully “blended in” and doesn’t make overt displays of their Judaism, etc.

            Except it isn’t a matter of blending in, in the sense of hiding. They’re increasingly just educated, wealthy, leftist Americans.

            Subparts of general blue tribe cultural — whether its media or academia have been influenced by the Jews who have passed through and now have some of that influence as parts of their respective cultures. People that acculturate into those subcultures, whether ethnically Jewish or not, are influenced by those aspects as well as the rest of the mix.

            For better or worse, the process is largely over. The Jews have joined the melting pot and are now part of the alloy. The alt-right types are fighting not the last war, but the one before that. That seems quixotic at best, and leads one to reasonably wonder if something else is going on.

            The Most Conservative:

            if it’s true that you frequently see Jews promoting open borders and multiculturalism for America, while they promote closed borders and ethnonationalism for Israel, why might this be?

            I reject the premise. You might be able to find a few examples, but frequently is just wrong.

          • a non mouse says:

            The Most Conservative:

            if it’s true that you frequently see Jews promoting open borders and multiculturalism for America, while they promote closed borders and ethnonationalism for Israel, why might this be?

            I reject the premise. You might be able to find a few examples, but frequently is just wrong.

            Is this impression of yours open to evidence? How many examples would it take for you to change it? Let’s set the terms before anyone goes dredging up examples.

          • brad says:

            If you have actual evidence, i.e. surveys, I’m all ears. If you were going to link me some random blogspot pages, don’t bother.

            I come across plenty of Jews in day to day life and I’ve never met anyone that’s for open borders. So on that basis alone I have a low prior for that statement being true.

          • a non mouse says:

            If you have actual evidence, i.e. surveys, I’m all ears. If you were going to link me some random blogspot pages, don’t bother.

            The Most Conservative talked about “advocacy” – not voting patterns. Your view of “surveys” as evidence is bizarre in that context. No one really complains about the voting patterns of Jews, yeah it’s over 70% for Democrats but Jewish people are only 2% of the population so it’s not significant.

            What influence that a small population can have comes from money and advocacy. That being said, what evidence in the realm of donations and advocacy would you accept for the proposition that you declared (with no evidence) is “just wrong”?

            I come across plenty of Jews in day to day life and I’ve never met anyone that’s for open borders. So on that basis alone I have a low prior for that statement being true.

            I come across plenty of Jewish people in my day to day life as well but I’m not so boorish as to talk about the minutia of politics with everyone so I don’t know what their stance is on open borders and if they believe the same policy is a good idea for Israel.

            That being said, this blog is hosted by a Jewish person who is in favor of open borders, the person whose comments we’re discussing on this thread (Yudkowsky) is a Jewish person in favor of open borders and of the people who have commented on this post the one person that I know is Jewish is also in favor of open borders (David Friedman). Update your priors accordingly.

          • brad says:

            Surveys are generally about opinions, voting surveys are just one small subset of surveys generally. So unless the thesis is that Jews advocate for positions that they don’t support, they are quite relevant.

            I think the original anonymous is probably right. Bizarre to come across frankly. I guess I’m sheltered.

            Anyway if tMC or maven want to continue the conversation, I’ll check back later.

          • Latetotheparty says:

            “Is Japanese nationalism verboten in Japan? Do Muslims apologize for the military success of Mohammed? Present-day Mongols glorify Genghis Khan, one of the most bloodthirsty conquerers in history. Contrast with British conquerers who abolished slavery in their territories. I do think there is something weird about white self-hate.”

            I think this is an artifact of humans thinking in near vs. far mode. Reading about the Roman Empire as a kid from far mode, the Roman Empire sounded really cool! Gladiators! Legions! Grandeur! But up close, if we were living inside of it, what would the Roman Empire look like? Slavery! Conquest! Brutality!

            Am I really worried about a couple hundred thousand Mongolians romanticizing Genghis Khan? No. Just like I don’t worry about an 8-year old boy romanticizing the Roman Empire. But would I worry about Western industrialized countries and their leaders romanticizing the Roman Empire and claiming that they would rebuild a new thousand-year Reich to rival the Roman Empire of old? Yes, very much.

            One reason for why we hold whites to a higher standard is because we are very much more capable to make our fantasies into reality at present.

          • Sandy says:

            Is Japanese nationalism verboten in Japan?

            It sort of is. Certainly not to the same extent as white nationalism in the West, but every time some Japanese group starts talking about Japanese pride and Japanese nationalism, media outlets in Asia and the West start firing out column inches about troubling trends from the Japanese right and implying Japan is on the verge of returning to the bad old days of Pacific colonialism and worshiping the Emperor as God on Earth.

          • sweeneyrod says:

            Likewise, regarding sensible people condemn the Muslims who glorify Muhammad’s military conquests, as sometimes they try to emulate them. If a Mongolian National Front started blowing stuff up in Central Asia it would be reasonable to worry about people glorifying Genghis Khan. Glorify/condemn is a false dichotomy, in most cases the correct response is somewhere in between (i.e. don’t care that much).

          • John Schilling says:

            Q: Is Japanese nationalism verboten in Japan?
            A: Every time some Japanese group starts talking about Japanese pride and Japanese nationalism, media outlets in Asia and the West start firing out column inches about troubling trends from the Japanese right and implying Japan is on the verge of returning to the bad old days of Pacific colonialism

            Thus showing that Japanese nationalism is verboten in Korea, China, etc, and highly suspect in the US, Australia, and UK. Big surprise.

            Japanese nationalism, in Japan, is controversial but absolutely not “verboten”.

          • The Most Conservative says:

            This all seems to be something that’s confined to fringe online discourse.

            Agreed. It’s small-scale ethnic tension… the white gang and the Latino gang at the local prison can be having a gang war, but this will have minimal effects on race relations in their local community.

            I think this is an artifact of humans thinking in near vs. far mode.

            That’s fair.

            One reason for why we hold whites to a higher standard is because we are very much more capable to make our fantasies into reality at present.

            Genghis Khan was also very capable of making his fantasies in to reality. Did this cause him to hold himself to a higher standard? The reason the world’s ruling clique (which disproportionately consists of white people) hold themselves to a high standard is because they inherited Quaker values. And that’s a good thing. But they shouldn’t count on Quaker values to persist if they aren’t defended. Many historical empires have had non-Quaker values. We got lucky with the American empire.

            I reject the premise. You might be able to find a few examples, but frequently is just wrong.

            Yeah, I’m not sure how true it is. I could try to check whether the allegations are true, but why? There are lots of great Jewish people and I don’t want to start seeing them as an outgroup. The explanation I offered will suffice in the least convenient possible world where “anti-white” people are disproportionately Jewish.

            That being said, this blog is hosted by a Jewish person who is in favor of open borders, the person whose comments we’re discussing on this thread (Yudkowsky) is a Jewish person in favor of open borders and of the people who have commented on this post the one person that I know is Jewish is also in favor of open borders (David Friedman). Update your priors accordingly.

            I know Scott has expressed skepticism about open borders:

            In terms of “political causes that we can be totally sure won’t backfire and devastate entire countries for generations”, I would place open borders…well, let’s say somewhere in the bottom quartile. A thorough analysis by one of its strongest and most intelligent advocates concludes with “doubt that the American polity could survive and flourish under open borders” but has been mostly ignored in favor of constantly retreading the same old streetlight-illuminated ground of whether immigrants do or don’t affect native wages.

            As someone whose own views on open borders are mixed (I should probably write a post)…

            The fact that you got Scott’s opinion wrong makes me distrust the rest of your comment.

          • a non mouse says:

            I simplified Scott’s position.

            The quoted part you put up was from a character in a dialog of his named “Bob” – who also came down against gay marriage – in other words, not representative of Scott’s beliefs.

            The rest of the second paragraph you quoted was this:

            As someone whose own views on open borders are mixed (I should probably write a post), I am really turned off by memes like the one above. And since only seven percent of Americans fully support open borders, that’s a lot of potentially turned-off people. They’re going to go on effective altruist sites, see that a big part of the movement is arguing for a policy that they abhor, and notice their potential colleagues talking about how people like them who oppose that policy are stupid and parochial and hate foreigners. “We think you’re wrong and stupid, come join our movement” makes a really crappy recruiting pitch. But it is the pitch we are sending to anyone who isn’t a Silicon Valley libertarian, George Mason University economics professor, or Vox.com journalist – the only three groups from which I have seen a level of open borders support much beyond the lizardman level.

            In other words, Scott is pro-open borders but thinks it’s tactically unsound to say it and tactically unsound to mock the people who aren’t pro-open borders. Oh, but he has reservations (of course he does, that’s his whole thing – having reservations about supporting whatever policy will destroy society).

            In the last comment thread Scott made this pretty clear –

            I’m coming at this from a position of being more against SJ tactics than SJ positions. I’m glad gay marriage is legal now. I’m not so happy people who oppose gay marriage have been ridden out of town on a rail.

            He’s against gay marriage opponents being ridden out of town on a rail – well, personally against it – he wouldn’t actually do anything about it other than say something about how you should be nice until you can coordinate meanness (like when you can make a gene altering virus to destroy your enemies rather than just riding them out of town piecemeal).

            Not the best example of an open borders advocate (because Scott doesn’t really do advocacy for policy), I’ll grant.

            As far as Eliezer Yudkowsky goes I generally avoid reading him because but in his seminal work – his Harry Potter fan fiction – his author insert stated:

            It had come up much earlier, before the Trial, in conversation with Hermione; when she’d said something about magical Britain being Prejudiced, with considerable and recent justification. And Harry had thought – but not said – that at least she’d been let into Hogwarts to be spat upon.

            Not like certain people living in certain countries, who were, it was said, as human as anyone else; who were said to be sapient beings, worth more than any mere unicorn. But who nonetheless wouldn’t be allowed to live in Muggle Britain. On that score, at least, no Muggle had the right to look a wizard in the eye. Magical Britain might discriminate against Muggleborns, but at least it allowed them inside so they could be spat upon in person.

            …and then in the very next sentence he discovered that he could power the killing curse – previously thought only able to be cast with the power of hate – with that same awful power of indifference. Subtle.

            David Friedman is on this thread and has supported open borders here.

            The original claim that I was refuting was that the poster didn’t even know anyone who was in favor of open borders. The examples chosen were to demonstrate the absurdity of that.

            As far as –

            Yeah, I’m not sure how true it is. I could try to check whether the allegations are true, but why? There are lots of great Jewish people and I don’t want to start seeing them as an outgroup.

            The discussion started with a quote from EY expressing contempt and hostility for Borderers in a frankly disgusting way. Sometimes it’s not about who you choose as an outgroup but who sees you as an outgroup.

          • Latetotheparty says:

            @The Most Conservative:

            I know that Genghis Khan himself wouldn’t hold himself to a higher standard (rulers can always find a way to rationalize their bloodthirsty deeds), but I would certainly hold his fantasies to a higher standard if he was in a position to implement them.

            I’ll give you another example: when I was a naive teenager, I actually found rap videos like this one humorous(!) because I thought, surely, blacks don’t really behave like this. Surely they are just clowning around and flinging some barbs at privileged whites to even the score somewhat for their historical oppression. But in the last few years, with more reports of random black hoodlum attacks on innocent white people in various towns, I am no longer so naive, and I consider the problem to be a deadly serious one, as it appears that black thugs do have the means and inclination to pull off things like this. It is not just a fantasy anymore (actually it never was; I was just naive before).

            Now, I haven’t become a complete racist because I happen to think that thug culture still has cultural and economic roots, perhaps in addition to low IQ and impulsiveness being a problem genetically with some people. And obviously, there are white trash thugs too in some places. But it does seem like, for whatever reason, it is disproportionately prevalent among black teenage males compared to other teenage male groups, and it gives me second thoughts when walking through certain parts of town at night.

          • hyperboloid says:

            @The most conservative

            Many forms of nationalism are certainly verboten in modern Japan, the old idea of Kokutai was quite possibly the defining ideological concept of prewar era, and since 1945 it has been rejected by all mainstream political actors as militaristic and antidemocratic.

            Common tropes of American nationalism such as boasts about military prowess, or claims that the country has a special role in history as a leader of other nations would be extremely controversial in Japanese politics. Japanese political culture is obviously less nationalist then it’s American counterpart.

            What I think you’re trying to get at is that in spite of this fact Japan remains a quite conservative and ethnocentric society. The country has some of the most restrictive immigration laws in the world and the overwhelming majority of Japanese citizens are descended form people who have lived in the archipelago since at least the Tokugawa era.

            The are two things to say about this that have Relevance to white nationalism. First, I think that this attitude has hurt Japan in the long run by contributing to economic and social stagnation. And second, what ever you think of Japanese nationalism, the Japanese certainly constitute a clearly defined ethnos. “White” people do not.

            Because of Japan’s history of isolationism, and the unifying policies of the bakufu and the Meiji government, Japan is a highly homogeneous society. The overwhelming majority of bearers of Japanese culture share a common ancestry, and the overwhelming majority of those who share Japanese ancestry are bearers of a common culture.

            “Whiteness” has never been precisely defined to anybodies satisfaction, and even at the height of the popularity of notions of racial supremacy Europeans never thought of themselves as a single nation.

            Japanese ethnocentrism can remain relatively harmless because it exists in a society where the population is almost exclusively Japanese.

            If we take white nationalism seriously as an actual political project, and not a way of trolling PC liberals, there is nothing harmless about it.

            Depending on how you count, something like thirty percent of the American population is non white. A nation state is a community bound together by institutions of coercion and violence. Installing a white nationalist regime in the United States would mean, at the very least, stripping that thirty percent of their civil rights. White nationalists have never been clear about how they plan to do this without horrific bloodshed.

            If it’s true that you frequently see Jews promoting open borders and multiculturalism for America, while they promote closed borders and ethnonationalism for Israel, why might this be?

            >

            Because American Jews and Israelis are two different groups of people with two different sets of priorities. Contrary to hundreds of years of antisemitic propaganda, “the Jews” with a capital J are not a collective political actor. They are people scattered across dozens of countries and sometimes separated by vast ethnic and political differences.

            Despite what many Americans think, Israel is not Brooklyn by the dead sea. It is a Hebrew speaking middle eastern country that has been at war on and off for the past seventy years. It is considerably less xenophobic then most of it’s neighbors.

          • NN says:

            > 1. White people are allowed to display the same level of ethnic pride that other races do, and America is allowed to be just as xenophobic towards foreigners as Israel is

            Funny, I don’t see many objections to Irish/Italian/whatever Americans being proud of their Irish/Italian/whatever heritage. Heck, within living memory a not-insignificant number of Irish Americans donated millions of dollars to an Irish ethnonationalist terrorist organization, and nobody seems particularly quick to condemn them for it.

          • DavidFriedman says:

            “perhaps in addition to low IQ and impulsiveness being a problem genetically”

            I’m curious. There is evidence, whether or not correct, that average black IQ is lower than average white IQ. Is there any comparable evidence for a difference in impulsiveness, or is that just conjecture?

          • Glen Raphael says:

            Regarding:

            you frequently see Jews promoting open borders and multiculturalism for America, while they promote closed borders and ethnonationalism for Israel

            I am an American former Jew (aka “jewish atheist” aka “culturally jewish”) who is unambiguously in favor of open borders, yet I fail to meet the criteria given because I don’t “promote” any particular policy for Israel – I don’t really care what Israel does.

            (Also, I have some reservations about “multiculturalism”.)

            I suspect the people doubting the assertion are parsing it the way I do – that to qualify as a positive example you’d need to find THE SAME PERSON meeting both criteria at once.

          • hyperboloid says:

            @Latetotheparty

            Ah, good old fashioned American negrophobia.

            It might help the case of you and your fellow incomplete racists if you didn’t sound like you’d never met an actual flesh and blood black person.

          • latetotheparty says:

            @ Hyperboloid

            Hahaha, I love it when people who know nothing about me accuse me of negrophobia due to my justified criticism of a particularly heinous rap video and a very real tendency in African-American culture towards that kind of stuff.

            It wasn’t very many years ago that I considered myself an anarchist-communist. Bakunin4life and all that. (I still consider myself a communsit). My favorite artist used to be Immortal Technique (I still like a lot of his stuff). Dead Prez also has some good stuff too. I am totally down with black liberation when it comes to reasoned criticism of, and organizing against, oppression. But when it comes to stuff like Dead Prez’s “Hell Yeah (Pimp the System)” video, I just can’t stand it, and more and more it actually makes me feel threatened. Like, if blacks are going to make things about race rather than class and attack any random white dude on the street, well, as a white dude it makes it pretty hard for me to be an ally with them, even if I would like to band together in a common (class) struggle.

            Here’s a Key and Peele video that highlights this awful discrepancy in black culture between serious resistance and bling-blang thug culture. I so much wish there were more of the former and less of the latter because it would actually 1. do more to help the black cause itself, make it appear more legitimate (even Malcolm X’s radicalism is fine when voiced in his serious manner. Whereas someone like L’il Jon is not helpful in any scenario), and 2. make it more appealing and possible for people like me to ally with them.

            And if some blacks would come back at me and say that this all sounds like whitesplaining their oppression to them, I would respond: do you want to win, or not? Because blacks are not a majority in the U.S. They don’t have the numbers without allies. Whites still currently do. And we all know that whites are capable of horrible things (Hitler, etc.) when they put their minds to it. Blacks absolutely cannot afford to antagonize all whites. And I happen to think that, with all due respect, I am one of the more sympathetic whites out there that blacks will ever encounter. So, if they can’t get me on their side, then they have a serious problem.

          • sweeneyrod says:

            @latetotheparty
            “my justified criticism of a particularly heinous rap video and a very real tendency in African-American culture towards that kind of stuff”

            I sympathise with you. It annoys me when people claim my sweeping generalisations about Norwegian culture’s tendency towards church burning are invalid, when I’ve listened to at least three black metal songs.

          • Anonymous Bosch says:

            I’m sorry but I’m gonna be laughing for a solid minute at attempting to establish black solidarity with an Immortal Technique namedrop

          • Zombielicious says:

            And I happen to think that, with all due respect, I am one of the more sympathetic whites out there that blacks will ever encounter.

            Truly, they are lucky to have you on their side.

          • brad says:

            I think for both blacks and Jews, benignly ignorant is preferable to malevolently knowledgeable.

          • Whatever Happened to Anonymous says:

            I’m not sure when we determined that him being a racist was the correct prior, and it was up to him to prove he was not.

      • Anonymous says:

        I have thought of myself as a member of the “rationalist community” for a long time, but having this guy as community figurehead strongly makes me want to find a new tribe.

        He’s the main reason I’ve never really joined anything like the “community”.

        (Although I admit that the bonobo rationalists also gross me out something extreme.)

      • The Most Conservative says:

        (I read the post again and, on second reading, I think my summary is somewhat unfair)

      • caethan says:

        I find it deeply hilarious that he picks the MWI of quantum mechanics as the “clearly obvious” example. He realizes that Einstein, de Broglie, Heisenberg, Bohr, et alia were all pretty sharp guys, right? For those of us who don’t deeply understand the theory and are willing to accept arguments from authority, it’s not like we’re dissenting from Authority that all agrees with EY and man we are so stupid. It’s more that there’s this big pillar of authority with lots of smart famous guys on and most of us go “OK, sure, that sounds reasonable” and EY is over there going “They’re all fools! FOOLS I SAY!”

        Every time I read him talk about this, I have to remind myself that Everett is actually a pretty sharp guy too and I shouldn’t overly discount the MWI because there are doofuses who support it.

        • a non mouse says:

          Man in Black: You’re that smart?
          EY: Let me put it to you this way – hhave you ever heard of Einstein, de Broglie, Heisenberg, Bohr?
          Man in Black: Yes.
          EY: Morons.
          Man in Black: Really?

        • Douglas Knight says:

          Those people all worked before MWI existed, so it doesn’t tell you much that they didn’t choose it.

          The Einstein-Bohr debate is about realism vs instrumentalism. Einstein argues that we should reject “CI” and search for a realist interpretation. So it’s fairly clear that he would choose MWI. Bohr argues that it doesn’t matter. So he’s definitely not rejecting MWI, but it’s not clear that he wouldn’t prefer realism if it were an option. I’m not sure about de Broglie, but Heisenberg said that consciousness causes collapse and I’m willing to call bullshit on his authority.

          • caethan says:

            It’s so nice that we have people like you around to tell us what geniuses would say if they could weigh in on this dispute. That way I can stop deferring to actual authority on the subject and instead defer to your made up opinion of what they would have said.

          • Douglas Knight says:

            You weren’t deferring to actual authority, but to your fabrication of Einstein rejecting MWI.

          • TheAncientGeek says:

            Einstein argues that we should reject “CI” and search for a realist interpretation. So it’s fairly clear that he would choose MWI.

            That’s not at all clear. He wouldn’t have gone for a hidden variables theory like Bohm’s, for instance?

        • Gazeboist says:

          Griffiths’ Introduction to Elementary Particles has a beautiful footnote in the first chapter that runs through a list of four or five examples of Bohr loudly and publicly claiming a position that was flat wrong.

          The real answer, of course, is that most people who aren’t philosophers don’t really care about the philosophical implications of quantum mechanics.

          • Douglas Knight says:

            This was a most disturbing result. Niehls Bohr (not for the first time) was ready to abandon the law of conservation of energy.* Fortunately, Pauli took a more sober view…

            * It is interesting to note that Bohr was an outspoken critic of Einstein’s light quantum (prior to 1924), that he discouraged Dirac’s work on the relativistic electron theory (telling him, incorrectly,
            that Klein and Gordon had already succeeded), that he opposed Pauli’s introduction of the neutrino, that he ridiculed Yukawa’s theory of the meson, and that he disparaged Feynman’s approach to quantum electrodynamics.

            Yes, authority isn’t everything.

            ━━━━━━━━━

            It’s certainly true that most people don’t care about interpretation of quantum mechanics. Probably they shouldn’t. Most physicists don’t, either, and I’m not sure that’s a good situation. But they were quite interested in this before the war. I took your second paragraph to be related to your first paragraph, so I thought the footnote was going to be examples of Bohr spouting philosophical bullshit to demonstrate that he didn’t care about philosophy. But those examples don’t seem to have much to do with philosophy. Maybe the rest of the physicists were just faking it, but Bohr was quite serious about the philosophy of quantum mechanics. Maybe he was faking it in the beginning (consciousness causes collapses is generally blamed on him), but taunted by Einstein he did most of the work of clarifying the issues. David Kaiser has interesting things to say about how interpretation fell out of fashion after the war.

          • Gazeboist says:

            Ah, sorry. I was classifying current, modern physicists with the non-philosophers in that second paragraph. Here are my thoughts as to why modern physicists are less interested in the philosophy side of things. I’m hardly an authority, so don’t take this as an absolute explanation, but it fits with what I’ve learned studying physics.

            Many physicists did care about the philosophical elements, all through the 1880-1950 period. Boltzmann was arguably driven to suicide because Machians objected to his theory of statistical mechanics on philosophical grounds. Less sensationally, Einstein’s theory of special relativity was based primarily on philosophy, as were Planck’s early objections to quantum mechanics, and then later Einstein’s own objections to the same. As Einstein’s generation faded, though, philosophy fell out of favor among physicists, replaced by a consensus that nobody really understood quantum mechanics (and, thus, that nobody really understood physics or its implications).

            And then some time in the late 70s or early 80s … everyone understood quantum mechanics. Bell’s Theorem showed that local hidden variables were dead, but there wasn’t much more to say. The next couple of decades saw the standard model repeatedly confirmed; fundamental physics hasn’t been shaken up in the same way it was during the preceding period. For a while the only theory that was even close to certain was electromagnetism; experiments were wildly ahead of theorists in terms of results they were getting. Now the only really fundamental* anomalous results are dark matter and dark energy, and there are plenty of theories that get those kinds of results. We just don’t have the data to readily distinguish between them.

            Modern physics isn’t getting constantly punched in the assumptions, so it doesn’t matter what those assumptions are. Choosing between relational, Bohmian, many-worlds, BST, or even Copenhagen or statistical QM doesn’t result in disagreement over what to expect from the next experiment. So … whatever. It’s not a big deal if someone proposes a bunch of inaccessible alternate universes, or thinks that a function we can’t measure changes its values in a faster-than-light manner every time two electrons get near each other.

            * Condensed matter people get all kinds of weird shit, but that doesn’t usually undermine fundamental physical assumptions the way quantum mechanics did.

          • Douglas Knight says:

            That the second paragraph started off with “The real reason” should have tipped me off that the two paragraphs weren’t connected.

            philosophy fell out of favor among physicists, replaced by a consensus that nobody really understood quantum mechanics

            Yes, that’s what happened, but that doesn’t answer why. You seem to say that physicists don’t worry about it today because they solved the problems in the 70s and 80s, but why did they abandon these problems in the 50s and 60s? Kaiser gives an answer: an influx of students required focusing on easy to grade calculations at the expense of interpretation.

          • Gazeboist says:

            Having read further on the topic, I’m going to revise my position that philosophy was abandoned by high level physicists: rather, consensus was reached on the debates of Einstein’s day, and the philosophical disputes of Feynman’s era were not well understood by non-physicists. That modern philosophers can sort of get a handle on the Standard Model / General Relativity conflict is a return to the status quo of the early quantum mechanical debates, which gradually drifted out of external comprehensibility as quantum mechanics developed.

          • Douglas Knight says:

            consensus was reached on the debates of Einstein’s day

            I’m not sure what time frame you’re talking about, but I thought that the whole point of this thread is that nothing remotely like a consensus was reached on the Bohr-Einstein debate and instead the whole thing was swept under the rug for forty years.

            Your last sentence is pretty disturbing. I think I should stop using the word “philosophy.” Do you have any suggestions for an alternative?

          • Gazeboist says:

            Physicists (and other scientists, but physics is often more dramatic) spend a lot of time poking around at the boundary between science and philosophy. Every so often, something that was a metaphysical or epistemological debate abruptly becomes a physical question with a fairly definite answer, usually because some physicist somewhere found a way to frame it as such. Atomism is the earliest I can think clearly about. Other examples include relativity of motion and whether various quantities are discrete or continuous.

            Einstein and others argued (from 1935 by the paper trail, but likely earlier in private) that quantum mechanics was incomplete because it seemed to allow for fundamental facts about the universe to remain unfixed until certain interactions take place. That implies that the universe is fundamentally nondeterministic, unless you accept instantaneous signaling, and thereby at least sort of accept time travel. Einstein thought both of those things were in fundamental conflict with the axioms of physics; he therefore sought a “more complete” theory that predicted the same experimental results as QM, but with additional factors that retained the definiteness of the results on a micro level*. In 1964, Bell showed that any such theory actually made predictions distinct from quantum mechanics. The experimental evidence didn’t come in until the 70s and 80s, but “it’s an experimental question” serves well enough as consensus for the theorists to move on.

            The Feynman/Gell-Mann split I referred to earlier was over the definition of a particle. Gell-Mann thought that particles were only those things that could be separated and isolated from other things like them; Feynman thought that was not a necessary condition for particle-ness. This turns out to be important for deciding whether quarks are real objects or mathematical constructs, since according to the experimental evidence it is impossible to isolate a single quark. Feynman turned out to be right: the particle nature of quarks turns out to have testable implications despite the fact that they can’t be isolated. Past this point, there’s a long period where most of the debates in physics are over various esoteric symmetries.

            Local realism is pretty easy to explain, and it’s easy to see what each side is saying, so the dispute became famous. Quarks, especially right at the beginning of the construction of the Standard Model, are harder to explain, and it’s hard to explain what meaning “particle” could have other than that the thing could be isolated without getting into things like Fourier transforms. Getting into what the theorists are even talking about with regard to symmetry is harder still.

            That’s what I mean when I say the debates “gradually drifted out of external comprehensibility” – it got to the point where, without some background in the stuff being debated, it was hard for someone to understand what each side was even saying. I don’t think that’s necessarily disturbing; as long as the people in the field aren’t hiding behind non-definitions or otherwise deliberately obfuscating things, an interested party can go in and learn the subject of the disputes. That there isn’t a particularly clear path from ignorance to understanding is a problem, but it’s one that can be solved. If nothing else, people looking for a path can ask for help finding one.

            In any event, there are many modern debates that are more easily understood. The big, easy to grasp ones are probably the question of why certain dimensionless constants can’t be calculated directly from the laws involved, the related but distinct question of fine tuning, and the reasons behind baryon asymmetry.** Other people here can probably think of more, or find them. It’s not like these debates didn’t exist in the 40s or the 60s or the 80s, but questions tend to get fixed to eras associated with the run-up to their answer, even if they were asked long before. Heliocentrism goes back at least as far as the Pythagorans, but it’s associated with the period that led up to Kepler and Newton’s laws. The same is true for atomism, in fact. It’s nigh impossible to say what question will be answered “next” without actually providing the answer, but it looks like the quantum / general relativity answer might come soon. Of course it’s looked like that for twenty or thirty years by this point, so maybe not.

            I don’t know what you should call these disputes that used to be philosophical but have since become physical. I mean, geocentrism vs heliocentrism really was a matter of philosophy for a while, until eventually the data was good enough that one could be tossed.

            Looping back to the original question of whether Yudkowski is committing some grave sin by “going against expert consensus”, I think the answer is that a lot of people have misunderstood what the expert consensus actually is. I’d say the consensus is “unless you have a way for us to distinguish between these theories, which one you believe is not our concern.” Yudkowski makes an Occamian argument that MWI should be preferred over Copenhagen, but until he’s got a distinguishing prediction (computational complexity of the universe?) this has as much force as arguments that nonstandard analysis and infinitesimals make for a more elegant approach to calculus than limits.

            * Compare Brownian motion: it’s a random walk on a macro level, but is perfectly explicable as the result of deterministic processes at the micro level.

            ** A couple of other open questions I like:
            (-) “Why is the cosmological constant smaller than the Planck energy by three orders of magnitude?”
            (-) “Why the hell is baryon number conserved?” (imagine if chemical reactions always conserved the number of atoms currently in a gaseous state of matter – that’s baryon conservation, loosely)
            And some that are waiting on experimental results:
            (-) “Did our hubble bubble strike another one at some point in the past?”
            (-) “Is dark energy a thing, or do we just happen to be at the dead center of a hubble-bubble-sized low density pocket in the universe?”

            [edit – holy fucking shit that got long]

          • TheAncientGeek says:

            Looping back to the original question of whether Yudkowski is committing some grave sin by “going against expert consensus”, I think the answer is that a lot of people have misunderstood what the expert consensus actually is. I’d say the consensus is “unless you have a way for us to distinguish between these theories, which one you believe is not our concern.”

            That’s true of most working physicists, but there is another kind of expert, which is the expert in the philosophy of physics.

          • Douglas Knight says:

            Gazeboist, can you give an example of a philosopher who was not himself a scientist or mathematician influencing science? Let’s restrict to post-1500.

            Many scientists claim to be influenced by Schopenhauer or Popper. Some people claim that Comte influenced Mach. Are there any other examples?

          • The original Mr. X says:

            @ Gazeboist:

            Every so often, something that was a metaphysical or epistemological debate abruptly becomes a physical question with a fairly definite answer, usually because some physicist somewhere found a way to frame it as such. Atomism is the earliest I can think clearly about.

            Actually no, since the “atoms” of modern physics aren’t atoms as Democritus defined them.

          • Gazeboist says:

            @Douglas Knight

            No; I don’t have a good knowledge of philosophers except for cases like Mach or Liebnitz where they were also physicists. But I also don’t really understand why you’re asking. I don’t think philosophers have any particular influence on physics; they just talk about it sometimes, with greater or lesser understanding of what things actually mean.

            @Mr X

            They are definitely the atoms that Mach argued against, though, and his arguments failed when Einstein successfully explained Brownian motion. I considered naming Kepler and Newton’s discrediting of geocentrism, but I don’t have the historical knowledge to talk about that period.

      • Maven says:

        Hi The Most Conservative,

        Despite the fact that it might come off as unnecessarily aggressive to some ears, I thought the basic idea behind Eliezer’s post was sound. Expertise is real, experts should be trusted (with caveats; epistemology is hard), and some people do make better political decisions than others. Eliezer did get lost in a Smugularity when he started talking about MWI (I grant that it is metaphysically and epistemically possible that Eliezer is so much smarter than all other physicists than the proper interpretation of QM is a non-issue to him, but my credence of this being true is quite low), but that shouldn’t impinge upon the rest of what he says. I confess to being something of a political elitist myself. I think it would be good if experts were given a greater role in public decision making, and democracy shouldn’t be fetishized to the degree it is.

        Turning to the specific content pertaining to Hillary and Trump , though. I gather that you’re a Trump supporter, yes? I confess that there are many points in Hillary’s favor (or rather, to Trump’s discredit) that make the choice somewhat “obvious” for me. Trump has threatened to expand the scope of libel laws to make it easier to punish journalists, and as someone who holds free speech sacred, I can’t tolerate this; he hasn’t assigned to global warming the priority it deserves, and may literally believe that it’s a Chinese hoax; his commitment to our NATO and Asian allies is questionable at best; etc. However, I do recognize some amount of pull towards voting for Trump, because he’s roughly on “my side” of the culture war. I assume everyone knows what I’m talking about.

        This cultural, ideological dimension to politics – the tribal dimension – is very powerful, and Eliezer may have ignored the importance of this dimension in his analysis of Hillary vs. Trump, instead choosing to focus on bare economic calculation. Tweak someone’s tribal allegiances and risk perceptions a little bit and you can get them to support wildly different political candidates and movements, regardless of what the “correct” answer is. Indeed, Eliezer himself listed “Trump’s past misogyny” as a reason why it’s “obvious” that one should not vote for Trump. The mere use of this phrase indicates that Eliezer has been inducted into a particular ideology, and he may not even be aware of it.

    • Jiro says:

      “I was just joking” is the common refuge of trolls and bullies who get caught. I have strong priors that anything which needs “I was just joking” and wasn’t clearly being misunderstood wasn’t just a joke.

      (Note that jokes are often merged with attacks. “I was joking” is a feeble defense if it doesn’t imply “I was just joking”.

      • Fahundo says:

        You remind me of the dad in this comic.

        Just joking!

      • The Nybbler says:

        It certainly read to me (before he said so) as a joking reference to Trump’s “Second Amendment people” comment. Certainly merged with an attack; clearly he doesn’t like Borderers and thinks they are dumb.

      • Tedd says:

        I believe nearly all of his intended audience interpreted it correctly. Since it is impossible to make a joke which will not be misinterpreted by someone, especially someone outside your audience who is generally mistrustful for you, I don’t think we ought to hold him to the standard of “no one, anywhere, thinks it is sincere”.

    • Deiseach says:

      Yeah, I can see that he was trying to satirise the original ‘perceived veiled threat’ but that’s the kind of “joke” where you take someone aside and explain “No, see, a joke is funny or witty“.

      Making the analogy of CRISPR editing out “Borderer values” would have been quite enough (though he couldn’t even come up with a quasi-plausible ‘what they are or where they might be located on genes or what factors influence them’). Making it coercive, non-consensual, and throwing in “And we’ll make all you poor dumb white trash smart as well” is asking for a smack in the kisser.

      If you’d write a denunciation of someone ‘joking’ about engineering a virus to make all the poor ghetto-dwelling blacks smart in order to make society safer and nicer for everyone, then you should re-think putting something of the same kind up yourself.

      • Autolykos says:

        The most charitable interpretation would probably be that EY was trying to get as close to the line as possible to create a perfect mirror image of Trump’s jokethreat (and since geneticists are, in general, perceived as less unhinged than some Trump supporters, the threat needs to be more credible to get the same ambiguity). And there’s a bit of “Don’t mess with old nerds. We can be more scary than your wildest nightmares without even trying.”
        But I agree that does make it somewhat unfunny. But I guess it’s more of a “Binnenspaß” anyway (I don’t know a good translation; it describes a “joke” you only make to amuse yourself, and don’t expect anyone else to get – basically an in-joke with an audience of one).

      • HeelBearCub says:

        Yeah, it’s not a joke.

        The best you can say about it is that it is an analogy that is supposed to invoke horror. Those who read it are supposed to be horrified, see the parallel to “Second Amendment Remedies”, and then be prompted to stop thinking about or referring to “2AR”s.

        If that was the intent, it is, as you say, satire, in the style of “A Modest Proposal”. Certainly that is his claim in the second post, despite referring to a “joke” (where “thatsthejoke” almost never means an actual attempt at humor).

        I’m not sure if that was the original intent though. Satire is, after all, dead. Counter-threat to threat is also clearly available interpretation, and indeed both can be true at the same time.

    • roystgnr says:

      “thatsthejoke.gif” doesn’t mean “this is nothing but a joke”, it means “people didn’t get it”.

      The most important thing some people didn’t get, even though the phrase “*my* equivalent of making ominous noises about the Second Amendment” should have handed it to them on a silver platter, is that the original post was saying “A ⇔ B”, which is not the same thing as saying “B”. In this case it is just the opposite: the first statement of a proof-by-contradiction which relies on the fact of “¬B” to work.

      Yudkowsky has had “bad optics” for forever; getting critics to out themselves as incapable of recognizing a proof-by-contradiction may have been a more effective expenditure of “weirdness points” than average.

      Amusingly, IIRC Trump was recently the victim of the exact same process. One set of “Second Amendment” remarks were indeed as creepy as Yudkowsky’s analogy makes out, but at another time Trump made a statement along the lines of “If Hillary thinks nobody needs a gun then she should have her Secret Service disarm”, which often got reported as “Trump wants Hillary unprotected” without showing the slightest recognition of the actual argument that was being made.

      • Gazeboist says:

        In writing, one usually concludes a proof by contradiction with, “¬B, and so ¬A”. Without any interpretive markers, “it could be interpreted this other way” is not a valid shield from criticism.

        • roystgnr says:

          No; in mathematical papers, one usually concludes a proof by contradiction that way. In colloquial writing to an informed audience, it should be safe to assume that your readers can take a contrapositive themselves.

          Regardless of whether any particular critic is capable of going that far, however, they should all be capable of detecting the difference between “A is equivalent to B” and “B”, correct? They should be smart enough to know that those are two distinct, independent propositions? I vaguely recall reading Scott complain at one point that news headlines seemed incapable of conveying compound propositions, that they could assert “A is true” or “B is true” but never “(A or B) is true” or “(A implies B) is true”; perhaps if someone’s contribution to society is “giving cnn.com another ad impression” that’s the correct floor to shoot for, but I’d hope SSC readers could be held to a higher standard.

          If someone had criticized Yudkowsky’s “support” for what genetic engineers might do to Borderers as well as his “support” for what extrajudicial things “the Second Amendment people” might do to Hillary Clinton, then I might be able to buy the theory that they had simply failed to infer the same unwritten steps of his argument that I did.

          Anyone who did not treat both those levels of “support” the same way, however, whether they concluded that it was both support or both condemnation, has no leg to stand on. Words like “equivalent” mean things, and understanding what they mean is a prerequisite to criticizing sentences which include them.

          • Gazeboist says:

            “Your claim of X licenses me to Y” is not readily distinguishable from “Your claim of X would license me to Y, therefore not X.” Both are typical in human discourse.

            These are especially hard to distinguish when someone has already expressed support for things that could be mistaken for Y; carefully separating your actual claims from similar sounding claims you do not endorse is an important rhetorical skill not demonstrated by the borderers post.

            [paragraph deleted as needless antagonism on my part]

        • Jiro says:

          In the real world, saying A ↔ B is often a way of saying B while trying to maintain plausible deniability. (This is also one of the reasons why people fight hypotheticals.)

          Also, even taking Eliezer at his word, the two statements may be equivalent in the sense that they are both ways of signalling hatred of X. We expect candidates to signal hatred of each other, but we don’t expect this of Eliezer.

    • TMB says:

      Yudowsky’s arguments for taking AI risk seriously are also excellent arguments for the rest of us to be careful of him.

  59. Virbie says:

    I was a little surprised to see a couple of your comments last time, but Fundamental Attribution Error and all that, particularly because the last couple threads were some of the more acrimonious ones I’ve seen in a while. Kudos for putting yourself on the ban register.

  60. Arbitrary_greay says:

    Has anyone watched Black Mirror? (currently available on Netflix) It’s an anthology show based around taking the implications of social technology and social media culture to their extreme ends. There are also detailed episode summaries on Wikipedia, if you want to know what each ep deals with without subjecting yourself to them, as many watchers have reported outright nausea and inability to binge the show because of what it depicts.

    And I can’t quite word my dissatisfaction with the conclusions it draws, or how so many find it “so powerful” and “soul-crushing” and whatnot. In some cases, like most of the Christmas Special, the gap between what people think the technology is like, and the reality of how it’s executed, is the problem. Some of the individual “bad end” extrapolations, I even can believe. But for most of them, the final world-building twist that each episode takes to goes from merely unsettling to horror is the one step too far to break my suspension of disbelief. (The only episode I kind of buy is “Be Right Back.”)

    And that kind of fear-of-tech-existential-horror seems to be a vein of fiction that I’m just not into, in general. It’s like anti-sci-fi. Am I just being too optimistic about humanity? Am I sticking my head in the sand, in denial of Hobbesian reality? (something something I dislike fiction that makes their thematic argument via fiction fiat something fuck Omelas something)

    I also ruminated this past week on how Westworld implies a future in which further developments in VR or wireheading technology apparently aren’t enough to stop people from wanting to abuse meatspace NPCs. But part of the abuse of NPCs in gaming comes from their failing to overcome the uncanny valley, as evidenced by how the schadenfreude can be equally derived from players’ abuse of their own avatars. Related to my feelings on Black Mirror above, I just don’t believe in things like The Purge going mainstream, so I don’t quite buy people treating androids of that level of realism as callously? And most all current cases of 1) animatronic rides and 2) visceral simulated experiences (like haunted houses, horror VR, zombie/apocalypse experience attractions), are all dependent on the customer not interacting and exerting their agency upon the NPCs at all. A lot of that, for the current-day examples, is not allowing the customers to damage the tech or hurt the employees, but I guess that adds another layer to my disbelief, that we’ll reach a level of androids that are designed to take the abuse and have that level of humanity emulation.
    Like, I could buy Dollhouse’s conceit, given the current state of sex work in a lot of places, but Dollhouse was also a very niche thing in-world. Westworld is not.

    • cassander says:

      I like tragedy. I love the show because you know it’s going to end badly, you just don’t know how, and they always manage to take you down the path in an interesting way. the show isn’t deep, but it’s not meant to be. Unless, that is, you believe this.

    • jaimeastorga2000 says:

      I’ve only watched one episode, “Fifteen Million Merits”. I liked it. It reminded me a little of The Twilight Zone. Not all science fiction has to be optimistic.

      • Arbitrary_greay says:

        It’s not that scifi has to be optimistic, but in Black Mirror’s case, it’s the comprehensive effect of the entire series being all “this technology/tech-enabled cultural attitude is HORRIFYING!” from every angle. For example, I enjoyed Fringe and Warehouse 13, despite their also having “science gone wrong!”-of-the-weeks, but their attitude towards science/tech overall wasn’t one of relentless fear. Twilight Zone, too, alternated between supernatural and mundane sources of weird.

    • Wrong Species says:

      What exactly about the episode “The Entire History of You” did you find unconvincing? Because I’m certain that exact scenario will play out many times when the technology is invented.

      • Arbitrary_greay says:

        I’ll concede that The Entire History of You was another episode I buy, and it was those similar “enhanced reality” bits of the Christmas Special that I also liked. Huh, it seems like I’m more okay with the ones that limit themselves to the realm of day-to-day living, and the eps that concern themselves with greater institutions, I don’t buy. Decisions by the individual feel more believable than decisions by the collective?

    • eniteris says:

      This post contains spoilers.

      I quite like Black Mirror, although I am more indiscriminate in my enjoyment of science fiction. I do agree that Black Mirror is more on the depressing side, but I don’t think it necessarily says that the technology is bad, rather it will have implications that we should consider.

      I thought the Christmas Special was quite good, especially on the abuse of ems.

      (I agree that Be Right Back is more positive episode.)

      (Episode by episode review below. Spoilers.)
      The National Anthem: Art and attention. Nothing really new about technology, only about media attention. And art.
      15 Million Merits: Actually based on a prison where the prisoners generate electricity on bikes. Basically dystopian, with some commentary on social norms, but they give the contestants drugs anyways, so most of that doesn’t apply.
      The Entire History of You: Accurate enough when everyone gets portable video cameras and Periscope becomes a social thing. An adequate extrapolation of the fall of privacy.
      Be Right Back: The happiest of all the episodes. Apparently there was a news article about someone building an “AI” based off a deceased SO. There’s a youtube video with the same idea.
      White Bear: Meh. That’s all I have to say. Again, something about media consumption.
      The Waldo Moment: Some sort of comment on our current electoral system? Not my favourite.
      White Christmas: Abusing ems to get them to do what you want. Also extending baleeting into real life, which doesn’t seem very plausible. I mean, what if you don’t wear the hardware?

      I haven’t watched Westworld yet. I’ll probably find a copy sometime this month.

      • Virbie says:

        > Also extending baleeting into real life, which doesn’t seem very plausible. I mean, what if you don’t wear the hardware?

        “Why don’t you just avoid using it” is always the question with stuff like this, but I thought they did a decent job of making it somewhat plausible. They mention that the implant is not removable, so all it takes is getting it once. I think the implication was that everyone gets one for the same reason almost everyone has a smartphone/Facebook account. It’s ubiquitous, most people are slaves to social pressure, far-off potential downsides don’t resonate with people as strongly as immediate benefits do, etc. I don’t think I know a single, solitary person within a few years of my age who has never had a Facebook account. Those few that I know without accounts made the decision to delete it after a few years (and again, the implant is not removable). I’m sure there are people here and there without the implant, but it’s clearly ubiquitous enough that blocking has real impact. I did think the final scene (blocked by everyone) was a little ludicrous though.

        FYI, the first episode of Westworld is watchable online for free: http://www.hbo.com/watch-free-episodes/westworld
        I think the second episode just aired today or yesterday or something, but the first is worth watching to see if it captures your interest.

        • Arbitrary_greay says:

          Virbie brings up an interesting point: much of this vein of horror-scifi is obsessed with highlighting those who get the short end of util. The authors seem to really want their audience to think about the minority who will suffer that culture’s failure modes, and outside of a couple of episodes, the primary perpetrators/enablers of perpetrators in Black Mirror are the collective of the mainstream populace. It’s still an appeal to “what if this happened to you?” but maybe my dissatisfaction is in that the implication is also that “this consequence is more common than you think!”

          And as per my comment to Wrong Species, the few episodes I do buy seem to be the one where I can believe that the bad end will indeed occur to a higher proportion of people. (Oh man, do I buy the kid’s behavior at the end of Be Right Back)

          Or maybe it’s that this genre is like the antithesis of competence porn, which is what I like in my normal story-consumption.

      • Anonymous says:

        Be Right Back: The happiest of all the episodes. Apparently there was a news article about someone building an “AI” based off a deceased SO.

        I also recall someone building a ‘blocking’ gadget that hides brand logos, inspired by “White Christmas”. Reading either, I was reminded of the phrase ‘to use 1984 as an instruction manual’…

    • Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

      The first episode is not even Sci-Fi, just speculative fiction, it’s cool.

      15 million merits is kind of run of the mill dystopia, but it’s competently executed and it looks good.

      The entire history of you is probably the best episode IMO, it works in a “this is what could happen with this future tech” way, and on an emotional level. It also seems like the most plausible one of the “actual sci-fi” episodes.

      Be right back is OK.

      Haven’t seen the rest yet.

      • Nostradamus says:

        I thought that The National Anthem and The Entire History of You were both very good. I also found Fifteen Million Merits quite thought-provoking once I got past the silliness of using human bodies as a power source. I thought White Bear and Waldo were both pretty silly, though, and I haven’t seen any of the others.

        • Arbitrary_greay says:

          Fifteen Million Merits was very much where each individual step was very plausible, and then just the one step too far has me feeling weird about it. It might even be that the conceit was too interesting, and I wanted them to acknowledge the huge amount of world-building they opened up. Like, humans throughout the ages have found ways to get around advertising. The mute button, DVRs, ad-blocking, pirating, other tabs, going outside, just regular ol’ eye avoidance, and while the industry has done its best to make ads more unavoidable, they’ve never achieved a state of complete unavoidance, and I don’t know that the populace would ever allow that. At the very least, the inclusion of a victim getting punished for attempted ad avoidance (a la the illegality of removing DRM) would have upped the credibility of the world-building a lot.

        • cypher says:

          I assumed the people in 15MM were ems.

          • Wrong Species says:

            I think it’s some kind of punishment or maybe it’s what they do with the unemployed. It seems more like busy work than anything else.

    • Virbie says:

      Some spoilers for Black Mirror ahead.

      I actually really enjoy Black Mirror. I don’t quite disagree with your complaints, but they don’t reduce my enjoyment of the show all that much. I find it generally well-made (acting/writing/shooting/scoring), but I’ll focus on the thematic stuff that you’re talking about.

      One of the reasons I like it is the way it manages to marry the foreign and the immediately relatable: The Entire History of Y is a pretty decent example. Most of the questions or complaints that put some distance between you and a society with norms like that are addressed by drawing parallels to similar norms in our own society[1]. I certainly agree with you that most episodes push the implications of the setting a little too far, often farcically, but somehow I’m able to write those parts off and enjoy the parts that they execute more subtly.

      White Christmas is a decent example: the part that horrified me the most was the torturing of the housekeeper cookie into submission, despite being a short expository story in between the main ones. I think it does what good fiction often does: adds a visceral understanding of an issue that’s actually pretty interesting. As machines become smarter, at what point does it become relevant to stop considering them as tools and start considering them in the framework of autonomy and rights that we afford sapients? The fact that a lot of the rest of the episode (and indeed, that segment) had flaws didn’t do much to diminish my appreciation of that part.

      [1] for a crappy off-the-top-of-my-head example, “why not just avoid getting a grain” vs “why not just avoid a FB account”. For a lot of people, the latter is nigh-unthinkable from a social perspective, and I say this as someone who’s a very, very light user of social media.

      • Arbitrary_greay says:

        Spoilers for the Christmas Special below

        The cookie was actually the biggest suspension-breaker for me, which is weird, since I didn’t mind the “torturing brain-image AI” storyline in Red Vs. Blue. In the Special’s case, it was that I don’t believe that brain-image AI would be as useful in the applications shown as the story believes. (For example, there are so many reasons a confession from the Cookie wouldn’t/shouldn’t be accepted in court. And why even are they punishing the Joe cookie at the end!?) Although it could occur by default in a world where non-brain-image AI fail to develop, I suppose.
        I most believed in the enhanced-reality “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” tech applications, especially the mechanism of Matt’s ultimate punishment, although I don’t believe that he would/should have been given it.

        Westworld is doing a better job of illustrating the spectrum of programs from tools to autonomous.

        • Anonymous says:

          And why even are they punishing the Joe cookie at the end!?

          Because they think he is a Bad Person™ and Deserves It™. Though personally, I think it’s the least believable part (or at least that they’d do so this thoughtlessly).

          • Common Pleb says:

            Because he’s not seen as a person period, no more than say those torture the dummy with a dictators face is. Society are capable of atrocities on the flimsies of rationals, not being Human(TM) is enough.

          • Anonymous says:

            I rather meant Joe than the cookie. But yes, That Too™.

          • arbitrary_greay says:

            @Common Pleb:
            But the horror that was supposed to come out Part 2 with Greta wasn’t simply the abuse of the cookie, but that it was done for such a coldly pragmatic reason, done in rote as a part of creating a product for the customer. Broken cookie!Greta has a purpose for which it was broken. There is no such future for cookie!Joe. There is no reason to not just delete the cookie when they’re done with it. Maybe if they characterized the cop as someone who likes to troll people in general, and this cookie is the only case where he could get away with it.

          • Virbie says:

            @Anonymous

            If there’s a plausible explanation for a behavior, why does it need to be explicitly characterized beforehand? If I see a character wolf down a bunch of donuts, I don’t think “that’s odd, they didn’t establish him as liking donuts that much”, I just think “homey probably likes donuts”.

    • Anonymous says:

      Overall I like Black Mirror but I’m worried that the episodes people like the most (White Christmas, 15 million merits) are the stupidest ones.

      15 million merits is basically a stoner rant “we are all cogs in the machine, dude!”.
      White Christmas and Be Right Back both postulate the existence of technology that would necessarily have consequences that would be vastly more far reaching than what’s used is the episode: they are speculative science fiction for people who lack any imagination.
      Be Right Back would work better as a story about a magical trinket bought from a gipsy.

      This leads me to suspect that the writer, Charlie Brooker, is a bit of an idiot when it comes to technology, since all the remaining episodes (which I liked) do not really deal with technology at all (The National Anthem, White Bear, The Waldo Moment), or were written by someone else (Entire History of You).

      Needless to say, this doesn’t bode well for season 3 and 4.

      • Arbitrary_greay says:

        I bought Be Right Back, although I think it would only apply to a subset of people with a particular personality type. It deals with much the same themes as the first portion of Spielberg’s A.I., before David runs away. And I’ve recently finished two stories that dealt with trying to simulate a lost loved one in technology. One (Mraqrtv, abiry ol Tert Rtna) came to the same conclusion as Be Right Back, in that the AI was ultimately unconvincing, but had the subjects scrap the AI instead, while the other (gi fubj Crefba bs Vagrerfg) didn’t get to fully explore the long-term aftermath. The fanfiction for the latter has had one wirehead conclusion, and a few fiction-fiat accepted the reconstruction as equivalent to the original (which is also what Red Vs. Blue did). So Be Right Back was kind of relevant to my interests and memories at the time.

      • tgb says:

        White Christmas had several plots happening. At least one of which (with regards to dating advice) was entirely plausible and, quite frankly, possibly happening at this moment. The censorship/blacklist point seemed quite OK too. Though your criticism is quite fair when it comes to the main technology employed. (Sorry, I’m going out of my way to avoid spoilers.) I think it overall was still among best best science fiction films yet. Other acclaimed recent science fiction works like Moon and Her could easily be criticized similarly; same for, say, Source Code and Looper. You have to look to novels to find something definitively better. All IMO of course.

        • Nelshoy says:

          Speaking of good scifi movies come out, is anyone else hyped for Arrival? I love Ted Chiang’s stories, especially the one Arrival is based on.

        • Anonymous says:

          The censorship plot is OK, everything happening with the uploaded AIs is preposterous. Spoilers follow.

          (1) The smart house concept is a disaster: there is no reason to be that cruel to the AI, doing that would make it unnecessarily dangerous and the concept wouldn’t work any better than a much simpler AI anyway.

          (2) If that technology existed its first application would be to make rich people live forever, which would cause uploaded minds to have the same rights as humans

          (3) Seduction coaching apparently nets you a lifetime ban from society, I can only interpret this as an extremely heavy handed satire of feminist society.

          • Anonymous says:

            (Apparently comments containing the G-word are filtered even if it only appears inside a link. I realise there are good reasons for banning the word, and have managed to work around the filter anyway, but I think it’s a bit excessive regardless.)

            Seduction coaching apparently nets you a lifetime ban from society, I can only interpret this as an extremely heavy handed satire of feminist society.

            Doubtful. For one, Charlie Brooker buys into the orthodox feminist narrative about the Ants, or at least he used to (he wrote a Guardian column about it, look for it). He’s a rather typical Blue Triber.

            But notice it’s not mere ‘seduction coaching’. The stream from the ‘client’s’ eyes is forwarded to several other people, and presumably recorded, without the knowledge or consent of the people he’s interacting with. Presumably it is also meant to include any possible sexual intercourse… in other words, it’s a live amateur porn broadcast. Keeping these things in mind, it’s not all that preposterous to penalise such a ‘service’.

          • John Schilling says:

            in other words, it’s a live amateur porn broadcast… it’s not all that preposterous to penalise such a ‘service’.

            I haven’t seen the episode in question, but it seems like given the premise all sex in that society would constitute a live amateur porn broadcast. Well, OK, probably a next-morning-at-the-office delayed amateur porn broadcast, but that’s a pretty fine distinction on which to hang a sentence of lifetime ostracism.

          • Anonymous says:

            Well, that seems quite horrible in itself and, though the episode doesn’t mention anything about it, I’d assume there would be measures to prevent that from happening — measures of the DMCA sort, i.e. ‘we keep pretending information is not copyable by giving really, really harsh sentences to people who circumvent our rules’. (Compare how child pornography is dealt with.)

            Also, the end of the episode reveals that being blocked by the whole country is not the standard sentence given for such a crime. Matt has negotiated a bargain that he’d be let go if he extracts a confession from Joe, and the police were dicks to him in upholding it.

      • Whatever Happened to Anonymous says:

        Overall I like Black Mirror but I’m worried that the episodes people like the most (White Christmas, 15 million merits) are the stupidest ones.

        They are the stupidest ones from a sci-fi perspective, but people like them because they have other good qualities. 15MC has a nice coherent aesthetic, White Christmas has Jon Hamm doing Jon Hamm things.

    • Deiseach says:

      I haven’t watched it, but reading the episode descriptions, it’s the good old horror anthology format dressed up in modern tech. It’s not about SF and social technology and all that jazz, rather, like the Fat Boy in “The Pickwick Papers”, the intention is “I wants to make your flesh creep”.

      • Arbitrary_greay says:

        For me, the use of technology and social media culture as the frameworks for all of the episodes matters, though. It gives the show as a whole a comprehensive bone to pick. As per my reply to jaimeastorga2000, anthologies that spread out the explanations for their horror don’t have the same effect. Black Mirror seems to want us to do something (moderate our culture, basically) to avoid the bad ends depicted in the show. The extra existential horror is supposed to stem from human nature itself causing the flesh-creeping, and therefore feel even more horrifying that it could be inevitable in the collective, since most episodes involve individuals trying to change their own personal spheres. White Bear is an Omelas where no one wants to walk away.

    • multiheaded says:

      “What if phones, but too much?”

    • Anonymous says:

      And I can’t quite word my dissatisfaction with the conclusions it draws, or how so many find it “so powerful” and “soul-crushing” and whatnot. In some cases, like most of the Christmas Special, the gap between what people think the technology is like, and the reality of how it’s executed, is the problem. Some of the individual “bad end” extrapolations, I even can believe. But for most of them, the final world-building twist that each episode takes to goes from merely unsettling to horror is the one step too far to break my suspension of disbelief.

      Sounds quite vague. Can you be more specific?

      Black Mirror isn’t really about technology. It’s more about how it enables people… hmm, it’s a bit hard to express… to give in to their urges that in the absence of the technology would be naturally curbed. The most conspicuous and direct instance of what I’m talking about is wireheading; Black Mirror offers more subtle examples. For one, the horror of “White Bear”, “The Entire History of You” and “Be Right Back” is brought about by people who cannot let go of the past, who are unable to forgive and/or forget.

      So, given that it focuses more on psychology than technology, I’m not particularly surprised that it doesn’t explore all the possible implications of the latter; technology is just a vessel for meditating on the human condition. And personally, I don’t particularly mind it either; though I am vaguely aware that probably some elements of the Black Mirror worlds don’t make very much sense and in reality couldn’t work as described (like the bikes in “15 Million Merits”). Black Mirror is more “Meditations on Moloch” than hard SF.

      Related: an interview with Charlie Brooker, where he basically says the same thing.

      • Arbitrary_greay says:

        Replying to the others helped me sort out my thoughts a bit.

        The basic interactions that have unsettling implications are solid, drawn from reality as they are. However, the method that Black Mirror uses to magnify the horror of the consequences is to simply scale everything up. Two people becomes an entire population, a small consequence is stretched to its extreme end.
        The problem with that approach is, micro does not directly translate to macro when it comes to human behavior. Contrary to Asimov’s Foundation, the predictability of humans decreases as the group number increases. Scaling up in most cases, even non-sentient processes, such as going from research batches to production line scale, introduces all sorts of complexities.
        Except that part of the horror of Black Mirror’s conceits is based upon a near-monolithic agreement from the populace. I expect a large number of protesters outside of the White Bear Justice Park every day, half of Victoria’s experiences sabotaged by them. I expect an investigatory podcast having found and publicized Carlton Bloom’s participation, memes lampooning Callow and Susannah alike behind their back. Neither Eich nor Sacco are homeless or jobless. Chris Brown and Woody Allen still have successful careers dependent on others’ eyeballs on their work.

        It’s like the lesser Black Mirror episodes make their arguments based on the following template:
        1. Social media technology enables herd mentality to the extreme
        2. ?????
        3. Due to step 2, everyone starts jumping off of a cliff
        4. Due to step 1’s extreme herd mentality, our protagonist also jumps off of a cliff
        5. profitISN’T THAT SCAAAAARY TO THINK ABOUT

        It’s logically sound, but only because step 2 was hand-waved away, but the probability/credibility of step 2 in a near-future setting really matters to my buying the argument!

        Which is why episodes that don’t rely on “groupthink is scaaaary!” work so much better. (Entire History, Be Right Back, the non-Cookie aspects of White Christmas, although the twist for part 1 was also too silly and does a disservice to their argument)

    • TMB says:

      All of the best episodes feature infidelity of one sort or another.

      Bad infidelity.

    • lemmy caution says:

      I love Mallory Ortberg’s line about black mirror:

      “What if phones, but bad?”

    • pterrorgrine says:

      “What if phones, but too much?” (alluded to, but I don’t think linked, above)

      • arbitrary_greay says:

        Thanks for the link. Loved the Twilight Zone riff in the comments. Some of the hypothetical episodes sounded like amazing anime or Kdrama pitches, too.

  61. Wrong Species says:

    Scott is so great. Not only does he ban himself, but he does so for this mildly offensive comment that he immediately apologizes for. If every person was that charitable, political debates would not be nearly as mind-killing.

    • SilasLock says:

      +1 for Scott love!

      I don’t think he had to ban himself, though. He apologized after realizing he’d mistakenly criticized someone else for something they didn’t do. We all make mistakes like that. When they happen, the best thing you can do is say you’re sorry as gracefully as possible.

      Scott, if you’re reading this, you have the right to ban yourself if you want to. But I think your comments this week were far from the worst thing I’ve seen here on SSC. You’re a good guy.

      • Callum G says:

        I appreciate his honesty, it’s really admirable of him, but I still think a ban was probably the best move. It’s a dangerous precedent when a leader starts to see themselves above the law. Even the little laws. He may be overcompensating a tad, but given the biases behind banning yourself, I think it’s a good to err on the side that’s the least dictator-like.

  62. Daniel says:

    We spoke about this in the last open thread, but I think it warrants further discussion, because the other commenters also seemed uncertain of the answer.

    How can I incorporate the uncertainty of a forecasting model into the confidence I have in an event happening.

    For example, as of right how, Predictwise says that Hillary Clinton has an 87% chance of winning the election and Donald Trump has a 13% chance.

    What should my credence level be that Hillary Clinton becomes the next president?

    I don’t think it can be 87% because prediction markets are not 100% accurate reflections of reality. But what should the number be then? Do I reduce my level of confidence below 87% to represent the fact that I’m not 100% confident in predictwise’s forecast?

    And if I lower my confidence in Hillary becoming president, is it acceptable to have a cumulative confidence in two mutually exclusive events that’s less than 100%? (Ie I know that one of either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton will win the election with 100% certainty, so would it not be problematic if I only believed Hillary would win with an 80% credence, but that Donald only had a 10% chance of becoming president).

    To help clarify my point, compare this to forecasting flipping a (normal) coin two times. The model shows that there is a 25% chance that heads comes up both flips. Because you have a 99.99% credence that the model is an accurate reflection of reality, you believe with a 25% credence level that the coin will land heads both flips.

    I look forward to hearing feedback and thoughts on this issue.

    Thanks!

    • pku says:

      Two ways to deal with this: one is to just reduce your probability for all cases (for example, there’s a statistical model that pretends you have one extra event of the opposite way for everything to mitigate small sample bias). The other is to balance it with some prior – For elections there’s an easy prior of 50/50 (or maybe count third parties if you want to). If you don’t have a prior though, this is hard.

    • Jesse says:

      THe key question is still is are the valid estimates centered on the values predicted?
      Is there any evidence of a bias in the models that should shift the estimates from the expected values?

    • Wrong Species says:

      I would take PredictIt’s probability estimate with a grain of salt. They don’t let you put more than a single dollar per bet which means people are much more likely to let their bias influence their bets. I feel like 538 is pretty good though and their polls plus model puts Clinton at 81%.

      • Douglas Knight says:

        a single dollar per bet

        Isn’t the limit $850?

        In any event, PredictIt is not the only prediction market. Betfair has about the same odds, 80-20.

        • Wrong Species says:

          They all have the same problem in that they’re limited by law in how much people are allowed to spend.

          • Douglas Knight says:

            Betfair has no dollar limit. It just bars Americans. That might be a problem, but it’s a different problem. And if it were a problem, we’d probably see arbitrage opportunities between the markets.

      • Virbie says:

        > I would take PredictIt’s probability estimate with a grain of salt. They don’t let you put more than a single dollar per bet which means people are much more likely to let their bias influence their bets.

        This definitely isn’t true. It’s a single dollar per contract, but you can buy thousands of contracts. Your risk per contract is capped at $850. I do agree with a much, much weaker form of what you’re saying: PredictIt takes a high percentage of both gross funds and profits, so the market is pretty inefficient and bias is capable of playing a larger role. But definitely in a whole nother universe than if each bet were capped at $1.

        Also, and more relevantly, GP is talking about PredictWise, not PredictIt.

        • Luke the CIA stooge says:

          Also these limited scope prediction markets, because they’re so limited, are easily manipulated by people who have something to gain in the bigger markets (or even the political actors themselves, the confidence of others is a powerful thing). Think about it :you have a staff of 500, can create new accounts easily and movements on this market of 2-3000 dollars can move the big markets by millions.

          If the prediction markets are 87-13 hillary I would adjust it to at least 75-25 if not 65-35. This election is just to wild and unstable and there’s too much vested interest in making it seem otherwise

          • Daffy says:

            But if you’re willing to adjust it to 75-25, why not just make an account on PredictIt and buy some shares against Democrats at 16c, the current price? Even after the fees, this is a positive expected value bet.

          • Luke the CIA Stooge says:

            Because on such small markets there’s a big problem of the payout for small corrections not being worth the time investment. Markets efficiency is a function of the liquidity (flow of money) through the market. Regrettably the SCC and various other regulators have set out to keep these markets small and irrelevant. so for the foreseeable future they will remain iliquid, unprofitable and useless.
            (unless you use them as a mechanism to manipulate public perception and the big profitable markets.

    • Anon says:

      I have done some amateur data science stuff and have found a pretty useful method for dealing with uncertainty that has lead to more accurate predictions:

      1. For a model you are using to develop probability estimates for an event assign to that model an uncertainty score between -1 and 1 (with 0 being completely uncertain and 1 be completely certain, and -1 being completely certain it is wrong)

      2. When that model gives you a probability estimate convert it to odds form

      3. Raise the odds form to a power equal to the uncertainty score you gave the model.

      4. Convert the odds form back into probability form.

      So if you are 75% confident in predictwise’s forecasting ability you could give them an uncertainty score of 0.75 leading to about 80% for Clinton, 19% for Trump.

    • Earthly Knight says:

      You may account for uncertainty by representing your belief that Hillary will become the next president as a credence interval or set of credence functions rather than as a single, precise credence function. Your credence that Hillary will win could be the interval [.82,.92], for instance.

      And if I lower my confidence in Hillary becoming president, is it acceptable to have a cumulative confidence in two mutually exclusive events that’s less than 100%?

      Yes, but you’re asking the wrong question. I think you mean to ask whether the sum of your credences in a set of mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive propositions can be less than 1, and there the answer is no.

      • pku says:

        That doesn’t quite make sense, though – if you’re already saying it’s a probability, you should just put it in the middle of the interval.

        • Earthly Knight says:

          I do not understand the objection. Suppose an urn contains some unknown mixture of red and black marbles. Of the first four drawn, three come out red. Of the first thousand drawn, 750 come out red. Intuitively, your credence that the fifth marble will be red and your credence that the 1001st marble will be red should both be .75, but the evidential basis for the latter prediction is much more weighty than the evidential basis for the former prediction. We can capture this dimension of difference by representing your belief about the fifth marble as a very wide credence interval centered around .75, and your belief about the 1001st marble as a much narrower interval around .75.

          • pku says:

            But you can still just multiply these probabilities. If you’re working with probabilities you already have a mechanism for dealing with uncertainty – having another one on top of it seems redundant.

            The method I’ve seen for this specific problem is to be “one ball less certain” than you should be – that is, when predicting the odds that the next ball is red, pretend you’ve drawn one extra blue ball. Your odds now in the first case will be 60% and in the second case 74.9%, which seems a good way to hedge your bets.

          • Earthly Knight says:

            Your proposal is incoherent, it has us assign a credence of .6 to the fifth marble coming up red and .2 to the fifth marble coming up black, but these were supposed to form a partition. You are probably thinking of Laplace’s rule of succession, which for m red (black) marbles in n trials has us assign a probability of m+1/n+2 to the next marble coming up red (black). For the fifth-marble prediction, this will be .667 for red and .333 for black.

            But using the rule of succession instead of the straight rule doesn’t help us at all, because the rule of succession has us assign the same credences, .667 and .333 respectively, for the 899th marble coming up red (black) if 599 of the 898 marbles so far drawn have been red. The difference in weight of evidence remains uncaptured: you are stuck pretending that absolutely nothing has changed from the four-marble case no matter how many trials you’ve conducted so long as red+1/n+2=2/3 . This is why we need imprecise probabilities.

        • Raga says:

          “If you’re working with probabilities you already have a mechanism for dealing with uncertainty – having another one on top of it seems redundant.”

          You’re just missing a meta-level, is all. EK is showing you how to deal with the situation where you’re uncertain about the degree to which you are uncertain about an event occurring; check out hierarchical models, like the beta-binomial distribution, for a way to handle a similar situation.

    • Mr Mind says:

      What you have here is a classic case of probability with a high Knightian uncertainty. 87% is the level of credence that you should have about Hillary winning the election, because that’s the meaning of probability, once you factor in every piece of evidence (yes, I’m a Bayesian).
      Your discomfort is due to the fact that this estimate is very fragile: any piece of evidence can wildly sway its value one way or another.
      The classic example is a tennis match: if you know nothing about the two players, you would give each 50% probability of winning, but that’s the exact number you would come up if you knew a lot about them and judge they to be at about the same level.
      In your case, 87% is the probability you give to one event, but under that one number there’s a lot of turbulence, and so you’re not sure about how much you’re not sure.

      One formal treatment of Knightian uncertainty that I always bring up is “Ap distributions”, from Jaynes: let’s say that Ap is any piece of evidence that brings the probability of A at p, that is formally:
      P(A|Ap) = p
      Then you can show that P(A) = E[Ap], the probability of an event is the average of the distribution of any piece of evidence you could conceive. Since the value of E[Ap] can stay the same while varying wildly the shape of the distribution, you get a nice explanation of Knightian uncertainty: if P(Ap) is very peaked, you have a strong certainty that P(A) is the correct value (because you judge other explanations to be very unlikely), while if P(Ap) is very flat, you can have the same value of P(A) but be very uncertain about why it should be that way.
      I suggest that this is what happening in your situation: you come up with 87%, but at any moment any other piece of evidence can make it vary a lot. Still, until such evidence arrives, 87% is your number.

      And no, you cannot have the sum of two mutually exclusive, exhaustive events at a value different than 100%.

      • Daniel says:

        Thanks for the responses everyone.

        So if I understand correctly, one should not incorporate the fragility of a forecast into our credence levels then?

        • Mr Mind says:

          You could if you want, but very few people know Ap distributions and even fewer think they are a good solution to Knightian uncertainty.

          But yeah, you could do that with a confidence interval on the Ap’s: I’m 87% sure that Hillary will win the election, and
          – I’m 95% sure that in the future this value will be no lower than 80% and no higher than 90%.
          – I’m 95% sure that in the future this value could vary between 50% and 95%.

    • Deiseach says:

      would it not be problematic if I only believed Hillary would win with an 80% credence, but that Donald only had a 10% chance of becoming president

      Ah God, I haven’t the maths to deal with this, but I think in this case it wouldn’t be beyond the bounds of trying to establish confidence in a prediction: as you say, there’s a certain amount of uncertainty baked in because no method is going to be 100% correct, and this specific incidence depends on other factors; right now it looks as if Hillary will win, but there is always the chance – however small or unlikely – that she will do something spectacular and implode her campaign, or drop dead (or, to be more cheery, have genuine health problems that means she has to drop out of the race), or that everyone will decide to vote for a third party candidate and Jill Stein will be the first woman president of the United States, or the Martians will invade, or something.

      So a 10% margin for “Who the hell knows, 2016 has been crazy so far, we have an actual Creepy Clown Threat, anything can happen” might be a bit wide but the general principle is sound enough.

      • Nyx says:

        I don’t think that’s it, because the same possibility of catastrophe applies to Trump. Clinton could have a meltdown, but so could Trump (in fact he seems to be melting down right now).

        Rather, it’s the reality that polls are an imperfect way to measure voter opinion. If your poll of 500 people gives Clinton +4, that could mean that the general population is anywhere between Trump +1 and Clinton +9, depending on how representative your sample is. And elections are themselves, not representative, with older, whiter people voting in disproportionate numbers to younger, blacker people. This creates an inherent element of uncertainty. Even if the election were held tomorrow, Trump still has a >10% chance of winning. The polls might be slightly inaccurate, and maybe unrepresentative, and maybe turnout among Trump-friendly groups is higher and Hillary-friendly groups is lower. That could add up to a pretty big swing.

        What we should expect is regression to the mean. Hillary has generally held a small lead over Trump throughout this race; if events cause a big swing away from that, that swing should gradually dissipate as time goes on.

    • Ilya Shpitser says:

      In principle you would Bayes All The Things (have a big Bayesian meta-model which gives degrees of belief in any specific model you have, and then integrate over all that). In practice, this is where Bayes falls down — it’s very hard to do this!

      So in the coin example you would have a big family of models with a prior on that family. Coin flips update your prior for the entire family via Bayes rule.

  63. jaimeastorga2000 says:

    SSC SF Story of the Week #22
    This week we are discussing Three Worlds Collide by Eliezer Yudkowsky.
    Next time we will discuss Manna by Marshall Brain.

    • jaimeastorga2000 says:

      When I imagine myself aboard the Impossible, I find the True Ending solution pretty suboptimal. First, because, unlike the Lord Pilot, I actually care a lot about “tiny irrelevant details” like remaining alive. And, second, because I don’t share the crew’s overwhelming urge to stop the Babyeaters from eating their children. What was up with that, anyway? Even the ones who opposed the invasion did so extremely reluctantly, based mostly on decision-theoretic reasons and the lack of course of action they considered acceptable once the Babyeaters had been defeated. Whereas when I imagine myself in that situation I think something like “why would I want to sacrifice a lot of humans just to forcibly change the way of life of a race that has been nothing but friendly to us so far?” It’s like every human has been genetically engineered to be a universalist utilitarian or something.

      Anyway, my preferred solution would have been something like going back to Huygens, rigging up a delay detonator, coming back with another starship, evacuating the crew to the second starship, and blowing up the crosslinking system. I would also have liked to keep contact with the Babyeaters, but that would have required blowing up the adjacent Superhappy system, which is probably impossible. And probably more trouble than its worth as well; if the crew of the Impossible is any indication, at least some non-trivial fraction of humanity is going to go to war with the Babyeaters no matter what, which won’t lead to anything good. It kind of makes me wish that the combined human-Babyeater military was an even match for the Superhappy onslaught, so an alliance option was on the table; nothing like The Outside Enemy to make people put aside their differences.

      Also, badass Confessor is badass.

      • youzicha says:

        I found myself liking the False ending more than the True one out of some kind of sense of fairness: why should the humans get away with not changing at all, even though the superhappies think this is terrible?

        I guess the author’s intention was to portray the True Prisoner’s Dilemma, a scenario which gets rid of such fairness intuitions, but for me it didn’t quite work. Maybe part of the problem is that he also portrays the future humans and their morality as kindof alien, so it’s hard to completely empathize with what they want.

        • Deiseach says:

          so it’s hard to completely empathize with what they want

          Markets, so far as I could make out 🙂

      • Evan Þ says:

        But at least as much as I have sympathy for the Babyeaters themselves, I also have sympathy for their devoured children. We don’t see them onscreen in the story, true, but we know they exist. Utilitarianism might let you write them off, but at least virtue ethics and deontology – the other ethical systems I’ve got sympathy with myself – dictate that we must save those innocent children.

        • Some dude says:

          What? I think you massively misread the comment you’re replying to. He’s saying the characters in the story being unable to “write off” the babyeater children is evidence that they’re all utilitarians, not that utilitarians somehow don’t care about children being eaten.

          You seem to have interpreted the exact opposite of what he’s trying to say.

      • PedroS says:

        I also found myself wondering the same thing regarding the way Humans felt that stopping the Babyeaters was an overwhelming, obvious, ethical imperative in spite of the carnage entailed in a galactic war (fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus). It almost sounded as if:

        A) the author never read anything about the just war tradition (i.e. a good cause is not enough: you also need a reasonable chance of success at a (moral/suffering/etc.) cost below that incurred by keeping the status quo)

        B) the author thinks that every pro-lifer who does not engage in terrorism/violence against abortion providers is a hypocrite, rather than someone who weigh the evils of terrorism/violence/mob-rule against those of abortion and finds terrorism to be a worse evil than both the current status quo, and peaceful cultural/political engagement which might elicit a change in their preferred direction.

        I would expect a self-described rationalist (i.e. one who dispassionately engages the reasoning behind other worldviews, in order to find a rational course of action) like EY to have engaged these strains of thought and to be able to articulate their reasoning, even if he finds them unpersuasive. Simply assuming that future humans will view a grave evil as a reason to engage in a massive galactic genocidal war seems to me a major flaw in the novel. That would not have bothered me, though, if the role the Humans play in the story had been replaced with Vulcans, sentient androids, etc. But setting the Humans as the species with that worldview immediately broke my “suspension of disbelief” and made me assume the novel intended to be a ham-handed indoctrination attempt. I did read it through, but could not shake this impression , and indeed several portions seemed to be a rationalization of ” (intellectual) might makes (ethical) right” in a cosmic scale.

        • raj says:

          It wouldn’t be genocide: society had advanced sufficiently far to agonize about the relative evils of occupation, the loss of their culture and self-determination, and so forth. They just weighed that as being completely dwarfed by trillions of child-minds being tortured to death.

          It is also assumed that there is a power asymmetry such that super happies >>> humans >>> baby eaters. If pro-lifers had such a power advantage, they probably would use physical force. In fact, that was the status-quo for most of human history.

      • Murphy says:

        I agree about the crew’s overwhelming urge to stop the Babyeaters from eating their children.

        I mean some counts of “EWWW”, some people a bit horrified, perhaps 1 or 2 saying they need to do something, sure, but the whole crew?

        It’s like people getting upset at the idea of ducks raping each other and deciding that ducks must be edited to stop it or getting upset by the effects of flesh eating parasites on wild animals with the added bonus that the babyeaters are intelligent enough to make choices about it, they all grew up with the constant terror of being hunted as food and still consider it great.

        • Deiseach says:

          I mean some counts of “EWWW”, some people a bit horrified, perhaps 1 or 2 saying they need to do something, sure, but the whole crew?

          I think that’s meant to be part of the point, though; the Confessor comes from the Bad Old Days (i.e. our time or shortly afterwards) and he would be tough-minded about it as we would be.

          But the descendants of the post-enhancement world (that solved aging and death and made everyone smart and empathic and compassionate etc.) plainly feel as badly about this as we would feel about slavery (or insert whatever makes you want to grab your sword and shield and sally forth for great justice) because they’ve evolved in their characters and ethics – it’s the Whig Version of History on steroids.

          the author never read anything about the just war tradition

          He may have been engaging with it in the question “And what do you do with the Babyeaters after you’ve defeated them? Do you kill all the adults and so wipe out their entire culture? Do you let the children grow up to become Babyeaters – if that’s their natural instinct – in their turn or do you interfere with their physiology and psychology? What do you do?” and if the result of the war is greater suffering, then you do not embark upon it, as in point four of Catholic ‘Just War’ doctrine below (presumably genocide of all the adult Babyeaters or destroying their entire culture and changing the child Babyeaters would be a great or greater evil than letting the status quo subsist):

          (1) the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain;
          (2) all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective;
          (3) there must be serious prospects of success;
          (4) the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated (the power of modern means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition).

          • Jiro says:

            plainly feel as badly about this as we would feel about slavery

            I’m pretty sure there are countries where slavery exists today and we’re not going to war with them.

          • Nelshoy says:

            @Jiro

            Slavery isn’t legal anywhere as far as I know. In the places it was (up until the eighties), other countries put pressure on them to change. I’m sure it’s still a norm in some places anyway, but we can’t insist right now that everyone alligns with or values anyway and no government has the power to universally enforce them. Right now we are still pretty fractured and weak as an intelligent global civ. The more unified and connected any group gets, the more likely the group is to crack down on the values they can’t tolerate.

            Duterte vs. Obama on how to deal with criminals seems like a real life example of this conflict going on right now.

          • Jiro says:

            Putting pressure isn’t the same as going to war, however. And “slavery isn’t legal” isn’t the same as not having slavery; driving over the speed limit is also illegal.

          • Fahundo says:

            And “slavery isn’t legal” isn’t the same as not having slavery

            Well then, “countries where slavery exists today” would include the United States, wouldn’t it?

          • Anonymous says:

            @Nelshoy: there is still slavery in the world, even in developed countries, except it’s not legal and less visible.

            It’s generally referred to as “modern slavery”: http://www.torontosun.com/2012/02/10/canadas-shameful-modern-day-slave-trade

          • There is slavery today in modern societies and it’s legal. The military draft is a form of slavery. Imprisonment for crime is a form of slavery. Even jury duty is a very mild form of slavery. In each case, you are doing things not because you choose to but because someone else orders you to and will punish you in some way if you don’t.

            I expect slavery in the traditional sense also exists elsewhere. I’ve been reading up on the Nuer, a Sudanese people. They were subject to slave raids from the northern Sudan well into modern times. Whether it’s still happening I don’t know, but I would be pleasantly surprised to discover that all of the slaves had been released.

          • nimim. k.m. says:

            >There is slavery today in modern societies and it’s legal.

            Somehow this use of the word “slavery” manages miss the feature that makes slavery distinctive from all other kinds of compulsory work and duties: the slaves can be sold. Laws and customs that apply to them are akin to property laws.

            Rhetorics like this is one of the reasons why I’m not sure if the libertarian crowd who constantly perpetuate it are arguing in a good faith.

          • John Schilling says:

            …the slaves can be sold. Laws and customs that apply to them are akin to property laws

            So when people say that e.g. the Nazis made use of “slave labor”, you see that as hyperbole, as rhetoric that makes you less than sure the antifascist crowd who constantly perpetuate it are arguing in a good faith?

          • Nelshoy says:

            @jiro and anonymous

            I chose my words carefully. Slavery still happens, but that’s very different from being an acceptable norm. Murder, rape, and theft are all common occurrences as well wherever you look.

            Slavery is still going on in the world, but so is a bunch of other terrible **** that’s hard to crack down on. But at least slavery is no longer a norm that everyone accepts as a fact of life and takes for granted. I’d like to see the current acceptance of factory farming make a similar transition.

            @ David Friedman

            Comparing jury duty to chattel slavery is the ol’ Worst Argument in the World and not a good recipe for people here taking your argument seriously.

          • Fahundo says:

            Comparing jury duty to chattel slavery is the ol’ Worst Argument in the World and not a good recipe for people here taking your argument seriously.

            So, is admitting that MLK is a criminal the Worst Argument in the World; or is admitting that MLK is a criminal, and therefore as bad as all other criminals, and therefore no one should look up to or respect him the Worst Argument in the World?

            I think what Friedman said is similar to one of those.

          • Jiro says:

            Well then, “countries where slavery exists today” would include the United States, wouldn’t it?

            “Countries where slavery exists today” means “country where slavery is relatively common”, not where there is any non-zero number of incidents of it. You’re being too literal.

          • dndnrsn says:

            @John Schilling:

            If you look at the way that slave labour was handled in Nazi Germany, I think you can reasonably describe slaves as being traded back and forth – consider, for instance, the haggling between Speer and Himmler.

          • @ dndnrsn:

            Back when there was a military draft, I assume there was some negotiation among different parts of the army as to who got how many draftees. Does that make it slavery by your definition?

          • “– consider, for instance, the haggling between Speer and Himmler.”

            Don’t you think that, back when the U.S. had a military draft, there were similar negotiations between different parts of the army as to who got how many draftees?

          • Nelshoy says:

            @fahundo

            I think Friedman was using a word loaded with negative affect (for good reason) to take a potshot at non libertarian government mandates he’s not in favor of.

            Friedman’s statement seems to me like a pretty central example of the noncentral fallacy: “slavery involves compulsion and is very bad, therefore since jury duty involves compulsion it is also very bad.”

          • Paul Brinkley says:

            Friedman’s statement seems to me like a pretty central example of the noncentral fallacy: “slavery involves compulsion and is very bad, therefore since jury duty involves compulsion it is also very bad.”

            I see it as an entirely different thing. Namely: people believe slavery is bad because they see slavery as compulsion*, and people believe compulsion is bad. Therefore, it’s instructive to look at other activities that rely on compulsion.

            The most obvious alternative to this leads me to infer that you’re in favor of compulsion. Is this the case?

            *Compulsion is defined here as threat of violence to motivate action (in people who otherwise were neither harming nor helping you).

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Paul Brinkley:
            Compulsion is a necessary but not sufficient part of the badness of slavery. There is also the totality of that compulsion. And the potential consequences for attempting to deny that compulsion.

            Compelling one’s child to eat there vegetables, even it is a child who is passed the age of majority should not be termed slavery. Nor should paying taxes or serving jury duty.

          • “If you look at the way that slave labour was handled in Nazi Germany, I think you can reasonably describe slaves as being traded back and forth – consider, for instance, the haggling between Speer and Himmler.”

            Don’t you think there was similar negotiation, back when the U.S. had a military draft, as to what part of the army got what draftees?

          • Fahundo says:

            since jury duty involves compulsion it is also very bad

            I don’t remember anyone saying this. In this thread, anyway.

          • Nelshoy says:

            Of course no one is coming out and saying jury duty is bad outright, that’s kinda the point. He just called it slavery, it’s up to You(Hint, hint, nudge, nudge) to decide if being slavery’s a good thing or not.

          • “If you look at the way that slave labour was handled in Nazi Germany, I think you can reasonably describe slaves as being traded back and forth – consider, for instance, the haggling between Speer and Himmler.”

            Don’t you think that back when the U.S. had military conscription, there would be bargaining over what part of the army got what draftees?

            We usually refer to galley slavery as slavery. Galley slaves were not normally sold, although they were sometimes rented out as labor.

          • “Somehow this use of the word “slavery” manages miss the feature that makes slavery distinctive from all other kinds of compulsory work and duties: the slaves can be sold. Laws and customs that apply to them are akin to property laws.”

            So galley slaves were not slaves? Why is it the transferability rather than the compulsion that you see as the defining characteristic of slavery?

          • Murphy says:

            To be fair, he did call it a very mild form.

            I don’t agree with the argument that slavery is only slavery if you can be legally sold.

            If I round up a village worth of people, put them in a camp and force them at gunpoint to build artillery shells for me then they’re slaves. Even if I can’t sell them to anyone, even if I promise to release them at age 60 and don’t claim legal ownership of them.
            I still have a gun pointed at their heads and I’m making them work for me with threats of death, pain or suffering.

            Frankly I can’t take anyone seriously who turns around and says “but that’s not real slavery!”

            Ditto if I roll up into a village, abduct all the males over age 10 to turn into soldiers and cut off the hands and feet of anyone who refuses to come with me. Or round up the women as “comfort women” for my troops. That’s still slavery even if I can’t sell them and they get a “choice” to accept the hand chopping instead.

            And these are things that happen in many places.

            By that measure jury duty is a very very mild form, so mild that it’s advantages can reasonably be said to justify using it. It’s mild (very very mild) because the punishments for it are so mild, and the fraction of a persons life affected is so small. Where I live it’s just a modest fine for failure to attend without notice and usually only lasts a day or so.

            Conscription can also be mild or not, to some extent depending on how it’s implemented and the punishment for refusing. At one end of the scale are children being abducted at gunpoint to bulk up the ranks of armies, at the other end are countries where they simply require a large portion of the population to go through some basic training so that if the country is attacked there’s already lots of people trained, armed and ready to defend themselves.

            For countries that are under serious threat from neighbors the more mild forms can be justifiable because the advantages are large.

            I’m willing to bet that if you outlined something with very similar terms to conscription but instead of some social good like keeping the countries population alive the people instead had to act as footstools and hand-servants for members of congress (with threat of jail if they refuse) then people would be more willing to say that it’s wrong and a slavery-like situation simply because there would be no social good.

          • Paul Brinkley says:

            Murphy’s comment says a lot of what I was thinking.

            Forget, for a moment, all the negative stigma attached to the word “slavery”, and see if you can come back around to that stigma by considering what slavery actually is. This process should reveal certain insights to you. And this process underlies the points Friedman is making.

            For instance, if I notify you that you need to sit on a jury and I explain to you the purpose of juries, and you think about it and conclude that, even if there was no one threatening violence, juries are better than the alternative, and similarly that the method that selected you for jury duty is better than the alternative, and you consented and sat on that jury, that would not be slavery. If you decided the former but not the latter, then you might request an exemption, and in US society you would likely get it. If you decided against the former, then you still would likely get an exemption – at worst, one of the lawyers would reject you.

            In general, if you shirked jury duty, there are sufficiently other Americans willing to do it that the threats never have to come out. So it never looks like slavery, because there’s no compulsion.

            If there were a movement of Americans rejecting jury duty on principle, such that courts began to have real trouble filling juries, then jury duty might start to look like the customary view of slavery, depending on how courts tried to solve that problem.

          • John Schilling says:

            If you look at the way that slave labour was handled in Nazi Germany, I think you can reasonably describe slaves as being traded back and forth – consider, for instance, the haggling between Speer and Himmler.

            And the secretaries of the Army and Navy never negotiated over the allocation of draftees? If you’re going to stretch the definition of “bought and sold” that far, it becomes meaningless and encompasses everything.

            I do think there is a meaningful difference between civic duties and slavery, but this isn’t it.

          • DavidFriedman says:

            On the bought and sold point …

            So galley slaves were not slaves?

          • David Friedman says:

            “Somehow this use of the word “slavery” manages miss the feature that makes slavery distinctive from all other kinds of compulsory work and duties: the slaves can be sold.”

            So galley slaves were not slaves?

            You are not defining slavery, you are defining chattel slavery, a subset.

          • dndnrsn says:

            @John Schilling:

            If we’re differentiating civic duties from slavery, one obvious one there is that slave labour used by Nazi Germany wasn’t Germans being forced to do it, as was the case with conscription (which was, after all, essentially at gunpoint – as the war reached a close, more and more German soldiers were executed for desertion). They were either minorities of one sort or another who as a result lost their protection by the German state, or foreigners press-ganged in one way or another.

          • Civilis says:

            The Google definitions of the word slave (as a noun, that apply to people) are:
            – a person who is the legal property of another and is forced to obey them.
            – a person who works very hard without proper remuneration or appreciation.
            – a person who is excessively dependent upon or controlled by something.

            The second definition certainly implies that coerced labor can be termed as slavery; after all, if you don’t negotiate your salary for jury duty or military service, you’re not being properly renumerated. A prisoner that’s forced to break rocks would also be a slave. Are modern American prisoners forced into labor? I don’t know that legal incarceration in the ‘here’s your cell, here’s your food, enjoy the next decade’ meets that definition.

            More importantly, what level of control is necessary for the population of a totalitarian state to be properly described as slaves rather than citizens? I’d say (as a starting point for discussion) if you’re not legally free to either work without government approval or leave the country to work elsewhere, you’re a slave.

        • Saint Fiasco says:

          They consider it great now, but they didn’t when they were young. It mirrors an argument the Superhappy made about human children, in that humans think a life of only pleasure is terrible, but children would totally go or fit.

      • Faceh says:

        > “tiny irrelevant details” like remaining alive.

        Only tiny in relation to the ENTIRETY OF HUMAN CIVILIZATION.

        >Whereas when I imagine myself in that situation I think something like “why would I want to sacrifice a lot of humans just to forcibly change the way of life of a race that has been nothing but friendly to us so far?”

        Because humans tend to place value on preventing the suffering of sentient life (and nonsentient, in some cases). The story makes it clear that Babyeater babies are, in fact sentient and in addition they feel IMMENSE suffering when they are eaten. It makes it clear that most of the babies are eaten and that this is not a NECESSARY component of babyeater life, but one that will continue indefinitely because the babyeaters enjoy it/see nothing wrong with it.

        So if you take each babyeater life as valuable, then the number of babyeaters that are eaten and die in agony is MUCH greater than the number who survive, and the number who WILL die in great agony over the next several millenia is greater still.

        In that perspective, an interstellar war is clearly a worthwhile endeavour in the long run.

        You could compare (awkwardly) the status of the United States before entering the second World War. “Why would I want to sacrifice a lot of Americans just to forcibly change the way of life of a Country that has been nothing but friendly to us so far?”

        Well, because there are millions of Jews who are suffering, and millions more sentients that WILL suffer if we don’t take action now.

        If you value Jewish lives on the same level as American lives, then you should see why Babyeater lives (including the lives of the babies!) are considered equal to human lives. No need to be a Universalist utilitarian.

        >Anyway, my preferred solution would have been something like going back to Huygens, rigging up a delay detonator, coming back with another starship, evacuating the crew to the second starship, and blowing up the crosslinking system.

        You could do that, except that every MICROSECOND delay is a risk imposed on the ENTIRETY OF HUMAN CIVILIZATION (keeping in mind that we’re a spacefaring species at this point!). The cost of waiting too long and allowing the superhappies to arrive is that ALL OF HUMAN CIVILIZATION is converted to something other than human. If you are even 1 second too late, ALL OF HUMAN CIVILIZATION is lost.

        Thus, the risk that appends to each additional second of delay is far greater than the value of a single piddling star system.

        Or, to put it another way, you have to argue that the lives of the crew and the people of that system are substantially more valuable than the lives of EVERY SINGLE OTHER HUMAN BEING CURRENTLY LIVING AND WHO WILL EVER LIVE.

        As above, that calculation is easy to make if you value the lives of all sentient being as appoximately equal.

      • LPSP says:

        My thoughts are pretty similar on 3WC. It’s a good piece of hypothetical, but Eliezer sort-of flashes his cloistered card with the way everyone expresses humour and pain. I can’t see modern humans reacting to Baby-eaters differently to how they react to knowledge of distant tribes with disgusting habits or whatever, poetry be damned. It could cause a war if the BEs were zealous enough to want us to eat OUR babies, but then I sincerely doubt our side would be primarily interested in saving BE babies or trying to reshape them.

        In a future where people are bred to be incredibly sensitive, furiously zealous, rape-happy utilitarians with inbred senses of humour, the story is totally plausible. I think that hypothetical is as fascinating as the two alien races.

      • raj says:

        why would I want to sacrifice a lot of humans just to forcibly change the way of life of a race that has been nothing but friendly to us so far?

        If your neighbors are members of a child-torturing cult, but are very friendly when they interact with you, that’s ok?

        But if you really feel this way, you may try to substitute the babyeaters for something else, for the purpose of the story as thought experiment rather than fiction. The point was to illustrate an unambiguously maximally negative disutility, that you really-maximally-don’t-want-to-negotiate-over.

        The moral calculus is supposed to be at high enough stakes that the value of the crew is totally dwarfed. This isn’t merely utilitarian rhetoric, it is well represented in human story telling and values, afaik. And if I were to choose a crew of humans to make decisions for the rest of humanity, I’d definitely choose one who wouldn’t let their personal well-being balance against the well-being of civilization.

    • blacktrance says:

      I have to give Eliezer some credit for trying to spin a happy ending as unhappy, but (IMO) he didn’t quite succeed.

    • Deiseach says:

      “Three Worlds Collide” is clever, and even funny in places. Ironically, it reminds me of the kind of thing the Sad Puppies stand for – it has a vaguely old-fashioned tone, even if it’s sprinkled with up-to-date-when-written references (you could do an entire Tumblr call-out post on its manifold lacks of diversity but while that would be amusing, it would not be germane).

      Part of the old-fashioned tone was the careful set-up to give the result the author’s philosophy wanted, but hey, if I can stand the lecturing from Asimov, I’m not going to whine about Yudkowsky’s ideal society. Also, the Confessor – pure old-school character and I liked the idea of how being old and experienced means you are Too Powerful 🙂

      Though I was reduced to laughter every time a decision was made on the basis of “quick, what does the prediction market say?” That was the least convincing part of it to me, followed by the appeal to Evolution as justification by the Babyeaters being rejected by the crew of the Human spaceship – yeah, but didn’t you guys just lay an “Evolution means that we do zis” explanation on me earlier in the text? If Evolution works to explain Human motivation and behaviour, and nobody seems to say “But that’s no reason to do it!” on the Human side, why not for Babyeater motivation and behaviour? As well, how the rejection is worded makes no sense – sure, they were eating their offspring before they ever knew what Evolution was, that’s what makes it an evolutionary behaviour.

      It’s not sufficient to say “Ha, their justification doesn’t work because they hadn’t a theory of evolution to let them decide what would be the optimally successful strategy before they engaged in that behaviour”, because neither did we and if evo-psych guys can have a reputable discipline saying “the reason men like blondes is because back in our savannah days…”, then so can Babyeater evo-psych apologists. Though I imagine this was more a criticism of Natural Law ethics/philosophy/theology under the guise of ‘appeal to Evolution’, and possibly also the kind of popular “Behaviour Z is common in nature, we see it in these species, so it’s perfectly natural and normal for humans!” Yeah, but there’s a lot of things that animals do that are perfectly natural and normal that we don’t emulate nor wish to, and hence arguing for or against Behaviour Z on the basis of an appeal to Nature is prone to cherry-picking the parts we like and ignoring the parts we don’t like.

      As I said, good old-fashioned message wrapped in prediction skiffy but the moral dilemma was set up in such a way that really there was only going to be one ending.

      • András Kovács says:

        Facts about evolutionary origin do not necessarily move any evolved agent to update moral views. More generally, processes may create processes with different goals; the paperclip optimizer I develop doesn’t care about my preferences. EY has wrote a lot about this elsewhere. He doesn’t think about moral arguments from evolution the way you think he thinks.

        • Deiseach says:

          Whatever you think I think he thinks, within the story there’s a self-contradiction. If it’s intentional, well done to the author, but I don’t know if it’s intentional or not.

          • youzicha says:

            There is no contradiction. The point the author wants to make is that morals developed for evolutionary reasons, but that what we consider to be moral depends on the what our morals are (the current “moral phenotype”, as it were), not on what is fitness-maximizing. He shows this by first explaining how it could be (approximately) fitness-maximizing to believe that eating babies is good, and yet if you don’t believe in the goodness of eating babies, arguments about fitness will not sway you.

            This is basically an author-tract in this passage, I think we can safely assume that the characters are arguing for the orthodox Yudkowskyan position without any intentionally introduced contradictions.

      • Murphy says:

        I think the humans blindness to their own reasoning is one of the anvils in the story.

        I think EY has straight out stated that it’s not his idea of a utopia, rather a intentional weird-topia

      • aanon smith-teller says:

        >If Evolution works to explain Human motivation and behaviour, and nobody seems to say “But that’s no reason to do it!” on the Human side, why not for Babyeater motivation and behaviour?

        If human and babyeater morality are both products of evolution, that doesn’t mean we should be immediately compelled to eat babies by this fact any more than it means they should be immediately compelled to stop. They’re programmed to eat babies, and we’re programmed to care about them.

        The babyeaters were claiming that eating babies would *speed up* evolution, improving the average health of the survivors. Do you think this is a good argument?

      • raj says:

        But there wasn’t one ending. It was deliberately set-up to illustrate the complexity and difficulty of meta-ethics (contrary to virtually all fiction written by humans). The “true ending” is a more traditional tale where the human spirit wins out, but begs the question: wouldn’t the babyeaters write exactly the same (relative) moral tale, where honor and defiance and babyeating won out in the end?

        But which is the true “true ending”? I don’t think that has an answer. Our values are many, and sometimes contradictory.

    • Callum G says:

      Parts of this book I found to be gratingly in your face about the point Eliezer was making and honestly, this limited it’s appeal as fiction. For example, unexpectedly mentioning rape as a point about how societies change. These things weren’t so much a plot device to further the story, it simply served as an abrupt signal for Eliezer to rant about rationalist things. I’m not against rationalist things, I am on this blog, but the messages could have been weaved in far more subtly.

      Other than that I really enjoyed it. He mentioned the babyeaters somewhere in the sequences right? Something about an Evolution Fairy magically keeping competing species at a nice equilibrium, but when scientists selectively breed for less offspring, they found it wasn’t due to altruism/Fairy but the insects were eating their babies. Or something along those lines.

    • Dr Dealgood says:

      I liked Three Worlds Collide on the whole, even though parts of it didn’t make much sense.

      The human society reminded me of the old “catgirl volcano” idea: it seemed like they had organized their society for the purpose of maximum juvenility. It just seemed thrown together and incredible. Big Yud said he was deliberately aiming for a shocking future after the dustup about legal rape but aside from that one weird detail there’s nothing that would be offensive to a modern liberal.

      The superhappies seemed like an extrapolation of that trend if anything. They’re emotionally weak, unserious, sex-obsessed and arrogant. Which gave it an unintended element of symbolism: when confronted by the ugliness of the path humanity was taking, those who had seen it firsthand willingly died to save the rest of the species from suffering it.

      • Deiseach says:

        I found the rape thing less offensive than I had anticipated it to be, but that’s probably because I was putting myself mentally into the Confessor’s shoes and thinking “Oh Junior, you have no goddamn idea – you think ‘rape’ is the same as ‘slap and tickle’ because your society has been engineered, and you guys have been bred, so that you would no more use violence on an unwilling sexual partner than you would cut off your dick with a rusty, blunt breadknife”.

        But yeah – the Babyeaters, Superhappies, and Market Humans were all three varieties of scarecrow (stuffed with straw) – they’re each Planet of the Hats aliens in their own way, and only there to represent the points the author wants to make. Which is why the story gave me the old-fashioned Golden Age SF echo that it did 🙂

        • Jiro says:

          I added a comment on the rape thing years later: In the real world, the only cases where a random person is permitted to do something to another random person nonconsensually is where doing the thing itself does not require any further use of force or threats of force. I can talk to you even if you don’t want to hear me, but if you’re wearing earmuffs, I can’t take them off of you or threaten to shoot you if you don’t take them off.

          If a society allowed rape in the same way that we allowed other nonconsensual activites, you could rape someone, but you couldn’t tear off his clothes, hold him down, or threaten him if he refuses.

          If a society allows rape in the sense that we normally think of, that society doesn’t just treat rape differently from how we do, it treats rape differently from how we treat everything else as well, and the comparison to our society doesn’t actually work.

          • Deiseach says:

            I think it’s meant to be pretty clear (even if Yudkowsky maybe didn’t allow for the shock value of the word “rape” or was trying to capitalise on it for that very point) that the Market Humans’ future society doesn’t allow rape in the sense that we normally think of; that it’s more of a cross between “when they say ‘no’, they really mean ‘yes’ because you’re not meant to be discouraged and back off too easily, they’re testing your alphaness” and “discouraging being a pricktease” (or whatever the male to female equivalent of that is) – that if you’re flirting and expressing sexual interest and you go beyond a certain socially agreed limit in your interactions, then you’re “asking for it” – but in this case, you really are “asking for it” and everybody knows that – it’s the equivalent of bratting *. So the scene is set up as nonconsensualish but everyone knows the difference between playing and not, and therefore it’s as legal as any other BDSM stuff because kink is none of the government’s goddamn business and get out of our bedrooms/alleyways/public parks.

            Which is why the Confessor is so drily and blackly amused, because he (like us) is a product of the Bad Old Days, when rape meant genuinely non-consensual, and often with the use of violence to the point of injury or even killing (he mentions near the end how he assaulted, injured, raped and killed a woman when he was a young thug before being Uplifted or whatever the magic treatment to make people nice and civil was).

            * I was trying to think “Where the heck did I learn this?” and I think it came out of a post on a Christian website talking about Christian complementarianism groups online that laid out how husbands should discipline their wives (including spanking) and that this drew quite a lot of unexpected attention from “people interested in spanking/being spanked by their spouse” that had little to do with complementarianism. Or Christianity.

            May I just take this opportunity to say “You Americans are weird, and I don’t mean only the BDSM crowd”? 🙂

    • Autolykos says:

      While I am not surprised by the crew’s reaction to the Superhappies’ offer, I would have taken it (once I listened the warnings by my System 1 and categorized them as “weird, but benign”). And I would have expected at least one of the escaping ships to go in the direction of the nova (and the Superhappies), not towards Earth.
      I would still have tried to negotiate some optionality into the deal, like allowing the modifications to be switched off temporarily, at least for adults. That would be so similar to the situation of the Kiritsugu (sp? – it’s been a while) that they would have probably taken it.

      What I absolutely do not get is why the Superhappies try to integrate parts of clearly inferior moral systems into themselves. I would slightly prefer becoming 100% Superhappy to a hybrid Superhappy/human, and becoming part Babyeater would probably be the worst part of the deal for me.
      But then, I have absolutely zero respect for tradition. The whole notion of preferring things just because it was like that in the past seems about as alien to me as the Babyeaters.

      • Faceh says:

        In this story Eliezer is making a point about the complexity of value and the immense difficulty in optimizing a society to sufficiently satisfy all participants who carry different values in their utility functions. Given the huge variety of utility functions present in human beings, imagine the difficulty when you add in the vastly different psychologies of an alien race.

        The solution offered by the superhappies is to IMPOSE a blunt merging of each society’s utility functions, broadly stated, with no consideration for that of each individual, many of whom would NOT have *willingly* chosen this outcome and didn’t WANT it. People are ANGRY that they weren’t given a choice and that their rational dissent was not noted and included. People KILL THEMSELVES in the story (not too unrealistic, but you could object) because that is seen a preferable to the change. You can’t really express your distaste with the choice in any starker terms.

        This is probably because the concept of self-determination is highly valued in by many humans.

        One of Eliezer’s larger goals in real life is to figure out how to design a superintelligent AI that doesn’t just NOT kill us, or improve society, but improves it in such a way that it considers and attempts to optimize based on EVERY SINGLE PERSON’s utility functions and thereby creates a society that is net gain for EVERY person, and still respects self-determination in the process. To oversimplify it: the changes that an AI makes are ones that every single person should WANT, regardless of their own individual preferences.

        The concept is called “Coherent Extrapolated Volition” and you can read a paper he wrote on it.

        There may be some out there who think integrating humanity into the borg such that all share identical values and no dissent is possible is an ideal solution, but that is what THEIR utility function allows, and not what every person would find ideal.

        So by adopting this solution, you are basically assuming that your utility function (or the one you’re advocating) is the clearly correct or superior one, while the whole story is about pointing out that the issue of values is hugely subjective and comes in large part to your own perspective.

        >What I absolutely do not get is why the Superhappies try to integrate parts of clearly inferior moral systems into themselves.

        Their terminal value is ‘happiness.’ They want to optimize for maximum happiness (and a few other variables). If integrating parts of a different moral system (i.e. utility function) into theirs results in more net happiness, they are probably going to do it.

        The fact that you call it a ‘clearly inferior moral system’ betrays what your utility function might look like.

        • jlow says:

          >So by adopting this solution, you are basically assuming that your utility function (or the one you’re advocating) is the clearly correct or superior one, while the whole story[…]

          Any solution, in this story, is imposing upon someone. By adopting the Superhappy offer, he is only trading off some values against others to obtain the best result as he judges it — which is, in this situation, exactly what anyone choosing any solution would be doing.

          I think that almost any utility function that values sentient beings will be better fulfilled by the Superhappy offer than the other choices — do we value self-determination for its own sake, such that suffering and death are preferable to its loss? doesn’t the latter also entail loss of choice? — but that’s another, endless argument.

        • Autolykos says:

          It seems jlow anticipated a lot of what I was going to say, so I’m just posting the diff:

          Yes, not having a choice about the matter kind of sucks, even if I get the solution I’d have picked anyway. But what you’re missing is that I don’t have a choice about my current state, either. Plus, it seems the Kiritsugu career would allow for a life with plenty of meaning/eudaimonia, but without much of the BS I have to put up with because this earthly shell of mine was assembled by a blind alien god. So, the best of both worlds, as far as I’m concerned.
          I’d probably enjoy the heck out of the Superhappy way of life for a while, just because I can. But when I get bored, becoming Kiritsugu is a nice option to have. And I expect many, many people would just enjoy the heck out of being Superhappy, period. That is, after they dealt with the culture shock and destigmatized hedonism.

          Also, I don’t see terminal values as quite as sacred as you (or EY, probably). If I have terminal values that require me to harm others, I want to get rid of them. My comment about the clearly superior ethical system was mostly about that point, wrt the Babyeaters – and in lesser extent to humans who seem to be perfectly fine with starting a civil war for the right to commit genocide (xenocide?).

          The only thing I’d criticize about the Superhappies is their radical interventionism. Force-converting any aliens they encounter may be the superior option from a purely utilitarian standpoint in most cases (even including the mass-suicides and possibly collateral damage from conquering unwilling species). But it is not very ethically failsafe. You might accidentally bulldoze worthwhile aspects of an otherwise lower-utility culture without realizing it. Having the civilizations coexist and allowing any individual to self-modify in any direction would eventually converge to an equilibrium around the best set of values, but at lower risk of missing anything valuable. You’re paying a bounded utility cost (the inferior values will eventually die out anyway) for the potential of very high gain (you get to keep the good parts until the heat death of the universe).

      • jlow says:

        @Autolykos: Hooray, I’m not the only one!

        I actually am kind of surprised both that Eliezer wrote the crew to have that reaction, and that so few people — as far as I’ve seen — side with the Superhappies on this one. It seems like clearly the best choice, to me; not ideal, but surely orders of magnitude better than any other. Continued existence for humanity is ensured, and death and suffering ended.

        I’m always mildly confused by how little people seem to value pleasure.

        (Or maybe how much they value “sacral ideology”, to coin a probably-opaque term for stuff like “romantic conflict”, awkward gatherings, catharsis, and other bewildering Traditional Stuff You’re Supposed To Like And Mildly Revere Even If It’s Kinda Awful.)

    • Immanentizing Eschatons says:

      The Last Tears ending is the best ending.

      The ability to feel pain, embarrassment and “romantic conflict” are not something I would want to take away from people unwillingly, but doing so is far, far, far superior to murdering 15 billion people.

      (dust specks for the win)

      People’s reaction to that in the story made very little sense to me- I really don’t think anywhere near that many people would kill themselves over this.

      • jlow says:

        Agreed. As I say (or rather, am about to say) above, one of the things that has confused me since the first time I read the story is how much dramatic effort went into making the Superhappies super baddies — sure, it’s not ideal, but mass suicides? the ending with mass death and suffering, in both immediate and ongoing terms, is the “good” ending? — and how rarely I see anyone disagree.

    • MugaSofer says:

      I’m genuinely shocked by how many people are commenting they would allow tens (hundreds?) of billions of children to be agonizingly tortured to death for eternity (or – admittedly less shocking – willingly turn themself into an alien fleshlight) in exchange for avoiding mild inconvenience; and find the idea of anyone caring about morality weird and unrealistic.

      • Anonymous says:

        I’m a little uncertain what “mild inconvenience” you mean. Avoiding interstellar war that could possibly slay untold multitudes and cause incalculable property damage sounds like more than a “mild inconvenience”.

        • raj says:

          The super-happies are assumed to be sufficiently advanced to automatically win without a wasting war.

      • Jiro says:

        People who are not utilitarians or EAs usually differentiate between action and inaction. “Allowing” them is inaction.

        • Anonymous says:

          Thank god we have the leading authority on normies to explain these things to we poor benighted basement dwellers!

      • Immanentizing Eschatons says:

        Wait, the “turning into an alien fleshlight” thing is done with the alternative being the death of 15 billion people- not exactly a mild inconvenience?

        I agree with you about the people who think it’s OK to let the babyeating go on though.

    • TMB says:

      I really enjoyed this story – the only negative I’d say is the rape stuff – I read the part about legalised rape as a kind of joke – we would be too out of touch to understand the enlightened moral sense of the later generations – fair enough. I didn’t find that offensive.
      But then, at the end when the confessor talks about raping and killing someone – I have to say, I found that a bit unnecessary, I didn’t really understand the point of it, and I felt it departed from the general tenor of the story, and kind of spoiled that character.

      From what I read here, there might have been some other reason to include that part, but for me, it wasn’t great.
      Still, other than that, good stuff.

  64. Benjamin Finkel says:

    Wow, that seems like a really tame comment to ban yourself over.

    • Autolykos says:

      But Sun Tzu would have approved. When a general exempts himself from his own rules, morale and discipline will collapse.

    • Link to the comment causing the one week autoban.

      I was annoyed at Scott for being uncharitable at the time and I don’t think a one week ban for that is unreasonable.

    • Paul Brinkley says:

      That comment by itself is tame, I agree. There may have been other comments, however, that may were weighing on Scott, based on some of the other bans he was handing out – some commenters apparently had ventured rather deeply into unnecessary-untrue-unkind territory without quite warranting a ban, until a relatively tame comment became the final straw.

      I agree with the Sun Tzu principle. One week seems light, but still fair (if it were up to me to be ruthless, a week would be about all I could justify, too).

  65. So, what’s with the new WordPress-based login in the Meta header? Is it supposed to remove Bakkot’s recently-posted sidebar widget?

    I don’t mind logging in (since I have a WordPress and everything), but I like that widget!

    Was there an announcement I missed somehere?

    • Bakkot says:

      Ehm… I’m not logged in and continue to see the widget, as usual. Is it that it goes away when you log in? If not (or if so), could you tell me what browser and OS you’re using?

      Although if you mean you couldn’t see it when you posted this comment, it may just be that there were not yet any comments. It only appears if there’s at least one.

      • Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

        Data Point: It removes the widget for me, even in threads that had new posts.

        OS: Windows 10
        Browser: Firefox

        • Bakkot says:

          Hm. Can’t get it to happen on Firefox, but I don’t have a Windows box lying around to test with right now.

          Also, are you logged in or not? Does it matter?