This is the twice-weekly hidden open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. Also:
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So apparently the Hillary campaign team believes that Obama engaged in election fraud in the Colorado primary in 2008.
https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/10290
But I’ve been assured in the past there’s never been any election fraud and that any such allegations are merely partisan Republican complaining. Why would the Hillary team believe that flooding a caucus with ineligible voters is even possible?
@ a non mouse
But I’ve been assured in the past there’s never been any election fraud and that any such allegations are merely partisan Republican complaining. Why would the Hillary team believe that flooding a caucus with ineligible voters is even possible?
It’s very possible, depending* on the rules for that particular caucus, how many volunteers show up to keep things organized (honestly or not) and on and on. But caucuses (caucusi?) only happen in primaries, and it’s the General Election in November that Republicans are talking about.
* And depending on how one defines ‘flood’, Obama ‘forces’, etc. Also some caucuses have such low turnout that a half dozen people can turn the balance. And Murphy always attends.
If you read the e-mail carefully, you’ll note these are two volunteers from Colorado, not the entire campaign team. Presumably Podesta says “they believe the Obama forces flooded the caucuses” because neither he nor Marshal believe it.
Right, they’re high level state political operatives:
Which makes it even more baffling to me. Those guys should know that election fraud is impossible. Barring that Podesta should just be dismissive of their claims, right?
Podesta might be dismissing their claims (it reads that way to me, but I lack context outside that link), but he probably wouldn’t want to do it to their face if they’re “high importance.”
Anyway, I’m not sure I’m following your argument. Some (many?) people have told you that flooding caucuses with illegal voters isn’t a thing in America, and now two other people think it is? What is the big deal? Were Jim and Mike among the many who previously claimed it didn’t happen?
Caucuses aren’t elections.
Typically no secret ballot, multiple rounds of voting and then persuasive argument in favor of your candidate.
Frequently they aren’t run by the state process and I think it is possible they may not even use the state voter registration roles.
Caucuses are their own animals, a holdover from a less populous time where party organizations were very much deciding in their preferred candidates in smoke filled rooms.
There isn’t a comparison to be made between primary caucuses and the general election, especially as regards the possibility of voter fraud which is relevant to an election.
Barring that Podesta should just be dismissive of their claims, right?
My impression of that is Podesta is saying “We have some high-level people that we can’t tell go jump in a lake, so let’s schmooze them and make like we’re taking their concerns seriously, so long as we know what they plan to do so they don’t screw the campaign up for us”. He makes a point about them being old friends of the Clintons, so they can’t just be brushed off because that would insult them (and maybe generate a backlash, or at the least grudges, within their state machine against members of the Clinton campaign. Going into a major campaign like the presidential one, you don’t want an attitude within a particular state party organisation on your side of “It’ll be a cold day in Hell before I work with that bastard”).
It’s more revealing of the insider attitudes within the party, where there’s a definite split between Hillary’s true-believers and those who supported Obama, either out of conviction about him or dislike for Hillary. Whether or not there was actual voting fraud, what matters is the perception by one camp that the successful guy screwed over our guy by cheating 🙂
But that doesn’t make any sense. They’re insiders so they should know that election fraud is absolutely impossible and that any claims to the contrary are just Republican propaganda intended to justify voter suppression.
Why would high ranking political insiders think that it’s possible, even likely, that election fraud occurred? After all, these are high ranking state party officials – if anyone is positioned to know that election fraud is possible, it’s them and they seem to think it not just possible but likely. Not only that but they think that measures such as poll observers and legal supervision will help – they should know that these measures are just excuses for voter suppression. I just can’t wrap my head around this.
Since these writers are talking about Obama vs Hillary, they are referring to primaries — which often have caucuses and caucuses are subject to cheating (or innocent sloppiness).
Current talk about ‘election fraud’ is about real elections, where, as HBC says, there are ballots and lists of registered voters and everything is very officially recorded. The current Republicans vs Democrats dispute is (mostly) about requiring photo i.d. to vote in a real election (They fear people walking into a polling place with false i.d., false registration cards, etc). Us Democrats say there is no significant ‘election fraud’ of that kind going on; Republicans say there is.
This is simply standard (unreflective) hypocrisy. If my side demands election observers and tight controls, it’s because my opponents are vile bastards seeking to subvert elections. If my opponents demand tight controls, well, I know that I’m honest, so it must be because my opponents are vile bastards trying to suppress voter turnout.
As discussed earlier upthread, many of the same people making excuses for Trump’s Access Hollywood statements were quite against Bill Clinton playing grab-ass with the help, and many of the people that got in front of a TV camera and destroyed Bill Clinton’s accusers (“bimbo eruptions”) are now aghast at what Trump was saying.
Meanwhile in Europe:
EU parliament workshop considers Asimov’s three laws for robotics.
Source: https://polcms.secure.europarl.europa.eu/cmsdata/upload/df73fa80-06f3-416f-80ae-56c59be5473f/DRAFT%20REPORT%20ALL.pdf
Apparently they don’t realize that most of Asimove’s robot stories were about the holes in the Three Laws of Robotics.
But the overall theme was that they were still a good thing. And even when they failed it was usually either human error (a human telling a robot to poison a cup it didn’t know would be drunk, for instance) or beneficial (machines preventing humans from interfering when they knew humans wouldn’t do as good a job). Asimov’s general position was that the solution to bugs was to try to understand them rather than throw the system out.
Election results just in!
Well, election results for the Jesuits 🙂
First time in five hundred years, the Superior General of the Jesuits comes from outside Europe – he’s Venezuelan. Given that the pope is also a South American Jesuit, this makes things interesting. Most fascinating to me was this: the majority of Jesuits are from Asia. Once again, the balance of Western Christianity (of all denominations) is tilted towards the Global South. This may strike you as a good thing (the West is finally getting cleared of all that superstition and it’s only holding out in the backwards regions of the world, where it will also wither once poverty has been alleviated and progress and education take hold) or a good thing (no reason for Christianity to be Euro-centric; this is now a really global religion).
That’s 5,600 out of 17,000 world-wide, which is a considerable block. This has been your religion news segment for Sunday 🙂
That’s interesting. Most of the prominent Christian institutions in India (schools, colleges, hospitals) are affiliated to Protestant organizations; with that plus the history of the British Empire, I figured most Indian Christians were Protestants. Turns out there are nearly twice as many Catholics as Protestants in India, and I had no idea there were five million Eastern Orthodox Christians in the country.
Are you sure that most prominent Christian institutions in India are Protestant? Maybe you executed circular reasoning, using the Protestant population to conclude that the institutions are Protestant and vice versa? Pretty much every Christian institution I’ve heard of in India is Catholic, but my sample is heavily biased towards Goa, for no apparent reason.
(I was the first Anonymous above, accidentally posted that without filling out the blanks)
Goa was a Portuguese colony up until 1961, so it would likely have a stronger Catholic presence than most other places. But on second thought, I should amend that previous statement. I grew up in the South, and lots of fashionable schools and colleges there are affiliated with the Church of South India, which is an Anglican institution. The same is true up north; St. Stephen’s in Delhi for example is one of the most sought-after colleges in the country and it is also an Anglican institution. But there are lots of Catholic institutions as well, I don’t know how I forgot about them considering my mother’s alma mater is a Franciscan convent school.
I abhor PETA, but I can appreciate this sort of topical marketing.
(crossposted to the subreddit)
So. On Thursday (about when I created an SSC account, linking it to my preexisting WP account), wordpress started blocking my posts here and at every other wordpress blog, so far as I have tested. Admittedly, that’s not hugely far (n=3), but still. I can post if I don’t provide the url of my blog in the website field, but that hasn’t been a problem before. My wordpress account *does* link my blog, so it is blocked from posting. Based on what happened when I was able to contact the mods of one blog, it looks like I’m getting caught in the spam filter. This *seems* to be correlated with my creating an SSC account, but I don’t see why that would cause problems on other blogs. It happens regardless of what email or nick I use, but when I stop providing my blog in the “website” field, the problem goes away.
I’m posting from chromium on an arch box with testing and multiarch repos enabled; my wifi is handled by dhcpcd and wpa_supplicant. I don’t use proxies, and nothing seemed off in a traceroute. I’ve temporarily frozen my system at last Thursday (Oct 13) due to what I believe to be a(n unrelated) bug in chromium, but I usually update daily. Anyone have any idea what might be going on, or where I could check for issues? (Also Scott/Bakkot if you see this can you please let me out of the spam filter?)
Property Rights and the Poor
On OT 60 the Ancient Geek remarked: “People think libertarians are right wing because making property rights paramount favours the wealthy and employers over the poor and employees.”
I responded by noting: “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.”
It seems obvious to me that secure property rights makes it easier for the poor to build wealth. If you’re a poor farmer, do you want to invest in equipment that will make your farm more productive if it would just be confiscated by your corrupt local official? Protecting investments with secure rights to land and the fruits of ones labor are essential to improving the human condition. Thoughts?
Here’s a follow-up. Short version: Sometimes the banks won’t lend on low-quality property. That’s the good outcome. In the worse case, increased legibility makes vulnerable people more vulnerable.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/hey_wait_a_minute/2005/01/the_de_soto_delusion.html
Study suggesting that formalization has little effect.
Key quote from Slate that indicates how valuable titled land is: “In Phnom Penh, the capital, untitled land near the city center has been selling for about $20 to $30 per square meter over the past few years. Titled properties nearby have been selling for around 10 times that much.”
The complaint is that the land is so valuable that corrupt local officials appropriate it to sell off, which reinforces that insecure property rights harm the poor.
Getting secure property rights isn’t as simple as just giving a title to land, but involves rooting out local government corruption as well. Securing property rights is hard.
The second link shows that formalization did have an affect on profits, just that it was only a few companies affected. However, for those few companies, there were enormous gains in profits by being able to tap into the nation-wide economic system, by for example getting a stamp to make it easier to transport the product around the nation or giving legitimacy that made it easier to contract with larger companies. A few companies getting massive gains seems like support for formalization.
The operative word was *paramount*. Having zero property rights might not be good either, but those are two extremes.
Can you describe more what it means to make property rights paramount? As a libertarian, I believe strongly in self ownership and ownership of the fruits of one’s labor. I can be persuaded in extreme situations that taking of a persons property is justified, but think a strong presumption in favor of property rights is both moral and leads to good economic consequences.
The Price of Safety
Continuing part of a discussion I had on OT 60:
=============
Me: 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.
bean: 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.
=============
Safety has a cost, either monetarily or in opportunity cost. Safer cars or planes cost more money to develop better systems and parts. Cars and planes could be made even safer than they are now if people were willing to give up comfort and convenience. If government mandated that everyone buys volvos or made race car seatbelts mandatory in cars or planes, safety would go up but the monetary price would increase and comfort and convenience would go down. Safety involves trade-offs.
So, my answer to bean is that yes, airplanes do things which increase or fail to decrease the chance of a plan falling out of the sky, but the FAA also implements policies with the same effect when they don’t mandate more stringent standards than they do for safety, as even they know there are trade-offs. Are bureaucrats who get lobbied from big businesses and have political authority better at determining the optimal safety/price/comfort/convenience trade-off point than private actors acting in their self-interest and accountable to customers and torts? I’m doubtful.
But customers are bad at making reasonable decisions based on safety records, and torts run by judges who know nothing about airplanes are terrible at telling the difference between negligence and actual misfortune – and airplanes crash rarely enough that it’s not reliable to go by them. Airline safety experts hired by the government would probably do a pretty good job – their judgement might get distorted by lobbying, but it’d still be a lot more accurate than the other options. (outright bribery would probably be possible but rare – I don’t know how many agency employees would be willing to take money when they know it would kill hundreds of people, but probably few enough that it’s not a major issue).
I mostly agree, but note it’s possible someone might also bribe them to make safety requirements more onerous – e.g. part replacements more frequently than necessary.
Consumer Reports or an equivalent is great for making it easy for consumers to understand safety records. Plane crashes making the news, and noting the airline or airplane, is another effective way to hold manufacturers accountable. Consumers don’t need to be expert engineers to have short-hand ways to know which airlines to avoid.
But really, airlines and airplane manufacturers have extraordinarily large incentives in the marketplace to make a safe plane, and I find it strange that this isn’t obvious to others.
I work for one of those airplane manufacturers, and we do our best to make a safe plane. There are times I have to remind people that if we really only cared about safety, we’d ground our planes and not let anyone fly. (I’m still waiting for someone to point out that this would result in more people driving and less overall safety.)
But not all airlines share this attitude. I can speak from direct experience on this, although I can’t share specifics for obvious reasons. Yes, it’s obvious to you that airlines have an incentive to keep their planes safe. It’s not obvious to them.
The FAA has an explicit mandate to look at those tradeoffs when they make their decisions. That’s why there aren’t airbags in your airline seat. They wouldn’t save nearly enough lives to be worth it.
I’ll be sure to let the FAA know that they should be lax the next time I deal with them because we’re a big business and they’re the government.
If the world was made of ideal rational actors, then I might agree with you. It’s not. When the lottery goes away due to lack of demand, we can trust ordinary consumers to be capable of making these kind of decisions for themselves. A businessman who is flying his employees around on his own planes would have his incentives more or less properly aligned. A businessman who is fighting for the travel dollars of the general public won’t. The public is absolutely terrible at judging risks, which in practice will mean that they’ll either demand far more safety than is economically justifiable, or far less, and my money is on the later. The current system may not be perfect, but it’s better than we can do elsewhere.
And I’m not in love with the FAA. Far from it. Dealing with them takes lots of time and effort, occasionally to the detriment of actual safety.
“That’s why there aren’t airbags in your airline seat. They wouldn’t save nearly enough lives to be worth it.”
Do you think the rule requiring computers and the like to be shut down for takeoff and landing saved enough lives to be worth it? The instructions on what to do if the plane went down in water, given for flights that do not go over any large bodies of water? Instructions on how to use seat belts?
Your basic argument is that humans are imperfectly rational, which is true. But the same is true for the humans whose actions produce FAA recommendations–not just the FAA officials but the voters who elect the politicians who appoint them.
Hmm. Good question. The cost in that case is not born by those with lobby groups, which does reduce feedback. On the other hand, it’s part of clear for evacuation, which is a good rule to have.
The first is a case of standardizing the checklist to avoid confusion, along with the fact that it might land in a small body of water (US Airways 1549 springs to mind here). The later is a bit annoying, I admit, and I can’t say for sure where it falls.
Yes, but the question is if rationality is concentrated or diluted in the process. I’d say that there’s an excellent argument for concentration, given that the average person just does not get cost-benefit analysis. Look at the Ford Pinto case. Ford is often pilloried for using cost-benefit, even though not using it is easily demonstrated to be stupid in the extreme. (So we should spend any amount of money to save lives? OK, but we only have a finite amount of money. Where do we decide to put it?)
A libertarian state populated entirely by people who are now libertarians would probably work pretty well. But most of the population is just not like that, and will break the libertarian system quickly.
It is not even worth it to mandate seat belts in school buses.
And when it comes to safety features, most consumers will even reject them so without regulatory bodies our private and public transportation systems would be very deadly. When seat belts were first being introduced they were resisted by automobile manufacturers because they implied that cars were unsafe, and people generally refused to wear them to avoid offending the driver or just in denial of the risks.
Even libertarians file injury lawsuits. They may even be more aware than average people about the financial benefits from doing so. You do not need a libertarian population, you need a legal philosophy that does not include gross negligence or duties to protect.
Is it the same reason there are inflatable safety vests under my seat? Barring that miracle on the Hudson, did any commercial airliner ever crash-err-land on water with any survivors?
Quite a few.
If you want to question cost-benefit, talk about the oxygen generators. Those have never, IIRC, saved any lives, and they have killed people. In fairness to the generators, I’m pretty sure that ValuJet would have had a fatal crash sooner or later anyway. No, the system isn’t perfect. But I strongly suspect it’s less imperfect than it would be in a libertarian system.
Hm, interesting, I didn’t expect that many, though most of them are decades ago…
It’s possible that math would say to take them off at this point, given how reliable modern airliners are. That said, regulators are not immune to public pressure, and life jackets are the kind of thing the public would demand even if it wasn’t justified. (This is not an advantage to libertarianism. They’d have the exact same problem, but worse.)
I think that everything published made a great deal of sense.
However, consider this, what if you wrote a catchier title?
I ain’t saying your information is not good, but suppose you added something
that grabbed people’s attention? I mean Open Thread 60.25 | Slate Star Codex is a little plain.
You might glance at Yahoo’s home page and see how they create article titles to grab people to open the links.
You might add a video or a picture or two to grab people interested
about what you’ve written. Just my opinion, it might bring your blog a little bit
more interesting.
Spambot has a point.
…is it a spambot? I honestly can’t tell what spam-oriented goal that post would accomplish. Then again, I don’t see what discussion-oriented goal it would accomplish either.
“gta’s just a weirdo” seems to be the Occam-friendly solution.
If it were a spambot, the point, presumably, would be to get gta’s link on this page, with possible implications for SEO? Or just hoping for clickthrough.
Relevant XKCD
alright, I’m pretty sure it’s spam – a search for “I ain’t saying your information is not good” (with quotes) returns a lot of comments following the pattern on unrelated sites.
Sounds likely, good work. What a strange spamming strat.
Crikey, spambots are improving by leaps and bounds. I thought that was a real, if odd, person. I’m too old for the bright new future of our AI overlords – imagine if the AI arises out of a spambot 🙂
@ Deiseach
Funny you should mention it, that’s how the AIs in my sci-fi setting came to be.
Does this mean that the AI that destroys everything will be maximizing for penis enlargement?
I couldn’t figure out how to comment there, so I thought I’d bring up Robin Hanson’s most recent post at OB here:
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2016/10/smart-sincere-contrarian-trap.html#comments
This is exactly the reason why we should bring back wizards. They serve a social purpose as being respected, acknowledged contrarians, whose job was to be a step ahead of everyone else, weird and difficult to people of power and prestige, and able to see through bullshit a mile away.
The most successful smart+sincere people in history have arguably made wizards of themelves in any case. Just look at Eliyud. The way he cloaks his Lesswrong posts in terminology pretty much amounts to hypertext robes and pointy hats, plus he wrote an HP fanfic.
Magic is not real. So bringing back wizards inherently creates a class of people whose beliefs are disconnected from reality.
Giving power to people whose beliefs are disconnected from reality is a bad thing and will likely lead to more mob rule; whenever the mob wants to attack someone, the wizard validates it by pointing out that yes, the guy really is possessed by demons.
Let’s just make computer science people the new wizards. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, after all.
What people? I assume he means people reluctant to endorse prediction markets, since that’s the topic of the paragraph I pulled the quote from, or maybe “people who have wrong beliefs” (but know about it somehow?). But if that’s the case then Hanson seems to be just firing off a broadside at all such people as inadequately smart and/or sincere.
Also what Gwern said about not having any examples.
Okay, can someone take this idiot by the hand and walk her gently through the magic of prediction markets? Why should we take them as the ne plus ultra of decision making? If money can be made, someone is going to find a way to game the system – that’s the one basic element of human nature you can rely on.
If the idea is “fifty million monkeys can’t be wrong” and the majority opinion will shake out to be right in the long run, people believe damn strange things. I imagine the theory is that rational decision-making will be engaged in by sensible people who thoughtfully consider the question and bring expert knowledge to bear, then use a mathematically-derived process to weigh odds and make their bets on the market.
Can anyone show me an example of this in the real world? I think it’ll turn out more like a small professional sub-set will know what they are doing, a larger group will follow their lead, and the majority will be ordinary punters having a flutter. I fear that basing policy decision on prediction market trends will leave us open to a lot of Peruvian gold mine swindles.
But as I said, I’m an ignorant idiot. Maybe prediction markets don’t operate like the bookies giving you odds on repealing the 19th Amendment (5,000 to 1, you can make a killing if you get in early!) and it’s a completely different process from stock markets and the like.
Picked up my DD214 today. I’m a veteran now!
Congrats!! I picked up my draft DD214 last week, almost every field had errors in it. Five months to go.
Wow. I did my worksheet two weeks ago, and the only update was to add my ETS award, which was new since my last ORB update.
Congrats on the short-time, though. I’m lucky enough to be moving to a civilian position at the same desk doing the same job, so the biggest difference is I now need to pick out my clothes every day.
Congrats
Democracy, opposed to an authoritarian polity, strengthens feelings of groupness, because every political act includes dealing with what i want (and people like me) vs what others want. In an authoritarian polity these would not be very salient categories, because it does not matter to me wether the blue eyed ones want the same thing as I do, political decisions do not include any of us.
looking for arguments & literature on the hypothesis. It is not my idea, so i guess there should be literature somewhere.
I don’t know about the social science aspect, but philosopher Jason Brennan suggests something like this in the last chapter of Against Democracy. See here for an excerpt.
Looked at from this light, Democracy is one huge externality trap/Moloch. Then again, so is many warring kingdoms. You fight with a man from the neighbouring realm to the death not because he is despicable, but because your mutual incentive curves are forced into it from the outside. Democracy essentially just replaced each king with a voting block.
Evading this system seems to involving placing one super power in charge of many people, acting as a regulator to force many into overral cooperation. No squabbling over votes, no problems. There’s a monarchy-resembling way – Emperor – and a democracy-resembling way – Patrician Class. Creating a good selection process seems to be the main challenge in both cases. With many small kingdoms and democracy alike, there’s a lot of fluidity and dynamicity in the market so new and competetive ideas form easilier, even if the best stuff ends up absorbed into the popular tyrants anyway. Inbred Imperial dynasties and increasingly-distant snobby Patricians are a pertinent issue to nations looking to avoid demographic warfare. But then again, distant snobby Patricians seem to represent one side of our current political quagmire in any case.
The ethnic makeup of imperial dynasties and patrician classes leads to demographic warfare anyway. Commonly this plays out by noting how few socio-politico-economic elites are black and Hispanic with regard to Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Congress etc. Uncommonly this plays out by God telling Hong Xiuquan that the Manchu emperors of the Qing dynasty are demons oppressing the Han and therefore he must start the Taiping Rebellion.
Read the last sentence.
I have not read Locke, but I think Locke argued something like this in Leviathan.
Not sure which you’re referring to, but Hobbes wrote Leviathan, not Locke.
I was wrong.
Bueno de Mesquita claims to observe that democracies are slow to war, but once committed to war escalate highly. You ask for psychological explanations and Bueno de Mesquita will not give you any. But it is good to ask what to people who disagree with you about why. (His explanations are always game theory.)
Is that last bit true, though? America seems very wary of escalating in Syria at the moment, for example.
I haven’t read him, so I don’t know how he operationalizes “war,” but don’t you think it would be easy to get a definition that says that the US is not at war in Syria? What do you think a poll of Americans would say?
Inasmuch as this is about public perception, there are two issues: publicity and casualties. The CIA does not wage wars. Air strikes occupy a weird intermediate space where the military publicly acts, but does not expend lives. Probably more CIA operatives have died in Syria than in Libya, but they’ve kept it under wraps, so it is less costly.
Syria (and situations like it) are messy because no, despite all the barrel bombs, the USA and Russia are not engaging in a war. First, there isn’t a declaration of hostilities. Second, they’re not fighting against a particular enemy, they’re giving support to a government against rebels (the ostensible reason). Third, if Syria is a war, it’s a civil war, and even that hasn’t been quite declared yet – the situation (as I understand it) is that this is an uprising against legitimate authority, not a civil war as yet. I hear references to “the conflict in Syria” more so than “the civil war in Syria” (despite what Wikipedia describes it as), mainly I imagine because calling it a civil war would confer some measure of legitimacy on the various rebel groups, which is something I think Assad is opposing – they’re not an opposition as such, they’re a bunch of fanatic extremists is the line? Fourth, I think that a poll of Americans probably would say the US is not at war in Syria, mainly because there haven’t been solemn announcements in front of a podium with the Presidential Seal on it about commencing Operation Johnson’s Folly and the armed forces being officially sent in as ‘boots on the ground’ in order to support freedom, democracy and the peace-loving regime of President Assad.
I don’t think it would be too far off the mark to describe it as a civil war.
Random general question:
do you ever see something in a movie/TV-show that breaks the appearance of reality that the show attempts to maintain?
In one case I can think of, a show about Robin Hood had a character predict a solar eclipse, and Robin was able to use the eclipse to his advantage.
Except I had a jarring realization: the character who looks up at the moon the night before is seeing a full moon. Then he looks down at his almanac, and tries to figure out when the next local solar eclipse is going to happen.
The next day (apparently), the eclipse happens.
Which would be impossible, if there had been a full moon the night before.
Any other examples of this effect in the entertainment world?
Can you explain, why you think that the answer to this is anything other than “yes, every single one of them”? I mean how is what you describe different from e. g. IMDB’s “goofs” section?
I’m thinking of the more outrageous stuff. Details that are added because most movies have that kind of detail. Even when that detail doesn’t make sense in this particular story.
Like an early James Bond film, in which I can hear the car tires squeal…as the vehicle is turning a sharp corner on a dirt road.
The solar-eclipse example is probably a combination of most moonlit scenes are depicted as full-moon, added to we need to have the character look at the moon and then his almanac.
But it breaks the flow of the story: a solar eclipse can only happen the day before a new moon. If a solar eclipse is known to be coming, the night of the full moon is a something like 13 days away from the next solar eclipse.
Like the thing they do in crime shows where 2*2 pixel images are “improved” to show faces or numberplates in full resolution on a regular basis? Or how “face recognition” software always works by showing every picture on screen at slideshow speed for no reason. Or how the McGuffin de jour increasingly often is described by “scientific” terms that do exist in real world but make no sense in that context.
All of these are cases were a factual error is a plot device rather than just an error and all of these are outrageous if you know how things acrtually work. I presume that to people who know how guns work every depiction of gunplay ever induces the same cringe. Or watching “House M. D.” with a background in medicine. [Or “The Sopranos” with a background in organized crime?]
So still I think it would be easier to enumerate shows that actually got it right.
This.
Dear hollywood,
Guns do not make random clicking sounds when ever it sounds dramatic.
Gun-clicks are the equivalent of audible shininess on swords in anime.
“Points gun at bad/good guy”
…
“Then chambers round”
*Eye twitch*
The other thing that really get’s me are the “everything sensors” you see in sci-fi movies and the magic “enhance buttons” Alex mentioned. As someone who does a lot of signal/noise analysis IRL that stuff feels more like magitech than FTL does.
Single action army revolvers did, I’m sure that’s where it originated (the original model didn’t have a hammer block, so if the hammer were hit hard enough the gun could fire on a loaded chamber). So people carried them with 5 rounds and the hammer down on an empty chamber.
Since the click worked as an outstanding indication of increasing importance, it’s remained a useful story element even though technology passed the story long, long ago.
This is a short story, not a movie, but the way my suspension of disbelief breaks suggests I have no idea what my premises are.
The Skeleton.
N zna orpbzrf bofrffrq ol uvf fxryrgba. Ur pna’g fgnaq univat n fxryrgba. N qbpgbe urycf uvz ol penjyvat qbja uvf zbhgu naq erzbivat uvf fxryrgba.
V’z ernqvat nybat naq univat ab ceboyrzf.
Ohg gur raq bs gur fgbel vf gur zna va pbyyncfrq zbqr pnyyvat bhg gb uvf jvsr (whfg fnlvat uryyb, *ur’f* abg jbeevrq) naq zl zvaq tbrf “Ur unf ab fgehpgher gb nyybj sbe nve fcnpr! Ur pna’g gnyx! Guvf znxrf ab frafr!”.
I have no idea why my limit is at that point.
I remember an episode of (I think) CSI where they managed to look at something behind the camera by zooming into a drop of water and looking at the reflection on it.
Yep. And a gun with a silencer does not make a tiny little “ppffft” noise – it still sounds like a gunshot and it’s still LOUD. Like, over 100 decibels loud. Loud enough that the guards in the next room aren’t going to overlook it.
Another one that bugs me is the convention that anybody can be harmlessly hit on the head – using anything handy, even a big metal wrench – and thereby knocked unconscious for a perfectly plot-convenient period of time. An attempt at such a knockout blow is either completely harmless or completely effective. It never causes blood loss or threatens brain damage. Is there a name for this?
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TapOnTheHead
@Incurian
Ah, I should have checked TVTropes. Thanks!
My friends and family include first aid instructors and ski patrollers so it’s hard to let that sort of thing go.
Person Of Interest was a strange variant – in the continuity of that show either shooting somebody in the leg or causing a rollover car accident serve the same plot purpose as Tap On The Head would in most other shows.
@Nancy I had the exact same reaction to The Skeleton. I think it’s because it’s violating the pulp story rule of thumb where you have exactly one completely implausible element and the rest of the story needs to be reasonably naturalistic so that the implications can be worked out.
@bluto
Another fun gun related pop culture fact; the phrase “Bust a cap” originated in the mid nineteenth century with cap and ball firearms.
*picks up pen and ink*
It just doesn’t sound right, does It?
@hyperboloid
Huh, I had thought it was a Vietnam-era reference to those toy cap guns kids had – I’d seen descriptions like “we ducked down in the ditch, and Charlie was busting caps at us” but I hadn’t realized it went back further than that.
Now I’m imagining guys with fanciful moustaches waving six-shooters at each other and declaring that, forsooth, if the other fellow does not withdraw what he said at once, why, a cap would be busted in his posterior, why, sure as God made little green apples.
@dndnrsn
The Vietnam era currency of the phrase almost certainly derives from the film True Grit (1969) where Robert Duvall tells Kim Darby: “I never busted a cap on a woman or anybody much under sixteen”, a line that is apparently in the book.
But if anybody doubts a nineteenth century origin, I have a few sources.
IIRC, the 2010 remake of True Grit didn’t have that line. Now I wonder if they cut it because it would have sounded anachronistic to modern audiences, despite being period-correct.
Like this?
But here’s the thing: you actually can… if you have multiple (sub pixel offset) frames. I don’t watch a lot of TV, but basically every time I have seen an enhancement they happen to be looking at the single best frame from video. Which is like a perfectly reasonable time to do it. With nothing more interesting than Photoshop even! Though I am certain that security types have specialized software.
Iirc it is limited to doubling the resolution, so it is undoubtedly exaggerated (in both time and effectiveness) on screen, but it is totally a thing you can do.
(Also if you have absurd amounts of money you can get a camera to do the work for you.)
I think the continuity error that bugs me the most is the recent trend towards teleportation in Game of Thrones.
Va gur svefg frnfba vg gnxrf n srj rcvfbqrf bs fubj-gvzr naq zbaguf bs va-havirefr gvzr gb geniry orgjrra Jvagresryy naq Xvat’f Ynaqvat, juvpu znxrf frafr vs lbh ybbx ng n znc bs Jrfgrebf. Naq rira sbe qvfgnaprf gung jrer yrff vzcbegnag gb gur cybg, vg hfhnyyl frrzrq yvxr crbcyr jrer npghnyyl zbivat guebhtu n infg jbeyq.
Yvggyrsvatre jnf gur svefg bar gb fgneg gryrcbegvat bss-fperra. Whfg fubjvat hc ng n ybpngvba jvgubhg frrzvat gb unir pebffrq gur vagreiravat qvfgnapr be fcrag nal gvzr trggvat gurer. Vg tbg zber naq zber oyngnag naq evqvphybhf gb gur cbvag gung zr naq zl sevraqf jrer qrongvat jurgure be abg gurer jrer zhygvcyr Yvggyrsvatref ehaavat nebhaq.
Ohg fbba rabhtu bgure punenpgref fgnegrq yrneavat uvf frperg. Ol frnfba 6 Fnz naq Tvyyl jrer gur bayl punenpgref jub jrer zbivat ng n abezny engr. Vg jnf vaperqvoyl qvfnccbvagvat naq sehfgengvat.
V guvax gung gur fubjehaaref unir cnvagrq gurzfryirf vagb pbearef ercrngrqyl naq xrrc univat gb oraq/oernx gur aneengvir ehyrf gb svk gung. Sbe vafgnapr, gurl znqr Enzfnl “oynaqyl vaivapvoyr” nf V oryvrir na Ngynagvp negvpyr ersreerq gb uvz nf – whfg trggvat njnl jvgu qbvat fghss gung jbhyq znxr uvf fhobeqvangrf naq nyyvrf nonaqba uvz, haqrsrngnoyr va pbzong, naq va trareny univat cybg nezbhe. Gur fbyhgvba? Ervasbeprzragf fubjvat hc bhg bs abjurer gung ernyvfgvpnyyl Fnafn jbhyq unir gbyq Wba nobhg (fur guebjf n gnagehz orpnhfr ur vfa’g yvfgravat gb ure, gura qbrfa’g gryy uvz gnpgvpnyyl pehpvny vasbezngvba?).
Qvq Fnafn ernyyl xabj gung gur ervasbeprzragf jrer pbzvat? Fur jnf ubcvat gur jbhyq, ohg V tbg gur vzcerffvba gung fur jnfa’g ernyyl pbhagvat ba gurz.
Nf sbe gur gryrcbegvat, V guvax vg’f rnfl rabhtu gb nffhzr gung gur fgbel vfa’g pbzcyrgryl yvarne, naq gung gurer vf n ybg bs bss-fperra qbjagvzr naq geniry. Lbh pbhyq unir gjb rcvfbqrf jurer bar bs gur cybg yvarf gnxrf n srj qnlf naq gur bgure n srj zbaguf. V’z fher vg qbrfa’g pbzcyrgryl jbex bhg, ohg vg’f pybfr rabhtu gung vg qbrfa’g obgure zr.
Eh, even just “oh by the way there might be some reinforcements coming, so don’t throw it all away” would have been fine. It’s not as though “will the reinforcements come? Will they get there in time?” isn’t tense. And Ramsay suddenly forgetting about things like posting scouts and so on was convenient.
The inconsistent travel times is also in the books, now that I think of it. They’re always pretty vague about distances, etc.
I’ve always taken the teleportation to be indicative that the story is told thematically rather than chronologically (ie an episode generally hits each story for a relevant update rather than all the events of each episode happen within a few days of each other. If the season covers several months of several stories, a trip to kings landing is only getting a mention if plot relevant events occur along the way, otherwise it’s just worth a summary that the trip occurred.
Same here. Showing the full journey from Winterfell to King’s Landing in season 1 is important because that caravan contains most of the main characters, and interesting things happen. Showing individual characters crossing the Narrow Sea isn’t necessary unless
So I only get weirded out by “teleporting” if it obviously screws up the timeline. Since the events of the series take place over several years, this isn’t much of a problem unless the intersections between storylines are done poorly, and so far they’ve been okay for the most part.
The only one that’s really bugged me is the last couple episodes – nccneragyl nsgre gnxvat bire Qbear, gur Fnaq Fanxrf jrer pbagrag gb qrynl gurve eriratr sbe ybat rabhtu gb yrg tenaal Gleryy naq Inelf zbir nyy bire gur qnza jbeyq?
Though this is complicated somewhat by, e.g., Gilly’s baby, whose age puts something of a limit on how much time has passed since his introduction without invoking the MST3K rule. (The Stark kids likewise, to some extent, but viewers are used to teen characters’ ages being a bit out of sync with their actors.)
I agree with the baby, I feel like he should have aged faster, but as for the Stark kids, I think they have aged fairly appropriately. Somewhere around six years from the start of the show to now seems within the realm of possibilities.
Lrnu, gur pbzvat gbtrgure bs Qbear/Qnal fgbelyvarf jnfa’g irel ryrtnag. V fhfcrpg gung’f jul gur obbxf unir tbggra fybj gb jevgr, naq jul zl bja thrff vf gung jr jba’g frr Jvaqf bs Jvagre nalgvzr fbba, vs ng nyy.
Cneg bs vg vf rkcynvarq ol gur geniry gb naq sebz Jvagresryy orvat n tvnag eblny cebqhpgvba. Va gur obbxf fbzrbar, V guvax Eboreg, npghnyyl pbzcynvaf nobhg ubj ybat gur gevc vf gnxvat naq vg’q or fb zhpu rnfvre gb qb vg jvgubhg nyy gur ubbcynu.
how do we un-spoilerfy comments here?
Copy and paste it here:
http://www.rot13.com/
Or there are extensions for Firefox (LeetKey) and Chrome (d3coder) that will let you highlight the section and right click for a decoding option.
(Desktop only, AFAIK– I haven’t seen anything convenient for mobile, though if anyone else has I’d be happy to know about it.)
The courteous commenters above are manually applying rot13, a google search will find many sites where you can convert to plaintext. A search for “rot13 plugin” also returns results for both chrome and firefox, but I can’t vouch for them.
I’m using a chrome extension, “rot13 decoder,” which lets me highlight and right click text to change it from normal to rot13. It’s a lot less of a hassle than copy-pasting it every time.
The 1969 volcano epic Krakatoa, East of Java was widely mocked in the press for getting a crucial detail wrong: Krakatoa is west of Java.
Is there any way to get blockquote to indent without italics?
<blockquote><em>text</em></blockquote>
It is impossible to get rid of italics, but it is possible to get rid of emphasis by doing more emphasis.
Is there any interest in a glossary of SSC jargon? I imagine it as a supplement to LW’s, including more specific tropes like Toxoplasma of Rage, Death Eater, Reign of Terror, Moloch, pattern match, and some from outside that enjoy frequent use, such as motte and bailey, em, isolated demand for rigor, and utility function.
+1. Interested.
That would be a lot of extra work for Scott, even if others wrote it and he just edited it. Imo better for each entry to be a link to the article where Scott introduced the term.
I don’t think Scott needs to be involved at all. I’m imagining it as a wiki that says “not by Scott Alexander” on every page.
This was roughly my thinking. The obvious location for this would be the LW wiki, after all, assuming it’s permitted. If not, then some other wiki host.
We could also set it up as a info page on the subreddit.
There is already disagreement on the meaning of these terms. If not Scott, who is to define them?
Supplying links to the original articles is something anyone can do, without room for disagreement. The original articles will be the most accurate, with the most detail and examples, and rich in discussion.
It could be a long list of accounts by different people of what the terms mean. Then the user could see what the user’s reader might think if they use the term.
I tend to like wikis for this very reason.
I firmly believe all of the stable shared definitions are worth recording – as Alliteration says: “this is what other people will think if you write this”. This is also why it might be a value-add over just looking the term up on non-SSC sources.
Links to first mentions or important mentions will be useful as well, with the entry itself being a good faith attempt to summarize.
Wait, why not just link to the term’s (rough) origin in SSC discourse, or the coining of the term-as-used-here? I think this might fail for Death Eater and Reign of Terror (maybe; I actually seem to remember Scott calling the policy change a “Reign of Terror” when the shift occurred), but for the rest it should be quite easy; most of them are terms deliberately introduced by Scott and the rest were coined and/or introduced by clear antecedents of Scott and/or SSC.
I’m not seeing a need to provide a definition directly. As I recall, everyone interpreted Moloch a whole lot more generally than Scott meant it anyway.
Reinterpretations of things like Moloch is one reason why I think a glossary would be useful. It’s not just how it was originally coined; these things occasionally morph.
Another reason it would be useful would be to save the reader some time spent searching the site or web for citations.
Done well, it could even be interesting reading in its own right.
I notice that “meta-level” and “object-level” have gone out of fashion recently.
Death Eater/Voldemort, Isolated Demand for Rigor and Moloch seem to be the only ones with any frequent use. Other terms are just broader post-tumblr rationalist/grey tribe terms. EM is Robin Hanson’s baby.
My rationale for including terms used elsewhere is that the referent here might be arbitrary (you won’t know to go to Robin Hanson for the meaning of “em”), and also that there may be some SSC-specific connotation added to the term.
Plus, it may help to co-locate terms even if they’re available elsewhere. It alerts users that these are relatively common terms in the readership.
Anyone aware of the comic strip Jesus and Mo?
Sort of satire against modern extreme leftist politics (but still leftist) and religion.
It’s also a shame that the artist chooses to be anonymous because drawing Mo’ is punishable by death… even though he’s not a Muslim.
Um, why are they in bed together?
Not impressed. Lazy art, lazy punchlines. Someone trying to coast on controversy instead of making an actually insightful comic.
Yes, humor needs to be transgressive. But it also needs to be funny.
I clicked through a few of them, and most are just old hats. Might have liked them 10-20 years ago, though…
First I’ve ever heard of it, it’s clearly a long-runner with reknowned amongst circles. I’d have impressed no doubt as a 14 year old in 2005, but while the comic is still pretty correct it’s not saying anything information-increasing or pertinent now.
I was listening to an episode of Tom Wood’s podcast here and he covered Scott’s post on epipens. What I thought was interesting is right at the beginning of the podcast, he said he tried to reach out to Scott but was told that he doesn’t do interviews. I think Scott’s still on his one week comment ban, but does anyone know why he has a no-interview policy? I think it would be good to have his well-thought arguments enter the public consciousness and doing interviews would be a good way to get his ideas and arguments out to a wider audience.
I’d assume it’s because he wants to maintain some level of anonymity. I’m also not quite certain Scott really wants a wide audience.
As a general thing, I’m amazed that people who want anonymity will permit their voices to be used in interviews. I listen to NPR and the BBC, and it seems as though there are people at serious risk will permit their voices (but not their names) to be used. There are also people who don’t permit either.
I used to be a fairly frequent caller at NPR, and people would tell me they recognized my voice.
That would make sense.
The more famous you are, the less you’re able to get away with saying unorthodox things, the less selective you’re able to be about your audience, and the more incentive there is for hacks to poison the well against you and get some quick clicks by writing an article about how you’re Satan.
I think a lot of SSC is pitched at a certain type of person, who my narcissistic side would call “intelligent and rational enough to take ideas seriously” and my pessimistic side would call “sufficiently similar to me that they basically agree with me already”.
This incident was weirdly influential on me – basically, I wrote a piece about psychopharmacology using a metaphor about what if the Russians had a different periodic table than we did. It got linked on (IIRC) Hacker News, someone from there came over to comment, and decided that the whole point of my post was to claim the Russians actually had a different periodic table and so I was an idiot. Also, when I and many other people argued that wasn’t the point at all, we were just lying. This is an example of a broader class of problems where outside a certain group of people whom I trust, it’s dangerous to use metaphors at all because people will think you’re saying two things are similar in every single way. And that itself an example of a broader class of problems where outside a certain group of people whom I trust, all my attempts to communicate complicated ideas fail in ways I wouldn’t have even thought were possible. When I assume this generalizes, I start to understand why eg the Presidential debates sound the way they do, and I become a lot less interested in trying to “break out” into mass media.
There are cases where people actually try to claim X in a way that maintains plausible deniability, and therefore use a hypothetical or a metaphor that is not literally a claim of X at all. (Often the metaphor or hypothetical is not exactly X either, but is an exaggeration of X.)
This is something to ignore at your peril even if you don’t do it yourself, because you need to make sure that you don’t accidentally sound like one of those.
(I am not claiming the Russian periodic table is one of those. It doesn’t sound like the sort of thing people would have much reason to hide as a metaphor.)
I think a lot of SSC is pitched at a certain type of person, who my narcissistic side would call “intelligent and rational enough to take ideas seriously” and my pessimistic side would call “sufficiently similar to me that they basically agree with me already”.
I massively, fervertly disagree with you on a large number of object-level issues (religion, AI, polyamory…), so that’s worth updating a little toward optimism, right?
For whatever it’s worth, a pretty significant-seeming number of us apparently disagree with you on object-level issues both heavily and regularly. That seems like evidence in favor of the pessimistic version being unlikely, I think?
A lot of us disagree sufficiently to make the comment threads lengthy, interesting, varied, and occasionally in need of the ban-hammer.
It’s certainly not an echo-chamber of “Yes, Scott”, “So right, Scott”, “Sure thing, Scott”, “Took the words right out of my mouth, Scott” by any means.
We should have one thread that’s just “Scott”, over and over. We could vary the punctuation, introduce repetition, or even substitute homophones and alternate spellings. Maybe on a links post?
Or a programming language.
Scot?
For whatever it’s worth, that remains one of my favorite comment chains on SSC specifically because, prior to that, I could never have imagined a metaphor being so badly misinterpreted. Reading that opened me up to a new understanding of how deep misunderstanding can go.
I think it’s a disservice to the term misunderstanding to call Chark Moi’s reaction that. He just plain missed it, and for whatever reason entrenched himself into a “It’s obviously spurious to set up language like that, the implication is obvious to me and you are all missing it and nyah”. Sounds like he just wanted a reason to dislike Scott, honestly. He thought he saw easy bait, jumped without checking, and then refused to back off once he got found out.
I don’t think everyone here agrees with all or even most of Scott’s positions. But I’d say all or most of the frequent readers/commenters share a way of thinking with Scott. In other words, Scott might present and argument, and, even if I disagree with the conclusion, I “get” his logic and his thought process. Even if his argument doesn’t convince me, it has the form of an argument that would.
However, I don’t think this way of thinking is universal, and that’s even leaving out the quirks, jargon, and inside jokes. I can sympathize with Scott not wanting to change to a more universal format, because his current idiom is uniquely well suited to himself and his audience.
Rational and Sincere. That’s what I’d call the core of SSC, Lesswrong, and other rationalist/grey-tribe circles.
What distuingishes SSC from its peers in this subset? Essay/conversation style with spiritual metaphors is the first guess out of my thinkpan.
Yes I think the way of thinking is true. In the past I have had discussions with people on the Internet, and on zines before that, where their arguments simply don’t make sense to me. And it is generally clear in their comments to me, that the reaction is mutual. Many of these folks seem intelligent enough, based on coherent sentences, if not arguments, and also based on others’ reactions.
I can’t remember coming across anyone on SSC with whom I’ve had this reaction. So I think there is some sort of argumentation style that can be compatible, without anyone necessarily coming to the same conclusions on the content. In my more self confident times I think this is simply being able to argue rationally and coherently vs. not, but I’m not sure if that is it.
I have never found a more pleasant place to discuss and debate than SSC. I used to debate extensively on the politics board at IMDB, and the level of trollishness and hostility as through the roof. The proportion of kind, thought provoking ideas to insults and bumper sticker arguments was the inverse of SSC.
The ability to have a host who leads by example and is willing to cut loose the bad actors makes for a really nice place to hang out.
> I used to debate extensively on the politics board at IMDB,
This strikes me as a very strange choice…
I wasn’t aware of another place to get into political discussions that had a wide variety of views. Originally, I came across the movie discussion board for Fahrenheit 911 where there was intense political discussion I found interesting, and later on IMDB created a specific politics board to contain off-topic discussions from the movie boards.
I’d say SSC is the best discussion place on the internet, even beating 4chan. The small price in being polite and putting an email down is made up by the sincere and smart attitude at all levels of the site.
For your consideration: A Longitudinal Measurement Study of 4chan’s Politically Incorrect Forum and its Effect on the Web. Highlights include footnote 2, and Figure 12: Perhaps the least rare Pepe.
Meme magic is real.
I was very disappointed, given how much the authors liked to use the word “hate,” that they never referred to 4chan as an internet hate machine. I was waiting for it the whole article and it never happened.
On that note, is this just me or is the language around hate speech sound ridiculously Orwellian?
It just sounds so damn sinister.
I’m personally disappointed that they didn’t do a more thorough textual analysis. Given the proclivity of 4chan to use “fag” to describe anything and everything (to the point where a gay person is a “fagfag”) I think there’s some minor potential for confounds. IMO a good attempt overall though.
“Gayfag” would be more typical for that purpose. “Fagfag” is highly unusual and IMO parses as something like “person who makes excessive use of ‘Xfag’ constructions even in cases where it’s not necessary or appropriate.” (Alternatively, “person who calls everyone a fag and expects to have this taken seriously as an insult.”) But then, the language may have evolved out from under me in the past couple of years.
Where I come from (mah neck of th’innernet woods!) Fagfag would indicate just a straightforward fag, someone pretentious and out of their depth.
cf “coke coke”
I named my new CZ Scorpion pistol “Klobberella.”
Nice, how do you like it? I’ve been drooling over the carbine since it was announced (the question of 922(r) compliant parts had me concerned about SBRing the pistol.
Unfortunately, I haven’t shot it yet. AFAICT there are no good public ranges in El Paso, so I ordered some target stands for desert shooting. Will report back after I get a chance to put some rounds downrange.
Impressions from handling it: It’s bigger than I thought. It’s better balanced than I thought it would be – holding it one-handed is doable for short periods of time, but would probably be extremely difficult to control. It feels very well balanced with an AFG-2. The mag well, magazines, and magazine release are the best I’ve ever used. The safety is annoying as hell and I’m replacing it with a smaller one that won’t dig into my hand. The trigger isn’t as bad as everyone says it is. The rails have a slit down the middle, but I’m using a LaRue QD mount anyway, I’ll let you know if the mighty 9mm ends up damaging it (I predict it will be fine).
On the subject of birthright citizenship, an idea I’ve been kicking around. The biggest problem with not having it, IMO, is the creation of a permanent non-citizen class (perhaps even including effectively stateless individuals). What I hear about the problem with having it mostly revolves around aliens doing anything they can to bear their child in the US. If they stay in the country as a result, this is a backdoor path to immigration for the mother. If they’re kicked out anyway, this is IMO the worst of both worlds — a child culturally not of the US with the full privileges and immunities of a US citizen.
So how about an amendment like the following
—–
1) The Fourteenth Amendment notwithstanding, Congress may through appropriate legislation exclude from US citizenship persons who
a) Are born in the United States of a mother who is a non-US citizen and
b) Leave or are removed from the United States before their fifth birthday, provided such removal is either voluntary on the part of the person’s custodial parent or done according to the operation of law.
2) A person is “eligible for exclusion from United States citizenship” if by law passed in accordance to 1) they may be excluded from United States citizenship if they leave or are removed from the United States before their fifth birthday. No person who is not eligible for exclusion from United States citizenship at the time of their birth may be made eligible by subsequent legislation, and no person born in the US who is eligible for exclusion but has not been excluded by operation of law may be excluded on or after their fifth birthday.
——
The basic idea is give the government 5 years to remove such children (if desired; I’d expect the legislation to not include children of permanent residents, for example, but since that concept isn’t in the Constitution I wouldn’t add it). The other stuff is to prevent shenanigans like a certain Arizona sheriff kidnapping 4.9 year olds over the border because he thinks deportation is taking too long, or various ex post facto situations.
I would not accept as proven that anchor babies are a problem worth amending the Constitution over, or even a problem at all. Debating the exact wording of the amendment is begging the question to me.
There is much lower hanging fruit if we want to limit unskilled immigration than birth tourism. Heck if they return to their home country we still get to tax their income unless they pay us $2350 to renounce. And if they stay we get a young person to fix our demographic pyramid who generally comes from parents of above average means and moxie. Rich Asians having American children is not worth losing sleep over.
Rich Asians are not really the concern here.
Says you. I find it insulting and offensive that foreign companies are openly selling American citizenship.
A question about negotiation, executives and legislatures.
In the UK at the moment there’s an argument going on about whether the negotiation about exiting the EU should be run pretty centrally by Govt or if Parliament should have a stronger role. The Parliament argument is obviously mainly about democracy. The main ‘govt should do it without Parliament’ is based on the point that it’s poor practice to make it public what all your priorities and red lines are before you enter negotiation as this puts you in a much weaker position.
I’m quite sympathetic with that argument, especially with the caveat that you can at choice make public commitments to pre-commit in game theory terms (e.g. if Govt says very publicly it won’t accept any deal that requires free entry of EU migrants, it MIGHT be able to move the debate amongst EU leaders onto whether they can make a deal or not given that. But I’m interested in what people think would work best and what the actual system is elsewhere (e.g. does Senate or President make treaties)
I’m mostly interested here in the negotiation stage, either setting red lines or committees of the legislature being directly involved in back-and-forth negotiation. Once the treaty terms are finalised, a yes-or-no vote on the final product by the legislature is less of a big deal – unamendable yes-no legislation often means that people basically have to agree in practice.
I don’t totally understand your system, but leaving aside fictions about the Queen, isn’t the “Govt” elected by and removable by Parliament — or more usually the majority party in Parliament?
The whole thing with Corbyn confuses me somewhat, but I assume the same thing couldn’t happen with an actual PM vs a shadow PM.
Not explicitly, but more or less yes. The Governmnet needs to command the confidence of most MPs.
But that’s a very blunt ‘we will kick you out’ tool, a bit like the ‘we will vote down the final deal, leaving no deal’. The ability to actually be involved in the detail matters more most of the time: even the Govt MPs who are annoyed about this aren’t going to bring down the Govt over it.
We’re confused about Corbyn too! The idea of staying as leader of the party without support of MPs is new. In principle, if he’d been PM, then the vote of no confidence would have lost him PM status assuming the opposition also voted no confidence. If a leader lost the support of most of his MPs but because of opposition support still had a majority of the House as a whole… not sure what would happen.
PS the ‘legal fictions about the Queen’ are quite important because our PM has lots of power under the royal prerogative: in many ways more than the President does in the US. Even though the PM is not directly elected.
The upside is that there’s no American-style “well the President wants something, and everyone got to vote for them, but they can’t get what they want because congress blah blah” sort of thing (be it real, or an excuse for why the President doing xyz).
Downside (I guess not a downside to some people) is that a PM with a majority has a lot of power.
Yeah, inasmuch as people here think about our system explicitly and agree with it, we tend to be quite explicitly not looking for American-style checks and balances. If someone is ‘in power’ they have the executive and the legislature, and the courts are just much less powerful and non-political.
This works very well for one of the key bits of democracy – the ability to hold people accountable and kick them out. In the US you have the whole ‘you didn’t deliver’, ‘well I would have if you’d not amended my Bill so much’ etc. And then in lots of countries you have PR systems so all govts are coalitions which presumably leads to people blaming coalition partners (lots of that here for our one recent coalition!)
The best use for democracy is as a check against the excesses of government, not as a driving force. When governments need democratic approval for every little thing, you end up mired in demosclerosis. A partial (and I mean very partial) solution to this problem is to give democratic checks the ability to say no to things, but not require them to say yes.
the UK parliament functions largely in this manner. Legislation is usually written by the government, not parliamentary committees, and parliament gets at best an up or down vote on the proposal in a body where the leadership has greater power than the US house, to say nothing of the senate. The function of parliament is largely to decide who the leadership is and to hold them accountable to constituents, not as a partner in government. This is a good thing. People should for damned sure be able to say “no, stop!” to governments, but forcing the system to get 51% national approval for closing bus stops is a recipe for logrolling and corruption.
I sort of agree with this. But on a factual note, you’re not quite right on
“Legislation is usually written by the government, not parliamentary committees, and parliament gets at best an up or down vote on the proposal”
The Government writes legislation but for substantial new laws (Acts of Parliament), amendments can be laid and voted on by members of parliament, and they can defeat the government. The break is a practical one, rooted in the fact that the government has a built-in majority (if it didn’t it wouldn’t be the government), so any amendment to government’s drafting relies on rebellion from government’s own members of Parliament. This is rare, but can happen: and the threat presumably causes government to approach things differently.
For smaller bits of lawmaking (‘secondary legislation’) it is often just a yes/no vote, and often even only if someone actively asks for one and there’s time.
I quite like this because it’s a sort of elective dictatorship which can get things done and be held to account for them. But with the caveat that you can be stopped but in practice only by your own side, which gives protection to someone going a bit nuts once in office – they might face rebellions either because their own MPs are genuinely opposed or because they fear it will destroy the party’s electability.
All of this ignores the House of Lords, which isn’t remotely democratic and often amends legislation quite a lot, but has conventions that mean it usually doesn’t directly oppose the government’s overall basic mandate (in particular, it has a convention not to oppose manifesto commitments and it doesn’t vote on ‘money bills’ so it can’t stop Government running its budgets)
The Parliament argument isn’t about democracy per se. Few people have voted for their individual MPs, most have voted for the party or party leader (although all major parties have changed leaders since the last election…). Rather, it’s about scrutiny of the executive.
Why do we have Parliament in the first place? Why can’t the Cabinet just rule by decree? Because democracy is a crude tool, we need greater levels of executive accountability than that. Why do we have a Cabinet in the first place? Why not just have all matters decided in Parliament? Because Parliament is too large, too public and too dysfunctional. As government has expanded over the past century, and as communication has become more (inter)national, the balance has therefore shifted massively towards Cabinet and the Civil Service. Gladstone and Disraeli would be astonished by the current position of the Commons. However, it seems to be shifting back a little since 2010.
Clearly, the legislature can’t be directly involved in diplomacy (except in the sense that ministers are drawn from the legislature). That has never happened, and never will happen, it’s a prime preserve of the executive. But I would be surprised if there were no Parliamentary votes between now and the exit – for example, approving the government’s conduct of negotiations, or similar.
The Nobel Prize in literature is weird. It has prestige, but where’s the prestige coming from, given that its past history has been so checkered (misses include Tolstoy, Kafka, Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Nabokov… hits include many writers no one remembers or reads any longer…)? Perhaps it borrows prestige from the other Nobels?
I think it likely that the Nobels in the sciences and medicine are more grounded in the reality of their fields. There is no history (?) of lots of truly outrageous omissions, nor an (admittedly subjective but widespread) reaction of “meh” every other year.
Maybe in the dark ages of 1930s or 1950s there used to be many rich literature prizes, all fighting for respect and prestige, all of them lost now to history except the boldest one, the most cunning one, the one who bribed, slandered, or outright slaughtered all the others. But more likely, it seems to me, that it borrows prestige from the overall Nobel umbrella.
I think the root of the problem is the same root that results in artists becoming popular after they die: the really good art is almost always that art which is one generation ahead of its first readers.
Aren’t all prizes forms of signalling? To assume they are awarded on merit requires an antecedent that the people awarding the prize can both recognize merit and expect to be rewarded by their target audience for doing so.
That likely applies still for most science-based Nobels (their biggest omissions are generally due to the unfortunate rule that your breakthrough must be obvious while you are still breathing).
The Literature and Peace prizes involve naturally more subjective achievements that have to be recognized and deemed fashionable by European high society. Hence why bizarre random choices like Eyvind Johnson take home the prize while Cormac McCarthy is looked over. Or why the Dalai Lama took home the Peace Prize for…..whatever it is the Dalai Lama does, while that African surgeon who saves rape victims toils away.
There’s a few choices in the scientific Nobels that don’t hold up over time; an example would be the Nobel Prize for Medicine going to that guy who invented lobotomies. But the scientific prizes are generally less subjective because an invention or discovery either moves the field forward or it doesn’t.
Is it clear how much Nobels are meant to be for influence vs. for excellence?
Part of the issue is that in science people broadly tend to agree (not always but generally) that very influential things are influential in a good direction – they represent new discoveries or interpretations that allow for discoveries etc. Partially because science is basically recognised as elite: it matters what scientists think. We don’t give Nobel prizes because someone has a massive popular influence in the field (e.g. convinces millions not to get a certain vaccine)
For books (and art in general) what counts as ‘good’ or ‘influencing in the right direction’ is much more open to dispute.
The cynical answer is that the prestige comes from the amount of money it represents. About $900,000, isn’t it?
I got swamped by the previous open thread, so here are some comments….
Am I the only person who noticed it was really hard for Eliezer to find out that politics was (a) for real stakes and (b) very difficult to do well? I give him credit for noticing and being public about how he found out.
I’m generally in favor of open borders. I think the extent to which borders are closing down is a scary feature of the modern world. Also, does permitting immigration count as effective altruism?
Someone in the previous thread said that anti-Semitism was a result of Jews not being permitted most ways of making a living and therefore ending up in banking. This has to be wrong because it would take anti-Semitism for Jews to not be allowed most ways of making a living.
I’ve only read part of Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition suggests another mechanism. Jews were a distinct group, and looked to the central government for protection. When it wasn’t safe to attack the government directly, it was convenient to go after Jews.
This sounds exactly like my mental model of him, but since I do not actually follow his publications, is there a link, so that I may indulge in confirmation bias?
https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154650743819228
Thank you.
To Yudkowskys credit his point seems to be that politics is (a) for real stakes and (b) very difficult to do well and (c) played by generally competent people as opposed to popular opinion, that politics is (a) for real stakes and (b) very difficult to do well and (c) played by generally incompetent people.
Whether this is true or not, I do not think that it is trivial. Acknowledging other peoples’ competence is hard and I imagine that it is especially hard if you are Yudkowsky.
So give the man more credit, I guess.
A lot of people don’t get (b) either. They think there are , easy answers such as Eat the Rich, Blame Ethnicity X, Build a Wall, Moveable Houses, etc. Which feeds through into the idea that politicians are stupid or evil, because if they weren’t they would be implementing the easy solution.
EY’s casual arrogance is astounding. From his post:
Governing a large country actually requires competence and cannot be done by just any enlightened self-declared Rationalist? No shit, Sherlock.
I appreciate his change of mind, and that he publicly admits that he was wrong. But even that is worded in a condescending, presumptuous way, assuming that since he didn’t know, most people probably didn’t.
Addendum: Oops, I didn’t mean to post this as Anonymous, I just forgot to fill in the fields below.
It’s the typical level of arrogance one ends up with if one was among the smartest in their school and never encountered any actual experts. The lesson you get from school in that case is that expertise can be almost completely substituted by raw intelligence (that was my main takeaway, and I’d guess EY is at the very least one sigma smarter than me).
You’ll only get cured from that belief once you get a chance to talk to someone who actually knows what they’re doing in a complicated field, and who takes you seriously enough to explain their reasoning (university does that, if you’re lucky). But even if you’re actively looking for it, you can go a very long way without ever meeting one of them. Many, many people are just faking it, and seniority and expertise are two very different things.
EY dropped out of high school (likely for approximately that reason).
There’s no real evidence that he’s that bright.
There is some pretty convincing evidence that he’s a good writer (e.g. the number of fans of his writing), but yeah, not much evidence that he’s brilliant in other fields.
Also, the part of that post I found most irritating was the line about carrying the nuclear football being a step down from his day job.
I don’t think you can call immigration altruism. Unless something changed since you wrote it you work for Google? That would make you firmly middle class. However immigration benefits the middle classes and the costs are paid by the working classes. Unless you’re paying the cost it isn’t altruism.
Now if there was some sort of system where you could swap your citizenship with someone from a developing country so you go to live there and bring your skills while a young person came in your place and benefited from the opportunities available in the first world – that would probably be very effective altruism.
Not really. There are other reasons other than anti-Semitism why this might happen.
I believe that what happened was that in ye-olde-days Jews had faced significantly less prejudice than other religions. Jewish communities, though they faced prejudice, were actually aloud to live in some Christian and Muslim nations while Christians and Muslims were outright barred from entering each others lands. And most other religions (Norse Paganism, kemetism, etc) had been outright exterminated.
So you had the Jews with special privileges that aloud them to live and practice in foreign lands. Then you had deuteronomy 23:20-23:21 (and whatever it’s Muslim equivalent is). The logic is clear:
1) Banking is awesome for the economy.
2) Bankers need interest to justify the risks.
3) The bible says you can only charge interests to foreigners.
4) Hey! We’ve got this special class of foreigners living in the next village.
Obviously you can’t condense the entirety of medieval economics into 4 bullet points and a bible passage but the point is that medieval Jewish-goyim relationships were a complex subject.
That’s what happens in The Rabbi’s Cat – which is an amazing book and you should read it.
I would avoid any theory that puts down one singular cause for anti-Semitim though. It’s a complex subject an the above certainly doesn’t apply to the anti-Semitism coming from the SJW left (who tend to be stateist if not fond of the people actually in charge). SJW anti-Semitism is probably at heart the result of the dissonance between a worldview that divides everything into oppressed and oppressor and the Jewish community defying that categorization by being very successful despite facing all sorts of prejudice.
(I think it’s our literally religious devotion to education. I always wonder why other marginalized groups don’t try and copy us).
This dissonance resolved itself with them concluding Jews are not oppressed, therefore they must be an oppressor, and unfortunately for them applying that stupid logic to Jews is not socially acceptable in the way it is when applied to white men.
I would have thought it was mostly about Israel being, as someone else on this blog once said, a vaguely European population living in a vaguely colonial context.
I actually think that’s getting cause and effect backwards. The need to resolve a contradiction came first, Israel was a justification.
One thing SJWs are very good at is enforcing language and propagating the latest correct terminology. I think the SJW memeplex had the competencies it needed to create a language that criticizes Israel while avoiding anything that sounds like anti-Semitism you have to ask why it didn’t?
I’m not sure that’s true.
PC language, since back when most of today’s SJWs were twinkles in their male-bodied parents’ eye, has always been focused on highlighting people. One of their biggest bugbears has always been saying ‘Xs’ instead of ‘X people’ or ‘people of/with X’. It’s a core part of how they do things.
A criticism of Israel, using any remotely-PC terminology, will be a criticism of Israeli Jews. And it’s not really possible to criticize Jews without being seen as antisemitic by the media.
That depends on whether they had this ideological framework of privilege before Israel came into being. Peggy McIntosh wrote Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack in 1988. Kimberley Williams Crenshaw introduced intersectionality theory to the world a year later. Those two principles, the dichotomy of the privileged/oppressed and the interlinking of all struggles between the privileged and oppressed worldwide, form the core of most of the modern anti-Semitism on the left that you describe.
But the New Left of the 60’s were the precursors of the modern culture warriors in many ways, and those guys were influenced by people like Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse, all Jews who supported Israel. Anti-Semitism didn’t begin to take root among the left until after Martin Luther King was assassinated and the Black Power movement took off; King defended Israel as “one of the great outposts of democracy”, but the black leaders who followed him were decidedly less sympathetic, especially after the Six Day War. Stokely Carmichael and the Black Panthers identified Zionism with imperialism; Carmichael even praised Hitler as the only white man he ever respected.
(Side note: Stokely Carmichael remains the most stereotypically WASPy name I have ever heard)
Several days before his death, King said of the more militant black activist crowd that they were “color-consumed and they see a kind of mystique in blackness or in being colored, and anything non-colored is condemned”. This was in an address to a rabbinical gathering. There’s a good deal of Jewish activism for social justice causes that is based on drawing a distinction between Jews and gentile whites as distinct populations with unaligned social interests. The problem with that conceit is that the vast majority of American Jews are Ashkenazim who are the most part physically indistinguishable from gentile whites; the fact that they are also a successful and powerful community in America does not help. Imagine a white-skinned, blue-eyed man trying to explain to a Black Panther that he is not the hated oppressor because he is Jewish. Worse, imagine expecting the Panther to care about these differences.
Avoiding anything that sounds like anti-Semitism? It’s not super rare to come across anti-Israel people repeating stuff that sounds like all the old conspiracy theories.
Imagine a white-skinned, blue-eyed man trying to explain to a Black Panther that he is not the hated oppressor because he is Jewish.
Oh, I’ve had a white-skinned, blue-eyed person of Jewish ancestry explaining on Tumblr that they weren’t white because they were Jewish (and so they didn’t have all those white person privileges and they were oppressed). I can see that being the descendant of immigrants who came to America because they were driven out by Cossacks and pogroms does count as oppression (for the grandparents and great-grandparents), but on the other hand, there aren’t that many Cossacks in America today.
They could have easily changed their views on Israel once a new framework became popular.
It makes as much sense to me as anything else about the framework of intersectional privilege.
Cossack pogroms and Nazi’s aren’t past the cutoff date (they’re more recent than the trans-Atlantic slave trade).
Therefore Jews are an oppressed minority group.
You cannot be oppressed and white.
Therefore Jews are not white.
Besides white has never been about skin colour; it’s only fairly recently that the Irish were considered white.
Though personally I prefer to resolve the above contradiction by dropping the whole privilege framework. Assigning entire populations into oppressed and oppressor is just silly.
There aren’t that many slavers in America today, and as far as hate crimes go, there’s still more religiously motivated hate crime against Jews than members of any other religion… including Islam, which does get to play the oppression card.
This works much better when you model privilege and intersection as a post hoc justification, not a heuristic.
I dunno, it seems to fit pretty firmly in my model of “ostentatious black guy making an effort to seem reputable” name-schema. It’s where the waters of names like Laquondarius Fletcher and Biscuits Giddyup meet.
That may have been me who brought up the colonial context. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Yes, the left was more Zionist in the ’60s, and there were a few factors that made that change. An increased focus of the left on anti-colonialism and the fact that conditions significantly worsened for the Palestinians under Israeli rule were part of it. More cynically, a key tenet of the hard left is that the US Government is a force for evil, therefore anything the government supports is evil and anyone opposing them must be good, and US policy became much more pro-Israel after ’67. And at the same time the left became anti-Zionist, the Zionists became anti-left, with the term “neoconservative” being coined for the formerly left-wing Jews who suddenly started writing pro-Nixon screeds in Commentary magazine.
That all happened well before the rise of “social justice” paradigms. By then structural antisemitism in America was a fading memory, American Jews were universally considered “white”, and Israel was obviously a central example of white colonialism.
It’s weird how they didn’t care so much about anti-colonialism in the area when it was Jordan and Egypt doing the colonizing.
Yeah… weird.
You can’t be colonized by people of the same race, silly.
More charitably, there were still lots of actual colonies to be against at the time.
The left has earned no charity whatsoever on this topic.
Sandy:
Open borders might count as effective altruism because it makes immigrants better off (sometimes much better off) at low cost. Possibly even a financial gain with the only cost being emotional.
Anti-Judaism came out in 2010 and doesn’t mention SJW or anti-racism. Anti-Semitism goes back to ancient Egypt– 410 BCE, well before both Christianity and Islam.
Also, both Jews and Christians were permitted to live in Muslim countries. So far as I know, driving out Jews and Christians is a very recent development.
Just to be clear, by “open borders” do you mean anyone that wants to can immigrate, no questions asked?
brad:
I find gung ho comprehensive open borders very tempting. I usually don’t have the nerve to advocate for that in public.
This is a UK centric perspective but SJW flavoured anti-Semitism only became noticed by the mainstream last year.
@Nancy:
My point was that if Nirenberg points to a relationship between Jews and central governments as a root of anti-Semitism, that seems flawed because it was not always true, and in fact was commonly false in Europe. Often the best Jews could manage was to persuade the European monarchs to let them survive; forced displacement and punitive taxation were common.
This isn’t true; Muhammad expelled Jewish tribes who violated his Medina constitution from what is now Saudi Arabia. The Qasimid kings of Yemen banished thousands of Jews to die in the Mawza desert because their council of Islamic scholars pointed out that Muhammad said there should not be two religions in the land of the Arabs. Likewise when Askia became king of the Songhai, he ordered the Jews in his domain to convert to Islam or get out.
Details on Jews in Muslim countries throughout history are relatively rarer because there were not that many Jews still living in Muslim countries by the turn of the 20th century. Before the Holocaust, over 90% of the world’s Jews were Ashkenazim and the vast majority of them lived in Europe. There have been Muslim rulers who allowed Jews to live in their lands — as I said elsewhere on this thread, Sultan Bayezid II sent boats to rescue Jews expelled by the Catholic rulers of Spain — but virtually all Muslim kingdoms and empires have eventually ordered Jews to convert, leave or die.
“but virtually all Muslim kingdoms and empires have eventually ordered Jews to convert, leave or die.”
I do not believe that is even close to true.
Consider the Ottomans, the last great Islamic empire. Or the Umayyad Caliphate, the first. Neither made any attempt to expel the Jews.
There have been occasional cases of Islamic intolerance of Jews but they are the exception, not the rule. Muslim law is quite explicit about the legal status of the tolerated religions. Their members owe a special tax but do not owe the tax paid by Muslims, there are various restrictions on them, details varying from time to time and place to place.
It’s a pity how we’ve been living in one of those exceptions for several decades now.
Yes? The history of Islam is on the scale of centuries (at 14, it’s approaching millennia), not decades. Much of this century has been bad for various reasons and in various ways. Others were better.
Unless you’ve got a time machine on you, that’s not tremendously useful to the present situation of Jews and other minorities in these regions.
Well, yeah, but Sandy (and David Friedman) was talking about the history of Jewish/Muslim relations, not the present day state of affairs.
What point are you trying to make?
Part of what’s being argued about is whether the current bad state of affairs is a result of the intrinsic nature of Islam, so history is relevant.
I’ve heard the argument that Islam has repeated fits of expansionism and authoritarianism because there’s always a temptation to get back to the (worst of?) the Koran, and that’s harder to either prove or refute.
“while Christians and Muslims were outright barred from entering each others lands.”
Not even close to true on the Muslim side. Muslim states often had large Christian populations–almost certainly larger than their Jewish populations. Both Christians and Jews counted as People of the Book, members of tolerated religions.
In the other direction it varied. Southern Italy under Norman rule had substantial numbers of Muslims. So did Christian Spain prior to the expulsion at the end of the 15th century.
Weren’t most of the Christians in Muslim lands there before the Arabian Empire took over? They were certainly tolerated, but I’m not sure they count as entering/immigrating into Muslim owned lands (I’d actually be curious to know if there are many hard numbers about migration during that era).
A significant number of them were “Frankish” or “Roman” merchants, based out of defined Christian enclaves but with some freedom to travel in their business. Also significant were Christian pilgrims to various holy sites, though after 1098 one might argue there was an element of coercion or intimidation to that particular tolerance.
Presumably some members of both groups didn’t bother to go home and so contributed to the permanent population.
A significant number of them were “Frankish” or “Roman” merchants, based out of defined Christian enclaves but with some freedom to travel in their business.
Wasn’t there a Greek-speaking, Eastern Orthodox religious structure in the Eastern Roman Empire…before the Caliphate came through, and established a new government?
I don’t think those Orthodox believers count as “Frankish” or “Roman” mechants.
What about the Coptic believers in North Africa, who were apparently the majority in that region before the conquests by the followers of Mohammed?
The Coptic church still exists, but is is no longer the majority in those areas.
The Caliphate conquered and subjugated a weakened empire that was religiously-Christian.
The Caliphs (and their successor states) varied from tolerate-and-tax to persecute-and-drive out, in their attitudes towards Jews and Christians.
“I don’t think those Orthodox believers count as “Frankish” or “Roman” mechants.”
From the Islamic point of view, the Byzantines were Romans and routinely referred to as such. The Roman Empire didn’t fall, it just lost its western provinces to the Franks.
Bernard Lazare makes for a rather curious case – as a Jewish intellectual, fervent Zionist and prominent defender of Alfred Dreyfus, he attempted a comprehensive historical examination of the root causes of anti-Semitism that is now fondly quoted by anti-Semites.
Nirenberg’s mechanism might explain societal anti-Semitism, but central governments attacked Jews too, whether by expulsion, punitive taxation or forbidding them to reproduce. I think piecing together one overarching explanation for anti-Semitism would be a fruitless endeavor. Places that were philosemitic once turned antisemitic eventually; the Ottoman Empire went from rescuing Jews after the Alhambra Decree to massacring them centuries later. Places that were antisemitic once turned philosemitic eventually; Jews now have the highest approval rating of any religious group in the United States.
Speaking as a player of Crusader Kings 2, the major reason for expulsion as a ruler is that then you don’t have to pay back those big loans you took out.
Speaking as someone who once took a relevant university course or two, this is as I remember it correct. Jewish communities, and the moneylenders therein, would have the protection of local elites as long as the elites valued being able to borrow money more than they valued not having to pay that money back.
I had always thought it was a different mechanism: Christians couldn’t go into banking (because usury was prohibited throughout most of the middle ages), so all the bankers ended up being Jews. I have no idea where I heard this though, so it is entirely possible that I invented it.
Sowell also asserts that outsiders are generally better at making credit decisions and saying no to uncredit-worthy individuals than insiders, which gives a natural advantage to minorities in retail. Sharing social circles and familial ties with your customer base can be a competitive disadvantage at least in some business types.
It’s been a while since I’ve read Sowell on the subject, but I think it’s not just a matter of being outsiders, other traits are needed as wel.
Yes he also ascribes cultural factors to explain why certain minorities succeed in filling those retail niches. But the niches exist because insiders are not dispassionate lenders and so can get sucked dry by freeloading relatives and friends.
I’ve definitely heard that before, so I doubt you invented it. Can’t speak to its veracity, though.
Who cares about labels?
X centuries ago, Christian/Islamic anti-semitism had the effect X. Later on, when Christianity wasn’t as important to the identity of as many as it once was, it turned out effect X might stir up a lot of discontent anyway.
You know, maybe.
I give him credit for noticing and being public about how he found out.
I don’t. He’s doing what he occasionally seems to do: finally pays attention to what the yokels outside his window are yammering on about, realises holy crap, this is actually a serious bit of business, and decides that now he’s an instant expert on the topic who must bring it to the attention of the rest of us, because if a Smart Guy like him only realised what was going on so recently, then the rest of us lamebrains plainly don’t have a clue.
Sorry, but some of us lamebrains knew quite well (a) there is such a thing as political theatre, posturing, and party propaganda disguised as concern for the state of the nation and (b) under that, there is the deadly serious business of governing a country, which includes international relationships and foreign policy, and which is subtle, tricky, and often in the hands of very much not disinterested parties who pull the strings and that we, the people casting our votes, have very little influence over the process.
Nice that he finally woke up and realised the world is going on under his nose, but I don’t appreciate the “let me explain how to suck eggs, grandmother” tone of his post.
Also even though he does say things about how he’s not really that informed etc. he still manages to write in terms of the key divide being betwee ‘people who understand national security like me’ and everyone else. I mean, I probably agree with his take. But I’m sure there are intelligent people who have read six or seven history books who disagree that Trump’s move was awful and think the objections are in fact pearl-clutching.
I mean, as a fellow complete non-expert I could argue that WWI was actually caused by the build up of big alliance chains that drew more people in, and if you hadn’t had all those pledges of protection it wouldn’t happen, and so US should leave NATO.
Also he treats corruption and abuse of office as not-serious and bad national security judgement as serious, and then focuses his arguments on why the latter really is serious rather than why the former isn’t. His example of the convicted child abuser is obviously ridiculous but we should definitely be incredibly wary of electing an unelected one: aside from the underlying questions of whether their activity suggests a more widely relevant mental illness or immense moral failing (I’d guess at least one!) they’re also hugely blackmailable which is fairly terrible in a world leader.
I refer to this comment I made two threads back, but I’ll say here that when I hear things like “I support open borders”, I translate it to “I want the far-right to take over”, just as when I hear things like “I want no welfare state” or “no financial regulation”, I hear “I want the far-left to take over”.
What’s happening now is only scary because it was done too late, but it would be even scarier if liberal nationalist and civic nationalist politicians weren’t making the necessary correction that the public demanded, because then when the dams finally did burst, it would be the bloodthirsty ethno-nationalists in power instead, and they wouldn’t merely be defining that their nation-states exist.
Why this weird dichotomy? I don’t think completely stopping all immigration is the other side here.
That Yudkowsky post is an amusing low from the guy. We all knew he was sheltered (shteltered?), but sheesh.
Anti-semetism seems to fall into three categories:
1) Orthodoxy of Christian and Muslim denominations looking to scour (and later squeeze) vulnerable minority religions
2) General xenophobia, especially from Germans who still possessed hard tribal barbarian instincts beyond that of the other founding Holy Roman Empire territories
3) The most important reason – after generations of the first two, Ashkenazi Jews had been shaped into an extremely careful and increasingly intelligent survivalist demographic – very sensitive, socially capable yet conservative in general dealings, highly resourceful and efficient, and seeks to evade conflict wherever possible. This, along with the partial, eventually increasing prominence of wealth in Jewish communities, created a feedback loop with the first two reasons, as gentile groups willing to engage in bigotry could use brute force to squeeze Jewish enclaves for wealth, knowing the Jews would at most avoid. The times changed and Jews are now highly secure from anti-Semetic attack, but certain instincts live on among non-Jews for targetting them.
Bob Dylan wins the Nobel prize in literature.
http://www.splicetoday.com/music/why-they-suck-bob-dylan
Having seen this in the news, I have no idea what to think. What with Elon Musk wanting to set up a Martian colony to ensure the survival of humanity, and now this, are we really expecting the apocalypse?
All I can say is that this is awesome and I hope it goes through. I suspect it will be resisted and won’t be able to get its status, however.
Not that there won’t be nation-states in space (the idea of socializing the entirety of space is ridiculous), but it probably won’t be this project, simply because it’s too early to accomplish. States independent from existing ones are probably going to have to fight for it.
If by apocalypse, you mean wealthy people using attractive fantasies and false solutions to bamboozle the general public and investors into funding their research and development of technologies that they plan to sell back to the public at a profit afterwards in real-world mundane applications and to boost their stock price and public image, then yes, the apocalypse is here.
If you’ve got a plan for the Glorious Future of Mankind in Space!, but you don’t have the budget for a spaceship, your plan is irrelevant. Whoever does have the budget for a spaceship will have their own plan, and it won’t be yours. That goes for Mars One, and it goes for these guys.
No, that’s a bunch of university professors who decided that this would be a cool project. Budgetary issues aside, their legal arrangements are dubious at best, with clear problems getting out from under the Outer Space Treaty. That says they’re under the jurisdiction of the launching state, and it’s really hard to get away from. Their technical details are nonexistent. And I’m not sure what they actually plan to do, either.
Why should anyone give a crap about the Outer Space Treaty, at least with regard to its provisions that are unlikely to ever be enforced? You might care if you want to bring people or resources from an extra-terrestrial jurisdiction to Earth, because of interdiction. But I don’t think Elon, for example, needs to worry about the U.N. sending blue helmets to enforce the OST against colonists who claim land on Mars.
And if they do, he wins anyway, because the UN would have to colonize space itself in order to enforce the treaty.
For quite some time to come, human life on Mars will depend on sophisticated bits of hardware that are only made in large industrial complexes on Earth, and can be delivered to Mars only by large and expensive rockets built on Earth, by people who won’t bother to do these things if they aren’t getting paid in Earth dollars.
If the governments of Earth decide that you are annoying enough, they can with a few strokes of the bureaucratic pen guarantee that you’ll never again get a new reverse-osmosis membrane for your water recycling system. Blue helmets not required. And really, it probably only takes one government to make that happen, unless some other government is willing to pick a fight with them over, what, a bunch of space cadets who have absented themselves from Earth’s political affairs?
The Prime Directive of any space settlement or colonization effort of this century is going to have to be, “Don’t annoy the Earthicans, period”. Unfortunately, some would-be space colonists seem to have this as their goal.
I do not agree with your premise. I suspect that a Mars colony would be roughly self-sustaining after being seeded with ~1000 people and ~1k tons of supplies and equipment. Stuff like launching their own comsats to get the internet (with 20 minute latency) would be beyond them for a long time, which would be a powerful motivation to cooperate with Earth. But the stronger assertion that the colonists would literally die without resupply form Earth seems to me unfounded. It may be true that *right now* we believe the colonists would be dependent upon nonrenewable goods (CO2 scrubbers? PV cells? etc) that seem difficult to produce using plausible in situ resources and infrastructure. But this assessment is based on technological assumptions that could become quickly obsolete.
Plus of which, I’m not even sure I believe the politics of denying resources to OST-skeptical colonists are at all plausible. If space access is commoditized to the point where large-scale colonization is feasible, colonial missions (including resupply) could be Kickstartable affairs. I doubt the signatories actually enough about the principles behind the OST to pull the trigger on actions that would harm their (ex-)citizens, even passively.
Will they literally die immediately without supplies from Earth? No. But I doubt they’d be able to keep running at anything other than a sustenance level over more than a year or two. You run out of reverse-osmosis filters, and have to improvise a distillation rig. Which takes a bunch of energy, and is maintenance-intensive. The extra energy has to come from somewhere, and that means slower growing cycles for the crops. Which means you have to switch to crops that grow more efficiently to get enough calories. Oh, and your pumps are starting to wear out, and you have no replacements. You can build new ones, but your stock of metals is running out. Now you need to build the infrastructure to recycle the old parts. Out of whatever random junk isn’t already being used to hold your colony together.
It’s just not going to be worth it for most people. There might be a few die-hards who would set themselves up for that kind of thing, but in practice, I expect them to be pretty quiet, and suffer benign neglect. The loud ones won’t get launch permits in the first place.
One ton per person? That’s a ludicrous underestimate. Try tens of tons per person at minimum. I’d also put the number of people required much higher.
How? Mechanical things wear out. Nothing is going to change that. You’d have to ship the infrastructure to repair everything, which is a lot more expensive than sending replacement parts occasionally unless your volume is truly huge. And that takes it out of this century.
And when the FAA refuses the permit because you’re trying to ship supplies to criminals? Remember that ships in space go fast enough regulation is inevitable, and everyone sees everything.
And you’re basing that on, what exactly?
I build space hardware for a living, and I’m not the only one here. Well, technically, at this stage in my career I look over other people’s shoulders as they build space hardware and say “here’s what you’re doing wrong…”
I look at systems vastly simpler than a Mars colony, and go out and do site visits to the people who are building the parts and components, and I see a dedicated supply chain that extends to far more than 1,000 people, production infrastructure that goes well beyond 1,000 tons of hardware. I have put a fair bit of thought into how that can be simplified, and I’ve talked to and read the technical publications of others who have done far more, and I’m not seeing self-sufficiency at that level.
So, of your 1,000 self-sufficient Martians, how many are involved in making reverse-osmosis membranes, and do you understand that this is one of more than a thousand things the Martians will need? Or do you imagine that manufacturing a reverse-osmosis membrane is something that can be done by a dilettante their spare time? Or were you planning to drink unrecycled piss for the rest of your life?
Really, if you’ve got anything more than handwaving, you should write this up for publication.
I like Charles Stross’s take on this, about the minimum number of people necessary to maintain our current level of technical sophistication. (He guesses a hundred million.)
This thread does bring something to mind. What if the people in question aren’t trying to maintain today’s technological standards?
Let’s call our group the Space Amish. They’re a religious movement who wants far, far away from bad influences, and considers much of modern technology to be bad. They somehow have lots of money (let’s assume Elon Musk converts to them in a few years or something of that nature) and so getting to space isn’t the problem. Their goal is self-sufficiency, regardless of tech level. How far back do they/can they go, and how many people do they need?
My guess is that we’re looking at a late 50s-early 60s tech in most cases, with about 10,000 people needed. I don’t have strong backing for those numbers, but any attempt at living in space (or on the Moon/Mars) is going to need stuff that just wasn’t available before then. Thoughts?
Would anyone care to speculate on how good nanotech and 3D printing would need to become to significantly simplify the life support problem? And how long it would take for them to get that good?
I can’t speak to 3D printing, but for nanotech:
If you’re referring to something like self-replicating nanobots, that sort of thing is very much the stuff of science fiction, and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Current nanoscience research is mostly about materials: trying to make things lighter, stronger, purer, more/less conductive, have very high surface areas (useful for chemical catalysts), etc.
It’s possible that this kind of research could lead to e.g. more effective carbon dioxide scrubbers or better water filtration systems or something, but it won’t really simplify the life support problem — nanotech-powered water filters will almost certainly be harder to manufacture than non-nanotech filters.
I find it unlikely that you can have any sort of self-sustaining space colony without a significant industrial base. Consider, for example, the task of lighting up Space Amish Village. The Space Amish need: glass, and a method for turning it into vacuum tubes; a source of tungsten (or Space Bamboo; Edison’s first light bulbs used bamboo because the technology for making tungsten filaments wasn’t good enough yet); a source of metal for the other parts of the light bulb, and the equipment needed to refine and shape that metal; a source of electricity; and, most importantly: the tools and resources required to recreate all of the previous items from scratch when they wear out. Now repeat that for every single other necessity of life, bearing in mind that you are in space, don’t have easy access to a plentiful biosphere, and have to do all your own mining.
There’s a similar issue with 3D printers: you don’t just need really good printers, you need a) really good printers that don’t require anything that they can’t themselves print, and b) a supply of feed stock that those printers can use as input. That strikes me as a problem whose solution is pretty far in the future. Self-replicating nanobots are just 3D printers that meet all the previous requirements, while also jumping through the hoop of being microscopic. I can’t see any way that nanotechnology makes anything easier.
I would want at least one order of magnitude more people than Bean’s 10,000. Maybe two.
@John Schilling:
Does your conclusion change if there is a major technological breakthrough on the production end? Molecular nanotechnology is the obvious candidate. Your inputs are atoms, readily available on Mars. The tools are general purpose assemblers. Those plus information build everything.
3D printers are a less extreme version, and would have to be a lot better than they now are to do the job.
3D printing would do more for making a minimalist extraterrestrial civilization richer than it would for making it smaller.
A 3D printer can’t do much that a CNC mill cannot, and the CNC system can’t do much my grandfather couldn’t do with a basement full of hundred-year-old machine tools. What it can do, is much more of the same stuff with less of one specific sort of human input.
Now, on Earth today and probably on Mars in 2050, skilled machinists are always in short supply. But if it takes 10,000 people to make for a self-sufficient extraterrestrial civilization, which I think is a plausible low end, maybe only 500 of those are machinists. Five thousand are mothers and children, five hundred are farmers, five hundred are miners, five hundred are leaders, and the rest are five each of six hundred different specialties you can’t live without and none of which involve assembling homogenous matter into arbitrary shapes.
So, if 3D printing increases the productivity of your machinists by a factor of a hundred, you can reduce that minimal population from 10,000 to 9,505.
Or, you can go from being able to keep the five Mars rovers spare parts for their semi-annual runs to the outlying mining camps that simply have to be maintained, to keeping fifty rovers in good repair for less critical duties including the Martian Iditarod, the occasional research expedition, and turning a blind eye to your teenage son driving over to the next chasm for a bit of privacy with his girl.
Nanotech, depends on how magical you want to make it. SFnal general-purpose robots are another approach, if you see an advantage to having a hundred people and ten thousand robots instead of just ten thousand people. But what we’re looking for, if the goal is to reduce the minimal size of a civilization, is maximum versatility. And “can form metal and plastic into any shape”, is too small a portion of the relevant landscape to make much difference.
I think that people are seriously over estimating the difficulty of some of these problems.
Just because NASA insists on making everything out of crazy titanium alloys and working tolerances out to the 9th decimal point doesn’t mean that a hypothetical colony needs to do so.
There isn’t anything on Iain’s list that can’t be accomplished with simple hand tools and a couple of houseplants.
“Universal Assemblers” are really what you need though – nothing less will really do. A universal assembler could be a nanotech machine (really it would need to be subatomic, unless you luck out and land on top of sufficient reserves of every element you might need), or it could be a fully-developed traditional manufacturing base. The latter takes a lot more than 10,000 people, and the former seems very far off, if it is even possible.
For a small colony, it’s unlikely that true self-sufficiency would make economic sense, even if possible. Consider that to be self-sufficient, you need the ability to replace anything you might use up or break. To do so, you’ve got 3 options:
1) Make everything you might need out of locally obtained resources. This is the holy grail, and the only truly “self-sufficient” method. But it requires not only manufacturing capability, but also all of the infrastructure for resource extraction. For a small colony, the extra people, supplies, etc. needed to get all the raw materials you need could quickly surpass the cost of shipping in what you need to keep your small crew alive indefinitely.
2) Make everything locally, with some input from Earth raw materials. Could work, especially if you design for interchageability (limiting unique spares) and for use of some in-situ bulky materials (e.g. rocket fuel from the atmosphere and homes made of Martian bricks). But you still need a supply line of some kind, and shipping raw materials from Earth is just as expensive as shipping in equivalent mass of manufactured stuff (the cost of manufacturing is negligible compared to the cost of moving it from Earth to Mars).
3) Ship in almost everything you need. This seems wildly expensive, but consider that, until you get advanced manufacturing capability on Mars, everything from Earth will be better. More efficient, more reliable, etc. Yeah, maybe you can get a “Made on Mars!” air scrubber, but if the Earth version is a tenth the size, lasts 10 times as long, and doesn’t require supporting a hundred Martians on the air scrubber assembly line, you still might be better off shipping it in.
Here’s the deal. I will give you as many hand tools and house plants as your heart desires. You go to Antarctica and come back with a working light bulb. Then we can start talking about Mars.
You forgot the stone knives, bearskins, and some sort of rudimentary lathe.
That’s taking things a bit far, but it’s not entirely wrong, either. You don’t need a continuous glass industry to make light bulbs, for instance. Most of the time, you just pull and replace the filament. If the bulb breaks, you recycle the fragments. As the colony grows, you will need more, but the obvious thing to do is make a big batch occasionally. It’s been long time since I did serious work on ISRU, but I believe glass can be made from most lunar regolith. Metal is a bit harder without the processes that concentrate it on Earth, but I think there are supposed to be intact nickle-iron asteroid fragments on the lunar surface. I can’t speak for Mars.
Here’s the deal. I will give you as many hand tools and house plants as your heart desires. You go to Antarctica and come back with a working light bulb. Then we can start talking about Mars.
I’ve made replacement tubes for old radios out of raw glass and wire stock while sitting on my patio and I can carry the complete set of tools I need to do so in a 5 gallon bucket. Lets talk.
True autarky would require that you were able to make everything you need out of a very small number of elements that are local (will graphene fulfill its magical promises?), which is a long long way away, but possible within the laws of physics.
Combine that with automation, and independent colonies may not need to be large, but that’s a far flung thing.
Sorry, the correct answer was “sand and ore”. Do you have any idea how large an industrial base is required to provide you with raw glass and wire (and to replace the tools you use as they wear out)?
The Toaster Project seems relevant here. Now consider the Spacesuit Project, with the death penalty, no appeal, if you don’t finish before your initial spacesuit wears out.
Yes and the number is much smaller than 10,000 closer to 5 actually…
Someone to collect the sand and ore
Someone with a furnace to melt it down
A glass blower to make glass
A metal worker/machinist to make wire, screws, and screwdrivers.
My goofy ass to make the vacuum tubes.
…and that’s assuming that no one does more than one job.
The toaster guy was an art student with 0 technical know-how who was doing it primarily “for the art” rather than to make a working toaster. He still managed to make a toaster and I think our hypothetical colonists will be able to do better.
@hlynkacg
You’re positing a space society where small, artisanal shops make raw materials? OK, I mean we’ve had glass and metal longer than we’ve had massive industrial concerns, but raw materials were very expensive there. I can’t remember which of the Little House on the Prairie books it was, but Laura Ignalls Wilder talked of getting a tin cup for Christmas; she was overjoyed because it meant she had a cup of her very own, and no longer had to share with her sister during mealtimes. It wasn’t making the cup that would have prevented her having her very own until her parents wanted to splurge. Making a cup isn’t that hard. It’s the cost of the tin that was the showstopper.
I don’t think you realize the extent to which you have to trade off labor and materials. I don’t blame you; I didn’t really realize it until it was shoved in my face at work. Another junior structural engineer and myself were looking over the as-builts for one of our dams a year or so ago. This was designed in the late ’40s and built in the ’50s, right at the end of the “You can do anything you set your mind to when you have vision, determination, and an endless supply of expendable labor” era. Both of us were marveling at the use of cover plates on steel I-sections in the lock gates, which require extensive welding, until an engineer who started in the ’70s pointed out that it saved a lot of material. It required a great deal of labor to construct, however. We live in an area where it makes more sense to use more (cheap) material to save on (expensive) labor, and neither of us realized that it wasn’t long ago that the opposite was true.
You’re positing a space society in which both labor and materials will be very precious; it’s going to run into a wall sooner or later, very probably sooner. You can come up with a solution to any individual problem–like your talking about having some dude smelt glass–but you’re going to run out of resources to solve all your problems before they kill you.
That’s just the thing though.
I fix old tech for fun, and often end up having to make my own replacement parts. Trading labor for materials is something I totally get.
The thing that I think that John has fundamentally failed to realize is that living in space means living there 24 / 7 / 365 / 60+. These aren’t NASA astronauts operating on a strict time-table. The “Little House on the Prairie” scenario you describe where labor is cheap but materials aren’t is pretty much the exact situation that our first generation of colonists will find themselves in.
I can’t speak for John, of course, but it sounds like you and I are in agreement on the availability of labor and materiel.
I disagree with you that our notional colonists trying to make a go of it without any inputs from the homeworld will be in a situation like in “Little House on the Prairie.” Pa still ran to town to purchase an awful lot of stuff–he didn’t make the cup I referenced, he purchased it from a shopkeeper who imported it from outside Kansas. Frontier living was liable to kill you on Earth, much less where a leak in the roof will cause you to suffocate in minutes.
You are incorrect. My understanding of this matter is in no way informed by “NASA astronauts” or really much of anything involving NASA. Those are straw men of your own creation, and I’m done with you.
To be clear, I don’t think that our notional colonists will be able to make a go of it without input from earth. At the very least they’ll need a bunch of seed gear and a vessel to get them there. That said I think that John Schilling, et all, are seriously overestimating the amount of input required…
From NASA’s perspective sending Col. Hadfield to the ISS only for him to spend 6 hours a day fabricating parts that can be purchased on earth for $20 dollars a pop is a massive waste of a trained specialist’s time and labor. However, as far as a colonist is concerned, old man Hadfield sitting in his shop building radios, is being eminently productive.
Like I said before, just because NASA insists on making everything out of crazy titanium alloys and working tolerances out to the 9th decimal point doesn’t mean that a hypothetical colony needs to do so.
Edit after being ninja’d…
@ John Schilling.
You’re still making the mistake of assuming that all production must be mass production. As Catcube says above, we’ve had glass and metal longer than we’ve had massive industrial concerns.
Who cares if the first space suits manufactured entirely on Mars look more like something out of Bioshock than The Martian? I don’t.
I can only endorse John’s reply to this. If you can afford to totally cut yourself off from Earth, then it might be possible to declare practical independence. That’s unlikely in any of our lifetimes. The only realistic alternative is for you to find someone to sponsor your independence. The US and China are in a diplomatic row, so the US agrees to take over as the supplier of reverse osmosis filters and the like for the Chinese lunar colonies. Or, more likely, agrees to not interfere with said lunar colonies buying supplies in the US and paying for transport to them. As well as guaranteeing that the Chinese will not interfere with the transit of said supplies. And this is obvious geopolitical maneuvering, no different from what happens on Earth.
It would be a different story on a hypothetical earth-like planet in a different system, or after some kind of terraforming, but a colony on a hostile planet I expect would be incredibly vulnerable even to delays.
All this discussion about colonizing Mars (or even a convenient asteroid) is just sci-fi fantasizing.
If I was given a large budget to protect a sizeable population from a world apocalypse in a sustainable fashion that could minimize risk and dependence on technological miracles, or even just to isolate them from Earth politics, etc. and was actually being judged on my success by the only critic that matters (reality), I and every other person who studied the problem seriously would be heading in the opposite direction of up.
Dreaming about Mars is fun. That is all.
Err no, the whole point of getting off planet is to be isolated from Earth based catastrophes and the tech required to build and properly isolate an underground colony just as if not more complex than the tech required to do so in space. In many ways doing it in space is easier. The biggest obstacle is getting to space in the first place.
This would be the part where you offer citations. Because the people who have studied this problem seriously might be worth paying attention to, but I have my doubts that you are among them.
I thought he was going for the moon. What is the trade-off in terms of ease of transport vs calamities not avoided? Obviously some things that destroy the earth will also destroy the moon, but not all, and it is much cheaper to get to than Mars [citation needed].
I’m pretty sure he was talking underground/underwater. The basic difference is that they’re much closer, which is good and bad. Good in that shipping is a lot easier. Bad in that it makes it a lot more likely that the plague gets in or the barbarians manage to break the gates. Or that a random nuke lands on your head.
I’m definitely in the lunar colonization camp. The only real downside to the proximity to Earth is that it means the colonies are more likely to have close political links to Earth, and thus get drawn into wars. That, and a shorter natural period for quarantine, I guess. The chances of a non-man-made cataclysm being a problem are basically zero, because that’s straight-up geocide territory.
radiation
thermal control
atmosphere
pressure
gravity
access to water
access to all other minerals
access to nutrients
transport costs
scalability (do all this for millions, not hundreds)
sustainability (do all this after your 1st generation of equipment needs to be replaced)
These are all solved problems underground (ventilation would be an engineering challenge, but nowhere near any of the other challenges posed extra-terrestrially).
But my first choice is to do the earth science necessary to save the near-perfect habitat we already have, and in the event of global thermonuclear war we would not even have to go underground. Unless we managed to literally destroy our own atmosphere, this rock is always going to be better than any other rock.
And if you want some meta arguments:
1) Investing in space colonies may cause people to discount the real dangers of screwing up this planet
2) Investing in space colonies diverts resources that would be better used to reinforce and protect the 99.9% effective habitat we have. One of those resources being really smart scientists.
3) After 30 years of investing in space colonies with billions and billions of dollars, and producing a one-way trip to mars for 50 people who most likely will either die within 10 years or have to be bailed out with 10’s of billions of dollars annually, scientists might lose some credibility with the general public for overpromising and underdelivering on the ability for Junior to move to Mars.
And now the second-level meta argument:
1) We may have to waste those 100’s of billions of dollars precisely so the types of scientists who advise such boondoggles do lose their credibility and the general public is finally convinced this Earth is it and we really can’t fuck with it.
Yes, it will be hard to build a large hab in deep space if I insist on getting all of my materials from Earth. Guess what nobody serious is planning to do? Look up ISRU and O’Neil Habitats and get back to us.
The moon is a poor choice for colonization. It doesn’t really have anything useful there (compared to any other random space rock), and, despite being much closer than, say, Mars, actually isn’t that much easier to get to.
The main challenge of getting something somewhere else in space is delta-velocity, and landing on the moon is tough because it’s fairly massive (lots of delta-V required to enter/leave orbit) and doesn’t have an atmosphere (you can’t use any aerobraking – every ounce you want to land on Luna needs to be decelerated from orbit with a rocket of some kind).
If you’re a person, the short duration trip to the moon is a plus, but that doesn’t matter much at all for inert cargo.
Let’s see. He3 (although at annoyingly low concentrations). Possible platinum-group metals. Various components of the regolith, which have been extensively studied for ISRU uses. Oh, and quite a bit of water.
But I can bootstrap the rocket out of lunar materials. If I’m feeling wasteful, I’ll use water to make an LOX/LH2 rocket. If I’m sensible, it’ll be Al-LOX. Also, the atmosphere of Mars only helps going out. If I want to come back, I have to get through it and off of Mars, then come back to Earth separately. The two challenges are not symmetrical.
Also, I’ve seen plans (which may or may not have been written by crazy people, I admit) for non-rocket landings on the moon. And non-rocket launch is pretty easy.
The point of colonization is to put people there, not just inert cargo.
I’m not saying there’s nothing you can use on the moon, just that it’s not uniquely resourceful, with the downside of a relatively deep gravity well.
If we’re talking about a long term colony, we’re going to be sending a lot more stuff to the colony then we are getting back. Same with people. The extra challenge of getting something out of the Martian atmosphere wouldn’t matter as much, because you’d be doing it less often.
Anyway you’ve apparently been thinking about a lunar colony on a sophisticated level. Mostly I get annoyed by the sort that see the Moon and think it’s an obvious “stepping stone” to Mars – they are unique challenges, not really sequential ones.
What do they say about real estate? Location, location, location. I’ll agree that it’s not the best location for getting resources, but it’s so much closer than anything else that it balances out.
Ideally, you’d want some trade long-term, and that means getting stuff back. Plus, the moon has a lot of advantages in terms of providing resources for work in near-Earth space.
I would say that a Lunar colony would give us valuable knowledge that could be applied on Mars. And I think that Luna is probably at least as important as Mars to our future in space. Mars isn’t even a good place to get resources from. Luna is. If your only goal is to get to Mars, then a Lunar colony may or may not be a waste of money. On the other hand, if Mars is your only goal, you need your head examined. That sort of thinking will get the planetary geologists a nice set of red rocks to go with the grey ones they got 45 years ago, and our grandchildren will be in the same place we’re in.
No no no! This is the fallacy that laymen are committing and I don’t want it perpetuated. In space travel, “closer” is not merely a function of distance. The data point most relevant is “how much of my limited resources must I spend to get from A to B?” and the biggest expendable resource is usually reaction mass / rocket fuel. So how much delta-V you need to propulsively supply is very important, perhaps the most important thing, depending on the application. And that application and velocity dependence is why “location, location, location” is a very poor model for assessing extraterrestrial destinations.
Though while delta-v is important, I wouldn’t think time and the availability of launch windows would be irrelevant, and the Moon AFAIK has some serious advantages there. (Whether enough to overcome Mars’ own advantages, I can’t say.)
@gbdub
Distance may not be the only thing, but it’s also not totally irrelevant. I’m aware of the importance of delta-V, but we can’t discount time preference. And when the time involved for minimum delta-V is something like two orders of magnitude less, then it’s hard to see a case for going to the asteroid belt.
(I’m not going to run numbers on this, but if you want to, you might be able to convince me.)
Actually, scratch that. Mass drivers.
Also, the fact that you’re always 3 days away, instead of having launch windows, makes a difference.
@bean
ISRU is not a magic wand and only even attempts to solve two or three items on my list (raw materials if you have an industrial base to develop and maintain deep space mining equipment and/or are willing to bombard your alternative gravity well with redirected asteroids) – nothing ISRU provides could not be better provided on Terra, even a post-thermonuclear-war one.
I purposely did not mention energy because ISRU is practical for *modest* levels of that, so figured why bother fighting over it. I was not trying to Gish Gallop with my list but instead to show that Earth would still hold basically all the cards even after we do our best to screw it up. If Earth2 was in our solar system and its inhabitants had completely destroyed its civilization, poisoned its atmosphere with 10,000 nuclear warheads, triggered a 30-year nuclear winter or raised the average surface temperature 15 degrees C, and made extinct every above-ground species larger than bacteria, as long as it had a semblance of a breathable atmosphere (even with filtering or other catalyzing) it would be still be our first destination and instead of arguing about Moon vs. Mars vs. deep-space you would all be arguing instead about how best to get to Earth2, because now in addition to being the patently-obvious-best-habitat-for-people, this Earth2 would also check the one box the colonizers must have checked to preserve their reality-distortion-field (it is not Earth).
Granted, being isolated means you have less access to some goods than if you weren’t, but we already took isolating oneself (be it in space or underground) as a premise, so it doesn’t matter.
I think that you are seriously underestimating the tractability of a lot of these problems.
Well, besides the fact that you seem to be grossly overestimating the effects of thermonuclear war, I’m not sure that the situation would be better on Terra. We’ve mined most of the easy ore. And I’ve seen suggestions that there should be accessible nickle-iron ore fragments on Luna.
Uh, if there was nothing left but bacteria, you wouldn’t have breathable atmosphere for very long. (Also, you’d want a really good filter system to avoid dying in a biowar. Easier to just seal the whole thing.) The other problem with Earth2 is that it has a deep gravity well. Good luck getting out.
@ bean
You seem to be generally ignoring my main points and nitpicking various minor areas I did not bother fleshing out:
a. raw materials -> space mining magic! without addressing radiation, thermal, gravity, atmosphere, pressure, e.g. all the really hard things that are the cost and energy drivers in human space exploration. If technology is getting better, it will make living on post-apocalypse earth even easier too, you have to show some marginal advantage to living in a place with no atmosphere or even biosphere and that we did not evolve in.
b. I deliberately am exaggerating thermo war because that is about the only plausible apoc scenario in an attempt to be charitable and grant you MAD, or even MAD squared. I will try to avoid exaggeration to your benefit in the future as you seem to agree Earth will still be quite hospitable compared to Mars or the Moon afterwards, so you must be thinking of some even more implausible scenario for the necessity of space colonization whose parameters are not up for discussion.
c. You seem to flit between gravity well and non-gravity well to suit your desired rebuttal. The truth is you must solve both those problems and how to transport easily between them to access your resources.
d. Your given premise is ‘Earth must be abandoned. What next.’ As long as that premise is invulnerable to question, you are not engaging in debate with me, just retreating to your prior.
@ dragnubbit
I don’t speak for bean but I feel the need to point out that radiation, thermal control, gravity, atmosphere, etc… are cost drivers in modern spaceflight specifically because NASA has to optimize for mass/delta V. Our hypothetical colony is under no such limitation. They can afford to grab a few tons of rock or ice and use them as a radiation shield/heat-sink.
Things like energy, farming, collection/processing of raw materials, are actually significantly easier in a space colony than a terrestrial underground colony due to increased mobility and readier access to energy. After all, green houses and solar collectors don’t work under ground, and are much easier to build in reduced gravity. Likewise, on earth you need to dig for iron ore on Mars, it is quite literally “common as dirt” (ditto aluminum oxide on the moon).
Like I said, the difficulty with space is getting there. Once you get there most of the issues you mention are actually easier to manage than they would be underground.
You want details? Fine. I’ll give you details.
Radiation? Lots of mass. 10 meters of lunar regolith is about as thick to radiation as Earth’s atmosphere. Design with that in mind, and dump it on with a bulldozer. This also solves your thermal problem quite nicely. Gravity? Well, if I’m on a body, I have gravity. If I’m not, I spin the thing, which also takes care of most of my thermal, assuming I point sensibly. Pressure? Trivial. I mean that. We do pressure vessels literally all the time on Earth. Putting them in space makes it no harder. As hlynkacg points out, if we’re doing ISRU and can cut the quest for minimum mass, all of these are matters that are readily susceptible to competent engineering.
Uhh…
I think you’re slightly confused. I’m not in favor of space colonization just because of X-risk. I’m in favor because I believe we need to exploit the resources of the solar system, and we need to go out there to get it.
Also, one of my other hobbies is nuclear weapons, so I actually know how this sort of thing works.
Mass drivers. I lean in favor of surface colonization over orbital, but medical may not allow that. We just don’t know yet.
You fundamentally misunderstand why I think we need to colonize. I covered this above.
@bean
You seem to be under the impression I oppose space mining. I don’t. I oppose space colonization (or more specifically, human colonization). If there are great resources in asteroids (which is plausible) or on other planets (which I seriously doubt are worth descending and then re-ascending their gravity wells for in the next 100 years) then that does not make habitation on Earth any less advantageous, or large-scale habitation on non-Earth any less a massive waste of those hard-won resources.
The vast majority of good science and knowledge that has come out of NASA (aside from the infrastructure parts like rocketry which are basically agnostic to the mission) came from non-human spaceflight. Human spaceflight is a HUGE sink on the science potential of NASA, and is only justified because, like College Football, it is required to garner public support for actual science that will be far more useful to humanity and human survival (like earth and solar science missions, and future unmanned asteroid diversion/extraction missions).
The argument that there are BETTER resources in space does nothing to say why your preferred gravity well is better than my preferred gravity well as my Earthlings can gather them far more efficiently than your Lunarians (since I am not wasting 90% of my GDP on life-support). We should both have drone miners, not humans. And returning my mined resources back down to my gravity well is not a huge issue, nor is the modest lift resources required to get my drone miners up into space a real cost if the resources are as great as you think they are. And if you posit some great replicating technology even better for my drone miners.
BTW – as I noted earlier, you solved gravity and radiation (inadequately) on the Moon but not in space, and resources (inadequately) in space but not on the Moon. In neither case have you shown any comparative advantage to Earth, if you allow my Earthlings to act in their own best interests and mine asteroids of any value they might possess (and we would be using drones, not fragile water bags who need not just decades of training but artificial atmosphere, tight thermal control, food, radiation shielding, etc. all without blowing up your mass budget).
It all just sounds like high-tech millenarianism to me. Heavy-lift and asteroid science is great. Planning to drop 100 people on Mars in the next 30 years is hucksterism.
The above comment was me obviously. Forgot to log in.
One other point on the risk of existential catastrophe on Earth.
Am I allowed to argue for the 10000x higher annual likelihood of existential catastrophe on a space colony or even a typical human-spaceflight mission (I may be conservative here)?
Humanity will go into space, but if it is going to be at any scale it will be drones.
I think that you are giving the “comparative advantage” argument entirely too much weight. The comparative advantages of colonizing California over South Dakota are obvious. California has more resources, a more hospitable climate, and it is much easier to get to, and yet last I checked there were people in South Dakota.
You’re also seriously overestimating the difficulty of the life support problem if you think that it will occupy 90% of the GDP (that is unless you’re including construction, energy, and food in that total in which case most of the Earthicans’ GDP is being spent of “life support” as well)
There is lots of oil to be extracted from the North Atlantic. It is easier to reach than anywhere in space, and far more hospitable by any metric you care to name. Despite those facts, we have not colonized the North Atlantic.
Why not?
Last I checked we had colonized the North Atlantic.
Not the wet part.
We have oil rigs, and we send workers out to them in shifts. Sometimes we send a ship sailing through. Nobody lives there on a permanent basis. Why should space be any different?
Yes we send workers out to them in shifts. We do this because transporting the crews to the rig is moderately cheaper than simply leaving them in place.
So here’s the deal either we make spaceflight cheap enough and routine enough that catching the weekly rocket to Ceres is no big deal. Or we make our peace with the fact that any appreciable space-based industry will require a functionally permeant human presence.
@dragnubbit
Several problems here.
1. Find a book on Lunar geology. Look at how much we learned from the Soviet samples vs the Apollo samples. I’d suggest normalizing for cost, but the Soviets didn’t really produce cost numbers.
2. We’re not discussing exploration, we’re discussing industry. I will happily agree that it will be more automated than industry on Earth. But take a look at the number of space missions seriously hampered by problems that would have taken a human with a wrench a few minutes to sort out. Now consider that we’re adding lots of moving parts in a poorly-controlled environment. There’s an optimum number of people to send, but I doubt it’s going to be 0.
What do you mean inadequately? My solution to radiation was totally adequate. If it’s inadequate, have you built a radiation shelter in your house yet? And you can use mass drivers from the lunar surface, too.
I’m probably better aware than you are of how annoying it is to have humans along on space missions. But there are some things we haven’t invented machines to do yet. These things are important in surface exploration, and critical in doing industry.
I do not understand the current fascination with Mars. Under my paradigm, it’s a uniquely bad place to go. Well, not uniquely, because Venus is even worse, but still bad.
That number seems really high, but the answer to your philosophical point is redundancy.
And 90% on life support? Care to provide more details on where that came from? Because that’s not a plausible number, unless, as hlynkacg points out, we define it in such a way that Earth would have a similar number.
Iain, we have not colonized the North Atlantic. You’re thinking of the North Sea, and have lost the geography bee.
Although it is a good question if drilling moves further out (probably out of helicopter range from shore) what we’ll do about the current rotation system.
We’ve moved on from the technology of the 60s. A teleoperated robot can wield a wrench and still doesn’t need everything that a fragile chunk of wetware requires.
@hlynkacg
Using the argument that people live in South Dakota despite its comparative disadvantage to California as a reason some people will find it advantageous to reside in space is quite a stretch. It is akin (literally) to comparing that because some people prefer avocados to strawberries that there are people that will find comparative advantage in eating poisonous radioactive sludge. You are proposing habitation in an environment that will literally kill you a dozen different ways if your tech fails, to do things that a drone could do at far less expense.
No one lives in mid-air (say on giant dirigibles), despite the great views, clear air and ease of transportation.
@Lumifer
The wrench was an example tool. Now, build a robot which can use every tool in a typical toolbox, and improvise new tools when the existing ones aren’t enough. Teleoperate it over distances of light-minutes. And somehow keep it going when it gets rocks jammed in it. Look over how many times Apollo missions ran into problems that would have been mission failures for robotic missions, and which the astronauts and mission control worked around. There was the broken switch on Apollo 11, the lightning strike on 12, the entire 13 mission (I will grant that a problem of that magnitude would have been more than sufficient reason to write an unmanned mission off), the docking problems and abort switch glitch on 14, and the gimbal and radar problems on 16. I’m not recalling anything for 15 and 17, but we’re up to 4 out of 7 missions even excluding them and 13. And then there’s Skylab.
I’ll also throw in the Intelsat VI repair mission. Two years of planning, custom augmentations developed for the space shuttle’s robotic arm to enable it to capture a satellite drifting in low Earth orbit. Software written specifically to conduct that operation.
Two rendezvous attempts with EVA support, failed to capture. Third try, Commander Daniel Brandestine manually piloted the Endeavour to within non-robotic arm’s reach of the satellite, whereupon astronaut Pierre Thuot simply grabbed the thing. Mission accomplished.
Robots are fine when you want to do something you’ve done a thousand times before, another ten thousand times. Until then, not so much.
@schilling
You are practically proving my point about the insanity of human spaceflight investments. This was a case where the sunk costs of the shuttle program made it possible for a private company to profit off of a major public boondoggle.
First you are referencing a mission in 1992 (24 years ago). So we will put aside the fact that tele-operated systems have progressed since then and will continue to do so steadily.
The enabler of that mission, the Space Shuttle, had a total cost of ~$200B inflation adjusted, with recurring costs of around $450M per flight and an average cost factoring in NRE of around $1.5B PER FLIGHT.
A single Intelsat IV had a replacement value of maybe $150M (call it $200M after launch costs), and its loss may even have had some insurance. Yes it was great that $1.5B Space Shuttle flight could actually do something marginally useful. So it was not some validation of how great humans are to have in space. It was the equivalent of putting in a few hours of work on an expensive business trip to justify the first class flight.
If Intelsat had had to front even the entire recurring cost of that mission (maybe even using the creative NASA accounting designed to make the shuttle look feasible) they would have just launched a replacement.
But I will grant you that it showed humans can do some things in space that non-humans cannot. At hideous cost and risk, and up until now almost entirely make-work.
If spaceflight were fully privatized, I would have zero concerns as I know companies would make good cost-benefit choices. If ACME Space Mining decides to station some waterbags on the Moon at their own expense, more power to them. But that is not what is discussed these days – there is always a huge government investment needed to make the economics work.
Human spaceflight is one of those areas where libertarians have a blind spot IMO.
@John
Why didn’t I think of that one? That’s even better than my examples.
@dragnubbit
Your basis for believing this is? Because I don’t see it, and nothing in this thread convinces me you’re at all familiar with the state of the art in space exploration.
Basically, INTELSAT got it added as a bonus for the checkout flight of Endeavour. Nobody was going to entrust a serious payload to that flight. I suspect that it was also done for experience in doing that sort of thing, which is at least potentially valuable.
You missed his bigger point. They put in 2 years of planning for this specific task, and still would have failed if not for the astronauts literally grabbing the thing. Should we have used more shuttle missions to fix satellites? No. But it’s good evidence that teleoperation is not the answer to everything.
@ bean
It’s not the answer to everything just like using a live human is not an answer to everything. However compared to dragging along these humans together with their life-support and safety systems it sure looks much more cost-efficient.
If you want space travel to be anything more than superpower dick-waving, it has to make economic sense. At the moment (and in the near future, as far as I can see) no manned mission makes economic sense.
(Elon Musk, clearly, wants to wave his dick along with the superpowers)
@Lumifer:
I’m an aerospace engineer, and there have been times I’ve said that if I wasn’t a big squishy bag of water I wouldn’t be in favor of dragging them along on space missions because they are ridiculously annoying to take care of. But that’s mostly in jest, because humans are really versatile. I’ve never said that humans are the answer to everything, and I freely acknowledge that any space industry will be more automated than its Earth-based equivalent. But there are also times when it might well be necessary to go in with hammer, wrench, screwdriver, duct tape, and whatever else is to hand and deal with a problem. John and I provided a list of things which could or would have flummoxed unmanned missions, and which the crew dealt with successfully and kept going. 4 out of the 6 lunar landing missions had them, and that’s just off the top of my head.
I found a fascinating report a couple of years ago which discussed the case for manned servicing missions. It pointed out that if the manned mission was approximately the same cost as the satellite (this was the 60s or 70s, before the shuttle became the mess it was), manned servicing is more efficient than Earth-based backups launched when the original satellite fails. Those have to be bought ahead of time, and might well not get used if the first satellite exceeds its lifetime. A manned mission can be canceled at any time. If the cost of a special deployment of people gets too high, or utilization gets high enough, then having humans on-site makes sense.
I agree on economics being vital, but I disagree that economics obviously excludes humans.
@bean
So now you are arguing that the Mars rovers did not show a steady progression in automation, machine vision, decisioning and tele-operation capabilities throughout the last several decades?
Every time I think I am just saying something that can just be agreed on, you seem determined to take a ridiculous stance in opposition to it. Pretty obvious I am attacking a sacred cow by implying humans in space are, and likely will continue to be in my lifetime, a waste of public money except for propaganda purposes (e.g. if I could have just the earth and space science, I would prefer that, but if I have to accept some astronauts so politicians will fund earth and space science, it is hostage-taking that I have to accept, but not embrace).
I’m arguing that Mars rover operation is of only marginal relevance to industrial work. Driving slowly across Mars and scooping up the occasional rock is a far cry from what we’ll need to do serious resource exploitation. How would any of these things have helped the Intelsat rescue?
@ bean
Know what? Thirty years ago it made sense to have a set of tools and some spares in your car on long road trips. This was because cars were simple and could actually be fixed on the spot by a shade-tree mechanic for a large class of breakdowns. But that time has passed. Nowadays it’s much less useful to have a set of tools in your trunk since a modern car is mostly a collection of computers which control and manage some mechanical machinery and they are just not fixable on the spot.
Your examples all go back to that 60s technology which in a large number of cases could be repaired with a crowbar, some wrenches, and duct tape. But its time is also passing. The number of mechanical moving parts goes down, the number of solid-state components goes up. And if you don’t have to do life-support and such, you need even less of the moving parts. And it’s still cheaper to be quadruple-redundant than put a human inside.
I do expects humans to go to space and set up manned bases on planets and moons. But that’s because we can, and not because it makes economic sense. We are a curious and exploratory species.
All of this is true. But we’re talking about doing industry here, which inherently involves doing things with physical objects that aren’t standardized. Your average person can’t fix a printer if it really breaks, but he can clear a paper jam just fine. Now, think about building a printer which doesn’t jam, or which can clear its own jams.
For mining and factories? Hardly. Again, industry, not just exploration. And half of the time, the ‘fix’ in question is something that doesn’t even rise to the level of being considered a fix, because of how simple it is. The lawnmower’s outlet got clogged with grass. The toilet is running because the chain got tangled and isn’t letting the valve close. The door is sticky and needs to be slammed to latch. Designing systems for absolutely no maintenance is a lot harder than designing systems which are very minimally maintained.
If we’re doing mining and industry that implies economic sense and we’re back to square one. Exactly what would you mine on planets, moons, and asteroids that would pay its way? What needs manufacturing off-Earth (and all microgravity stuff can be done in orbit)?
And we’re not designing systems for no maintenance, we’re designing them for maintenance by maintenance robots.
Solar power satellites. Resources for building more space habs. Platinum. He3.
And who fixes the maintenance robots?
Maintenance robots have the conspicuous disadvantage of not existing. If they did exist, there would be extremely lucrative applications for them here on Earth, e.g. in the deepwater oil industry, but not only do they not exist, there isn’t much in the way of efforts to develop them. Instead, we get great enthusiasm about the prospects for teleoperated systems capable of performing only the simplest maintenance tasks.
For the rest, there’s humans or there’s abandoning everything as soon as it breaks in a not-simple way. Or there’s waiting for the true -general-purpose AI, because that’s what a general-purpose maintenance robot will require.
Granted it may be a minority view here in the LW diaspora, but some of us aren’t planning to wait for AI to make all our dreams and/or nightmares come true.
@ bean
That which fixes broken meatbags : -P
Oh, that’s just to match the space mining industry.
@Lumifer:
The example of saturation divers is relevant here. These people have to spend their off-hours in pressurized habitats so they don’t get the bends. Replacing them with robots would be a major benefit, and wouldn’t even have the recursion problem I brought up, because we could just haul them up and fix them on the surface. For that matter, replacing EVAs with robots would be tremendously helpful, simply because EVAs are a major pain. Again, no recursion problem because you haul the robot into the airlock and fix it there. And yet they don’t exist, and I’m not aware of any serious research on them.
@ bean
Here is a real-life deepwater maintenance robot. It fixes undersea cables.
@bean
Bean:I’m arguing that Mars rover operation is of only marginal relevance to industrial work. Driving slowly across Mars and scooping up the occasional rock is a far cry from what we’ll need to do serious resource exploitation. How would any of these things have helped the Intelsat rescue?
Now you are moving the goalposts around a lot. The original point you/h were making was how awesome it was that humans could catch a satellite that a special robot arm in 1992 couldn’t. I said tele-operation, remotes, etc. have progressed a lot since 1992 (implying that the future is not limited to 1992 technology). You said no progress was made at all in tele-operation, and I brought up the Mars rovers as a space-relevant example. The specific tasks of the those rovers may not be the exact same as large scale space mining, but their rapid evolution in capabilities shows that our computers and our software are getting much better and machine vision is actually a real thing now (and will be getting better). All of that is very relevant to a wide variety of tasks beyond specimen collection.
I think today having a robot do the Intelsat repair would still be more expensive than a free space shuttle ride (if you are going to discount all the actual costs of transporting and safely returning waterbags). But junking it would be the cheapest solution, and satellites and industrial processes (six sigma, etc.) are much better now than they were in 1992 so blunders like Hubble and Intelsat IV which are amenable to manual repair will be even more rare in the future. Designing complex systems for easier LRU replacement can also be done if you do anticipate that need (certainly for all routine maintenance like battery swap outs, etc. that should be expected in long-term designs). Obviously satellites are not currently designed that way. If there were any routinely necessary maintenance functions they would be designed for automated drone services. And if they were rare types of failures, then the mass of the replacement will almost always be a better expense than the mass of a waterbag Maytag repairman and maintaining the infrastructure around him.
“The team behind the idea also wants to ensure that humanity has an independent “country” which prioritises scientific advancement over political or commercial ambitions”
I think their plan could benefit from a healthy dose of cynicism.
In related news, I’ve finally begun reading Seveneves and it’s really good so far!
@The Guardian
Neoliberalism is creating loneliness. That’s what’s wrenching society apart.
No, no, no, no, no. Humans are not being peeled apart. They’re being freed from dependency relationships that forced them to be glued to their families and birthplaces for their entire lives.
You can make all sort of “psychic unity of mankind” like statements when you paint with a broad brush, but while it’s true that humans like interacting with each other, what you are missing is that they also hate interacting with each other. Atomization allows me the delicious freedom to choose my levels of interaction with others.
Overwhelmingly the first two. Marx could tell you that (God, Marxists are so much better than tepid progressive liberals).
Uh, what? Some places we are told that and other places we aren’t. The Guardian isn’t a minor publication.
The problem with this is that you are acting as if all you need to do is elect Labour instead of the Conservatives and then technological atomization will grind to a halt. This is wrong, and it really is mostly due to technological change and not capitalism (which just produces the capacity for it). If you achieved some sort of magical post-scarcity socialism, people would still be hyper-atomized. It’s not individualist ideology that creates atomization, but an increasing supply of easily accessible resources. If I receive according to “my needs”, then I am freed even further from the relationships which are merely dependency relationships, and then we find out who my true friends really were, all along.
Complaining about consumerism has always struck me as a profoundly conservative argument. When I hear people complain about it, it brings to mind pictures of people living in thatched huts, all 19 in the family huddled around a fire, only able to consume each others stories and gritty bread farmed by hand.
When socialists complain about consumerism, I just don’t get it. Surely, the bad part of capitalism is the part where people are being exploited and deprived of the resources their labor produces. It’s contradictory to then complain about the resources they can access, unless your claim is that the masses will magically like totally different products that conform to my personal aesthetic tastes because socialism? Your complaint basically boils down to all the things people like being distractions from our real human spirit. This is some heady reactionary stuff.
Now, I insist on not using social media and just email people and text them instead. I think Facebook is a disgusting monstrosity, but I at least admit that this is just my personal taste, and not some objective fact that is being hidden from people by the distortions of neoliberal ideology. There’s certainly an in-authenticity to having thousands upon thousands of “friends”, but really the fact that people are gaming this stuff has nothing to do with ideology, or capitalism, and everything to do with that nasty spooky thing called human nature.
Again, why would getting rid of neoliberal capitalism get rid of social media? If it’s just arbitrarily more regulated capitalism then it’s still going to exist. If it’s actual outright socialism, then all that will happen is that Facebook gets nationalized. Imagine trying to take social media away from people!
There is no alternative!
That’s human biology + technological capacity. Neoliberal capitalism as a system let alone as an ideology isn’t the defining factor here.
Have mental illnesses actually increased? It could totally be true that social media has increased the intensity of sexual competition between women, but the base of that competition is still biological, and it has existed forever. Some level of intensification of competition could have occurred, but this would be due to social media allowing women to display themselves to wider audiences who are able to view the pictures at all times, leading to higher levels of stress and the additional worries about anonymous harassers and doxers and so on. Again, there is little here driven by ideology or by the capitalist system (except in the sense that capitalism generates enough wealth to drive technology forwards).
Actual solutions (if mental illness and suicide have increased), would involve increasing funding to mental health treatment. Social media end solutions have already been implemented in the form of block bots and so on. The problem will always remain so long as social media exists, however, and I don’t even think the stressed out women want to ban it, and even if they do, they are outnumbered anyway.
It’s far too variant to treat as seriously. Not easy to enforce by law. The push to do so is a big part of the cultural battleground right now. Let’s stop and just increase mental health funding or something please.
The reason many people find it difficult to connect is that other people don’t want to connect with them. It’s a “tragedy of the commons” in that technology and abundance have freed people from having to interact with people they would have previously had mutual dependency relationships with. Even with people we have valuable interactions, there may be other traits about them that we hate that in a totally free environment would drive us apart from them.
The social pain comes from the cognitive dissonance caused by missing the positive aspects of interaction once you have long since been free to escape the negative aspects. However, if you then tried to force yourself back together with these people, you’d remember the negative aspects all over again, and with the modern capacity to do so, drift apart once more. We’d experience even more pain trying to go back to how things were.
What is new is that the things we dislike about each other are finally winning over the things we like about each other. This does not mean that we don’t form friendships and relationships, but that they are now much more fluid than they once were. Instead of living with your family for your whole life in the same village, even poor schmucks like me can escape and go live elsewhere. We still love our mothers, but we now dip in and out of interaction to sample the positive parts and then quickly flee from the negative parts once more.
We have less friends, because only through stable long term interaction through thick and thin can loyalty and camaraderie emerge. People lament the decline of friendship while being unable to maintain any more than shallow relationships with those around them.
But it’s not yet done. People still have childhood friends from being forced into the school system together, and they still have adult friends and relationships from work and friends of friends and family, but even those institutions will pass. Come the automation of labor, there will no longer be any jobs and therefore no longer any school. All these institutions and the bonds they have created will disappear, and what remains is a pleasure seeking, pain avoiding animal.
Society will be abolished.
You have no choice. Every complaint about alienation occurs in a divided “individual” who assists the process themselves by fleeing from pain, only to lament what is lost, to return, only to flee again. Humans will never be happy (but still increase NHS funding or whatever please).
Well, a policy response that actually wanted to end alienation would be disastrous and kill millions of people. Reappraising our worldview how you want will likely lead to bad policy responses.
Humans don’t “do it alone”, but there is not a unified force holding them together either. Humans work together under some level of duress versus some level of comfort, with the level of cooperation determined by the benefit against the cost. The benefits will never become zero, but they are lowering steadily all the time as technology marches forwards, while the costs remain relatively fixed. When the benefits drop below the costs, people’s relationships become highly impermanent.
The result is an “unsociety” in which people sample each other like commodities. Social media is just optimized human interaction for the masses.
People will still date! Well, sure, but that’s more fluid now too. What do you think all that weird sex politics stuff is about? Do you think that’s just ideology?
Neoliberalism is simply aligned with free market capitalism which underpins wealth generation which supports technological growth which accelerates desocietalization, from which flowers forth a whole host of bizarre modes of thought in response. Technology is a force running against Conservative ideology (but not against right wing ideology per se; there are deeply unconservative forms of right wing thought), and against the small c conservative ideology that remains deeply closeted behind the radical facade of left wing thought.
Go ahead, put on the brakes. I dare you, but you aren’t going to like it.
Quick rhetorical question: if you were raising an animal in captivity, and you knew that in the wild it lives in groups of 150, how many would you put per cage minimum? How many maximum?
Human nature is real, we’re not blank slates. If you atomize people then their instincts will scream at them that they’ve been thrown out of the tribe. And that was a profoundly dangerous position to be in for nearly all of human history.
Human beings do best in small kinship groups or in military-esque clans a la Männerbünde. The wealth of research on the outcome of even relatively amicable divorce on children, Putnam’s research into the decay of social trust in diverse atomized societies, plummeting birthrates in the first world and just using your own eyes should reveal that the breakup of society is a catastrophe.
It sounds great to say “see, now that you’re free from society you can associate with whomever you want!” But in practice it means putting humans one-to-a-cage. Not exactly a recipe for health.
In any group of humans, there is a hierarchy. The group tends to be good for those on the top and often for those in the middle, but those on the bottom would be better off alone (though this would not be good for society). The nature of hierarchy means the plurality are on the bottom.
This is why adult children prefer not to visit their parents and why the parents wish they would.
I was going to say: though I don’t disagree with the basic contention that humans are social animals, it seems like they break apart and atomize as soon as they get enough money to do so–and not just to be free of the authority of e. g. parents, but just to be free to do what one wants in general. I am frequently surprised, for example, at how not-close my father’s extended family is, given that I am quite close to my parents and siblings.
“So… Dad, haven’t seen your sister in what? 20 years? What happened? Big fight? She hates your guts? Just never get around to it? But you had a chat a few years ago?” (answer is they like each other fine but just never get around to it: some bond this family, these genes!)
People in the past basically lived on top of each other because they had to. Once people had the chance to have their own bedroom, their own kitchen, their own sphere not to be bossed around by their parents, they mostly jumped at it. Not saying this is optimal, but seems to be a kind of “race-to-the-bottom” of social activity.
Yes you need other people for mental health, but other people are also annoying. Maybe it’s like being fat: it wasn’t a problem to be fat in the evolutionary past, so your genes err on the side of letting you get crazy fat sooner than you undereat. It probably wasn’t a problem to be able to live a comfortable life independently with internet porn in the evolutionary past, so evolution hasn’t worried about you claiming too much independence with the result of you secretly getting depressed sooner than deal with your mother-in-law.
My maternal grandfather is just like your dad – doesn’t have any bone against his many siblings, but he just sees little reason to visit them. He turned 80 this year, and it was the first time he saw pretty much any family since grandma died.
I don’t understand this. You think parents want children to visit because the parents are higher status???
Saying the group is good for the top and bad for the bottom presumably relies on a zero-sum reading: the strong can exploit the weak. But it’s very possible a more communal existence is just better (or just worse) overall. Doesn’t have to be zero sum.
As someone who’s recently had a kid and who has friends with slightly older kids, it is obvious to me that a more communal lifestyle would be better for families with young kids (or indeed who MIGHT have young kids) for instance: much easier for a commune/village/tribe of a few dozen all play part in raising all of their children than have lots of individuals or couples doing it solo. But this communal approach is less easy/natural now and in the West than in other places/times.
Yes, the parents are higher status. They never quite let go of the idea that their children are children. If the adult children try too hard to disabuse them of this notion (that is, to challenge their lower-status position), strife results.
It doesn’t have to be zero sum; in fact, it is almost certainly positive sum. That doesn’t mean there aren’t many people worse off than they would be alone.
I think the internet fixed this by making it possible to be a member of your tribe of 150 by choice rather than having to stick to the, let’s admit it, often suboptimal tribe you were born into.
The unsolved problem is (and maybe has been throughout all history?) of course sex, the one form of interaction the internet cannot provide –
even though HD-porn is a major improvement and I assume that porn will be the market that makes or breaks VR.Maybe I’m peculiar, but I’ve never found any friends online, and the only times I’ve met people from online it has been an absolute disaster.
I guess I’m not so into any one topic that someone being into the same thing is going to be more important to me than how they smile, or whether they laugh at my jokes, or are pleasant to be around.
Also – a problem. If you have some local institution that exists so that lonely people can come and meet friends, it tends to be a bit depressing and not much fun. It’s better to have an institution that *everyone* has to attend (work/church/school) and then it works a lot better.
There’s a phrase I remember hearing a lot when I was younger. I’m almost certain that it’s made up but it has nonetheless been useful to me.
It was something like “when you’re talking to someone the words you say only carry about 10% of the meaning.” The implication being that 90% is intonation, gesticulation, posture and a thousand other subtle signals which you can’t easily transcribe.
An online friend is the modern equivalent of a pen pal, with the bonus of maybe seeing them over Skype on occasion. You’re rarely going to be in the same room, much less go out and do anything together. It’s better than nothing but it’s not a substitute for real human contact.
Anyway sex is not much of an issue in an atomized world. I’ve had sex with more women in the last year than most of my ancestors probably did during their entire lives due to loose modern courtship norms. The issue is with long-term relationships: even if you want to marry and stay married it’s very challenging to do now.
Let my try again.
I hope I do your original statement justice, when I say that you seem to think that society in pronciple could improve by reasearching ideal yet specific human living conditions (“the human nature”) and then striving to implement these conditions. If e. g. research showed that social groups of 150 are ideal, it should be our societal goal to provide social groups of 150.
The obvious alternative theory – inspired by David Friedman’s book and postings, but mistakes of course are mine – is that individuals know best what is best for themselves, no further research needed, and cannot help but striving to implement whats best for them, also nothing else needed. If e. g. we observe that most individuals do not belong to groups of 150 this is not evidence that something is fundamentally wrong but that 150 not really is the ideal group size. However, if 150 actually were the ideal group size, there should be no arbitrary rules against forming groups of 150.
Me, personally, I believe that I want to have the choice. In your original analogy, I most certainly do not want to be encaged with 149 others, bring all the research you want. If that means that I miss out 90% of human interaction so be it. My argument for the internet as a solution is that it makes individual choice essentially free.
You seem to prefer or advocate preference of something else, but I am not sure that I understand what.
@Alex,
My position is kind of a mix of what you predicted my position to be and David’s.
If you want a sexy pseudo-scientific name for it you could say I’m arguing from memetic evolution. A slightly less sexy Kipling reference would be ‘The Gods of the Copybook Headings.’ Personally, I prefer to call it Tradition with an upper-case T but that’s because I like to pretend I’m a wizard online.
Societies which follow certain rules consonant with human nature prosper and those which don’t die out. Some of these rules are more amendable to rational analysis than others: the purpose may not become clear until after they are removed. But in general when you find a “highly conserved” social arrangement across time and space you should assume that it’s important even if it’s not clear why.
Individuals do generally know what’s best for them, and top-down control is usually going to backfire. But Traditional society is less like a Procrustean bed people are forced into and more like the tertiary structure of humanity: if conditions are right, people will self-organize into well ordered societies. But if conditions are wrong then you get chaos and a bunch of useless social amyloids building up everywhere.
Fair points.
Societies need to adapt to circumstances as well as human nature, and societies have died from over adherence to tradition.
Evolution was not designed to make us happy. Nor is their proof 150 is the evolutionary optimum for such (I thought the evidence actually pointed to it being the point where social cohesion begins breaking down so it is more of where the resource limit of personal relationship maintenance in pre-historic societies exist).
I imagine if pre-historic societies had had today’s communication technologies and available free time that the ‘tribal limit’ would have been much higher.
@Dr Dealgood
My argument is specifically based on human nature being real and humans needing social interaction. What I’m saying is that the preference isn’t completely flat and instead is defined by the struggle between the desire to interact and the annoyance of interacting.
I cannot into math but…
Level of societal cohesion = (Base psychological need for interaction + Dependency induced need for interaction) – Base psychological costs of interaction
Therefore, the cohesion formula is: S = (B + D) – C
Since B and C are relatively (but not completely*) fixed by biology/average levels of pleasantness and annoyance of people, whereas D is rapidly trending downwards due to technological acceleration, S falls downwards until D = 0 (fully automated post-labor world) and S = B – C, which either means that S finalizes at a very small number (since empirically B isn’t gigantic otherwise we wouldn’t be complaining about atomization in the first place) indicating a weak pull together (that we would today still be called hyperatomized), or C is bigger than B, and in which case S is negative and we completely desocietalize.
*B and C will vary within that human range based on temperament (introverts, extroverts), and it’s possible we can mod B and C drastically by transcending human biology. “Be less annoying” for C, or “Be more fun to be around” for B aren’t going to be up to much when considering the macro scale.
The thing is, you can have the group without the kinship or community or society or whatever you want to call it, if the group is merely this fluid transient thing. On the internet there are various communities, but I can dip in and out of them rapidly and choose my level of interaction. Instead of social bonds we have social commodities.
Imagine that in the real world and society as this “thing” is abolished.
I think the people in families would win.
What do you mean?
I agree with this, but I think there’s a missed problem. For people to get to do what they want, it isn’t sufficient for there to be a lack of coercion. Rather, they need to have low-cost opportunity to do what they want, and if that opportunity is lacking it doesn’t actually matter very much whether it’s lacking because of coercion or because of coordination issues or because of any other reason.
I don’t think this is true. I don’t think most people have no one who would want to connect with them, or want to be alone. I think they’d just rather be with people they prefer to be with, and who prefer to be with them, and I think those people exist; they’re just having trouble finding them.
I see a lot of lonely people who seem perfectly nice, and would be glad to be with each other, but can’t find each other, or no one is breaking the ice, which is not helped by the emphasis on keeping geographical location secret online. Forming groups involves a deliberate effort and generally induces a great deal of anxiety, and is very slow to happen. I don’t think people aren’t forming social groups because the other people they’d want to be grouped with would rather not be; I think they aren’t forming social groups because we haven’t actually worked out an efficient process for consensually doing so except online, where people are geographically scattered.
Forming close-knit committed groups is even harder; it’s difficult to come up with non-religious examples that aren’t small, private circles of friends.
Agree that this is the mechanism which is causing this process, and that by on large it’s a good thing. But I think it’s a valid problem that while it has disrupted the processes that force people into groups, it hasn’t replaced them with low-cost ways of finding and joining groups consensually, it’s just left groups without any means of recruiting or forming, and people without any means of being in a group, and this leaves a lot of people unhappy and would be worth trying to develop some new social technology to solve.
That’s not really what socialists complain about most of the time, though. I concede it’s what they say. But most socialists are just frustrated at what’s wrong with the world. They want to get rod of capitalism because they think that will fix it. That’s wrong, of course. But it’s not capitalism they’re really fighting against; they’re fighting against all the pain and purposelessness they see and feel around them.
I sympathize with the historical materialism and find the positive account convincing, but disagree with some implied normative claims.
I’ve posted this before, but it bears repeating:
(source)
I haven’t read the article– this is just a general point.
While it’s good that people can get away from people they don’t like, there’s another piece.
People get scattered away from each other in order to find work. This has good points, but there’s a substantial downside. Social networks, including families, get separated, and this makes life harder, especially when the cost of helping parents (by people who want to help their parents) is driven up by not living near them.
I suspect that a lack of long association makes neighbors less likely to help each other.
I expected that telecommuting would be more useful and common than it’s turned out to be.
You seem to think that being free do to whatever you want will be good for you, (for a wide and diverse range of “you”). It was a nice theory, but, to more and more people’s dawning horror, it turns out to not actually be the case. Turns out all those dead old men who wrote those dead old books were on to something.
It’s far too late to turn back, of course.
Think of it as the pan-society equivalent of the final words recorded by flight recorders recovered from fatal crashes: “oh, SHIT!”
Alternatively, life goes on.
Here’s an article that may be relevant:
https://www.wired.com/2013/12/ap_thompson-2/
Apparently humans have the same level of desire for social connections, but because they’ve been denied full meatspace social interaction, the youth are getting it where they can get it: on social media.
Romance/sex is apparently still primarily meatspace-oriented, though:
https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/10/01/445118529/we-need-2-talk-most-teens-still-start-end-their-relationships-offline
That was a pretty impressive post, so of course I’m going to ignore almost all of it and latch on to one minor point: is there, in fact, an epidemic of mental illness, in the traditional sense of the word “epidemic”? I could see any or all of the following:
1. Things aren’t actually worse, but “mental illness” has been redefined downwards. So minor problems or personality quirks are now considered major issues.
2. People have always had this level of mental illness but modern culture encourages them to be more open about it.
3. People have always had this level of mental illness but modern culture puts such people into public life instead of hidden away in homes or institutions (not quite the same as #2.)
4. Mental illness, or at least the claim thereof, is rewarded with social status/power in certain subcultures. Therefore we get more of it, especially from young and impressionable people who spend most of their time in those subcultures.
5. …?
It occurred to me to wonder today* if a plethora of new definitions of illness, especially mental illness, get made simply because of the American health care system? Your medical costs are paid by your private insurance plan, but your insurers will only pay for what are defined conditions. So your doctor or psychiatrist can’t write you a prescription for something as a once-off, but if you have a diagnosis of Pain In Toe Syndrome with an official definition and entry in a handbook like the DSM, then they’ll pay up.
So what before would have been the ordinary ups and downs of life now have to be Officially Recognised Disorders simply for book-keeping purposes.
*This was in the context of something I read about in a post berating how the pain of bereavement lasting longer than two weeks was medicalised as an illness by the American Psychological Association (or it might have been the American Psychiatric Association, I can’t remember which APA it was), because a particular drug was good for treating it.
I can’t help but feel a lot of borderline cases of ADHD and Autism fit this mold.
“*This was in the context of something I read about in a post berating how the pain of bereavement lasting longer than two weeks was medicalised as an illness by the American Psychological Association (or it might have been the American Psychiatric Association, I can’t remember which APA it was), because a particular drug was good for treating it.”
That would be the American Psychiatric Association’s DSM V
I think it’s something else, related to 1: mental illness will be diagnosed today at a milder level than it would have been in the past, but at the same time, mental illness is more disabling than it used to be. Severe MI was always disabling, but now many relatively mild disorders can ruin or at least seriously harm your ability to earn a decent living, and because old structured social networks are broken down and people have to form their own, it’s much more difficult for people with mild to moderate MI to form a robust social network that would take some of the edge off.
When many jobs demand constant cheerfulness, mild depression makes it very difficult to succeed, whereas a similar job a few generations ago would have demanded basic competency and decent manners, not a convincingly bubbly, always-happy demeanor. One full-time job in the 1950s would usually pay enough to live on; today many people require two jobs just to qualify for an apartment lease, and working two full-time jobs with MI is much harder than working one, even if the jobs themselves are physically somewhat easier.
So yes, it takes fewer symptoms and less severity to qualify for a diagnosis, but it also takes fewer symptoms and less severity for it to cause you major problems in life today, and therefore I think making the dx’s with a bit less makes sense. It’s not an epidemic in the strict sense of more people having mental illness. It’s that more people are suffering serious secondary consequences – complications, perhaps – of mental illness.
I think the future is customized relationships. You get your AI and you program it to like certain things that you like, have certain quirks that you find endearing and fulfill all of your fantasies. It starts off with the lonely nerds and then quickly moves up until preferring human romance is considered completely backwards. And this will apply to friends too. To me, this sounds like a horrifying future but on the other hand, future values are usually dystopian.
Perhaps it wouldn’t be considered completely backwards, but instead kind of kooky, like insisting on making all your food from scratch, or only wearing clothes you’ve made yourself.
That’s a good analogy. I can see the setting right now…
“So if he’s so lonely, why doesn’t he just get his own AI girlfriend.”
“He has this weird hang up about it. Says that it isn’t “real”. I don’t really get it but if he wants to be bitter and alone, that’s his prerogative.”
“But why would anyone even want a relationship with another person. What if they have some annoying habit that drives them crazy?
“Well, he would have to deal with it”
“And what if they didn’t want to be with you”
“Well then you didn’t get to be with them
“And what if you were with them but then they stopped wanting to be with you”
“Then they would leave you”
“That sounds terrible”
“It was”
“And he actually wants that?”
“Like I said, it doesn’t make any sense to me. He’s always been like that though”
“This is bringing me down. More soma?”
I’ve got a half-sentence review of “Black Mirror” up at my blog:
SSC is blocked on my computer most of the time (too addictive), but I’ll do my best to keep up if we can talk about what’s wrong with this series and how it has the potential to be great but fails. Have I put my finger on it? Opinions, go!
Your link is broken, because it points at a nonexistent SSC page.
Your review is stupid, because it makes us click through for 2.5 more sentences.
It is broken! Weird. Here’s the link:
https://welldotdotdot.wordpress.com/2016/10/11/black-mirror-in-half-a-sentence/
My review is awesome, c’mon.
Seriously, the click-through is part of the format of the blog: I try to keep each entry to about 11 words, and if it gets longer I usually provide a click-through link even if it’s just to a few more sentences. (In most cases it’s to a few more paragraphs. In this case I thought I’d write more but found I didn’t need to.)
My question to you, thoughtful SSC commenter, is about whether you think I hit the nail on the head. Have I correctly summarized the core problem with “Black Mirror”?
I don’t think a one sentence quip is enough to establish your chain of thought. I would go in to much more detail on why you think you’re right. Otherwise you might as well be posting to twitter.
To your point, I think seeing Black Mirror and dismissing it as focusing on relationships is like reading Hamlet and dismissing it as mere family problems. Superficially, that’s what it’s about but it’s really about human nature. The Entire History of You isn’t about petty jealousy. It’s about how technology can be used in dark ways to strain our relationships. How there needs to be a certain level of trust so that someone doesn’t feel the need to go back and obsess over tiny details to keep himself paranoid. It’s how technology can do useful things but can also dehumanize us as well. Yes, technology might kill us all or ensure utopia but that doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with examining the subtle ways it affects us. If you don’t like Black Mirror that’s fine, but shallow is not the word I would use to describe it.
But see, that’s my point. In that episode, it isn’t about “our relationships,” it’s about this one paranoid, jealous guy’s relationship with his hot wife. It’s obvious to me that even without the mind chips, those characters would end up the same way.
A show about the same old human problems wrapped in a sci-fi shell isn’t interesting when the pitch is that it’s an examination of the dark side of technology—and such an examination is sorely needed.
What about technology’s impact on our relationships? What about the millions of people who are addicted to the devices in their pockets, or who are useless without them, or whose thought patterns and biases and preferences are engineered according to the UX decisions of a small team of designers and cognitive scientists in Palo Alto? What about our complacency with lack of privacy, and our willingness to broadcast to the whole world (and in so doing, to hand over to a giant corporation) intimate artifacts from the most personal moments in our lives? What about the impact of technology on our dignity, our way of living, our way of working, our traditions and the world our grandkids will inherit?
A show like “Black Mirror” has the potential to tackle these issues, but instead it is fixated on high-school-level romantic relationships being spoiled by Cellphones Behaving Badly.
That’s why I say it jumps off a high-dive and lands in a puddle.
There was a science fiction story (sorry, author and title forgotten, probably some decades old) about a future where living alone is so convenient that people have forgotten how to be even a little polite and accomodating with each other.
@Nancy Lebovitz
That goes back to what I said about social hierarchy being crappy for those on the bottom. I can see that happening thus: When those who have to defer to everyone bail out, there’s a new bottom. They get sick of having to defer to everyone, and they bail out, until everyone’s alone.
It would have been a lot harder for him to figure out his girlfriend was cheating on him if he didn’t literally watch it. If he didn’t replay that those videos over and over in his head, would he still have been paranoid? Maybe, but I don’t think to that extent. He probably would have just dropped it after getting drunk that one night. This isn’t to say that the technology was the sole reason that the events played out the way they did but it did change his relationship with his wife, just in a different way than some other sci-fis might have implied. And it’s also about the Lack of privacy, they even mention that when the one women mentions her grain being stolen for implied illicit purposes.
And even beyond that episode, do you think Be Right Back is an episode that is basically the same without the tech aspects? What about the Christmas special? Even the episodes with no new technology usually show how our current tech is changing how we live. In the National Anthem, everyone is glued to the screen so much no one notices that the princess is safe. So maybe they aren’t raising these issues in the way you expect but they are talking about them.
I am curious what others know about the Columbia referendum against making a deal with FARC. Before the referendum it sounded like a good idea to me, if it helped to end the violence in Columbia. On the other hand, I have heard that FARC has been mostly defeated anyway, so maybe dealing with them politically is a bad solution, if they can just destroy them militarily.
I have seen no one in these comments self identify themselves as a Columbian, or even from South America, but I’d love to hear somewhat local comments about why the vote went against the referendum. Was it because people thought it was a bad idea to keep FARC in the politics of Columbia when it isn’t necessary, or is it mostly revenge thinking that FARC has to be punished and not rewarded?
There’s a huge difference between “mostly defeated” and actually gone (compare Hamas). I grew up in Israel, and it’s incredibly sad when people reject peace because it doesn’t satisfy their need for revenge.
I am not Colombian, but a large chunk of my native country is plagued by Communist terrorism and has been for quite some time. Thousands of people have died. India’s communists share a philosophical outlook with Peru’s Shining Path, which is to say they are happy with limitless violence aimed at innocent people they deem to be “traitors”, “reactionaries” and “enemies of the revolution” so long as it moves the country further toward their Maoist utopia.
So I understand the feelings of any Colombian who voted “no” because they want retribution rather than reconciliation. I don’t want a detente with domestic terrorists; I want them exterminated en masse. Do you consider this a good message to send a domestic terrorist organization — that if you kill enough people over a sustained period of time, you can frighten the state into forgiving you?
Across the sea from where I grew up, there was a civil war raging in Sri Lanka for 25 years. There were numerous opportunities for a final settlement with the LTTE over the years but they all failed because the two sides had irreconcilable differences. Eventually all the leaders of the LTTE were killed, their organization was shattered, and as a result nothing like the LTTE will ever come again. When there is no common ground, the only way to settle things is to destroy one side.
The problem with any analogy to the naxalites is that India is a functioning democracy that has several perfectly legal Marxist parties that hold seats in the Lok Sabha.
In fact an entire spectrum of left wing and socialist ideas have been represented in mainstream Indian politics for decades, and the parties that championed them have won tangible victories in areas like land reform, public health care, and labor rights . Indian leftists have no grounds to claim they have been unfairly shut out of the political process. Even the Indian right has, at least sometimes, shown an admirable commitment to providing public goods to the poor.
According to world bank statistics India has a lower poverty rate then Colombia despite having less then half the GDP per capita.
the social circumstances are just not the same.
During the peace negotiations with the Belisario Betancur’s government in the mid 1980s the FARC tried to form a political party called the Unión Patriótica, some enterprising gentlemen form Medellín basically exterminated every one of their candidates, and a quite a few of their voters. Colombia remains the most dangerous place in the world to be a trade unionist and activists on the left have targeted for execution by paramilitaries every bit as violent as groups like the FARC and ELN.
The FARC are gangsters, what ever political aims they once had have been cast aside long ago in favor of banditry, but the same thing can be said of the AUC or any of it’s myriad descendants.
Most of the perpetrators of right wing violence in Colombia have been allowed to demobilize while receiving no meaningful punishment for their crimes, it is strange to demand a different standard for the left.
The only issue I have about the post is the poverty level comparison between Colombia and India. More than 20% of Indian population earn less than $1.90 a day whereas that number is less than 5.3% in Colombia.
There is a subtle difference in comparison between Farc and Maoist Naxalites. India cannot easily be thought of as a single country, but more like a agglomeration. The states where Naxalites spread through are Sub-Saharan in their indicators. The point of comparison between the FARC and Naxalites is the tribal subaltern class (even below the farmer level) that support both groups.
That seems to be a point where I was just plain wrong, I assumed that the world bank statistics I was using reflected a purchasing power parity estimate of poverty, in fact they just listed the percentage below the national poverty line.
I thought it was surprising at the time, and should have double checked it.
But to try and salvage some of the point I was making; as you say, there is huge regional variation India. If I had limited my claim to Kerala, Punjab, Himachal, or even Tamil Nadu (places, where the are of course no Naxalites) I would have probably have been right. Those places are not wealthy, even by developing world standards, but they have taken action to alleviate the worst kinds of deprivation.
There are clearly mechanisms in at least some parts of India that allow the political demands of the poor to be addressed through democratic means. How is it that the Indian political system has been so much more responsive to needs of it’s citizens in Kerala then in Andhra Pradesh?
Can someone explain to me how they deal with links in these comments? There are lots of links here, often integral to the discussion, but I ma hesitant to use them because I often lose my place in the comments when I come back. In particular, I often use cntr F to find responses to my comments or to find all the comments placed in the past day. It seems when I come back from links the cursor goes back to the last ctrl F item I had, which could be 100’s of comments away.
Is there a way to ensure I can come back to the same place after using a link?
I use tabbed browsing.
What is that?
Right click on the link and select “Open in New Tab”
Oh my God that works great! I don’t know why I didn’t figure this out myself, since I was playing around with it to figure out how to do just that.
Thanks a lot.
Tabbed browsing is awesome. I
primarily use it to keep track of interesting links I want to read/watch when I don’t have the time to get to it right away. On my desktop I have at least 20 tabs open at any given time.
Control-click also works, and is a bit faster (at least for me, on a laptop). Chrome and chromium keep a stack of your closed tabs; Ctrl-Shift-t pops the top of the stack and opens that page. I’d bet that firefox can do the same thing, but I don’t know the shortcut.
Middle mouse click also does this, at least on Firefox, and middle mouse clicking the tab itself will close it again.
The downside is that the number of open tabs tends to grow exponentially that way. At least until you’re pretty familiar with the topic in question – you’ll notice that this is the case when an increasing number of links in the articles you read is already dark…
What are tabs?
A diet cola from the early 60s, and its successor beverages.
…mmm tab.
Since we had a discussion about classic movies we hadn’t seen, I’m going to ask the opposite question, what movies have you seen that you think are overlooked classics?
I’ll start off with a special selection for latetotheparty,
Straight outta locash!
It’s the 1993 Chris Rock gangsta Rap satire CB4. Not a perfect movie, but a definite example of a film that came too early. Hip hop had just recently made the crossover into mainstream popularity, and the Jokes went over the heads of mostly white audiences.
The 1963 film The Servant is I think a massively underappreciated classic. It’s written by Harold Pinter, and is about a man who becomes a servant to a british aristocrat and gradually turns the tables on their relationship of dominance. The acting, writing, and cinematography are all excellent.
Also, Three Women, by Robert Altman, which is like a better version of Bergman’s Persona.
Also, I don’t know if it counts as overlooked, since there’s a subset of critics that do rank it highly enough to put it on the BBC’s top 100 of the new century, but I think Under the Skin is by some margin the best film of the past ten years.
Under The Skin is definitely underrated and overlooked.
Might be the best movie this side of y2k
Loved it the first time I saw it. Cried the second
Dead Ringers is a fairly well regarded film, but it is often overlooked in favor of other Cronenberg works like The Fly and A Dangerous Method. I highly recommend it; I think it can stand alongside anything David Lynch has done in the psychological thriller genre.
I agree. I think it’s Cronenberg’s best film.
Thirding here. Vintage weirdness, Jeremy Irons gives a magnificently repulsive yet pitiable performance as the twins, and Genevieve Bujold is excellent as her character.
I enjoyed Dead Ringers, but it’s a strange one because it seems halfway between Cronenberg’s David Lynch-esque films and his mainstream films.
Dead Ringers has the bizarre joined-by-flesh dream, the mutant tools, and the blood-red surgical robes, but the viewer never loses track of what level of reality they’re on.
Unlike, say, Existenz and Videodrome.
One of the distinctions that I see between Cronenberg and someone like David lynch is that, while Cronenberg’s films may be surreal, they always follow an internal logic of their own.
To me the aesthetic appeal of surrealism rests on exploring a world that is internally consistent but operates on rules very different form our own.
When I watch Lost Highway, or Mulholland Drive, I often have no idea why anything on screen is happening. Can anybody explain to me what Inland Empire was about?
For the same kind of contrast compare Terry Gilliam to Alejandro Jodorowsky. Brazil and Twelve Monkeys have unconventional plots, are full of elaborate and strange scenery, and depend on narrative devices that twist the audience’s sense of reality, but everything is there for a reason. On the other hand The Holy Mountain is just weird for the sake of being weird.
I prefer it to be precariously balanced between the two. Basically, it’s best when a movie provokes viewers to be confident in their own interpretation of it, even when the text of the movie doesn’t lend itself to interpretation.
I think most viewers have some basic idea of what’s going on in Lynch’s movies: the main character is in some sort of distress. If what you’re shown provokes distress in you, then you sympathize with the character.
Why does the man in Eraserhead kill the child? It’s not just because of it looks like a cow fetus. Is it because of his guilt over having an affair? Is it because he’s an insomniac and has terrible dreams of decapitation? Is it because when he eats meat it’s a horrifying, blood-spattering ordeal? You can attribute any of those things to him, but prioritizing one as his concern also prioritizes it as your own concern.
I think surrealism is the easiest way of inducing this, but realism sometimes has this effect too. I remember that the director of Doubt said that, based on the conversations he overheard in the theater lobby, that everyone had seen an different entirely play.
In other words, the characters attributed a moral stance to each character because those characters emoted their moral stances without verbalizing them.
In the group I saw it with, one of us believed that it was primarily about a priest who molested children, one of us believed it was primarily about a boy who was confiding his homosexuality in a priest, and one of us believed it was primarily about a nun who lost her faith in religion.
I just saw The Raid: Redemption, and I’m not sure how overlooked it is, but I really liked it and want to rave about it. It’s a master-class on how to do good martial arts action. It’s clear and comprehensible, showing off all the stylish techniques, but at the same time it’s got a visceral, brutal feel where each strike has impact. Like, the main character will do a complicated parry with his police baton, then follow up by stabbing the guy in the knee and slamming him into a wall. A good mix of elegance and brutality.
It doesn’t have much in the way of plot or characters, but holy shit does it have good action.
Great movie, especially the earlier parts of it. We discussed it at some length in a previous thread.
Jose Ferrer’s Cyrano de Bergerac.
To Be or Not to Be (1941)
I still haven’t seen the Mel Brooks remake, but the original holds up great. It’s about a Polish acting troupe trying to save lives during the Nazi invasion of Poland, and it’s a comedy from 1941! It’s kind of amazing how irreverent it is, I can only imagine because they didn’t know the scope of Nazi atrocities at the time.
In 1941 the Nazis had just started committing serious atrocities. assuming writing started in late 40 or early 41, there basically weren’t many to know about. A nasty anti semitism, sure, and the ugliness of the night of the long knives, but nothing to indicate the scale of what was coming.
Kiki’s delivery service – I only recently heard of it (way after I’d watched most of Myazaki’s other movies), but it’s one of his best.
Mr. Nobody also hit me pretty hard (though it might just have been my mood when I watched it).
I have some odd tastes in movies, but overall I tend to lean toward comedies. Ruthless People and Soapdish often come up. Trading Places is terrific, but I wouldn’t call it overlooked. Children of the Revolution is, however – an Australian movie about a woman’s affair with Joseph Stalin. Yes, it’s a comedy. So is Thank You For Smoking.
Meanwhile, a friend alerted us to Rare Exports a few years ago, and now we watch it every Christmas season.
Agreed on Thank You For Smoking and I continue to insist to anyone that will listen that most of Paul Verhoeven’s movies are comedies as well.
Showgirls was definitely a comedy, I’m just not sure if it was intentional.
Ruthless People is great. “This might very well be the stupidest person on the face of the Earth. Maybe we should kill him.”
I’ll go out on a limb and mention The Divide (2011) as an overlooked, underappreciated one. Fair warning that it has ratings of 25% and 37% (critic and audience) on Rotten Tomatoes, so I’m clearly in the minority here in having not hated it. It’s a deeply disturbing film, at least an order of magnitude more messed up than what I’d consider similar ones (stuff like Snowpiercer or Vinyan), which is probably the main reason it got such a negative response. There is truly not a happy moment in that film, and definitely a case of “trigger warnings for absolutely everything.”
Picking this because it’s hard to think of a movie that’s genuinely overlooked, as opposed to something like Primer that is already known to be great and just suffers from having been an indie film that only got a limited release, or movies that are kind of underrated but not much more than that.
Spinning off a topic mentioned in the comments on Scott’s domestication post (but having nothing to do with the content of that post):
In recent years some Catholic dioceses have been selling off their excess property with restrictions in the deeds binding future owners to abide by Catholic doctrine. For example, about 10 years ago restrictions regarding a New York University dormitory built on the former site of St. Ann’s Church on 12th Street came to light. Now I’m an atheist and as anti-clerical as anyone, but I don’t see anything wrong with a Catholic church requesting that the new owners of the land don’t build an abortionplex or a porno theater or anything else equally offensive to their religion.
The issue I have is that the restrictions in the deed don’t just bind NYU, but all future owners of the land as well, apparently forever. Under New York law deed restrictions expire after 30 years but can be renewed indefinitely, and I don’t see why the archdiocese wouldn’t. The law also allows for restrictions to be removed if they no longer benefit the party with the right to enforce them, but of course it benefits the Church to see its doctrine followed. So in 100 years Walgreens may decide to open a pharmacy there (they’ve already got one on every other block in the city), but they won’t be able to sell condoms or the pill like at their other locations because it used to be owned by the Catholic Church many years ago.
So now I’m wondering why every church doesn’t put open-ended restrictions on their property, and for that matter why every religious person doesn’t do the same and sell the enforcement rights to their church. Fast forward a few cycles of turnover in the property market and everyone will have to follow the religious doctrines of every past owner of their property combined. Totally nuts but apparently allowed under current law.
(No, the Church can’t just put “every future owner must be Catholic” in the deed. Those kinds of deed restrictions were made unenforceable in Shelley v. Kraemer in 1948. To be honest, I’m sure the courts would find some way to limit these religious doctrine restrictions before they got too out of hand too, but it’s fun to speculate about how far it could go.)
(As another side note, the front wall of St. Ann’s was left standing in front of the dorm building. This is probably a metaphor for something.)
Presumably the reason more organizations don’t do that is that nobody is required to buy your property: if the restrictions are too onerous, they’ll either ask for a huge discount or walk.
Most people selling buildings need the money for something else, so unless they’ve got particularly deep pockets and/or are in a place like New York with insanely high land prices there’s a strong incentive not to try it.
Anyway, there’s a strong value in having these sorts of deed restrictions. People with strong sentimental attachments would be much less willing to part with property if they knew that the new owner could, say, chop down their prize 300 year oak tree on a whim or build a “massage parlor” in the basement of their childhood home. As long as buyers are made aware of the restrictions and choose to go forward with it anyway I don’t see the problem.
Thomas Jefferson said it quite nicely for me, and leads me to believe perpetual deed covenants need some reasonable limitations to avoid generational over-reach (not saying this particular case is over-reach but that there are limits):
I set out on this ground which I suppose to be self evident, “that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living;” that the dead have neither powers nor rights over it. The portion occupied by an individual ceases to be his when himself ceases to be, and reverts to the society. If the society has formed no rules for the appropriation of its lands in severalty, it will be taken by the first occupants. These will generally be the wife and children of the decedent. If they have formed rules of appropriation, those rules may give it to the wife and children, or to some one of them, or to the legatee of the deceased. So they may give it to his creditor. But the child, the legatee or creditor takes it, not by any natural right, but by a law of the society of which they are members, and to which they are subject. Then no man can by natural right oblige the lands he occupied, or the persons who succeed him in that occupation, to the paiment of debts contracted by him. For if he could, he might during his own life, eat up the usufruct of the lands for several generations to come, and then the lands would belong to the dead, and not to the living, which would be reverse of our principle. What is true of every member of the society individually, is true of them all collectively, since the rights of the whole can be no more than the sum of the rights of individuals.
I’m presuming the particular restrictions were made because the building had been a church, and also that the diocese weren’t expecting the developer to pull down the entire building and just keep the facade, so that they didn’t want these specific usages. I think, given that the church building itself no longer exists, if a future purchaser wanted to challenge the restrictions, they might be able to. It’s one thing to say “We don’t want our former church turned into an abortion clinic”, it’s another to say “We don’t want the huge ugly dorm buildings on the site of the church which was torn down to be knocked down in turn and an abortion clinic built on the land”.
I’m pretty sure the plans were always to build a tower on the site, though possibly with a greater degree of adaptive reuse of the church structure than the architectural folly they ended up with. As a side note, the facade wasn’t original to the Catholic church – it had been the facade of a Protestant church building on the same site, later briefly used as a Jewish synagogue, before being almost totally rebuilt as St. Ann’s.
Policies appear to vary by diocese. In Massachusetts the Boston and Springfield dioceses are a lot more aggressive (warning: contains potentially lethal doses of left-wing anti-Catholicism). In particular, requiring that former Catholic school buildings not be reused as schools just seems wasteful, and banning non-Catholic churches from the sites is hypocritical – it’s fairly common for church buildings to pass between denominations, and in fact a future cathedral in California was bought from a Protestant megachurch.
former Catholic school buildings not be reused as schools
I wonder about that. Part of the reason might be that if the parish can’t support a school of its own, if another body comes in and builds a school then the parents will probably send the kids there instead of sending them to the Catholic school(s) left open, which undermines the entire purpose of amalgamating and re-ordering schools and parishes: not enough kids going to the designated Catholic school so that gets shut down as well, while the kids go to public or non-denominational schools and don’t get a Catholic education.
About the use of churches, the Boston Archdiocese does seem to have a policy in place:
I don’t know what the internal politics of Boston or the relationship between various denominations are like, to have such a clause. But for the Episcopalians, there was a rather bitter case in 2008 when a conservative parish in a liberal diocese (Central New York) were forced (let’s say) out of their church building; the diocese went to court to have them turfed out, the judge awarded ownership to the diocese (the Episcopalians did things differently from the Catholics so there was some argy-bargy over who owned the title to the church, the parish or the diocese?) and then put the property up for sale. The old parish offered to buy it, but they were turned down, and in 2010 it was eventually sold on to become an Islamic Awareness Centre. The diocese would rather sell it to non-Christians than let the troublemakers who weren’t with the programme on gay bishops buy it.
A combination political compass and electoral map.
Catholic trivia: the papal name Pius was popularized as a pun. When Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini was elected pope in 1458, it had long been customary to take a regnal name rather than use one’s baptismal name. He chose to become Pius II, because “pious” was the hero Aeneas’s epic epithet.
After the last open thread, I’m feeling like I’m living in some bizarro world. Maybe I really am a racist, despite my self-image as a charitable, rational, equality-minded communist….
So, to calibrate things, I showed my wife that Dead Prez video entitled, “Hell Yeah (Pimp the System).” My wife is about as social justice as they come, although I wouldn’t call her a social justice warrior. But she reguarly gets into facebook fights with extended family on abortion, discrimination, gun control, etc., taking the feminist/social justice viewpoint. She hates Trump and is pretty strongly pro-Clinton (although I am working on convincing her of the merits of voting for Jill Stein instead).
So, what was my wife’s reaction to the video? Well, she’s not the type to comment on internet blogs, so you’ll just have to take my word for it: That is was basically ugly and heinous, with the intro part of the white family getting lost somewhere and getting their car stolen being especially unsettling. Yes, that’s an anecdote, but at least that’s one other person out there who had the same reaction that I now have (like I said, as a teenager I thought the video was funny instead).
That makes sense. Those white people at the beginning of the video are us. White, well-meaning, dorky, and probably utterly defenseless should we ever find ourselves in that sort of situation.
Unless you live in some social justice warrior bubble, you’d probably understand that a majority of white Americans would also identify with that family at the beginning of the video. The number of whites that would sympathize more with the gang in that video and find it humorous or even maybe say, “Yeah, take it, you spoiled, privileged, racist white bourgies!” would be few in number. (My teenage self would have taken that latter viewpoint, believe it or not).
Now, is one hip-hop video the end of the world? No, of course not. I’m not going to be like that Christian mom that recently went on youtube and demonstrated her naivate that, oh my gosh, there is CURSING and LEWD LANGUAGE in today’s rap music. I wasn’t born yesterday. The “Hell yeah” video was just the most salient representation that I could think of to explain something that makes me deeply uncomfortable.
People wonder where the alt-right comes from. Well, I think I can understand one angle from which people might approach it.
Imagine there are two groups in society: the green-grassers and the orange-grassers. Green-grassers believe that grass is green. You’ve always prided yourself on being one of the rational green-grassers. You’ve always felt like politics was a pretty straightforward thing: the green-grassers were the “reality-based community,” and the orange-grassers were either ignorantly mistaken or purposefully deceiving themselves and others with their lies that grass was orange.
You often enjoy deriding the silly ideas of those orange-grassers with your green-grasser friends.
Then, one day you also notice that the sky happens to be a particularly beautiful shade of blue with nary a cloud in the sky. You happen to innocently comment to your green-grasser comrades that, “Wow, what fine weather! This sure is a nice blue sky out today, eh?” not thinking much of it. But suddenly they all turn around and look at you like they are the borg and like you have just committed thoughtcrime, and they are coming to assimilate you. “What—the hell—do you mean, ‘nice’ ‘blue’ sky?” They say. “First of all, the sky isn’t blue, you dirty blue-ist, and second of all, it wouldn’t be a ‘nice’ thing if it were. So, I guess it would be okay with you if the ocean were ‘blue,’ or maybe you’d even like to get your hands on a ‘blue’ pair of jeans, you dirty blue-ist! Yes, please, go ahead and ‘blue-splain’ to us all the merits of a ‘nice’ ‘blue’ sky!”
You are left feeling baffled, like you’ve gone over-the-top of the trenches in WW1 and discovered, mid-way through no-man’s land, that everyone else on your side has disappeared.
Except, there’s this one guy in a foxhole a few meters over who is waving you over. He yells out that he’ll give you covering fire as you make your way to the next objective. You don’t notice that he seems to be pointing 90-degrees away from your original objective, and you barely catch the glimpse of the swastika tattoos underneath his shirt cuffs, but all you know is that your reality has just been rocked, and you’re not really sure which way you need to be running anymore, but you know that you can’t stay in no man’s land, so you set off with this seemingly-sensible stranger.
I had never heard of Dead Prez until today, so my opinion on them and their intentions is very superficial, but I actually found the video to be quite interesting and provocative. It is clearly not just an attempt to glorify “thug” life, nor just to make fun of the dorky white family at the beginning of the video, who are clearly depicted as innocent victims. Rather, it feels like a very strong and intentional juxtaposition of two very different worlds.
The “black people world” which begins once they steal the car is clearly an over-the-top, almost comedic depiction of white peoples’ worst fears about black people. One could almost see it as a kind of propaganda video for Stormfront or something the black people are so comically bad. Parts of it almost reminded of the Chappelle Show, actually (not in being like something Stormfront would put out, but in black people making fun of stereotypes about black people without 100% rejecting them either).
At the same time, since the duo is themselves black, I’m assuming they aren’t trying to create an anti-black music video. It feels a bit more to me like “this is what you think we are, isn’t it? Fine, then we’ll live down to your expectations.” It feels defiant and in-your-face, but not in an uncomplicated “white middle class people are lame and black gangsters are awesome” sort of way. I think it’s better than that. Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but I don’t think it calls on us to identify 100% with either group, but rather to contemplate the stark juxtaposition.
Yes, it could be that the video is a subtle form of satire, but unfortunately I feel like we run into Poe’s Law here: because I am aware of other rap videos glorifying this stuff in an entirely unironic way, I can’t quite be sure whether the ironic or unironic interpretation is warranted here.
I don’t think this video is that subtle. I think it’s pretty clearly not glorifying this stuff.
I think you misinterpreted the responses you got in that thread. No one was disagreeing with your interpretation of the video, and trying to cast you into the outer darkness for reading it wrong. Probably no one else has seen the video.
Rather the big problem with your comment was that you put seemingly enormous weight on a rather insignificant piece of evidence and allowed it to massively shit what you claim was a strong prior.
At best that makes little sense.
Perhaps I should make it clear: it was not just this one video that radically changed my views. In fact, like I said, I was already familiar with this video back when I had what I consider now to have been hardline black liberation views.
Rather, it is that a bunch of other little things in the intervening time have changed my views more than I realized, to the point where I am now startled when I go back and look at that video and realize that I used to root for the opposite side when watching it. I am using this video as a personal barometer to demonstrate my changing views…
…which, to get back to the original point in the last thread, was: “It all seems like fun and games when you are a teenager and it is all in the realm of fantasy, but when you have a wife and kids suddenly a video like this doesn’t seem so funny.” Just like how, studying Genghis Khan seems like fun and games until he is banging on your door.
Hence, why I was explaining, contra “The Most Conservative” why I hold Western countries and whites to an even higher standard than others. They are in a powerful and advantaged position to act out their bloodthirsty fantasies. It is bad enough when blacks do it. Whites, being the ones with privilege and advantage in our society, have the power to be even worse. If I saw a rap video (or a Swedish black metal video, as one commenter in the last thread suggested) showing white punks preying upon a black family, it would probably be even more concerning.
So, actually, there was an anti-racist point in there that I was trying to make, but I guess I didn’t do a very good job of explaining it.
My objection with the Social Justice dogma is that they overstate both the hyperagency of the ‘oppressors’ and the hypoagency of the ‘oppressed.’ By doing so, they (ironically) create a white man’s burden, which by itself is discriminatory and reinforces bad interactions between the groups.
Fact is that people can be extremely bloodthirsty with means far less than those of the West (Rwanda, Boko Haram, ISIS, etc).
It’s fine to argue that Westerners have bigger armies, more money, etc and thus have greater ability to do good/bad. It’s not right to argue that this means that everything bad that happens is the fault of Westerners and/or that non-Westerners are powerless to improve their lives.
A very similar thing is true for white vs non-white.
I’d like to try and refute what you were saying in the previous OT, but I’m honestly not even sure where to start. From the way you made it sound I was expecting a serial killing or something – but it’s all this over a car jacking? I don’t even understand what you’re trying to condemn black people for here – the crime or the behavior represented in the video? How is that even a racial thing more than a “poor criminals in the ghetto” thing? You’re aware that “being a violent thug” is a thing that crosses racial boundaries, right? Why is this a “black people are dangerous” thing rather than a “poor ghetto thugs are dangerous” thing? And more importantly, why is it that you consider this video particularly representative of a danger posed by black people, particularly a random hiphop video?
Again, I’m not sure if you’re worked up about the crime shown itself, or the culture represented, but compare this to the parallel where someone watches a bunch of movies like Wolf of Wall Street, Deliverance, Schindler’s List, Last House on the Left, The Girl Next Door, etc (I could keep going) and then draws conclusions about how obviously screwed up and dangerous white people and white culture are.
(ETA: Ah, your reply to Anonymous above answered a lot of this already, but I’d already posted it before you replied. Still, it gets interpreted pretty badly when you’re associating it with a specific race, especially when adding stuff about bad genetics on top of it.)
One of the things that I am precisely paranoid about right now is that, if the U.S. gets into a war with Russia, then a bunch of fascistic white people in America are going to go all Hitler on my “unpatriotic” ass and throw me in a concentration camp for having the gall to criticize the U.S.’s hand in this escalation.
And I would never in a million years want to spend one moment with Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in “The Wolf of Wall Street.”
I guess one difference, though, is that I don’t feel like I run much risk of running into those unsavory whites on a daily basis (at least, like I said, until the U.S. goes to war against Russia and patriotism blots the 1st Amendment out of everyone’s minds as it always does in wartime).
I thought all the fascists this election were controlled by Putin’s propaganda?
Oh, I think (hope) this is more about the dangers of mob mentality then. It was kind of unfortunate to sidetrack it by using a random hiphop video as being representative of “black culture” then. Just to finish that off though, it’s an example of why broad negative stereotypes about groups of people are bad. You don’t have much to worry about from “unsavory whites” (and probably not blacks either unless you live in a racially homogeneous ghetto), but there’s probably someone sitting around having the exact same reaction about white people to a police shooting video right now.
You need some kind of norms or defense mechanism against that kind of herd mentality taking hold, otherwise you end up with random groups getting scapegoated and attacked. Unfortunately that’s an unsolved problem afaik – some group or another always seems to be bearing a disproportionate amount of the blame for society’s problems. Which I think is why you got such a negative response – people get defensive about it in the same way that (some) people do when being anti-war is considered treasonously unpatriotic.
I guess this is the crux — why would rap music change what you fear on a day to day basis? I assume you’re at least twenty or so, you should have enough experience to have an idea of how much danger you are actually in.
I don’t care for or listen to rap or hip hop, I don’t have the proverbial black friends, I never read Malcolm X, but I lived in two different predominantly black neighborhoods for a total of three years. While I wouldn’t say that they felt as safe as the tree lined suburb I grew up in, nothing ever happened crime-wise and I never felt singled out for hostility as a white guy.
Feeling at risk and being at risk are two different things. How much regular contact do you have with lower-class blacks? If you don’t have much contact, I think it’s fairly normal for an ingroup-outgroup brain to feel at risk around them even if you aren’t really at risk (which you probably aren’t).
I had that initial disalignment of feelings and fact when I moved to a majority black city for grad school, but that feeling of being at risk eventually dissipated after realizing I wasn’t at risk (and I was even mugged at gunpoint once).
Then in what sense were you “not at risk”?
I wasn’t at significant risk, I was unlucky. The probability of anything happening to me then (and now) was (is) very low.
There seems to be some… conflict between these two parts of a single sentence.
What are you comparing the risk to? Obviously you were at much higher risk in that neighborhood than you would have been in some white bread gated community.
The risk of getting mugged in the black neighborhood might be low, but it is relatively very high when compared to alternative neighborhoods.
I come into contact with lower-class blacks on a regular basis when I substitute teach in certain schools in my city. I would come into more contact with them if my wife and I hadn’t specifically bought a house in a section of town where we knew that we wouldn’t have to encounter these lower-class blacks (or whites, for that matter); as a consequence, we had to pay about 50% more for the same sort of house.
My encounters with lower-class blacks in the schools were not themselves threatening to me, considering there were other teachers and administrators and security guards around (although, actually, sometimes I have still felt a bit threatened when I had to sub for ISS, which, of course, tends to concentrate a particularly bad crowd into a small room, and they would become hostile and defiant over absurdly reasonable requests).
I know enough from these subbing assignments to tell me that I would NOT want to meet these lower-class hoodlums outside of school on the street. I even subbed in a juvenile correctional facility, and the administrators were very clear that I was required to NOT tell the students my real name or any identifying information, lest they try to track me down afterwards. I can only imagine why they felt it necessary to take that precaution. Usually those rules don’t exist unless some precedent has happened in the past to require it).
So…yeah…substitute teaching has really soured my idealism in some respects…..
@JayT
I would think that absolute risk, not relative risk, should be the criterion by which feelings of risk are judged to be accurate.
OK, but at what point would you consider the absolute risk to be high? In Oakland California (I live one town over) the chances of becoming a victim of a violent crime is 1 in 59. To me, that’s a pretty high absolute risk. Especially since Oakland has several wealthy, fairly crime-free neighborhoods, I would guess that the chances of becoming a victim in the majority black neighborhoods is significantly higher than that 1 in 59. I avoid those areas, and I don’t think it is at all irrational.
I think the phrase “at risk” is a bit of a red herring. If you described your neighborhood to anyone looking to move in as “a safe place to live, I was only mugged once, so far” very very few would continue to pursue looking there. Perhaps that is irrationality on their part. But don’t go into reality.
@JayT
That’s a good question, but it’s no doubt heavily dependent on individual risk aversion. I moved from that city, where there’s an (unconditional) chance of about 1 in 150 of being the victim of a violent crime (as I was) to an ultra-white suburb where that chance is 1 in 1000. Despite the huge difference in crime rates, I would move back to that city in a heartbeat if I could (initially moved because of family) because it was about a billion times more interesting and, yes, diverse than the suburban expanse I now live in.
And, of course, depending on who you are, those probabilities may actually be much lower. Over half of violent crimes are assaults, and a very large proportion of those are non-random (you’re not just walking along the street and someone jumps out of the shadows and kicks the shit out of you). Most of the rest are robberies which, while not fun, aren’t deeply traumatizing (generally). So, if we make up some hypothetical conditional probabilities (counting only rape, murder, random assault, and some arbitrary proportion of robberies), we might say it’s 1 to 600 for one city versus 1 to 4000 for another. Again, a huge difference in relative risk, but neither really seems that bad.
Ultimately, I think it’s easy to overstate risk and not be critical enough of one’s feelings of risk.
Speaking of. A little-known piece of San Francisco history.
First of all I also want to second Anonymous Bosch’s comment about immortal technique. I get that you think you’re pretty fly for a white guy but, Señor Felipe Andres Coronel was born in my mothers home town in Peru, his ethnic background is more George Zimmerman then Malcolm X.
Second I think this conversation would go best if we avoided using the word racist. The concept of racism includes basically any kind of unjustified prejudice towards any ethnic group, so it can cover a lot of ground between average slightly clueless white guy who makes generalizations about people they don’t really understand, and David Duke style bigots.
I’m certainly not accusing you of having an actively malevolent attitude toward African Americans.
Dead Prez is a hip hop group famous mostly for being confused with The coup . If I asked them why they made that video I imagine they’d give an answer similar to onyomi’s.
Now, do I believe that explanation? eh…
On the one hand if you watch the video all the way through, it ends with them getting busted by the police, then waking up on a beach surrounded by women speaking some Bantu language (I think Yoruba, but I could be mistaken), with the debased condition of the black man in America having been a bad dream. On the other hand, the cynic in me assumes that that the real reason they made the video was less any making political statement, and more trolling the gullible to generate controversy and sell records.
You’ve basically stumbled across the black equivalent of the Pepe the frog crowd.
Most black people have never heard of Dead Prez. I’ve bought music form Ted Nugent, should I be judged by the nonsense that comes out of his mouth?
We can have an intelligent conversation about why so many young black men make destructive, and self destructive, decisions. And that is an important discussion to have, but as far as I can tell you don’t live in an area with many black folks, and your understanding of them and their culture is based entirely on Hip Hop videos and media reports about violent crime.
If you wade into the debate about African American society and politics starting form the point of view that gangsta rap videos are some kind of documentary, then you are going to sound like a damn fool; and people are going to call you on it.
It’s interesting you compare them to the Pepe the Frog crowd, because it reminds me of something I was thinking lately: /pol/ is horrifying with how genuinely, not-subtly racist, xenophobic, antisemitic, etc. they are. But while I think some of the posters genuinely hold racist views, I think they are, to a large extent, a kind of contrarian performance/joke: a way of saying “well, everyone thinks white men are racist anyway, might as well be guilty of the crime.” It’s not good because the line between ironic rebellion and actually just being a hateful bigot is not that clear, but one can sort of see how it happens.
Arguably, artistic glorification of thug lifestyle may sometimes be a black version of that: you think we’re all thugs anyway, so let’s be thugs. Yet like the Pepe the Frog crowd they also express nostalgia for an idealized, non-debased version of their group: for /pol/ white people it’s going on about Western civilization and Nordic gods and Greek statues. They actually have almost as much vitriol for “degenerate” white men (yes, they really use such terms) as for their hated outgroups. I saw a thread on there seriously asking whether premarital sex made you degenerate. So, in a sense, this is the opposite of glorifying the thug life: it’s parodying it and then fantasizing about something better.
But re. the Pepe the Frog group, while I don’t think we have much to fear from ironic internet nazis, nor, indeed, from ironic gangsters, it does seem like the overly promiscuous accusations of racism run the risk of creating actual racists who are just being contrarian/in for a penny in for a pound.
aka trolling.
Fun fact: on a once popular tech site (Slashdot), there used to be a gang of trolls who had an entrance exam: watching the movie Gayn*ggers from Outer Space. These people clearly rallied around offensive content by virtue of people getting offended, rather than actually believing it.
So we’ve just accepted, uncritically the assertion that Pepe is only posted by white nationalist groups?
That’s not what I said, certainly. Firstly, I realize he was a comic character and that the creator himself is not happy about this new association.
Also, when I mentioned the “Pepe the Frog crowd,” I was referring to /pol/ trolls, and for all its ickiness, I wouldn’t call /pol/ a “white nationalist group,” though they certainly don’t discourage participation by people who might be members of such. But my point was that, while I’m not excusing it, and worry it blurs the line into real racism, I think a lot of it is a kind of contrarian rebellious performance/joke–aka, as Aapje, noted, trolling.
Though not his original intent or only use, Pepe has definitely become an icon of this particular flavor of trolling.
OMG, that makes it even funnier.
Thanks for the link onyomi.
Dead Prez are mostly famous for Hip Hop, which is one of the most iconic rap tracks of all time. Apart from that, their career has been lame, yes.
Dead prez are definitely conscious rappers. Did you listen to the lyrics of that song? They very obviously suggest that black crime is a result of poor-socioeconomic issues. I’m not sure how familiar you are with hip-hop but this is entirely a case of social commentary rather than racial-violence glorification. The rappers aren’t saying that violence was good, just that they found it necessary to survive. The race differential is a juxtaposition, highlighting that middle-class white Americans don’t have to deal with. I could quote almost any part of the song to support this, but the most succinct explanation is probably the bridge:
The intro is an ugly and heinous event, the rest of the song provides a commentary on why these artists think it happens. Whether you agree or not with their analysis, this isn’t meant to encourage the act. The video epilogue even shows it being part of a bad dream and that black people would prefer not to be in situations where they have to do this. There are so many more obvious cases of violence/drug glorification by black artists in hip-hop (although perhaps less so along racial lines). It boggles my mind that you settled on this one to make your point.
Yeah, I’m probably pretty out of touch with the African-American community, I agree. And I suppose I need to be wary of over-generalizing from stuff like this.
Then again, I object to the idea, if it is what the artists were implying, that this thuggish behavior is what they needed to do to survive.
People have lived through far worse things while exhibiting far more solidarity and far less anti-social behavior than this.
As far as why I settled on this video to pick my fight, it is precisely because it sits on that fine line between what my earlier self would have excused and what my current self finds objectionable. I was never a fan of Ludacris or the other more obvious cases of drug/violence glorification. I feel like Dead Prez ought to know better.
I am more and more starting to come around to the opinion that being a leftist doesn’t mean you give disadvantaged groups a free pass on every imaginable thing, no matter how awful it seems to you. When people are afraid to call the sky blue, when it is politically incorrect to call a thug rap song a thug rap song, then that just gives ammunition to the alt-right.
It’s like, if I were a witness to the Russian Revolution and I saw it going off the rails, but if I apologize for every thing it does no matter how heinous, rather than speak out about the secret police and the disbanding of trade unions and all of the other betrayals of the revolution like Emma Goldman did, then you reinforce the perception that, “Yep, the Russian Revolution really is about the Cheka and dictatorship and whatnot. See? All of their supporters agree.”
I don’t think allowing genuine social commentary is seen as giving the artists a free pass. Dead Prez are on the same side as you, they see the violence as a bad thing. They are just giving their view on why they think this is happening, which, whether you agree with it or not, is valuable. Do you also have similar sentiments towards the movie crash?
You do have a point that politics is the mind killer; choosing ‘sides’ encourages censorship of rational thoughts at risk of upsetting whatever side you’re a fan boy of.
But really, Dead Prez giving honest social critique is where you draw the line? I don’t think that fits the pattern of ‘group censorship of rational thought’. Do you feel the same about movies that depict the struggle of the Irish? Such as “in the name of the father” or “The wind that shakes the barely”?
Your point is very much true for things like.. vandalism by SA student protestors or the BLM movement. Dead Prez though? Naaah.
What was Crash’s view on racism, anyway? From what I remember it was just “You know, everybody’s a little bit racist in their own way!”.
And there are lot of examples of non-glorification rappers like Q-Tip, Maxi Jazz, and Mattafix.
I think the crime is whom the media and record labels choose to promote.
This track by Hopsin comes to mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRVOOwFNp5U
Basically a harangue about people not talking responsibility for their actions.
@James – “I think the crime is whom the media and record labels choose to promote.”
I’m a big fan of Reggie Watts, but Jay Z sells a heck of a lot better, and 99 problems is actually a damn good song.
The thing about videos like this is even if they aren’t explicitly endorsing violence it still normalizes it to an extent that is deeply disturbing. You can blame him for missing all the nuances but how many of the kids who watch this get the same message he does?
Someone should look into this kind of stuff. Maybe like a music video resource center for parents.
If you’re being sarcastic I can’t tell.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure he’s being sarcastic, referring to the Parents Music Resource center https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PMRC, aka “the bunch of Senators’ wives who were outraged about obscene music lyrics and had their husbands hold Senate committee hearings on the subject”. Memorable for, among other things, having both Frank Zappa and John Denver appear before the committee speaking in favour of freedom of speech.
Also Dee Snider.
He’s trying to “cleverly” imply that because you dislike something, you want it subject to official censorship.
This is considered a dick move in Grey Tribal culture.
Couldn’t you say the same for world war II films? Video Games? Fighting as sport? Generic Hollywood action films? Most of those don’t even try to explain the violence with a valuable social message.
I think the trade-off here is worth it. Saying that you can’t have any sort of violence in media because of normalization would greatly restrict storytelling abilities. Even world news would be seen as troublesome under that model.
The difference is that when it comes to video games and action movies I know it’s all fantasy and I think everyone else does too. And even then it’s usually good guys versus bad guys. But this is straight up glorifying threatening an innocent family and using violence to your own convenience. And I’m not saying we need to take legal action. It’s just that it shouldn’t be so out there to ask if music videos like this might possibly have something to do with the problems in the black community. If you are raised on a culture that is constantly telling you it’s ok to be violent because you’re oppressed, you might just internalize that. If it was just this one music video it would be one thing but it’s not. And I think we all know that.
If you’re going to go down that road, at least have the courtesy to consider the parallel argument that continual artistic and media portrayals of black people as dangerous crack smoking gangsta hoodlums have grossly distorted people’s perception as well.
Zombielicious –
That’s in Bizzaro-world. Here on Earth it’s policy that news reports never include the race of criminals if the criminal is black leading to such hilarious descriptions of fugitives like “the suspect was described as being approximately six feet tall, of medium build and wearing a white tee shirt”.
In entertainment black people are uniformly portrayed as surgeons and computer hackers except if there’s a black woman – then she’s a judge. This, of course, doesn’t cause people to have grossly distorted perceptions.
I bet that if you asked people what percentage of the population black people are you get numbers that are way too high. If you ask them what percentage of murders are committed by black people the number you get back is way too low. Searching for information on these questions the only surveys that I can turn up avoid asking actual factual questions to get an idea of how properly calibrated the public is on the facts.
.
……I don’t think we’re consuming the same entertainment.
‘
Part of this discussion is about a genre of music heavily marketed to suburban white teenagers based on it’s supposedly authentic portrayal of the lives of black drug dealers.
probably, but you have to factor in social desirability bias.
A more important test would be ask people to estimate the odds of a given white person being a victim of black on white violent crime, I suspect here you are likely to hear a vast over estimate.
I’m worried at how people are still seeing this as ‘straight up glorifying violence’. There absolutely are rap artists that do: shock rappers like DMX or gangster rappers like Mobb Deep. Hip-hop does have some terribly violent, homophobic and misogynist lyrics at times. Those probably are bad and more relevant to your arguments.
This particular video right here? To me it is very obvious that the artists are trying to portray a message above violence glorification. They’re trying to diagnose causes of black violence just like you are. Saying they shouldn’t discuss this because of internalization is like saying a Doctor shouldn’t diagnose mental illness for the patient may internalize the symptoms. A discussion of a negative issue necessarily involves depictions of that issue.
The glorification that you’re talking about exists, but it’s worrying that community dialogues are casually lumped into that stereotype.
a non mouse,
I think The Wire doesn’t have all its black characters as respectable professionals. (Haven’t watched the show, did a little googling.)
https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=the%20wire%20cast
Media influence on The Children is a topic that gets brought up every decade or so. Remember the D&D/Heavy Metal hysteria in the 80’s when everyone thought kids were being seduced to worship satan? In the mid-90’s, gangster rap was the concern (e.g., the uproar over Ice-T’s “Cop Killer”). In the late 90’s and early 00’s, it was violent video games (did Doom cause Columbine?). We should probably look to those past instances to see whether in fact any of those were justified (I’m guessing not).
@Wrong Species: a rap video is glorifying violence against innocents and using violence when it’s convenient, but, say, Grand Theft Auto isn’t? Plus, you don’t have to look to pop culture to see people benefit themselves – you just have to look to history and current events. “It’s OK to use violence against others because [dubious reason why they’re the ones attacking us]” is as or more potent than “we’re oppressed so violence is cool”.
@hyperboloid:
You’re probably right. People in general probably overrate the chances of any given person of whatever sort being victimized by any other sort of person, but they probably would have a larger gap for black-on-white crime.
@a non mouse/hyperboloid:
I think there’s probably a polarization effect going on. Some fiction makers disproportionately portray black people as lower-class hoodlums. Others respond to this by portraying them as saintly and usually professional class. The net result of both (I would argue that the second group has better intentions) that you see relatively few black people falling between “poor” and “affluent” or between “scum” and “angels” outside of media specifically by and for black people. I live in a neighbourhood that’s mostly lower-middle-class, and the black people (mostly Caribbean, as far as I can tell, with some Ethiopians and maybe Somalis) seem to be the same “sort of people” as the white people in the neighbourhood (Portuguese and Italian mostly). The real noticeable differences are between the Middle Eastern Muslim immigrants (who seem fairly conservative – I see black women wearing hijabs, but it’s only Middle Eastern women wearing niqabs as far as I can tell) and everyone else. (I figure, though, give it a generation or two and they’ll be decrying the laziness and low morals of their grandchildren, just like every other immigrant group ever). I think that this is some highly compelling anecdata.
With regard to nonfiction reporting, it is dumb to leave out the ethnicity of the suspect if it’s known. Especially since it’s often counterproductive – a lot of people will just assume “oh well if they didn’t list the ethnicity let’s just assume…”
Combining pop culture and descriptions of perpetrators, I’ve been watching back episode of The Originals, a vampire show. At the start of season 3, a new, dangerous, group of vampires appears when a black woman in the group attacks other vampires. At one point a character asks for a description of the attacker and the response completely fails to mention her skin color. This description was still enough to identify her.
The actual policy in most places is to not report the race of criminals when there aren’t sufficient details to narrow things down. Telling people to watch out for “a black male, age 18-30” only puts people on edge, without conveying any useful information.
@Iain:
Wouldn’t reporting “an 18-30 male” put people on edge too? Or are there just so many of those that people would ignore the report?
My understanding is that empirically speaking, you get significantly fewer people calling in to the police saying “oh my god, I just saw the suspect!”, and subsequent gun-drawn police take-downs of completely innocent bystanders, when race is left out of vague descriptions.
Even for more detailed descriptions, it can be an issue. I remember reading an article about the number of (for example) 5’8″ black men in t-shirts who are reported as sightings of 6’1″ black suspects in hoodies, although my cursory Googling didn’t manage to turn it up.
@Iain: OK, that makes sense. And really, being more careful around 18-30 year old males is … kind of smart regardless of most other factors.
Side note: How do people estimate heights consistently? I’m awful with things like estimating heights and distances. I’m amazed that people can look at someone and do that.
Know your own height, add or subtract a bit as appropriate.
Also, lots of customer-facing businesses will have a rule with tick marks on it on or right next to the door frame, so anybody who walks in or out has to stand next to it.
Also the height of people you know well. I know my height and my gf’s height, and where the top of her head comes up to on me. It’s easy to guesstimate people in between.
For distance, think of how many times you’d have to lie down touching feet to head to reach a certain spot. The room I’m in right now is probably about 3.5-4 of my body lengths. For longer distances, you’d need to compare to a distance you already know well, like how far it is to the end of your street, or the distance to some landmark you know.
There may be better methods; I’m not sure how e.g. cops, snipers, professional archers or shooters do it.
…This seems a little nonsensical. If your goal with giving a description is to alert people to a possible threat, with an eye to having the public serve as eyes on the ground, as it were, specifically leaving out information would seem to run counter to that goal.
Or if the goal is to not alarm anyone, then what is the point of alerting anyone to anything?
@Artificirius:
I’m guessing the reasoning is “this will cause people to be shitty to black guys 18-30, but saying that it’s a guy 18-30 won’t cause people to be shitty to guys 18-30, because numbers”.
Alternatively, people do seem to care a lot less about disparate impact hitting men than disparate impact hitting black people. This is at least partially rational – isn’t the male-female gap in violent crime significantly bigger than the black-white gap in the US? I know that if I’m picking the side of the street to walk down at night, I’m going to take the side with the black women over the one with the white men 100% of the time.
Is there actually evidence that this (not reporting the race of a suspect) is actually a widespread policy? A duckduckgo search didn’t turn up much beyond a lone Breitbart article about a single incident. I almost never watch/listen to local news or radio, so I don’t have handy examples, but I could have sworn it was pretty standard to report “the suspect is a white/black/hispanic male/female between the ages of blah blah blah.”
Considering the original assertion was also followed by the rather dubious statement that “In entertainment black people are uniformly portrayed as surgeons and computer hackers except if there’s a black woman – then she’s a judge,” I’m kind of guessing it has a similar truth value (i.e. none whatsoever).
@Zombielicious:
Canadian newspaper explaining its policy (it appears that they didn’t report the race of a white suspect when they had a good picture, and reported the race of a black suspect when they didn’t).
Article about AP stylebook but I have no idea if it’s legit. I believe access to the AP stylebook involves paying money.
Something about U of Minn’s policy.
So, on the one hand, there are papers and universities with policies on this that seem a bit weird and overly flexible. On the other hand, three is a garbage sample size, and there is clearly no vast left-wing conspiracy to disguise who is committing crimes. Having read the articles, it seems like reporting race/ethnicity is only worth it when there’s enough detail for it to actually help identification. The whole darkly hinting thing as to why papers do or don’t report race/ethnicity is lame – as a left-winger, when I’m feeling down, it helps to know that in fact I am part of a vast and omnicompetent conspiracy to destroy all that is right and good.
Anecdata: sometimes it is relevant and they don’t report it. A few years ago, there was a group described as teens or youths or whatever robbing people at subway stops near campus. There were several high schools in the area, so kids being around wasn’t exactly unusual. It would have helped to know what to look out for in groups of kids. White? Black? Asian? A delightful mix of ethnicities, proving that criminality unites where racism divides?
As always, the best policy is probably to keep in mind that maleness followed by intoxication and youth are better predictors of violent criminality than race/ethnicity.
@dndnrsn
I think the single most common form of racial bias I’ve seen among whites is just this kind of polarized perception.The average white person seems to think that there are two sorts of black folks, upper middle class professionals, and welfare dependent drug dealers.
It’s bizarre, they just don’t believe that the black working class even exists.
As if there were no black orderlies, nurses, truck drivers, maintenance men, super market cashiers or bank tellers.
People who, like eighty percent of the black people I’ve ever known, may not be wealthy, or highly educated but have reliable employment and are basically law abiding.
@dndnrsn
I would agree with a reasoning of ‘We don’t want people to think we’re shitty racists, and mentioning that it is a black person committing the crime screams racism, so we don’t report on race’ as a possible explanation.
A far more likely one is that such a thing does not occur for actual reportage of warnings, or in the warnings themselves. From up here in Canada, I seem to recall that race is often mentioned, at least.
@Artificirius:
The Star’s explanation seems to have come off of someone noting their not reporting a white subject’s race, and reporting a black subject’s race, and possibly accusing the paper of racism against black people, on that basis. When in fact their policy seems to be a fairly reasonable “if there’s a picture we’ll show that”.
I think their official statement of values or whatever it is was recently edited to mention “social justice”, though, wasn’t it? The context up here is of course different than in the US (Eagleland Osmosis aside).
@hyperboloid:
I find myself wondering if that’s an especially American thing that has been taken abroad due to the influence of US media. In the UK and Canada, I am pretty sure that “Caribbean lady working as nurse/medical orderly” is a fairly common stereotype – the polarization there is that they either get portrayed as hyper-caring and hyper-competent (“aren’t you glad you have this motherly woman with a musical accent to look after you/your parents whom you should really visit more”) or the opposite (which is a variant on the “incompetent DMV worker” American stereotype, more or less). But that’s the only working/lower middle class image I find myself readily associating with black people.
What does this mean, exactly? My basic interpretation is that this is claiming that this type of media influences the consumers of that media in such a way that, on average, there’s an increase in the amount of violence they perceive as “normal” in real life.
Assuming that interpretation is correct, that to me raises 2 important questions.
1. Is this true? This is a claim about reality, and we shouldn’t accept it as true unless and until we’ve collected evidence that indicate that it’s true. Given the replication crisis that’s been more clearly shown in psych recently, do we have enough strong and conclusive studies to let us be confident that this is true? Intuitively, I would guess that it’s true, but human intuition and reality have a very very loose relationship.
2. Even if it’s true, why is it disturbing? Does influencing a population so that they accept more violence as “normal” in real life cause any “disturbing” effects in their behavior? Again, this seems intuitively true to me – someone who believes a higher amount of violence in real life is “normal” seems likely to escalate to violence and escalate the type of violence more quickly – but do we have enough research to actually conclude that this intuition matches reality?
This doesn’t just apply to violent media, of course. There’s always talk about certain media “normalizing” certain patterns. Unfortunately, this kind of stuff isn’t like evolution or relativity where multiple lines of independent research have verified it to such an extent that we can just take it as being obviously true. These are strong claims about reality, and we should demand a high level of evidence if we are to believe that those claims are true.
You probably want to stay totally ignorant of computer games, especially first-person shooters. It’s really for the best : -/
On a lighter side of things, what “classic” movies that you’d normally be expected to know about haven’t you seen? I’m not referring to refusing to watch because it’s not your cup of tea, but those you just somehow never got around to.
The two that I’ve been reminded of recently (one during comments here): Blade Runner and Robocop. It just seems that whenever those movies were playing on TV, I either found them halfway through or just didn’t feel like watching TV at the time.
There’s tons of great Asian cinema sitting in my “to watch” list. Edward Yang, Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, Kobayashi, Sono. The subtitles are a bit of a psychological barrier, I think. I’ll get to them some day.
You should really watch Blade Runner sooner rather than later, it’s incredible. Go for the final cut.
I forgot about Rashomon (and some other Kurosawa). The plot sounds like something I’d love, but it’s not on Netflix, and I never remember to look for it when I fire up my cable box.
Yeah, my “need to watch someday”s are Seven Samurai and Grave of the fireflies.
Don’t put off Seven Samurai. The beauty is incredible. It won’t feel like eating something wretched which you know is good for you.
I second Seven Samurai (Ran is also pretty good). Never got around to watching Yojimbo, though (and stopped watching Rashomon halfway through). Kurosawa is especially worth watching if you’re familiar with the Spaghetti Westerns that
copiedwere inspired by him.I don’t believe I’ve ever watched the original and the third Star Wars straight through, though it was often on in the background of friend’s house so I probably picked it all up at one time or another.
Actually, I don’t really watch enough movies to really be a useful data point. I’ll watch with someone, but don’t choose to do so on my own.
Not really a principled stance, since I’ll spend all day with Civ or Final Fantasy Tactics, etc.
Once or twice I caught bits of The Matrix on TV, but I didn’t watch it all the way through for a while. Then when I did see the whole thing, I discovered I had already watched all the good parts.
In the “reminded of recently” and “would be expected to know about” category, I’ve never seen Fight Club. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Wrath of Khan all the way through. Or any of the Alien movies (though I did see the meh Prometheus).
And then the real “classics” – I’ve seen Casablanca and Citizen Kane but never Gone With the Wind, Lawrence of Arabia, or Psycho
I’ve seen precisely half of Gone With The Wind. I watched it in a near-empty movie theater; when intermission came I thought the movie was over and left.
Gone With the Wind is not particularly appealing to me, but it frequently appears high on lists of “greatest X movies” and recently there have been rumblings of it becoming “problematic” so I should probably get around to seeing it.
It was much better than I expected; Gable’s character in particular.
I just happened to watch Fight Club for the first time last weekend (along with Brazil and Being John Malkovich – both also good). Definitely worthwhile, and even worth seeing at least twice, I think. It has one of the longer trivia sections on IMDB, if that tells you anything.
Other classics I’ve not yet seen include Godfather (1 and 2), Scarface, 12 Angry Men, Animal House, Idiocracy, Clue, Memento, Primer, Vertigo, and Psycho.
I watched Clue two, maybe three years ago. A lot of fun, although for some reason my brother despises it. Unless a comedy has a straightman he can’t laugh at it, and there are no straightmen in Clue. Everyone is bonkers, and everyone is a suspect.
12 Angry Men is an excellent movie. Clue somewhat less so. Primer is only really good if you have … special tastes, but if you have them it’s an absolutely astounding film. Watching with a plot chart is highly recommended, as an important part of the story takes place mostly off-screen. As to the rest, I am at least as ignorant as you.
Oddly enough both Clue and Clueless are pretty good movies.
I haven’t seen the former, but will attest that the latter is quite good.
“Citizen Kane”. I’ve had it recommended to me by at least one person with tastes very similar to mine. I’ve just never got around to it.
Seconding Randy M: I almost never watch something on my own. Whether it’s sports, a TV show, or a movie, I only really watch stuff with other people.
I watched that movie and was extremely disappointed. The story is not very engaging at all.
Maybe it was an amazing leap forward in camera angles or lighting or something, but unless you are a cinematographer I’m not sure why you’d care.
Contrary opinion – I watched it expecting it to be lousy, but I wound up genuinely really liking it.
I had pretty much the same reaction. Found the whole story to be banal and lacking anything that could drive me to care one bit about any of the characters.
After the fact, thinking back, I was able to see that it really was a revolutionary film for its time in terms of cinematography, and I sorta did start appreciating it more after thinking that, especially since I love good cinematography in films. But good-for-its-time cinematography really wasn’t enough to salvage the bore that was the rest of the film.
I was disappointed too. I assume that a major reason is that the revolutionary advances have mostly been adopted, so they are no longer special.
High expectations may also have played a role.
It is beautifully shot, but I don’t think it has aged nearly as well as say Casablanca, The Third Man, or any of Kurosawa’s work.
Citizen Kane is thought to be the greatest film ever made TM because of how innovative it was at the time. It comes form a time when people were still figuring out how to make movies, so many of it’s innovations, the relatively naturalistic acting, the low angle shots, and the deep focus cinematography for instance, don’t seem very impressive today.
It is a fine film that just has not been well served by the hype that surrounds it.
I’m reminded of a similar kind of thing that I experienced in video games. When I got a Nintendo 64 and played Mario 64, the controls and graphics were amazing–the game was legitimately revolutionary and probably defined 3D platformers. When I went back to play it (emulated) a few years ago, the controls seemed really clunky and difficult to use. Trying to position the camera in some places was frustrating, even though I had fond memories of that particular level. It’s just that while the game was groundbreaking, there was still a lot of stuff they hadn’t figured out, which obviously wouldn’t have counted against it at the time.
This isn’t fair. Mario 64 is still unmatched in many ways today. In an open thread a while back, someone posted videos of a guy who figured out parallel universe travel within the game. The physics of Mario 64 are simply unlike anything released before or since.
This is partly because emulators really do have lousy controls compared to originals – but yeah, I remember playing Mario 64 when I was ten and finding the camera angles annoying. Still a great game, though.
@CatCube
Dune II is also a good example. At the time, it defined a new genre. When you replay it, the missing features compared to newer games in the genre are just so frustrating.
System. Shock. 2.
Amazing game from an atmosphere and narrative point of view, but… sweet Freya, the interface and controls.
GTA: Vice City is in my opinion the best of the series in every way (haven’t played 5 though) except for the aiming, which is terrible. Lock-on aiming? Whose idea was that? GTA IV improved the aiming so much.
Fahundo’ sort-of got a point. Mario 64 actually and legitimately remains unsurpassed in certain gameplay and feat terms. However, he’s being a typical hype swallower about the works of Pannenkoek. Take it from someone who admires the work of the guy:
a) Pannenkoek is an extremely dedicated speedrunner who has worked with others to unravel the complicated mechanics that govern Mario 64‘s world, learning how to break its boundaries to perform improbable feats in the process, like completing difficult vertical challenges without ever jumping. This is not a credit to Mario 64‘s design. It’s a credit to Pannenkoek and co’s ingenuinity and dedication. The fact that there are these loop-holes big enough to plow trucks through is a sign of Mario 64‘s datedness.
b) One of the more famous of Pannen’s glitch exploits involves the small, looping nature of Mario 64‘s world, combined with a speed-building gimmick that lets him bypass walls to launch out of one side of a world and re-enter from the other. Because any interactive object other than walls, ceilings and floors get left behind, Pannen decided to call the process “travelling to parrallel universes”, or PUs for short. This is just a naming convention. There are no actual parrelel universes in a video game from the 90’s. Pannen has not furthered real-life physics. It is misleading to boast about “parralel universe travel” without context.
Huh? No, I already knew everything you explained there. If you REALLY want to destroy the impressive-soundingness of the QPU travel, mention the fact that it’s tool-assisted, and would probably be impossible to pull off on an actual Nintendo 64.
I disagree, but it really doesn’t change the fact that, even in normal play, later games such as Mario Galaxy have simpler movement options and less player control over momentum.
Then why would you list “parallel universes” as an example of Mario 64’s advancement as a game? It’s literally an example of its era-specific limits. The stuff about momentum is great, but not what you stated.
First, it’s not QPU travel. You have align yourself along quarter PUs to make use of it in level completion, but that’s calling a car journey with a lot of left turns “left-turning car travel”. It’s just car travel. Spamming the word QPU is memery.
Second:
Why the hell would you want to do that? It’s probably the single most incredible feat in game mechanic exploitation, well, ever.
Because you have to spend 12 HOURS building up speed by clip-grinding on a misaligned set of slope tiles. It’s perfectly doable without tools, just mind-numbingly boring to both do and watch. Similarly, you can crash Paper Mario by striking one block in Dry Dry Desert for 416 straight years. Having a tool to rout-around the problem of maintaining the integrity of an N64 console, supply electricy, and train up a rota of people spanning several generations and lifespans to maintain the hammering of that one button, is pretty reasonable. Doesn’t mean you have to cheat to do it.
Given that this is what I stated and you didn’t, the point you were making doesn’t make sense. You’re agreeing with my point, but trying to make it sound like I’m agreeing with your point.
This is called “Seinfeld isn’t funny” on TVTropes.
I loved the Roger Ebert commentary track about all the special effects. But I’ve forgotten how deep focus was achieved. mirrors? multiple exposures? Paris, Texas has a couple of scenes shot through…bifocals.
I’ve never watched Princess Bride, that one seems almost obligatory in nerd culture with how often it’s quoted.
To me it’s one of those movies that’s better as quotes and memes. Overall I like it, it definitely has its moments, and you should watch it, but overall the cheeseball factor makes it hard for me to really enjoy. (Then again I love Monty Python and the Holy Grail, but in that the camp is more obviously intentional)
Given the tone of the book, I’m pretty sure the camp in Princess Bride is as intentional as Monty Python.
I’ve not read the book, and am only commenting on the film (and the film is clearly intended as comedic). Personal taste and all that – basically my issue is that there are enough scenes that seem to be intended to be taken seriously (which is not necessarily a problem), and those hold up badly compared to the rest of it. Given the time frame of the movie’s release I’m a bit jarred as to whether they are intentionally cheesy or are supposed to look good.
Anyway really what I’m struggling to get at is that there are scenes and quotes in The Princess Bride that I find legitimately hilarious, but if I sit down and watch the whole thing I’m always a little disappointed.
Possibly, but even The Holy Grail just sort of falls apart at the end. Or rather, instead of ending.
I agree. But a lame ending is easier to swallow than repeated groaners throughout.
I dunno. Back to personal taste I suppose. I thought the “twu wuv” angle was played a bit too straight, and I found Buttercup to be a bore (Humperdinck as well).
Yeah, Buttercup has all the personality of Bella Swan, and about the same appeal.
(I mean, from what I hear.)
The fighting and the repartee is good; almost like you are watching the imagination of the young Fred Savage, glossing over the details of the kissy stuff.
“Almost”?
There’s a reason the book calls itself the “good parts version” of a (nonexistent) larger story, and in editing down to movie length Goldman et al took that principle and ran with it, and wrapped it in a framing story to make that clear. No, you don’t have to read the kissing parts, but maybe by the end you won’t mind so much.
Tongue, I had thought obviously, in cheek.
Having read the book years before the movie existed, I have to agree the movie is lacking. A large part of the charm of the book is in the narrative — Buttercup’s world rank in beauty and the like. That doesn’t really come through in the movie.
Also, in the book Buttercup can be unimaginably beautiful. In the movie, we’re limited to real world possibilities, so she’s about as good-looking as many actresses tend to be.
For me it was the opposite – the book kept lampooning itself, which annoyed me and ruined my immersion; even though the movie was just as over-the-top and comical when viewed from outside, it took itself seriously.
I actually didn’t care for the ending of the book, but that’s personal taste. I hate open-ended stories, because it feels like a cop-out to me. I actually preferred the ending to the movie of “The Mist” to the book for that reason.
I believe even Stephen King preferred the movie’s ending to his own, though more because it was a really good concrete ending than because he generally preferred concrete endings.
FWIW Stephen King has said the same thing. 😉
I’ve never seen “It’s a Wonderful Life” or “Miracle on 34th Street.” I always just watched those stop-motion claymation things around Christmas.
“It’s a Wonderful Life” is a neat film, but I’ve only managed to catch it in parts- half one year, half another.
The two films I make sure to watch every December are “White Christmas” and “A Muppets Christmas Carol”, the latter of which I consider to be among the finest movies ever conceived.
Those actually are both true for me as well. Same thing with “A Christmas Story.”
Michael Cain is the best Scrooge of any adaptation thus far. (Bill Murray is a distant second)
This is absolutely indisputable.
Demonstrably false. This is by far the finest Scrooge:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woJrjb91pW4
I will have to see that one. For now, this is my favourite version.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Christmas_Carol_(1999_film)
Still haven’t seen Titanic. Or The Poseidon Adventure for that matter (did see the Kurt Russell remake though…).
Don’t know if these qualify as classics, but the kind of “everyone has seen these movies!” that I’ve never seen:
ET (seen bits and pieces of it on the telly, usually during Christmas, but never the whole thing). Jurassic Park. Finding Nemo. Schindler’s List. Saving Private Ryan. Any of the Godfather movies. A lot of the new Marvel Universe movies (saw the three Iron Man movies, none of the others). Any of the Spiderman reboots and re-reboots. Ditto the Superman reboots, and gave up on the Batman reboot with the Clooney version (the infamous “nipples on the Batsuit” one). The new Star Wars (saw the first trilogy, saw the one with Jar-Jar Binks, said ‘no thanks’ to any more). Titanic. Avatar (both the James Cameron and the Last Airbender ones). Brokeback Mountain (because I didn’t read the novel, either; simply wasn’t interested).
Probably a lot more – if it’s one “everyone has seen”, I probably haven’t 🙂
Some of those don’t seem like things you’d enjoy, though–if you’ll permit me to guess based on previous posts–specifically the Marvel movies. And you state you actually started watching “Batman and Robin” but gave it up because you didn’t like it.
I’m referring to movies you’d like to see but just haven’t. It’s not on TV, or on only when you don’t have time to watch, etc. It was actually a post by you that prompted my OP, when you were talking about Robocop some number of open threads ago. I realized that I was interested in seeing that movie, but just never had for some reason.
I suppose the ones I really wanted to see, I did (whether in the cinema, on TV or via iTunes, Netflix, etc.) The ones I couldn’t be bothered about, even if they were “Everyone has seen this!”, I didn’t.
If I can throw in something a bit different – years and years ago, I went to the cinema with my sister to see “Re-Animator” and enjoyed it immensely (we both did), much more than I expected to, probably I was going in with the attitude “Okay, it’s based on Lovecraft stories, it’s going to be cheap B-movie horror, don’t expect a lot from it”. It was (is) cheap pulp horror, but somehow serves the Lovecraft source material better than movies which have tried (and failed) to be ‘artier’ or higher-brow, and if you don’t expect depth or subtlety and don’t mind fake blood and flying entrails, it’s ghoulishly good fun.
There’s a Hallowe’en movie recommendation for you all, now! 🙂
The Godfather
Top Gun
Citizen Kane
Blade Runner
Airplane!
Seven Samurai
Citizen Kane
Lawrence of Arabia
The Room
Problem Child 2
Schindler’s List
Saving Private Ryan
I started watching The Bridge on the River Kwai once, but underestimated how long it was.
It took me years to get around to watching 2001: A Space Oddysey, and I bought it on VHS of all things from a thrift store.
Even though the scene where the bone is thrown into the air and becomes a spaceship is iconic, nobody mentions that the first twenty minutes leading up to that feature apes. They just say “it’s a long movie”.
I had a similar experience. The people I was watching with spent the whole time voicing their increasing incredulity, which I found more entertaining than the scene itself.
I saw it for the first time about 5 years ago. The part with the apes didn’t get to me, but the psychedelic light show towards the end was aggravating.
I remember thinking, “did Kubrick intend for you to be high while watching this, or was this effect considered so impressive when it was new that people would basically enjoy spending 10 minutes watching an electronic lava lamp?”
I have always been of the opinion that ninety percent of the “Jupiter and beyond the infinite” section should have been cut form the film. Just have the it end with Dave Bowman approaching the monolith, have the soundtrack build to a big dramatic moment. We see the shuttle pod disappear into the “star gate”, and roll credits over the slit scan photography sequence.
We don’t need to know exactly where Dave is going, other than that he’s being transported by an alien force to a realm beyond human comprehension. Trying that show it on screen was always going to look silly.
Oddly, the line “My God, it’s full of stars!” has become strongly associated with that sequence in pop culture, even though it isn’t spoken in the film. It’s from the book version (written simultaneously with the screenplay – neither was based on the other) and I think it’d be a fine place to end on.
The white room was underwhelming, but I thought the aging effect made the impression it was supposed to. Strange things happening in a normal-looking place worked for me.
I think the movie would have been better as a musical, with Dave Bowman replaced by David Bowie.
Well, the light show probably would be pretty impressive in a theater in 1968. I’d love to see it in an IMAX theatre even today.
On a TV set…not so much.
Maltese Falcon is next on my list of things I need to watch, probably.
Unlike Citizen Kane (IMO) the Maltese Falcon holds up really well. The characters are engaging and it’s got a lot of top-notch talent in front of and behind the camera. A lot of the big names from the “golden-age of Hollywood” are big names because of this movie.
I quote Godfather and Apocalypse Now often enough that I figure I should probably watch them sometime.
Oh, and Chinatown.
Chinatown is really good.
I keep forgetting it, yeah.
I’m a bit of a film musicals buff, but I’m missing some Fred-and-Ginger outings. Skipped all of the Judy-and-Mickey musicals, and while I know I watched one of them, I have no memories of the “Gold Diggers of 19__” films.
And I haven’t managed a whole viewing of Philadelphia Story yet, or most of the Hepburn/Tracy outings.
Back to musicals, I haven’t seen a few of the Rodgers and Hammerstein adaptations. (State Fair, The King and I, South Pacific, Flower Drum Song)
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (although I have listened to the soundtrack which is great), The Magnificent Seven (although I have seen Seven Samurai, which I thought was just OK), all of Ingmar Bergman’s famous movies, Terminator, Rocky, Alien(s).
It was only a few years ago that I watched The Godfather for the first time. I’ve always waited for the hype to die down on things before I stumble across them and say “what the heck, let’s watch”. I watched The Warriors only earlier this year, Breaking Bad only last year, and I marathoned Arrested Development for the first time, like, last week. And I’ve never watched 24. Or The Wire for that matter. I’m a moderate fan of heavy metal, but I only listened to any band besides Rammstein when I went to Uni and joined a society. Not much of any music to be honest, besides some of my father’s classic rock and video game soundtracks, which I’ve always loved. I watched little Tarantino before that point. I only watched Alien and Predator a few years ago, and I’ve watched none of the sequels. (I taped Predator 2 recently)
I guess what I’m saying is, 6 years ago, I had watched nothing besides The Lord of Rings, Pixar, Star Wars and Bond films. I’ve randomly built up my repertoire of watches since, but I never go out of my way to watch famous things.
Just cooked up the greatest musical example I can – Eric Clapton. Never gone out of my way to listen to him until literally just now, when at the moment I typed “literally” one of his songs came on to youtube. I didn’t know what Layla was called or who wrote it until now.
One of the things I love about this site is when in one thread a commenter will be arguing what I consider a total nutter position, and then in another be the only person (again, from my perspective) talking any sense. I’ve seen this happen somewhat frequently (like every post/OT or two, on average) and with at least half a dozen different commenters.
I like to think this is evidence of a good mix of ideas being thrown about. Does this sound accurate? Also, does this perception say anything epistemologically about me? Has anyone else noticed a similar pattern? Maybe it’s nothing special, but not something I can remember seeing much of in other communities.
I don’t know if it’s true but for what it’s worth I share that sense.
The last comment of the week was about a debate within linguistics between those who believe in some innate language faculty (generative grammar, Chomskyites) and those who view language as more emergent (cognitive grammar, Langacker, etc.). I’m not a linguist, though I’m very interested in linguistics and enjoyed Azure’s nuanced summary.
But what I’m interested in talking about here is not linguistics in particular, but rather what I see as a more general phenomenon of progress in many diverse fields, namely what I guess could best be described as wide-ranging application of Occam’s Razor. That is, don’t posit an extra thing when you can explain everything with what you know you already have. More importantly, think about how the things you already assume exist may be wholly reducible to simpler elements. In the linguistics case, it seems probable or at least conceivable that we didn’t evolve a discreet “language faculty” (though we are clearly evolved to use language), but that language emerged by bootstrapping itself onto existing functions. On a gross physical level, the lips, palate, and tongue, for example, are crucially necessary to being able to talk as we do, yet all greatly predate language in the animal kingdom.
Though I’m no physicist, my understanding is that major discoveries by Einstein, about quantum mechanics, etc. basically showed that time and space are one thing, and that it wasn’t necessary to posit different rules for e. g. subatomic particles.
I recall when I first became an anarcho-capitalist after years of being a small-government constitutionalist libertarian that it was a similar experience of essentially just de-reifying something in my mind which had been “a thing,” which had occupied a special place, but which I realized wasn’t necessary to exhaustively understand the world. Whether or not you agree it’s advisable, the first step to being an anarchist is just comprehending the “not-specialness” of government.
I guess what I’m saying is that discovery and deeper understanding, especially in recent decades, seems as often about saying “no, special rules do not apply here,” as it is of finding special cases. Is this just Occam’s Razor? If so, I feel like, popular as it is to quote, its full significance maybe isn’t generally well understood, if not necessarily among SSC readers, then certainly the general public? Even evolution, which I’ve long thought to be one of the most powerful interpretive frameworks ever, is arguably an outgrowth of it.
Maybe this is all just obvious to readers here, but thinking about developments in linguistics got me thinking about it and wondering where else it might be interestingly applied already, or could possibly be in the future.
Can you think of counter-examples, where such an attitude would lead one astray or has been overturned?
Perhaps sub-atomic particles, at least until all particles are explained by fields. The existence of each of the fundamental physical forces is an area that rankles physicists due to being seemingly in violation of Occam’s Razor in not being able to be described in one equation. Dark matter, too, perhaps.
I can think of a few more areas of Chemistry, say. Why is it that each position an electron can be in holds two electrons? Seems needlessly complicated but accurate.
It is certainly an eminently possible sort of error: any time something gets lost or predictive power weakens in the process of trying to simplify, arguably.
One thing that might fit, though I think is slightly different, is the systematizing impulse which sometimes results in seeing patterns where none really exist. This is very common in traditional Chinese and, I think, Indian thought: one wants to be able to say that everything in the universe arises from the principle of yin and yang, but yin-yang as a concept is arguably too powerful as an interpretive framework–that is it easily obscures real differences in the effort to collapse things onto a single spectrum–arguably the whole “schizophrenia is the ‘opposite’ of autism” thing is such a case.
If we think of yin-yang as an interpretive net with very small holes such that it “catches” almost everything, however, there is a sense in which it might arguably be an instance of the kind of mistake I’m talking about: we need to widen our holes so we stop seeing things that aren’t there like, e.g. a special, discrete language faculty.
Though if you go too far in the opposite direction (widening the holes in your “net,”) you seem to fall into another sort of mysticism: either you develop a unified theory of everything or just accept the universe as an undifferentiated mass of swirling, infinitely interconnected unfathomable stuff (which, in a sense, is the truth, so maybe that’s why it feels like making things “un-special” brings us closer to it).
Chemistry reduces to physics. At least, we think so, but we can’t calculate the specific numbers predicted. But the point about two electrons, that really is explained by QFT, not a free parameter.
Correction accepted.
As someone who dabbles in DFT, the problem isn’t that we can’t calculate the specific numbers predicted, it’s that we can calculate any specific prediction, and no small part of that is the precise exchange problem Randy M brought up.
Huh?
Chemistry does reduce to physics: we can calculate a great many things based on the total electronic wavefunction of a system, including (but not limited to) vibrational frequencies, phonon modes, binding energies, reaction mechanisms, and many other properties.
The problem is, solving that wavefunction is hard. Extremely computationally expensive. There are a number of ways to speed things up, and density functional theory (DFT) is one of the most widely used.
One of the major free variables in the method is the choice of the exchange-correlation functional. Part of what the XC functional models is the Pauli repulsion. There are dozens of XC functionals, and they can give wildly different results for different properties.
For example, the B3LYP functional just works for a lot of small molecules, but can get binding energies wrong. LDA systematically contracts unit cells, while GGA systematically enlarges them. BJ06 is great at getting the band gap, but completely screws with your forces.
So we can get very different numbers depending on what XC you use, and it takes some serious validation to get physically useful results. There’s lots of examples in the literature of researchers using computational chemistry as a black box and getting erroneous results. If you’re not careful, you can tweak your system to get whatever numbers you want.
For example, see the CO adsorption puzzle (apologies for the paywall).
This phenomenon might be better termed, “abstraction.” You extract the similar characteristics of each of several structures, and then talk about the general structure, and if you want to talk about more specific examples you consider them a special case of the original. For example, the real numbers and the complex numbers both form fields, so we talk about fields in general, including finite fields or whatever, and only restrict ourselves to the reals if we really need to. (This description is of course an oversimplification, but I think there’s a grain of truth). Similarly, we abstract key characteristics about time/space or subatomic/superatomic objects.
On second thought, though, maybe it really is the case that we should in general not expect hard distinctions in nature to match what our intuitions or words would indicate, since those words and intuitions are often developed with a lack of any actual evidence.
It’s the law thread!
(In a way, of course, all threads are law threads)
First, a few cases courtesy of the Institute For Justice’s Short Circuit newsletter, available here.
From the Eleventh Circuit – A financial advisor cons an elderly couple out of $142K. The trial court holds that it would sentence her to time served if she could repay the money; since she can’t, she goes back to jail. Is it legal to condition her freedom on ability to pay? Maybe not under the Constitution, but definitely not under the Federal Sentencing Guidelines.
From the Tenth Circuit – a county discovers that they’ve lost their zoning map and associated regulations. They decide to have a contractor quietly try to re-make them from scratch instead of going through the hassle of re-enacting the zoning. Property owners are a bit annoyed when they discover they’ve been spending money to comply with regulations nobody actually promulgated. Due process violation? No.
On to other business.
The Supreme Court has granted certiorari in the case of the Mexican youth who was shot across the border fence. The question at hand: can the boy’s family sue the border guard under Bivens when they aren’t American citizens, or is the guard entitled to absolute immunity even though he didn’t know that at the time? I expect this oral argument to be really good.
A collaborative project between Volokh and Paul Levy
discovers a fascinating trend in which sites are getting deindexed from Google pursuant to court order after the respondent in each case admits to libel and agrees that the court should issue an injunction. One problem: the respondents in these cases don’t appear to have been the actual owners of these sites. Also the respondents may not exist. Also the actions are all probably filed by the same person. My guess? Coincidence.
Finally and arbitrarily, in honor of Judge Merrick Garland’s 210th hearing-less day, some of the late Justice Scalia’s best quotes! (Stolen from his Wikiquote page, selected for striking style rather than substance.)
‘This case, involving legal requirements for the content and labeling of meat products such as frankfurters, affords a rare opportunity to explore simultaneously both parts of Bismarck’s aphorism that ‘No man should see how laws or sausages are made.’
– Community Nutrition Institute v. Block, 749 F.2d 50, 51 (D.C. Cir. 1984)
‘Frequently an issue of this sort will come before the Court clad, so to speak, in sheep’s clothing: the potential of the asserted principle to effect important change in the equilibrium of power is not immediately evident, and must be discerned by a careful and perceptive analysis. But this wolf comes as a wolf.’
– Morrison v. Olsen, 487 U.S. 654, 699 (1988)
‘I am persuaded, therefore, that the Maryland procedure is virtually constitutional. Since it is not, however, actually constitutional, I would affirm the judgment of the Maryland Court of Appeals reversing the judgment of conviction.’
– Maryland v. Craig, 497 U.S. 836 (1990)
‘Life is too short to pursue every human act to its most remote consequences; “for want of a nail, a kingdom was lost” is a commentary on fate, not the statement of a major cause of action against a blacksmith.’
– Holmes v.SIPC, 503 U.S. 258 (1991)
‘Today’s judgment will, to be sure, have the beneficial effect of solving more crimes; then again, so would the taking of DNA samples from anyone who flies on an airplane (surely the Transportation Security Administration needs to know the “identity” of the flying public), applies for a driver’s license, or attends a public school. Perhaps the construction of such a genetic panopticon is wise. But I doubt that the proud men who wrote the charter of our liberties would have been so eager to open their mouths for royal inspection.’
– Dissenting, Maryland v. King, 133 S. Ct. 1958, 1989, 186 L.Ed.2d 1 (2013).
I was under the impression it was rather common to sentence people who committed certain crimes (both blue and white collar, e.g. vandalism and fraud) to probation or small sentences on the condition that restitution is made. Does this Eleventh Circuit precedent wipe out all of those, at least in Federal courts?
IANAL, but no, because they explicitly dodged the constitutional question (see page 12).
Scalia on Bivens
It’ll be interesting to see what happens to Bivens if the liberal wing of the court picks up a fifth vote. Breyer is fairly skeptical of Bivens, and there is some indication that Kagen and Sotomayor are as well (see Minneci v. Pollard), so it may just be a dead letter regardless of who is appointed.
Seems like a total crapshoot to me, honestly. Clinton’s rhetoric on the Supreme Court has mostly focused on Citizens United, and I don’t know that there’s a lot of correlation between wanting to roll that back and Bivens one way or the other. After CU, I assume her biggest qualifications would be accepting Roe and Obergefell, which you’d think would be related to the stance on judicial powers a pro-Bivens judge would have… but like you noted, the liberal wing which supports those is skeptical of Bivens anyway.
If we assume that Judge Garland still has a shot, either under a President Clinton or in a lame-duck confirmation, the ACLU seems to think that he’s open on Bivens claims, although that could obviously just be respect for stare decisis. Others are more skeptical.
Is it legal to condition her freedom on ability to pay?
Ooh. No legal expertise here, but I think debtors’ prison has been done away with, so you can’t be jailed simply for owing money you can’t pay. On the other hand, given the nature of the crime, the accused could be faking poverty to avoid giving back the money she stole. If she blew it all on a fancy lifestyle, then whatever can be recovered (jewellry, property, etc.) should be sold and the proceeds returned to the people she swindled. If she won’t or can’t do that, jail time seems fair enough.
a county discovers that they’ve lost their zoning map and associated regulations.
This kind of thing happens. You’d be surprised how easy it is to mislay Very Important Documents that were drawn up fifty years or more ago, put away in a dusty filing cabinet somewhere, never looked at again, and in the various changes of offices, amalgamations, retirement of the one person who knew where everything was kept, etc., stuff gets lost. Ahem. Not that I’m speaking from anything I’ve witnessed in my experience at work, of course 🙂
On the first point, yeah you don’t want debtors’ prisons, but at the same time, if I were a victim of a similar crime (notably, something with a pretty clear cash value), the cash restitution would mean a lot more to me than jail time for the criminal. It would also be nice not to have to pursue a separate civil action to get that restitution – a legal way to encourage getting paid back would seem to be a plus from the victim’s point of view.
At a considerable tangent …
I’ve just read a book chapter on an 18th century London debtor’s prison (a few non-debtors as well). A sizable minority of the prisoners were free to live outside the prison in the neighborhood, the prison was pretty openly run by the prisoners and there was a lively economic and social structure inside the prison, most of it (unlike the equivalent in modern U.S. prisons) open and legal. Prisoners were free to have wives and children in the prison with them. For a while there was a rule against having them there through the night, but it wasn’t enforced.
Presumably part of what was going on was that debtors, unlike serious criminals, were not likely to run away. Even the ones living inside the prison seem to have been able to go in and out to a considerable degree.
On the other hand, the prisoners paid rent for their rooms, although at far below market rates, and were responsible for feeding themselves.
Dickens’ Little Dorrit – his novel about debtors’ prison.
Speaking of locking people up for not being able to pay….
At some point a liberal court could rule bail unconstitutional for large classes of offenses under the 8th amendment. The experience of jurisdictions that have largely abandoned bail (DC for example) are showing few problems getting defendants to appear, and the disparate impacts of assessing bail for minor offenses are obvious.
It wouldn’t surprise me at all, honestly- I worked in government records-keeping and for a historical agency for a while, and the incredible disparity between how different kinds of records were kept and maintained boggled my mind. On the one hand, there were sleek metadata-indexed searchable-by-text .pdfa compliant databases for certain regularly-accessed information. On the other hand, charters and binders of potentially pretty important public data which nobody used regularly were stuffed out of order in cardboard boxes, un-indexed, with faded yellow labels falling off the boxes and mice nesting among the returns.
…and these records were only five years old.
Ross Ulbricht of The Silk Road had an appeal hearing this past Thursday.
The 2nd Circuit ruled yesterday in a lawsuit by the Abbott and Costello families against the producers of a play in which a character performs part of the “Who’s on First” routine. The lower court had ruled that the quotation of the routine in the play was fair use; the circuit court disagreed, but still found for the producers because the heirs couldn’t prove they had a valid copyright in the routine.
Hmm. On the one hand, there probably shouldn’t be a “genericized mark”-type exception to copyright law. On the other hand, modern copyright law is heinously overprotective. Not sure how I feel about this one.
It wasn’t ruled “generic.” Rather, the ruling was that A&C filed a copyright for the routine in the ’40s and then didn’t renew it after 28 years, causing their rights to expire in the wacky world of pre-1978 US copyright law. (It’s very odd to realize that the US, now a force for IP maximalism in all things, used to have very permissive laws by world standards. We didn’t even adopt the Berne Convention for a century after it was passed.)
The heirs have also bought the movie rights to the routine back from Universal, but those rights do not cover performance in a play.
Yeah, I’m speaking more to the lower court ruling. It feels intuitively correct, but runs directly counter to the purpose of copyright, at least before renewal.
This is the best thing I have seen today. Thank you for finding this.
Question: Does this qualify as lamentable ideological policing via public shaming and the destruction of a livelihood in the Brenden Eich mold, or does the fact that it was less-than-direct political expression occurring during work hours make it qualitatively different?
http://www.nbcnews.com/video/employees-fired-for-playing-f-tha-police-in-vicinity-of-cops-783425603603
edit to be upfront about my agenda: I roll my eyes at 90% of complaints about “SJWs” but I think the threat of losing your job for hetrodox political opinions is a very legitimate thing to be concerned about. Since I think it’s also not uncommon on the opposite side of the spectrum (just more low-key, since most of the victims on that side will naturally live in areas of Red Tribe hegemony and therefore be less socially and geographically accessible to media), I’m curious to see if its feasible to reach a little common ground.
According to this, the dishwasher was doing it on purpose to annoy the cops, who were customers:
http://allblackmedia.com/2016/10/houston-restaurant-employee-fired-blasting-n-w-s-f-police-cops-ate-bbq/
So not at all the same thing as Eich.
Is the intent the important distinction for you? Because while no one can say that the intent of Eich was to piss off the customers, Mozilla could more-or-less credibly claim it had the same effect (as long as you translate “customer” to “important donors/stakeholders” since of course Mozilla had no customers per se)
Overtly and deliberately antagonistic towards these customers right here in front of you versus privately and abstractly antagonistic towards a class of “customers” seems like a useful distinction, yes.
The intent makes it a slam dunk. That it was done during work hours and on work premises, that it did annoy the customers and did so while they were there in their role as customers, all that factors into it.
If Brandon Eich had muttered “goddamned fags” while in the Mozilla offices when a homosexual donor was there, very few would be screaming about his ejection.
On the other hand, if these employees had played “Fuck tha Police” while at home when the same cops were patrolling nearby, and then they got fired for it, I’d be on their side.
Exactly, the distinctions raised above are very relevant.
I’ll just leave my boilerplate response:
I think it’s good that they can do this (fire the employees), and also think it’s regrettable that they chose to do so.
Seems like being fired for being deliberately rude to customers who are currently eating at your restaurant is fairly reasonable.
This would be my stance.
It’s one thing to be fired for your behaviour outside of your place of employment; it’s another thing entirely to be fired for your behaviour while you’re actively working.
I’m sure any day now the long awaited unicorn will show up and all these freedom of expression loving diehards will get outraged over something that happened to someone other than a right winger.
Any day now …
Shouldn’t you be posting as Anonymous?
We were outraged over something that happened to left-wingers *first*: the Hollywood Blacklist. We were literally taught to be outraged at blacklists in grade school. Many of us took it seriously. Then we found out that for others, the stated principles were just a cover: they were actually pro-blacklist, as long as the victims definitely weren’t communists. Since you’re denouncing hypocrisy as well as freedom of expression, can I presume you’ve been openly pro-blacklist all your life? People should risk professional and social blackballing for their beliefs, right, person behind an unidentifiable three-letter pseudonym?
That much-praised and shared xkcd cartoon, in particular, is entirely supportive of the principle underlying the blacklist.
On one level I’m in complete agreement with you, on another level I’m also an unrepentant communist and obliged to point out that you’re talking about events over 50 years apart.
Most of the blacklisting advocates today – self-identified communist or otherwise – weren’t even alive during the McCarthy era. And more than a few people on the hard left, young and old (myself included) are as strongly opposed to blacklists as you are and very much involved in the fight against them.
But that era is still talked about in this era. It’s not as if it’s an obscure bit of history that only matters to historians; McCarthy is constantly brought up by the left today in a political context in order to attack the right.
Anecdata: of people I actually know, the ones who are actually on the hard left tend to be bigger on freedom of speech than liberals, or liberals who think they’re radicals.
The people I know who post that xkcd comic tend to fall into the former category – the guy I know who best fits the latter tends to post a Wondermark cartoon making the rather weak claim that free speech is only a tool to protect the evils done by the privileged.
It’s a pretty common pattern, death-eaters aside. For example, look at the “Party of Lincoln” shit, by people that are the ideological, and in many cases actual, heirs to the confederacy.
Or how so many right wingers are all of a sudden all for strict equality of opportunity when it serves as a convenient foil against affirmative action.
If they actual held the meta-level position they claim to they’d be able to find *one* living, contemporary person to champion that they disagree with on the object level. But they can’t. There are no Skokies, because this isn’t a sincere movement. It’s just grabbing at whatever they hope might stick to attack the hated enemy.
I’ve noticed that as well. The Freddie De Boer types, under whose administration there’s maybe a fifty-fifty chance I’d end up in a camp*, are still far more supportive of freedom of speech and association than your average generic social-justicey Democrat. Perhaps it’s out of principle, or perhaps it’s the pragmatic attitude that allowing people to express their fringe ideologies freely benefits you if you have a fringe ideology yourself.
* Not that he’d put me there! But right after the revolution, he’d be overthrown by Lenin 2.0 in turn and that would be that. Maybe we’d get to work the fields together, that would be fun.
It’s interesting that Anonymous has nothing to offer but ad hominem.
Are you surprised? That’s pretty much his entire shtick.
@Thirteenth
Don’t you mean Stalin 2.0?
@ThirteenthLetter:
I’m imagining him getting into a million-message-long Twitter argument with his betrayers, while in exile, even during his struggle with the assassins sent to get him. Then, everyone who disappeared into the secret prisons would sign detailed confessions as to their involvement in the vast and insidious DeBoerite conspiracy. Then, the people in charge of the prison camps would be themselves purged for their miserable failure to contain the conspiracy. Fifty years later, annoying university students in other countries would call themselves his followers.
@BLA:
Is there some reason Aaron Swartz doesn’t count? Here’s a snippet from his wiki page:
Eh. I don’t think “information wants to be free” is really the same thing as freedom of expression, but if Eichians want to pick him up, sure that would count. I’ve seen no evidence of it here at SSC.
Aaron Swartz died in 2013, which is ancient history now – Scott was in the process of shutting down his LiveJournal.
The trouble with Aaron Swartz is that it’s just too obviously upsetting to pretty much everybody here that there’s no other side. So it can’t generate enough toxoplasma to remain a current topic of interest. There was sadness and outrage but it burned out really fast for lack of any real resistance to push against.
If what you are saying is true about the consensus here then maybe I shouldn’t put myself in the firing line, but I don’t agree with the standard narrative around Aaron Swartz.
Was he overcharged? Yes. Did that overcharging play a role in his suicide? Yes. Was his suicide tragic? Yes. Was what he did okay, or even heroic, and regardless of legality ought to be celebrated? No, I don’t think so.
@brad:
From the little I know about the case, that is my (epistemically uncertain) take on the case as well.
Brad, there once was discussion of Swartz and yours was a common position. But I don’t think that’s relevant to the comparison with Eich. No one thinks Eich was heroic, either, particularly since he took his actions as the majority.
@Brad et al
It seems like we all agree that Swartz was overcharged while engaged in a speech act, leading to unfortunate consequences.
Some of us on the more libertarian end of the scale might indeed be inclined to think the act should actually be celebrated, but the difference between “shouldn’t have been punished as much as it was” and “should actually have been celebrated” isn’t worth getting upset about.
We can all be outraged together at the overcharged part of the assessment. And we were, if I recall correctly. So it seems to fit the remit.
@Brad – “Was he overcharged? Yes. Did that overcharging play a role in his suicide? Yes. Was his suicide tragic? Yes. Was what he did okay, or even heroic, and regardless of legality ought to be celebrated? No, I don’t think so.”
What do you find objectionable about what he did? And generally speaking, it wouldn’t matter to me whether what he did was “heroic” or not; his life was intentionally destroyed by a monstrously uncaring government.
I don’t know if I should reopen this, but I wouldn’t call what he did a speech act. What he did was at least very close to trespassing vis-a-vis MIT and theft of services vis-a-vis JSTOR. Neither of those things are particularly admirable. The JSTOR articles may have been out of copyright, but JSTOR scanned them. If he wanted to “free” them, he could have bought a scanner and started scanning.
That he thought had some clever technicality that meant he wasn’t doing either of those things pretty much concedes the point. Swartz had his technicalities and the AUSA had his.
My perspective on this is influenced by the fact that I represented clients for a brief period in criminal cases. Overcharging is absolutely endemic to our system. I had clients who had their lives ruined by overcharging. Yet the outrage over Swartz never seemed to gel into a larger critique of the criminal justice system, just how swell a guy he was.
Well maybe he was a swell guy, but he a committed a crime — not the crime of the century but a legitimate crime nonetheless — and got caught up in our terrible justice system. That’s the kind of thing that happens tens of thousands of times a year. If he had been the charismatic face of a movement to condemn and reform the system as a whole that would have been one thing, but I can’t get on board with a narrative that seemed to have more than a tinge of “this kind of thing isn’t supposed to happen to people like him.”
The Attorney General overcharged in order to force him to plea to a felony. He correctly realized his life would suck ever after once he did so, and killed himself. The sickest part is that to the Attorney General, this was a win. Deterrence against anyone who decides to do this sort of thing, and an understanding by future defendants that the AG does not care if you live or die.
It is kind of depressing. You’ve got all these different people of completely different political persuasions pointing to specific cases of overcharging and police/prosecutorial cruelty, but unwilling or unable to work together. Black Lives Matter says that Eric Garner shouldn’t have been killed for selling loose cigarettes (they say a lot of other things, but I can at least agree with them on this one.) Libertarian conservatives object to local governments that collect excessive fines from the poor and trap them in justice system hell, like in Ferguson. Techno-utopians point to Aaron Schwarz’s life getting annihilated over copyrights, or random Internet users paying huge fines for piracy. The Reason Magazine types object to civil forfeiture. And so on, and so on.
I’m reminded of the blind men and the elephant: they can’t seem to get it together and realize they’re all holding on to the same animal.
(NB: I agree that some people who hold these objections are pointing to the whole problem, of course. Just not quite enough of them to really make the political moment gel together.)
I don’t see how working together would make a difference. There are a whole bunch of powerful groups who like the way the system is working, thankyouverymuch, from law-and-order Republicans to police and prison-guards unions. Techno-utopians or Reason are not a political force.
But techno-utopians, plus Reason, plus libertarian conservatives, plus Black Lives Matter? That ain’t nothing. It’s more than enough to decide just about any competitive election in the United States, if they all pushed in the same direction.
The problem is that we’ve seemingly lost the ability to work, and vote, across party lines for a specific political goal. Any general objective that a variety of people agree on (reduce police and prosecutorial misconduct and the government systems that encourage it) gets atomized into individually polarizing issues (halt regulations, end copyright, call all police racists, et cetera) and distributed across the major political tribes who already spend all their time screaming at each other. And thus never the twain may meet.
@brad:
Aaron Swartz was one of a great many interesting noncentral examples of the problem of overcharging.
Sure, but behaving in a way that seems very close to a crime is not the same as actually committing that crime. So long as he didn’t actually commit a crime, he makes an unusually sympathetic test case for this pervasive problem…if you’re a nerdy anti-authoritarian type.
(I would write more, but ThirteenthLetter already said the rest.)
You have evidence of intent to cause death? Because what I see is intent-to-discredit, coupled with negligence and indifference. Those are all bad things, but I have very little tolerance for people who exaggerate the badness of things they want me to be outraged about, and I don’t think I’m alone in that.
Also, I tend to be somewhat less outraged about bad things happening to people engaged in deliberate civil disobedience than about bad things happening to people minding their own business, and I don’t think I’m alone in that either.
They intended to destroy his life by means of a felony conviction, either pour encourager les autres or just because _that’s what they do_. That he killed himself instead was merely an acceptable substitute.
@ John Schilling
Are you suggesting that the charges were filed accidentally?
@Glen Raphael
It’s far from clear to me that he didn’t actually commit any federal crimes.
So many rich people outraged, how many donated to organizations trying to reform the criminal justice system? As opposed to the EFF or the FSF or something like that? (Though to be fair, at least the EFF does some criminal work.)
It sucks that I have to keep on saying that I do have some sympathy for what happened to him, and no one has to ever say the same about all the people that were overcharged yesterday. Kind of reminds me of the seemingly universally required “of course no should kill police officers either”.
I see zero evidence for this proposition. A collection of different fringes is still fringe.
But a big enough collection of different fringes is a voting bloc. As I said, if you could put together even five percent of the vote — well below the Lizardman Constant — you could flip a lot of elections. Do you think there are five percent of voters in this country who are interested in ending police and prosecutorial abuse?
@hlynkacg: Are you saying that “his life was destroyed” was the best way you could come up with to describe a felony indictment?
How much clearer do I have to make this? You can have my agreement that the Federal government did a bad thing to Aaron Schwartz. You can have my support for any reasonable campaign to stop them from doing that in the future.
OR
You can make silly hyperbolic statements that make you feel all righteously outraged and convince me that you will not stay within the bounds of reason as you pursue this matter and I need to stand back and watch from an amusingly safe distance.
@ThirteenthLetter:
You’re assuming the rest of the electorate just sits there statically while this coalition affects policy. If it was that easy to force policy changes, every group around the size of the margin would already be doing it. But if a politician takes up the platform of a fringe group, they move further from the median voter, so that part of another coalition moves away from them even as yours moves closer. I’d guess this is 99% of Trump’s problem – you can do well in primaries by appealing to fringe coalitions within your party, but doing so alienates the broader electorate when the general comes around. Hence the usual GOP strategy of “nominating the most conservative candidate who can still win.”
Not that it can’t happen, but the votes they stand to gain have to outweigh the ones they stand to lose. An alliance of techno-utopian libertarian conservatives would certainly alienate a lot of votes (and probably more than BLM would, at least among Democrats, which is why they at least pay lip service to their goals – there are more people in the Dem coalition who are at least kinda sympathetic to them than ones who are outright hostile to them). You kind of have to assume that all the campaign strategists getting paid to calculate out exactly how much you have to compromise to get 51% of the electoral college somewhere failed to close an arbitrage opportunity of potential votes.
That’s assuming you could even get those groups to work together for five minutes, rather than just calling each other terrorists and neo-Nazis…
Ah, but here we run up against that paradox whose name temporarily escapes me, where the small group of with a weird idiosyncratic demand usually get it because the vast majority of people don’t know or care and would buy the product/vote for the politician/watch the show whether or not it met said demand. Assuming you’re a Hillary voter: would you bail on her if her campaign released a position paper promising to re-evaluate federal law enforcement’s use of civil asset forfeiture? I kind of doubt it. Assuming you’re a Trump voter (and pretending for the moment that he was a normal GOP candidate instead of, well, Trump): would you bail on him if same thing, except promising to create a commission to examine racial disparities in law enforcement? Again, I doubt it.
(These promises would be small beer, of course, and even if they were kept that doesn’t necessarily mean anything will happen. But it’s a seat at the table, it’s a start. Slow and tedious is how things are supposed to work in this system.)
Yeah, I kinda think this is the harder part of making such a coalition happen.
@brad:
Do you have any particular such organizations suggest?
(A few I like include the Cato Institute, Institute for Justice, ACLU, Amnesty, Drug Policy Foundation, but I suspect none of those would work for you. Part of the problem is that the word “reform” is an applause light.)
I respect much of the work that each of those organizations does (well I never heard of the Drug Policy Foundation, but based on the website they look good.) Some of them seem more directly on point than others — i.e. Amnesty’s primary focus is abroad and IfJ focuses more on civil litigation than criminal, but all do some good work.
I’d add: The Sentencing Project, The Innocence Project / Network. Various public defense organizations also frequently engage in high impact litigation, though not much lobbying. Perhaps more controversially, the NAACP does some very good work in this area (along with other things). I believe they will take targeted donations, but I wouldn’t swear to it.
The Koch brothers are working on getting public defenders more resources.
@Brad – “Well maybe he was a swell guy, but he a committed a crime — not the crime of the century but a legitimate crime nonetheless — and got caught up in our terrible justice system.”
We appear to be in vehement agreement. I am not remotely under the impression that Schwartz was an isolated case. I am at least tangentially familiar with the fucked-up nature of the public defender system, overcharging generally, the moral hazard implicit in departments making budget via civil forfeiture, and quite a few other things besides. I am heavily on board with any “movement to condemn and reform the system as a whole”, and the fact that no such movement exists, and particularly that BLM decided to focus its narrative on racism rather than the entirely fucked nature of the system is especially infuriating.
@John Schilling – “You have evidence of intent to cause death? Because what I see is intent-to-discredit, coupled with negligence and indifference.”
If I might appeal to fictional evidence, consider the Count of Monte Cristo.
I am entirely comfortable calling a trumped-up felony indictment “ruining someone’s life.” If it happened to me, I do not think I would survive it. Dropping someone into the criminal justice system because you find them inconvenient is a monstrous thing to do. Destroying someone’s business over bullshit regulatory technicalities, likewise. If that nomenclature is unacceptable to you, I’m open to suggestions that capture a similar torches-and-pitchforks feel. The point is that this, like so many other things, absolutely should not be stood for, and the fact that we stand for it says bad things about us.
This is one of those things that would have me voting for Hillary in a heartbeat if I thought she’d try to address it.
Whether or not they were right to be fired, it does seem like a sort of self-refuting political position. “I’m a black* man who believes cops are looking for excuses to kill black men so I will go out of my way to insult them” is not terribly coherent except as posturing.
That said, if cops are as corrupt as they are accused, they the firing is fair, since they are endangering the owners of the establishment just as if they wore T-shirts that said “F-the [well known mafia family]!”
*This is an assumption, of course.
If they were good employees otherwise, I would hope that they would be given a talking-to and a second chance – turfing someone out of a job for what amounts to a dumb prank seems a bit disproportionate, especially with the jobs market as it is. If they had, say, spat in cops’ food, that’s instant firing, plus maybe charges (tampering with someone’s food is generally against the law, right?)
As I see it: off-work behaviour should be more protected than behaviour at work not directly related to the work should be more protected than behaviour at work directly related to the work.
He was a dishwasher. Not someone with lots of skills and twenty years of tenure.
A dumb 17-year old kid lost his job for being a dumb kid. I still think that the harm suffered by a 17-year old losing a menial job (and, after all, we can’t assume that money isn’t needed for something) is more than the harm suffered by a cop hearing a song that is rude towards them.
If I’d have been the cop, I would have said “hey, don’t fire the kid”. Get some goodwill, maybe.
I would probably fire the kid, but I disagree he suffered less harm. It’s easier for the cop to find a new place to eat than for the kid to find a new job. But it’s hardest for the manager to find new clientele.
True. The manager might suffer harm. It is, after all, a private business. He can fire the kid if he wants.
Still, can we focus on the cop for a second? His response to a 17-year old’s dumb prank is speak to a manager, say he’ll never eat there again, post on Facebook about it.
We make fun of college students for wanting safe spaces, but this cop seems to have gotten pretty upset about his identity as a Person of Law Enforcement being invalidated.
Since we’re going there, you shouldn’t presuppose that they even identify as a person of law enforcement in the first place. Better to just say ‘Assigned Cop At Birth’
😛
Lots of people become cops because they like to throw their weight around. I can’t really fault him for talking to the manager, but making a public stink over it seems excessive.
@ dndnrsn
Then was your parent comment phrased wrong? You said the cop suffered more harm, and I disagree, but that seems to be the opposite of what you are saying now?
Frankly, I think the cop suffered zero harm, but still wouldn’t blame him for going elsewhere and telling the manager why.
Wow, you’re right, I phrased that the exact opposite of what I meant. Not sure how I thought “less” was a synonym for “more”. The cop suffered less harm than the kid.
EDIT: Can Scott or somebody edit my post? It’s confusing and I look dumb.
Yeah, I had a similar experience at a restaurant once with cops at the next table over getting all uppity that not everyone was paying them the “proper” respect.
Seeing a cop come into your business and then deliberately playing anti-cop music does indeed strike me as not paying them the “proper” respect, in the sense that if a garbageman came into your business and you played some anti-garbageman music you wouldn’t be paying them the proper respect either. It’s the respect due to a human being, not to a cop or a garbageman specifically. No matter what you think of cops or garbagemen, you should politely carry out your business with them and see them on their way.
Is that an offense worth firing for? That depends on the circumstances. I can imagine situations where it obviously is, and situations where it obviously isn’t.
^^
Pretends not to know that contempt of cop is an arrestable offense.
^^
Citation needed.
Does my experience being arrested as an accessory to someone else asking a police officer for his badge number count?
That wasn’t, of course, the charge.
I think the question of “Are cops really Bad And The Worst?” is immaterial to the question of “If an employee in a restaurant plays music to deliberately piss off some of the restaurant’s customers, should that employee be fired?”
The answer to the latter question is “yes”, making the answer to the former question irrelevant. Brandon Synecdoche was fired for things outside of work that did not impact his job, these guys were fired for things they did at work that directly negatively impacted their employer.
@DrBeat:
What if these guys lived near (one of) the cops and were in the habit of playing “F the Police”, etc. from their home stereo out of the windows when the cop got home?
That would seem to make the situation more analogous.
Would the cops be out of bounds for mentioning it to the owner of the restaurant? Would they be out of bounds for telling him/her that’s why they don’t come to their restaurant anymore? What if the restaurant was near the police station and the lunch and dinner rush were made up of 50% cops?
That is still not a matter for the guy’s employer, since he didn’t do it at work.
Indeed, in that in neither his case nor Eich’s should their employment be at risk. At least, not in a sane society.
They might have an emotional desire to do so, but the correct thing to do is man up and not drag some unrelated dispute into the guy’s employment. If he’s committing a crime, arrest him. Other than that, well, with great power comes the great responsibility not to abuse it.
“That is still not a matter for the guy’s employer, since he didn’t do it at work.”
Would you have the same attitude if the targets were black or hispanic?
Suppose he works in a place most of whose customers are black. Further suppose that, when not at work, he make a point of antagonizing blacks, says insulting things to them. He does enough of it so that blacks avoid the place where he works.
Is that a legitimate reason to fire him?
For a slightly more likely version, make it women. He is always hitting on women and doing it in a clumsy and offensive way–but not at work. Women therefor avoid the place he works.
I should add that this might be relevant to the Mozilla case–depending on the actual facts there.
Yes. I’d have the same attitude no matter who the targets are.
Now, I realize that — thanks to media hysteria and some adroit propaganda — there are a lot of people who are irrational on this topic, can’t separate out people’s work and private lives, and so would hunt down the person’s employer and give them crap about it instead of taking their objections directly to the person in question. So maybe holding on to this principle isn’t the best for one’s immediate business.
But that’s just the tragedy of the commons in action. It’s easy to give in to any specific demand and fire Villain N to make the problem go away for now. But that just encourages people to seek out Villain N + 1. Yesterday you’re giving in to pressure and firing someone who posted a racist message on Facebook, and maybe even feeling good about it. But today you’re giving in to pressure and firing someone for objecting to gay marriage ten years ago. And tomorrow you’re giving in to pressure and firing someone who was caught in public disliking the new Ghostbusters movie. And the day after, somebody who stopped applauding too early at the announcement of the grain quotas for the next Five-Year Plan. It’s not going to end.
More like, we know how it ends.
Question: So it would be better if they silently collectively decided not to patronize the business, and the employee loses his job anyway because the job disappears?
If they independently decided not to patronize the business because they guy made them uncomfortable, fine. If they joined together as a mob specifically to get this guy, where the outrage of every person in the mob builds on the outrage of every other person, not fine.
(Note that this is the opposite of Scott’s essay about making sure your meanness is coordinated.)
Okay, I don’t watch videos and there wasn’t a transcript or an attached news article, so I don’t know what went on.
But (a) it seems a stupid thing to do. If the cops complain to your boss, you could get fired (or more likely, they’ll keep an eye out for getting you on petty things like not having your car taxed, going a little over the speed limit, etc. so they’ll get you back by hassling you) (b) I don’t think they should be fired if it’s a once-off or even a couple of times. The boss tells them “knock it off, it was funny once but not five times in a row”, and they can play the music in the kitchen or elsewhere it won’t be heard by the customers – including the cops.
There’s no point in being stupid. This wasn’t a point of principle, it was silly point-scoring. Now, unless we’re talking about members of Black Lives Matter and this was a political protest, I don’t see any free speech element here, just the kind of juvenile joke some people never grow out of. But still not a firing offence, unless all the customers complained and said they’d boycott the place, and the boss has to weigh up loss of custom versus a couple of smart-alecs who aren’t smart enough to realise when they’re being jackasses.
I’d still go with the warning and “knock it off guys” rather than firing them, though.
Why is this newsworthy?
Because as for “public shaming and destruction of a livelihood”, this guy lost one job of a very common sort. If he was capable of getting a job as a dishwasher before, he’s capable of getting a job as a dishwasher again, and now he knows that “don’t annoy the paying customers” is an actual legitimate job requirement that one can be held to during working hours.
But putting him on television and saying “this is the guy that did that really stupid thing, this is what he looks like, and OBTW he’ll be looking for a job in your town real soon”, that does cross the line into public shaming and I don’t think that’s a good or proper outcome. Since there’s no transcript and I don’t waste time on video for things like this, whose idea was it to put this story on the air and why?
I’m guessing self-inflicted, in which case probably the best outcome would be for it to blow over and go away without a fuss.
Are topics related to the US election allowed?
I am thinking about betting some money on Trump if his odds go below 10%. Not because I think he will win, but to hedge myself against the risk. What do SSC readers think, is this rational?
If I bet $300, I could gain about $2700 if Trump wins. It is not a huge amount of money, but I am not a muslim in America or something, so a Trump presidency is only an indirect risk for me. If nothing else, I would have something to be happy about. I would most likely lose the $300, but I happily pay for various insurance policies that I expect to be money down the drain.
I am outside the U.S. so I can legally use sites like Betfair. Are they efficient as prediction markets, or will I loose too much to the house?
It seems foolish to bet on a heavy underdog, unless you have some special information others don’t that leads you to believe they’re undervalued.
If you are going to be upset if Trump wins, and want to bet a few hundred so that there will be a silver lining, whether or not to do that is a different question, but is largely one based on your own emotional state, which you are the expert on.
Buying lottery tickets is a dumb way to make money. But if you like to spend a few bucks on a lottery ticket every now and then because, hey, why not, it’s kinda fun, that’s a different situation.
Gambling is usually a poor way to make money, but if you derive enjoyment from it (and don’t end up hocking your grandmother’s gold rings to pay for your high-stakes poker habit), then it’s not a money decision.
tmk is specifically talking about hedging. The idea is to, in a two-outcome scenario, make a bet against your preference, so that when you also consider the bet you become indifferent to the outcome. He is not trying to use superior information to make money. When you say “… is a different question”, actually it is exactly the question he asked. His statement is approximately: “I am indifferent between a world where Clinton wins but I have $300 less, and a world where Trump wins but I am up $2700. Does anyone have advice on executing this hedge?”
The discussion of how much money it is, and the “if nothing else”, suggested to me that the question was primarily about the money, but you’re probably right.
As a rule, betting markets overestimate odds below 15% – there’s a cognitive bias that rounds up low-probability scenarios to 15%. So if Trump’s odds are significantly below that, it’s likely that they’re still overestimated.
That said, I think they’re still slightly above that.
These are small amounts of money. For small amounts of money, your utility should be linear in money. If the election is a catastrophe that it affects your value of money, then you should hedge. But then you should hedge regardless of the odds. I suspect that you like the idea of hedging at 10% because you are, at some level, thinking of $300 as nothing and $3000 as real money. This is an error.
This is not the first time I’ve heard the idea, actually, but as more of a psychological strategy than anything: you bet against the outcome you personally desire. That way you have something to be happy about either way.
I have done this in Vegas – bet (about a steak dinner’s worth) against my favorite team in a game I planned to watch that day, with the logic that I either win my bet and buy myself a steak dinner, thus drowning my sorrows over my team’s loss, or I lose my bet but am happy because my team won. Either way (since you pay for your bet up front) there’s a “happy ending”.
Of course I got really lucky and my team won by 2 while the line was my team -3. So I won both! Downside was the game went to OT, and in the extra time a new dealer swapped in at my blackjack table and went on a hot streak, taking me from up on my blackjack for the day (if the game had ended on time) to down.
I wouldn’t bet that he’d win, but it might be worth betting that it’ll be closer than predicted. I don’t know if any of the sites are saying “Trump to get 38% of the vote” or the like, but that seems to be a better bet than straight “He’ll win despite all this”.
Paddy Power, for instance, have bets about Mike Pence not being the VP candidate, or either Trump or Clinton winning then resigning because of impeachment, or the third parties getting elected.
The Pence thing is interesting – does anyone have any opinions on whether he’ll stick with Trump, or decide that the risk of tainting his name is too great and he’ll jump ship? Might be worth a flutter!
The Trump campaign seems to have Hindenburged, but there’s one point I want to make sure isn’t lost in the chaos. Both Bill Clinton and Donald Trump have had credible accusations of sexual assault (in Bill’s case, rape) leveled against them. Does anyone else find it fairly disturbing that, no matter which way the election goes, there’s a decent chance we’ll end up with a sexual predator in the White House, as president or first man?
I don’t find the accusations of actual rape against either all that credible (Juanita Broderick with Clinton and Ivana in the divorce plus a 13 year old for Trump). But I think it’s inevitable that most heterosexual men who run for the presidency (and are thus your ambitious, power-seeking types) are going to have stepped over the line.
Bill Clinton, I think, probably fits “predator” better, in that the most credible complaint against him is that he used the power of his office to have sex with subordinates. Trump, on the other hand, seems more like a handsy douchebag, using his fame to get away with lesser sexual touching. I wouldn’t suggest anyone be happy about their daughter working in the White House whatever the result.
A bit of Googling is giving me nothing about whether politicians are more likely to commit/be accused of sexual assault than the baseline.
I would guess that politicians of any combination of gender and sexuality are probably more likely than their non-politician equivalents to do stuff ranging from “unpleasant misbehaviour” to “full-on rape”, but that’s entirely on the basis of the stereotype I have of politicians (namely, that they are usually people who enjoy power over others, and people who enjoy power over others may not be especially picky in how they get or exercise that power).
Bill Clinton has been accused of doing this since long before he was anybody really important, hasn’t he? Meanwhile, Trump’s reputation as a womanizer* is not a new thing either.
*side thought: guys who were charming and promiscuous, and guys who were outright sexual predators, both used to get described as “womanizers”, which doesn’t seem to be the case as much. I’ve read that in the past (further in the past) stuff got referred to as “seduction” that today we would view as unambiguous rape.
Was there any that dated to before he was governor?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Clinton_sexual_misconduct_allegations
Dolly Kyle claimed an affair 1974-1992, though if true would not be sexual assault, just him cheating on his wife repeatedly (which we already know to be the case).
Eileen Wellstone claims he sexually assaulted her in 1969, when he was a Rhodes scholar.
Meanwhile, Trump is supposed to have been a groper in the 80s, and there’s some stuff in Sunday’s NYT about the early 90s.
@dndnrsn
Although that claim is second-hand and traces back to an extremely unreliable source. Nobody as far as I know has produced proof that Eileen Wellstone even exists. Even though the original source claims that she was one of Clinton’s “classmates”, nobody has asked the University if they have a record of someone by that name attending at the time.
@AlphaGamma:
True. Not so much “this is a credible accusation” as “we have an accusation of him being a sexual predator pre-Governor and an accusation of him cheating on his wife pre-Governor”.
The article Wikipedia links to seems to be missing a big chunk, also, so I can’t compare the two – the Wikipedia phrasing makes it sound like a firsthand allegation.
To put it another way:
We know for a fact he cheated on his wife more than once. It’s more likely than not that he was doing this before he became governor – I would be unsurprised if it turns out he cheated on every girlfriend he had pre-Hillary. “He is the kind of person who cheats” makes more sense than “he was an innocent who couldn’t deal with the seductive effects of being Governor of Arkansas”.
If he is a sexual assaulter of whatever variety – unlike the above, which he directly acknowledged, this one is unproven – it’s also likely he’s always been like that. “Sexual predators behave in a sexually predatory fashion in any context where they can” is more convincing than “the power of being Governor of Arkansas turned him into a brute”.
Now there’s a woman saying Trump groped her in the 70s.
@dndnrsn
I don’t think the new stories are going to move the needle. I suspect some of them are true, but some of them will be politically motivated, some of them from disturbed people, some of them just from people wanting their 15 minutes of fame. And there’s no way to distinguish them at this point.
Oh, I’m not saying anything about their truth one way or the other. I can believe all the stories – there’s nothing inherently unbelievable. But there’s also no proof. Again, due to my stereotype of politician/business types, I will readily believe stories about them disrespecting people’s boundaries.
You’re right they’re not going to move the needle – nobody was saying “Trump isn’t a misogynist” or “Bill Clinton is a gentleman” up until whatever the latest thing was.
I don’t think the question is “are their allegations that claim conduct occurred before political relevance” but “are their allegations that were made before political relevance”.
Given the very long history of a) political opponents attempting to tar their rivals with anything sexual, and b) the media loving things that are “titillating” about a public figure, from a Bayesian perspective you have to do some discounting when sexual misconduct allegations are made about a public figure.
“John McCain has a black child” was a well circulated rumor during the 2000 Republican primary in South Carolina.
Of course that also ends up working the other way as well, where public figures can get away with things sort of by hiding in plain site.
Trump is slightly unique in that most of the stuff he has been alleged to have done he has said in the past he has done. Most of those people don’t make it past the primary (or even pre-primary) stage.
You’re right that allegations after someone’s become famous, or when they’re in a political race, or whatever, are probably a little less trustworthy than accusations against Joe Schmoe.
The McCain allegations were pure scurrilous rumour, though. He and his wife adopted a Bangladeshi orphan, and people started spreading rumours about the kid’s parentage.
It would have been different had a woman showed up and said “so-and-so-many years ago, I had an affair with him, and here is his secret lovechild!” Not instantly credible, but more credible than “psst psst psst McCain’s got a dark secret ifyaknowwhatImean”.
If there were stories going around like “Trump is a groper, everybody knows it” or “Hey, didja know Bill Clinton gets it on with secretaries?” that would be different from individual women making the allegations, especially when using their real identities.
@ The Nybbler
sex with subordinates.
Why is ‘subordinate/s’ plural. The only subordinate I know of was Lewinsky. The other accusers had no connection with government employment.
It is disturbing. It’s also illuminating. When the allegations against Clinton came out, people who nominally were against sexual harassment in the workplace started looking down at their toes and drawing little circles on the floor with the toes of their Birkenstocks when it came time to denounce him. Similarly, we have nominal Christians making excuses for video talking about grabbing women by the pussy.
It still infuriates me that we nominated an unprincipled RINO against the most unelectable Democratic candidate since at least the 80s, and one I couldn’t even bring myself to hold my nose and vote for. I still haven’t really forgiven McCain for McCain-Feingold, but I was able to get over it long enough to at least support him in 2008.
One of my stated reasons for refusing to vote for Trump (I don’t remember if I said it here or over at Megan McArdle’s) was that I didn’t think the Republicans needed their own Bill Clinton. I was just referring to unprincipled and scandal-prone. I didn’t think I’d end up being so on-the-nose with that statement.
When the allegations against Clinton came out, people who nominally were against sexual harassment in the workplace started looking down at their toes and drawing little circles on the floor with the toes of their Birkenstocks when it came time to denounce him.
Tell me about it. The one thing that really disappointed me was when the Monica Lewinsky story was proven to be true (and not just scurrilous gossip or a faked-up scandal by political opposition). I was gravely disappointed and shocked about Bill Clinton. And then all the feminists suddenly got very quiet, or started defending Bill, or were willing to sacrifice a young woman’s reputation and life because Clinton would do more for them while in power to achieve their aims.
And I still see dismissals of it, particularly when talking about Hillary versus Trump: “what’s a blowjob compared to rape?” or “it was just a blowjob, no big deal”.
IT WAS SEXUAL HARASSMENT IN THE WORKPLACE, POWER IMBALANCE, INAPPROPRIATE CONDUCT, ADULTERY, AND A FEW OTHER THINGS.
The kind of thing that would drive people ballistic if it had come out about one of the Republican candidates – imagine what hay would have been made if, say, Ted Cruz was proven to have had an affair with a younger woman working in his office!
But no, it’s so vital that Hillary get elected because of the Evil Of Trumpness, that genuine wrong-doing be brushed off as “only a blowjob”. Even the younger crowd, who are all the “consent is everything, not using someone’s preferred pronouns is the exact same as physical assault” mindset are saying nothing or sweeping it under the carpet because “Hillary is progressive, Hillary stands with Planned Parenthood, Hillary will do wonderful things when she’s elected”.
That kind of behaviour is wrong, no matter who does it or what the political connections are, and when we (on any side) start excusing it away because the more important thing is that our side, who are the good guys, win – then we’ve capitulated on principles and let rottenness spread.
There was a quote reported from a feminist back then, I heard it on Bill Mahr’s late night show at the time, that went something to the effect of “I would have given him a BJ for keeping partial birth abortion legal.”
I can’t say if this was reported or remembered accurately, but I do think it reflects an attitude of personal behavior being excused is one is for the cause.
This can be seen on the right as well, though I do not believe in equal measure, likely due to media pressure.
This isn’t fair. There are lots of people talking about Bill Clinton. Here’s a selection from the 538 chat about the issue, for example (more at the link):
If you are wondering why there is more talk about one than the other, consider the subtle but important distinction between Donald Trump’s sexual harassment and Bill Clinton’s sexual harassment in the context of this campaign: only one of them is running for president.
But Bill has been campaigning for Hillary, and she’s made a point of having him in the White House being a good thing. Hillary has used her experience as First Lady as a positive in her campaign. Also, their careers are inextricably linked – do you think Hillary would really be the leading candidate for President if Bill had gone down in flames over the sex assault allegations (or been convicted during his impeachment)? “Team Clinton” is pretty clearly a partnership, and it’s dubious to dismiss the older allegations as “well that’s just Bill, Hillary’s the one running” unless and until Hillary dumps him (or at least makes it clear that she feels his past actions disqualify him for a role in her administration).
More importantly, there’s also the question of to what extent Hillary herself excused / enabled Bill’s behavior. After all, if you’re going to condemn rape culture you need to condemn the women who perpetuate it as well. And there are accusations that she went farther than that, namely by organizing or at least participating in a slut-shaming / victim-blaming campaign to assassinate the character of Bill’s accusers.
Also, given that she wasn’t prosecuted for what look like clear violations concerning classified documents, it doesn’t look good for her to be strongly pushing “Believe all women accusers” but add in “Except against my husband.” It adds credence to the view that she thinks powerful or politically righteous people deserve to be above the law.
This would be a relevant distinction were it not for Hillary saying “Remember how great the two-for-one was in the 90’s? Well, you can have that again!”.
Whoa, wait, what? That comment about Bill Clinton versus Trump as sexual predators wasn’t a comment from Anonymous, that was me. I don’t know what happened there? Deleting and re-posting under my own name:
the subtle but important distinction between Donald Trump’s sexual harassment and Bill Clinton’s sexual harassment in the context of this campaign: only one of them is running for president
Only one of them has demonstrated he would act, and did act, in a sexually predatory manner while president.
Do we want to let him return to the White House as First Gentleman and half of the Billary team (which is the anticipated Third Coming of Bill’n’Hill?) Do we think he’s going to behave any better if he’s not the president, just the president’s spouse? (Of course, he’s older now, and maybe as Hamlet says “The hey-day in the blood is tame, it’s humble”).
At least with Trump, we know he’s liable to abuse his position when it comes to soliciting sexual favours from women before he’s elected (if he’s elected, which is probably not going to happen).
I’d prefer to know if I’m liable to get bitten before I stick my hand into the cage, thanks all the same.
Folks, do my homework for me– I’d heard that Lewinsky went to some trouble to seduce Bill Clinton. Is this true? If so, I’d say it’s good evidence of consent.
When I’ve brought this up (just once), I was told that the affair was still very bad because of the chance of favoritism.
I’d heard that Lewinsky went to some trouble to seduce Bill Clinton. Is this true? If so, I’d say it’s good evidence of consent.
Still doesn’t let him off the hook. He was married, older, and her superior in status. If it really was “Oh, I got swept off my feet by a conniving little vixen twenty-seven years my junior, gosh I just couldn’t help myself” – that’s not great, either. It still means he was willing to commit adultery and to have an office affair.
That’s the whole point of being an adult: if a sixteen year old has a huge crush on you and tries to play Lolita around you, you behave appropriately, you don’t go “Well, she was throwing herself at me, what could I do?” (Or for boys with older women, which also happens).
Even if she did set out to seduce him, nothing says he had to let himself be seduced. The best thing would have been to let her know that was not happening, it was not appropriate, and if she continued to try and have an affair with him, she’d be moved away from having contact with him at work.
Still doesn’t let him off the hook. He was married, older, and her superior in status. If it really was “Oh, I got swept off my feet by a conniving little vixen twenty-seven years my junior, gosh I just couldn’t help myself” – that’s not great, either.
Agree that it’s not great, but phrases like “sexual predator” are not appropriate for a married guy who gets seduced. “Adulterer” certainly, “inappropriate conduct” definitely, but “predator” no.
Lewinsky is far from the worst allegation against Clinton – I’ve seen a lot of people say “well, all Bill did wrong was cheat on his wife” and that speaks to how effectively the Clinton campaign has memory-holed Broaddrick, Jones, and others.
Of course, even if you’ve got Lewinsky, saying “clearly she seduced him, and that makes it okay” doesn’t seem too far front the Trump boast that he can do what he wants because all women will want him. Realistically, it’s still an inappropriate relationship. Monica was a much younger subordinate.
The Hillary Clinton campaign, formed to support her run for President in 2016, is responsible for people not remembering or talking about allegations concerning Bill Clinton that date from thirty eight and twenty five years ago respectively?
Get a grip.
The “Clinton campaign” started in support of her 2016 Presidential run? Get a grip. You know what I meant.
Deiseach
You’ve missed my point. I wasn’t arguing that she coerced him, nor that he showed good judgement.
I was addressing the claim that boss/subordinate sex is always a result of inappropriate use of power by the boss and therefore all such sex should be forbidden.
There is no reason (unless I’ve missed something) to think Clinton pressured Lewinsky into sex.
@Nancy Leibovitz:
I think that boss-employee relationships are always a potential issue, from the standpoint of power dynamic. It’s very, very frequently unethical behavior.
But, especially given evidence of consent, especially enthusiastic consent, that issue isn’t a criminal one.
However, we should probably favor a prediction of non-consent if all we know about the situation is that it is employee-employer.
I don’t think highly of either Bill Clinton or Donald Trump, but I find the assumptions behind a lot of the criticism of the sexual behavior of both unpersuasive.
Suppose, as might well be the case, that Bill had permission from Hilary to play around, as Donald claimed to have at least limited permission from his wife.
What then is wrong with Bill seducing or letting himself be seduced by a younger woman? The only thing that occurs to me is the irresponsibility, given his position as president. It was obvious that if such behavior became known it would badly distract from the job he was doing and also obvious that it could become known.
The implication is not, in my view, that he was engaged in sexual harassment or anything similar but that he was indulging himself at the expense of a serious risk to the job he was supposed to be doing.
I realize there are other and more serious allegation about Clinton, but this is the one which is known to be true.
Getting back to Trump … . Reading the transcript of his remarks, I think it is clear that he is boasting that he is so attractive, due mostly to status, that women consent to the things he does. He may well be fooling himself in that or even deliberately misrepresenting himself, but that is the implication of what he says. If what he claimed to believe was true, I don’t think the behavior would amount to assault or harassment, whatever the current legal rules may be.
I note, by the way, that it seems well established that FDR had affairs. Probably some other presidents as well.
@ David Friedman
JFK was a prime example, I think.
What then is wrong with Bill seducing or letting himself be seduced by a younger woman?
CW: “Borderer” sentiments attain expression towards the end. The sensitive should have hartshorn to hand in case of attacks of faintness from exposure to such peasant ignorance and violence.
He is twenty-seven years older than her. At the time of the “seduction”, he was forty-nine and she was twenty-two. He had a fifteen year old daughter at the same time he was having sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky. That means that when Monica was his daughter’s age, he was forty-two years old. It’s entirely possible for fifteen year olds to have crushes on older men. I don’t know if you’d be happy if your fifteen year old daughter said she was in love with your forty-two year old neighbour, or what your reaction would be if he claimed that she seduced him into sleeping with her. And I don’t see that seven extra years of age carries very much more maturity with it in cases like that, where he is literally old enough to be her father.
I’m saying he was a grown man, married, the father of a teenage daughter, and he apparently couldn’t resist an inexperienced young woman dazzled by his undeniable charisma and approachability (unless we all accept the narrative that she was a scheming harpy who was full of worldly wiles).
Were I the mother of a daughter involved in a relationship with a married man of that age and status disparity, I’d drag her home by the scruff of the neck and I’d kneecap the bastard. But YMMV.
@David
Part of the opprobrium directed at Clinton is that a boss should essentially never sleep with his employees because of the inherent power differential. That applies doubly when your boss is literally the POTUS. Though personally I’d be more worried about it distracting from the job of POTUS (and I think it may, in certain cases, have caused him to make politically motivated decisions related to foreign policy in an attempt to distract from the scandal), that is not the primary accusation against Bill Clinton. Rather, it’s that a boss sleeping with e. g. his secretary is inherently predatory.
Of course, taken to an extreme, this seems to imply that powerful people are never allowed to sleep with people who are attracted to powerful people, which is not a small group, because you’re not supposed to sleep with people less powerful than you. My impression was that Monica was a consenting adult and knew exactly what she was doing and enjoyed it. She never struck me as traumatized or anything of the sort. Sure, part of the attraction might have been sleeping with the POTUS, and while I find the idea of leveraging such a position for such a crass thing to be yucky, you can’t entirely separate Bill Clinton the man from Bill Clinton the POTUS.
And even though I mostly disagreed with Bill Clinton on policy back in the day (though I was only barely old enough to have much of an opinion at the time), I definitely also recall thinking that the Republicans were being obnoxious and calculating: that their moral outrage was fake and being used for political gain.
My mom (not a Christian, btw), on the other hand, tells me that all the kids decided oral sex didn’t count as sex after that, so apparently some people do believe in the “president as exemplar” thing.
The whole “sexual relations with someone you have an existing power relationship is tantamont to rape” thing was very big at the time of the Bill Clinton scandals; it was pushed by the feminists of the time, and had figured in a scandal which resulted in a court-martial of the Sergeant-Major of the Army. So yes, the Republicans were utterly phony in their moral outrage… but on the other hand, they were also just holding Clinton to the standards of his side.
“Part of the opprobrium directed at Clinton is that a boss should essentially never sleep with his employees because of the inherent power differential. ”
Yes. I don’t agree with that broad a claim.
I’ve noticed that tactic never works when it’s Republicans trying to use it.
@ Onyomi
Rather, it’s that a boss sleeping with e. g. his secretary is inherently predatory.
That’s SJW-style logic.
My mom (not a Christian, btw), on the other hand, tells me that all the kids decided oral sex didn’t count as sex after that, so apparently some people do believe in the “president as exemplar” thing.
Heh. If she meant younger kids, the Starr Report was a detailed instruction book. With college aged kids, there had been a survey* previous to this scandal, about how they used words. They defined ‘blow job’ as not real sex; ‘sex’ was full penetration, PIN. Iirc, some middle-aged midwest Republican lady wrote a letter to the editor scolding the GOP for impeaching a POTUS for “heavy petting”.
* Source: JAMA
@ Nancy Lebovitz
I’d heard that Lewinsky went to some trouble to seduce Bill Clinton. Is this true? If so, I’d say it’s good evidence of consent.
It was in the book that Lewinsky wrote at the time, iirc. Dunno if the current edition has been changed.
@ Sandy
Hillary saying “Remember how great the two-for-one was in the 90’s? Well, you can have that again!”.
I’ve been saying that. Has Hillary said it too?
Well, I usually say “Remember what peace and prosperity were like.” I didn’t think anyone under ~40 would recognize ‘two-fer’.
@houseboat: On the prosperity front, Hillary’s plan is apparently to put Bill in charge of the economy.
On the peace front, she seems quite intent on going to war with the Russians, and unlike the Balkans circa-the 90’s, that’s one group of Slavs that it’s not advisable to try and bomb.
@sandy
Citation very much needed.
The fact the consensus on the right seems to have shifted from “Russia is the greatest geopolitical threat to the US”, to “who will defend poor Vladamir form the wild Hildabeast”, is a Eurasia has always been at war with Eastasia kind of situation. It’s just surreal.
Clinton’s position on Russia is a continuation of the last thirty years of US policy in Europe, and is much less hawkish then either of the last two republican nominees for president. If they did not want a war with Russia, why do you think Clinton does?
@hyperboloid:
I don’t think Putin needs to be protected from Clinton. I just think war with Russia would be phenomenally stupid, completely unnecessary and would in no way serve the interests of the United States or those of the American people. Russia’s interests in Syria are tangible more than just ideological — they need the Assad regime to stay because Syria is a Russian access route to the Mediterranean. It is why they have warships surrounding the Syrian port of Tartus and why they have worked to mend relations with Erdogan. The United States has no tangible need for Syria at all. The only reason to remove Assad from power would be to tick another box on the Wilsonian checklist. Likewise, Iran will fight regime change that removes the Alawites from power tooth and nail, because for them that is the difference between the security of the Shias and a slaughter of the Shias.
Clinton has repeatedly (for years, and as recently as last Sunday) pressed for a no-fly zone over Syria. The Libyan no-fly zone only went ahead because Moscow agreed to abstain from the UN vote on the matter. There is less than zero chance now that Russia will allow this after what happened to Gaddafi; she knows this, Obama knows this, Kerry knows this, everyone from top to bottom knows this. Actually attempting to create a no-fly zone will necessarily mean shooting down Russian planes. Even if she later decides to drop the no-fly zone idea, she is quite adamant that Assad must go, and so she will run afoul of Russia and Iran anyway.
The last thirty years of US policy in Europe involved dealing with the Soviet Union and the fallout of its disintegration. Russia today is not a threat to the United States. You cite the “consensus on the right”; when Mitt Romney ran for President in 2012, he spoke of Russia as an political adversary rather than a military one.
And forgive me for not caring about “the consensus on the right” as defined by what the Republican establishment thinks the consensus on the right is — before Trump won the primaries, they were planning to run Jeb Bush, a guy who still defends his brother’s Iraq policies even though 63% of GOP voters don’t believe they were worth the cost. The consensus you cite is the product of Wilsonians who have steadily purged Jeffersonians from the ranks of influence. And for the record, I think Romney’s ideas about Syria were stupid and dangerous too. These people are all part of one long, treasured, stupid and dangerous tradition that dates back to the Fourteen Points.
“Iran will fight regime change that removes the Alawites from power tooth and nail, because for them that is the difference between the security of the Shias and a slaughter of the Shias. ”
By “the Shias” do you mean the Alawites? I interpret the Alawite self-identification as Shia as a consequence of the alliance with Iran, not a cause. Their views are sufficiently odd to make it dubious whether they are Muslims at all, at least as much as in the corresponding Mormon/Christian case and perhaps more.
@Sandy
Thanks for the link to the informative CNN article at
http://money.cnn.com/2016/05/16/news/economy/hillary-bill-clinton-economic-job-growth/
The article had some solid facts about Bill Clinton and the 90s economy:
The U.S. economy boomed during President Clinton’s administration. His economic record is an effective selling point, especially as U.S. growth remains sluggish, and most voters worry about the economy.
During Clinton’s eight years as president, the U.S. economy added more than 22 million jobs. That’s slightly more jobs than were added during the combined 22-year tenure of the four most recent Republican presidents.
In the spring of 2000, Clinton’s final year in office, a greater percentage of Americans had jobs than any time since record-keeping began soon after World War II.
Giving Clinton’s policies full credit for boosting the economy isn’t entirely fair. The rapid growth of the Internet during his eight years in office greatly increased business productivity and profits and helped to fuel the hiring boom. There was also a bubble in Internet stocks, which poured money into the tech sector and helped spurred hiring.
But government policies did help also. The federal government actually ran surpluses rather than deficits during Clinton’s final three years in office, and that reduced the need for government borrowing and helped to keep interest rates relatively low.
The rest of the article is mostly opinion and speculation.
@David Friedman
The rebels aren’t *just* slaughtering Alawites. Fu’ah and Kafriyah are predominately Twelver Shi’a towns which have been resisting a rebel siege for over a year.
@Birdboy:
Thanks. That was my question.
Certainly not forgiving Bill Clinton, who I agree was guilty of de facto sexual harassment w.r.t. Lewinsky. But there are some differences that might help explain it:
a. When the Lewinsky evidence came to the public attention, Clinton had already had what was by then a very successful presidency for his party and was on his way out the door (in the latter half of his second term), and it was at the end of what appeared to be just another overdrawn partisan investigation that had gotten many of his supporters invested in his exonerance. They then had to turn on a dime because it turns out he did have sex with that woman. Not saying that makes Clinton’s actions any less odious, just that it makes his supporters reactions more conflicted. Most Americans thought the public shaming was just but that impeachment was just political (many of those fighting for impeachment were later shown to be marital cheaters). Trump, by contrast, has no record of being a successful president (and in fact all indications are he would be a terrible one) so he has no reservoir of good will built up except among his most ardent (and ‘deplorable’) supporters who believe his rise is critical to their political or identity goals.
b. For many, many, years, the two parties seemed to take different approaches to judging and selecting candidates. Democrats urged their voters publicly to pay attention to issues, while also appealing to identity politics. Republicans tried to turn every election into a ‘character debate’ where they would put the presumably more upstanding and religious candidate up and try to play to those strengths. And as it turned out, most sex scandals involving Democrats were that they were a lot of philanderers, while the main sex scandals involving Republicans were that they were closet gays or pedophiles.
So Clinton was a successful president already heading for the exit ramp and getting impeached. Trump is running for his first election as the head of the ‘character’ party and being put forward as the best person to lead this country for the next 8 years.
I agree that it looked like they were trying to find any stick to beat Bill Clinton with when it came to impeachment, and the process was just as drawn-out and tedious as you say.
However, a couple of things do matter. First, the affair began in his first administration. He then ran for re-election and was successful and was elected a second time. Had people known about the affair during his second campaign, would he have been elected?
If people – and I’m particularly pointing my finger at feminists here, because I was hugely disappointed in their reaction; I’m not looking for a witch-hunt, but if sexual harassment is wrong and women are at risk of sexual predation in everyday life, you don’t throw a young woman under the bus for the sake of “but the guy will do more for us since he’s the one with the power” – would have excused Clinton and would have voted for him even had they known, then Trump’s supporters and Trump himself are no worse (definitely no better, but what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander).
Second, I don’t and can’t see Trump as a two-term president (nor Hillary either, if it comes to that). So it’s the next four years under one or the other of them, and if Hillary – as is looking likely – gets elected, we’re seeing the return of a known sexual predator to the White House. If an admitted and proven affair between a young woman and a man old enough to be her father who was literally the most powerful man in the nation at the time can be pooh-poohed away as no barrier, so can some disgusting bragging on a videotape from ten years ago.
I agree that Clinton has a better than average chance of not getting a second term, but given the fractured state of the Republican party, inherent advantages of an incumbent President, and wider demographic trends, a second term for her isn’t really that absurdly unlikely either.
given the fractured state of the Republican party, inherent advantages of an incumbent President, and wider demographic trends, a second term for her isn’t really that absurdly unlikely either
I genuinely don’t see that she’s particularly liked within the party or amongst Democrat supporters. There’s a small core of “She’s a woman, she’s progressive!” women voters who probably do like her, but in the main I think it’s more that she’s deadly ambitious, she’s tried for the job before against Obama, and this is her best chance. She’s the Democrat candidate and, particularly against Trump, the lesser of two evils. I don’t see anyone being so enamoured of her that she’ll get a second term, though fair enough, it does depend on what her presidency would be like – if she makes America great again 🙂
But honestly, if the Democrats can’t find a better candidate to run in 2020, I’d be highly surprised. The Republicans have an awful lot of rebuilding to do, particularly after what Trump has done to that side of the political divide, and four years is too short for them to get it all done. I could see a Democrat succeeding Hillary, but not Hillary in a second term. I could well be wrong, though.
@deiseach
>But honestly, if the Democrats can’t find a better candidate to run in 2020, I’d be highly surprised.
That’s not how the system works. The party has basically zero say in who runs, to get someone instead of hillary, they’d had to have that person win the primaries against a sitting president, something that’s basically impossible. Efforts to do that with more popular and established replacements, Reagan in 76, Ted Kennedy in 80, have failed. If Hillary wins, she will be the democratic nominee in 2020.
To clarify: There are things the Democratic National Committee can do, legally and procedurally, to prevent “Hillary Clinton (D)” from appearing on the ballot in 2020. They cannot prevent “Hillary Clinton (I)” from appearing on the ballot, should Clinton chose that path. And barring a truly cataclysmic scandal or health crisis, they cannot arrange for “Jane Doe (D)” to win the 2020 general election without Hillary Clinton’s endorsement. The bully-pulpit effect is huge.
There is precedent for a one-term POTUS’s self-acknowledged failings leading to their deciding to step down after four years, possibly after a private intervention by party leaders. If they decide to go down fighting, they’ll take the party with them.
@ Deiseach
IT WAS SEXUAL HARASSMENT IN THE WORKPLACE
If you like to say ‘harassment’, pls note that Lewinski harassed him: she snapped her thong at him, and kept after him.
(The other accusers were not connected with the government.)
POWER IMBALANCE
This sounds like SJW-style reasoning: any member of X, Y, or Z group is automatically condemned.
INAPPROPRIATE CONDUCT
That’s true.
ADULTERY
Not by some Old Testament standards, I think. Lewinski was not a married woman; thus there was no husband to complain of his property being stolen, or a cookoo egg possibly being left in his nest. Lewinski and Bill didn’t even do anything that might cause pregnancy.
Bill Clinton is a married man, that’s adultery. He was older than her and her superior at work, that’s power imbalance. If she was foolish enough to pursue him, that says little for her good sense but he was a mature adult, someone with experience of the world, and married. He could have and should have politely declined, told her to comport herself in a professional manner, and if she couldn’t, find work elsewhere.
Are we really still stuck at the stage of “Women – they’re all jezebels and sultry seductresses, and poor helpless men can do nothing when they flash their knickers at them, the men just fall into bed in a daze”? Really? No man can control himself, he’s reduced to mindless lustfulness?
Again, Lewinsky is not the only or close to the worst allegation against Bill.
Katherine Willey claims that at a private meeting Bill forcibly embraced her, kissed her, and, well, “grabbed her right in the pussy” to borrow a lewd phrase.
Paula Jones accused Clinton of exposing himself to her. Her lawsuit was originally dismissed but was getting some sympathy on appeal and ultimately Clinton settled for $850k. He was later found in contempt of court and settled with the Arkansas Bar to strip his license for 5 years.
Juanita Broaddrick asserts that Clinton forcibly raped her.
I was under the impression that this was because of his lying about the Lewinsky affair. In other words, there was never any evidence regarding the Jones accusations themselves.
No, the contempt of court came from Judge Susan Wright, who judged the original Jones case.
@gbdub:
Yes, it was Jones case, but the contempt of court ruling was about Lewinsky.
I seem to recall that the judge declined to that the judge declined to charge him with perjury, however, as the testimony in question was deemed to be immaterial to the case. I could be wrong about that, though.
@ Deiseach
I’m attaching this to my comment about old standards of ‘adultery’.
I got that from Lewis. In Mere Christianity (which I don’t have at hand), he mentioned adultery not as I would have expected under promise-keeping, or devotion to one’s family but as “Sexual Justice”.
In his Appendix to The Abolition of Man, he lists “Sexual Justice” parallel to “Honesty” (about stealing) and “Justice in Court”, under the category “The Law of Justice”.
The AoM examples of Sexual Justice are:
‘Has he approached his neighbour’s wife?’ (Babylonian. List of Sins. ERE v. 446)
‘Thou shalt not commit adultery.’ (Ancient Jewish. Exodus 20:14)
‘I saw in Nastrond (= Hell)… beguilers of others’ wives.’ (Old Norse. Volospd 38, 39)
@sandy
Upon becoming secretary of state one the first things Hillary Clinton did was to initiate the so called reset with Russia that lead to the New START disarmament treaty. Compare this to say Ronald Reagan’s first term in which he called the Soviet Union an “Evil Empire”, deployed Pershing missiles to Europe, and lunched the Strategic Defense Initiative, an absurdly ambitious missile defense program that could supposedly render the United States invulnerable to soviet retaliation. If he didn’t want war with Russia why do you think Clinton does?
Remember you’re making a much stronger claim than just “Clinton is a bigger Russia hawk than Trump”.
The fact that anybody thinks that American foreign policy planers are idealistic crusaders for democracy is shocking to me. I’ve long assumed that claims to that effect were, like cold war era soviet propaganda, oft repeated but little believed.
The United States’ interest in Syria is is directly tied to the Assad regime’s relationship with Iran. Syria has for decades served as a conduit for arms shipments to Hezbollah, and formed a keystone of Iran’s “axis of resistance” foreign policy. Hezbollah is an organization that is responsible for the killing of hundreds of American citizens, and has been engaged in on and off warfare with our closest ally in the region. The fact that the some in the United Sates government would see the war in Syria as an opportunity to topple a pro-Iranian regime is not surprising.
As for the idea that Clinton committed to shooting down Russian planes to enforce a no fly zone, I believe our most gracious and benevolent host addressed that argument here.
A pro-Hezbollah Syria is far, far less dangerous to America than a pro al-Qaeda or pro-Islamic State Syria. Maybe US support for the rebels was sensible at the start of the civil war, but as early as 2012 Jabhat al-Nusra was tied closely to the rebellion.
Not terribly surprising. Power corrupts, and beyond that, rich and powerful make targets for blackmail, star-infatuation going wrong, etc.
On a totally non-scientific, merely an impression from the media, the Tories in Britain tend to have sex scandals (or used to do, on a regular basis); quite often married male politicians tend to have affairs with female colleagues (though there was one case of a married female politician in Northern Ireland).
So it seems to be a combination of personality, access to power, proximity, and genuinely believing they are special and talented and attractive and irresistible 🙂
I think I put my finger recently on part of what bothers me so much about PC outrage. It’s often hypocritical, yes, but more than that, I think it’s often downright fake. By which I mean, the reaction of most of my friends on social media to the offensive Trump comments was almost downright giddy. Yes, there was all kind of moralizing, soapboxing, scolding about treating women with respect, etc. but the impression I got was that people were excited not only about the fact that something had come out to hurt their political enemy, but that it afforded them an opportunity to get on a moral high horse at the same time. I am much more likely to believe you are actually offended if your reaction to something can best be described as “disturbed,” rather than giddy.
Which is not to say I don’t think I’ve ever witnessed genuine outrage, fear, acting disturbed about Trump, just that most of the opposition I’ve seen does not, in my subjective estimation, fall into that category.
And I don’t mean to make this a left-right thing, though left and right each have their particular, different high horses they like to get on. Rather, my point is, I don’t buy your outrage if you seem secretly pleased to have it, or, of course, if you’d look the other way when your guy did it.
Reminds me of my big problem with the drug war, all kinds of economic regulation, and to some cases of intellectual property law. My personal heuristic is: if you think it’s totally 100% fine when your buddy smokes pot, you don’t get to be in favor of keeping pot illegal. If you think it’s totally 100% fine when your buddy gets paid under the table, then you don’t get to demand stricter labor regulations. If you think it’s totally 100% fine when your brother pirates music and books, then you don’t get to support SOPA, etc. etc. (I realize this is a whole other can of worms as to whether or not one can have one position about individual action and another about what constitutes good policy; my main point here is just the analogy: you reveal what you really think should be illegal when you judge your close friend harshly for doing it; you reveal what genuinely outrages you when it still outrages you when your guy does it. Re. Bill Clinton and Trump, I don’t think there’s much genuine outrage out there about either of them).
See also Joy Behar on The View referring to the Clinton accusers as “tramps”.
By now Trump is post-outrage. How can he shock or disappoint anyone at this point?
I believe there was genuine outrage when he gave his Mexican rapist speech from those who heard it live. And a little bit less fresh outrage when he disparaged McCain as a loser for getting captured. He found some new people to outrage when he suggested breaking NATO and that S. Korea should go nuclear. By the time he threatens on live national TV to jail his opponent he is just being Donald.
Most of those “outraged” at his remarks about jailing Hillary are just being disingenuous anyway. He gave a perfectly cogent (!) explanation of what he intended to do — appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the email server affair. His later quip of “because you’d be in jail” was just that, a quip. I don’t agree he should appoint anyone to investigate Hillary, but feigning outrage as if Trump is just going to have Chris Christie lead a goon squad to her door is silly.
If it was just a quip, it is one he is now repeating as a campaign slogan at his rallies. From news coverage of his rally today in Florida:
Clinton “has to go to jail,” Trump warned, adding that the lawyers working for her over the email issue should also be incarcerated.
He seems quite enamored with the response he is getting, and does not seem to think much of the opinions of lawyers either.
I agree. I get the sense that a lot of the ‘calling out’ comes equally from self-identity reinforcement as it does from any real desire to see change. Though this isn’t always a bad thing, I imagine Gandhi probably had a self-identity as a person of peace and also wanted to see peace in the world. He was likely giddy when he saw people calling out others in the name of peace. It happens in academics all the time when one researcher critiques another. Of course they do really want to correct the record but they also get a kick out of being right and being able to hurt their researcher adversary. It doesn’t diminish their argument and feeling giddy is good motivation. For PC culture the giddyness is probably amplified as it’s a central part of their in-group behavior.
You’re right though that it’s worrying when this attitude gets linked to tribal groups and object-level thinking. If you’re giddy to call out trump on misogyny, because you’re anti-misogyny, then you should be equally giddy to call out Bill Clinton. Further wishful thinking would say that if your ideals don’t match with the current way of the world, then there would be a clearly defined world that would. If that ideal world revolves more around party politics than minority advocacy then that speaks volumes.
While I’m on the opposite end of the political spectrum, I basically agree with all of this. The Trump video is nothing; there’s no new information in it. Everyone already knew who Trump was (or had no excuse for not knowing), and the video doesn’t show him being a different person from his normal public persona.
It’s like if a tape came out in which Bill Clinton mentions having had an affair with Monica Lewinsky. We know, guys, we know. Anyone who now won’t vote for Trump but who would’ve before the tape came out seems to be dangerously uninformed and it’s probably best for everyone if they hold off on voting at all. The only people who changed their minds because of the tape are people who’d been paying no attention to the news for at least the last two years.
It’s a bright, shiny, distracting, news-clip-friendly bit of nothing, but the tape is nothing.
TheWorst: You’re agreeing with the part of onyomi’s comment about the Trump scandal while supplying a solid refutation of it.
Consider your very reasonable assumption that many people already thought Trump was likely a groping jerk, beyond the pale of conventional libido-driven tackiness, and that this was completely obvious. Those folks have been looking at this election thinking “all these people are supporting this huge asshole for president and it looks like he has a chance of getting elected.”
Now a tape comes out that provides evidence of what those people were already
convinced was true, and it hurts Trump’s chances. Why shouldn’t they be really happy about that? From their perspective all that’s changed is enough people are waking up out of their pro-Trump fugue state to make it unlikely he’s elected. It’s also evidence that those people changing their minds were mistaken in their impression rather than just not caring about the issue, which is at least arguably good news from their perspective. You can’t have “they’re hypocritical for being happy rather than disturbed” and “there’s no new information in [the tape]” at the same time.
Being happy the tape came out–i.e., that an issue that concerns you is finally getting attention–seems like a different thing to being happy at having opportunities to be self-righteous and/or to pretend it proves something. I read Onyomi’s comment as remarking on the latter, but was mostly thinking about the tape itself and people claiming to be outraged by it.
But I agree wholeheartedly with the bulk of the post, which is, basically: Either an issue matters or it doesn’t. An issue that only matters when it’s an opportunity to attack your political opponents is an issue that doesn’t matter.
A compendium of reasons why people were angered by the Trump tape
It has stuff about red tribe thinking that never would have occurred to me. I’d appreciate it if red tribers and ex-red tribers here would tell me whether it sounds plausible for their culture even if it doesn’t apply to them personally.
Content warning: includes feminist rage which I think might be excessive.
I do not have the spoons to read through a compilation like that, but I will say that the grossest part of the tape, for me, was how Trump and his associates went from basically predatory talk amongst themselves to schmoozing up the woman as soon as they exited the bus.
Deeply vile.
1. These people are trying way, way too hard to believe that everyone who votes Republican secretly believes that all women are property. Not just to believe it, but to convince everyone in their bubble that it is common knowledge. This can be part of the discussion, but it has to be actually discussed, not just asserted and affirmed.
2. Anyone who can write that many words about how Republicans see Donald Trump, without so much as mentioning Hillary Clinton, is suffering from extreme clue deprivation. The single most important question on the Right is, can Donald Trump save us from the Ultimate Cosmic Horror that is eight years of Hillary, and if not, why not? I’m pretty certain lots of people on the right are angered by the tape because it is seen as the reason why Trump can’t be the Savior. That also absolutely needs to be part of the discussion.
It is I believe a nearly universal attitude that the Protector of the Tribe is entitled to as much pussy as he can grab, and to the presumption that said pussy was willingly given unto him, right up to the point where it impairs his ability to protect the tribe – then it becomes a moral failing. Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, or Og the Caveman, makes no difference.
Holy moley did I underestimate that content warning. The author could lower her blood pressure by taking off the patriarchy-tinted glasses, but the general thrust is reasonably good.
Section 4 in particular is both solid and lucidly written. It ties into the whole taking Trump “seriously/not-literally vs literally/non-seriously” that’s been brought up here before. The repulsive thing about Trump talking like he’s in a middle school locker room isn’t that he believes the braggadocious things he’s saying are actually true, it’s that he’s a 60something (at the time of the tape, iirc) that still talks like a 7th-grader on XBox Live. But then that’s nothing new with Trump.
It might be a bubble effect for me (I’m from a Red area of a Blue state, and in my experience both sides tend to be saner when in the minority), but I’m skeptical of the whole “The Right still considers women to be chattel” angle. I think it’s a legitimately insightful perspective… on a straw position. But I confess I don’t know how straw-y it actually is out in the True Redsman parts of the country.
I think more likely, the GOP establishment has never liked Trump and only reluctantly supported him to begin with. After the writing was on the wall for the Primary, Republicans held their noses because they were expected to for the party (and because the alternative was a guaranteed Hillary presidency). The scandal just makes for a concrete event over which to finally jump a ship they didn’t want to be on in the first place. I actually suspect that “never”-Trumpers who got on board after the Primary have been partially hoping something like this would happen so they’d have a good excuse to denounce Trump. Losing their seats to Tea Partiers is still a pretty strong concern for moderate Republicans, so they can’t signal too loudly how much they hate populism. They needed something soundbite-sized to point to when they’re challenged in the next primary about why they didn’t do more to stop Hillary.
And the Trump supporters are leading them right along with #RepealThe19th. An election of the article versus the comments, shills versus shitposters, a Serious Candidate versus a not-so-rare Pepe… is it not glorious? If this is the indeed the end of the Republic, at least it is going out with a bang, not a whimper.
Lord God Almighty – yellow font on purple background with blue borders? Nancy, the author may have had the wisdom of the Sibyls indeed, but since my retinas were seared right out of my eyeballs, all I could read was the line about “the traditional line about how he doesn’t want his chattels to be degraded” before I had to flee for the sake of my
sanityeyesight.(I get the feeling that person thinks “The Handmaid’s Tale” was a searingly accurate description of the very secret plans the right-wing theocracy were drawing up to snatch away freedom from women that very moment, rather than a so-so skiffy dystopia – but I forget, Ms Atwood is not a hack purveyor of genre, no, she rises above that, so why won’t those obtuse reviewers recognise that and stop saying she writes “science fiction” instead of “speculative fiction”?).
Yeah, the “Read in black and white” link at the top was both helpful and necessary. Without it I’d have closed the tab right away.
The link for reading in black and white
I have no idea how the world looks to siderea such that she really likes her lj format.
As a general thing, select all (control-a) will change pages into a relatively readable white-on-darkish-blue.
The content warning was sincerely offered (why upset people for no good reason?) but I still think it’s kind of funny to offer a trigger warning for feminism.
To be fair, I think that’s how Atwood sees it too.
[Content advisory: raw discussion of the attitudes that validate the subjugation of women, sexually and otherwise, and legitimize rape and sexual assault.]
Pardon me while I snort very loudly; the person’s exegesis apparently stops at the Old Testament (oh those evil and wicked Jews! Oh, I’m sorry, is this not the point we’re making here about their appalling misogyny? It only applies to modern Western white cishet right-wing males?), or assumes (American versions of) Protestantism is the default Christianity; if we’re going to gasp and be appalled about the Tenth Commandment lumping all the (presumed) males’ property in together, including the wife, then we should at least acknowledge that the Catholics – including St Augustine in the 5th century – separated those out into the Ninth (thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife) and Tenth (thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s goods).
So the wife was not lumped in with possessions, and also the prohibition was held to apply to lusting after a married man, as well as a married woman.
But why let inconvenient historical facts interrupt a good screed about how Evil Men On The Right think Women Are Property? God help us, what will such people do when their ideal world is realised and they have nothing to be offended about? They won’t know what to do with themselves – or rather, they will; they’ll hair-split ever finer distinctions and start devouring each other over being microaggressive about preferred pronouns or whatever the new shibboleth of the day will be.
The people she is describing are overwhelmingly American Protestants. Is it also objectionable that she didn’t discuss the Samaritan take on the Ten Commandments or only that she missed out on the Irish Catholic view?
I don’t neatly fit into any of the tribes (possibly gray?).
In any case, the reading in section 3 about the emphasis on “married woman” doesn’t sit right with me.
Looking at the arguments and facts as present as true, I don’t think it’s a matter of “damaging someone else’s property” so much as “marriage is a contract which is supposed to be recognized by the whole community”.
For example, it’s true that some younger women will get flirty with powerful men which may lead to some form of sexual activity which will later on be regretted by both parties. Sometimes these younger women may feel regret or used and cry foul, despite being enthusiastic participants at the time. This is generally thought of as a “false” accusation.
However, someone who is married is presumed to have sworn fidelity. This tips the balance of the scales towards “did not consent”. Moreover, if Trump knew that she was married at the time he had the obligation to reject her advances, were they present, much as someone is obligated to rebuff the advances of a minor.
Can’t talk about red tribe in general, but her descriptions as applied to my own familiar section of the red tribe – Mormons – are ridiculous and silly, and I find it offensive that she tries to accuse Romney of secretly supporting female oppression via Trump when he’s been openly and vociferously anti-Trump from day 1!
Fun fact: Mormon Utah passed female suffrage as a territory back in 1870. It was reversed by Congress as a part of anti-Mormon legislation. As soon as Utah was granted statehood, they reintroduced female suffrage.
I’ve observed this all my life, and the only explanation I can offer is that the Left wing’s official role in the theatre that is politics is the nice-player. Left wingers aren’t any nicer than right-wingers, so they feel an equate need to woop and harass – but they have to wear the mask, and lately it’s been harder and harder to stretch it over their rictus grins.
Right wingers meanwhile have been boiling for a decade or so because they had to pretend to be mean and tougher than they are because the Right wing is the “tough” performer; in this election Right wingers are actually just being as genuinely aggro as they are, no false outrage.
Five additional women now accusing Trump of kissing or groping them without consent. Uh-oh.
Have you guys heard about the rumor that Chelsea Clinton is not Bill’s daughter, but was in fact fathered by Webster Hubbell? It sounds really out there.
Had to Google this, but reading some articles, it sounds like nothing more than gossip and speculation. I imagine some people (especially back in Little Rock) would love to believe it’s true, but I can’t see it.
No, this is just stupid gossip (for the record, I don’t believe the “murder/suicide” rumours either).
Ambitious (both of them), charismatic, flawed, and with genuine trouble keeping his trousers zipped (him), tough-minded, will walk through you to get her own way (her), both had genuine achievements and genuine scandals (I’m prepared to believe the cattle trading thing was sharp practice, that like a lot of others their foundation has sincerely charitable goals but that it’s also handy to funnel gifts etc. through, and that what she did as Secretary of State re: the emails is actionable – when I left the housing section, I had to turn over the flash drives I kept files on because of confidentiality and not being permitted to take anything home with me, and I was only a very low-level minion; surely the State Department has similar rules?)
I don’t like Hillary and I don’t particularly trust her and I do think she is very hawkish in her approach to foreign policy, but having a child by another man? No.
Barring a DNA test on the relevant parties which isn’t ever going to happen all you’ll have to go on is your own judgment. There is some hearsay evidence you might want to consider – one of Bill’s lovers has claimed that he told her that he is infertile due to childhood measles.
Take a look at pictures of Chelsea and Webb Hubble. Seems plausible to me. She really does look a lot like Webb and not much like Bill.
Amusingly I read an article in salon that was supposed to “debunk” the rumor and there were multiple paragraphs mocking the idea and zero pictures of Webb Hubble. That says something.
“Trust me, babe, we don’t need to use a condom, you won’t get pregnant because reasons”?
What’s your Bayesian prior for that class of statement being true when made by someone with a Y chromosome?
But is this the correct question to ask? I assume that “accidental” impregnation is at least a major inconvinience and my priors are high that a man with the cunning to become US President will also have the cunning to avoid that inconvinience, even at the cost of short term gratification.
This is, of course, very different from my priors w. r. t. the average holder of a Y chromosome.
Isn’t there some Baysian Codex that forbids you to ignore information which you actually have?
my priors are high that a man with the cunning to become US President will also have the cunning to avoid that inconvinience
But you’ll also have to consider that a woman with the ambition Hillary has exhibited, and the intelligence and toughness, won’t run the risk of having a child when married to a man whom they both know is infertile (unless you want us to suppose Bill shares that information with random lovers but not his wife).
The risk is too great; suppose he gets angry and divorces her, leaving her with a public scandal on her record which will quash her chances of the high office she hopes to hold (at least at first, as spouse of the next president)? Suppose her husband is complaisant but her lover decides to make it public, for whatever reason?
If Bill’s ambition and cunning prevent him from running the risk of unwanted pregnancy, that goes double for Hillary. Even if she did have an affair and did have an unplanned pregnancy, we know that she has no objections to abortion so a quietly arranged procedure to take care of the problem would have been the answer.
Deiseach:
True, but in the end this only lowers my estimated probability for Bill having really said that. Most likely the “lover” quoted here is lying?!
Actually I misremembered part of the story – it was Juanita Broderick (the woman who alleges that Bill raped her) who alleged that he said it after the rape.
Anyway, the prior for that being true is low. The after the event estimate of it being true goes up substantially since there aren’t a bunch of Bill Clinton bastards running around out there nor are there “Bill pressured me into an abortion” stories.
Oh and Deiseach is (kinda) correct about this:
Except that it was I who was the one who was mistaken. Juanita claims that Bill had claimed it was due to mumps.
You mean like Warren Harding, Grover Cleveland, and Thomas Jefferson (that we know of)? And for that matter John Edwards, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Jesse Jackson, unless you are postulating that this contraceptive cunning is somehow imparted by the inauguration process.
I’m not versed enough in the progress or non-progress of contraceptive technology over the centuries to decide if Jefferson is a relevant data point to the question.
And to be honest I’m not versed enough in all things US to either have made that list or even place Harding and Cleveland in the correct decade from the top of my head.
Inauguaration is proof of cunning. Running and loosing is not.
Inauguaration is proof of cunning. Running and loosing is not.
Running for POTUS, other than as a vanity write-in, is proof of six-sigma cunning or the equivalent. Are you really going to argue that not fathering illegitimate children is harder than e.g. becoming Governor of a large state, that only the very highest political achievement can possibly match the extreme cleverness involved in the “keep it zipped” or “use a condom” strategies?
Ok, let’s backtrack:
My claim is that the average holder of a Y chromosome is very likely to do very stupid things when aroused. And that the average POTUS (and if you insist: candidate) is very likely to be the kind of person who is able to trade short term gratification for avoiding long term inconvinience.
So we should not use our everyday-man priors for presidents.
Your counterpoint is three historical presidents and three candidates. As for the presidents either my estimate of just how inconvienient accidental presidency would have been for Clinton is wrong or maybe the degree of inconvinience has changed over the course ogf history.
As for the candidates, I did not look up the order of events, but if their affairs were known while they were running, I think that it is possible that this influenced their lack of success, so yes, I conclude that maybe thei did lack that last micro-degree of cunning that was needed to actually become president and yes, that last bit might have been their unability to “keep it zipped” or “use a condom”.
I do not think this is so ridicolous as you are trying to make its sound.
“Even if she did have an affair and did have an unplanned pregnancy”
Why unplanned? You have an insufficiently fertile imagination.
A child is a political asset–as Hilary has demonstrated. Imagine that Hilary and Bill want one, Bill is infertile, and neither has any strong objections to the other playing around. The deal that comes out of that is obvious.
The question is whether Chelsea was conceived before or after DNA testing for paternity was well enough established to make it seem likely that the facts would eventually come out.
Checking Wikipedia, “Highly accurate DNA parental testing became available in the 1980s with the development of RFLP.” Chelsea was born in 1980, so I don’t think the theory is entirely impossible, although it would have been a bit risky by then.
The next question is whether the putative father had a blood type that would have produced offspring consistent with Bill being the father, that version of paternity testing being much older and it being easier to learn the blood type of prominent figures than to get tissue samples for DNA testing.
I think it’s a lovely theory. Someone should make it into a novel.
There is some hearsay evidence you might want to consider – one of Bill’s lovers has claimed that he told her that he is infertile due to childhood measles.
Mmmm – I always heard it was mumps (or German measles) that could cause infertility in men, not measles. He could have been mistaken, or lying, or the alleged lover could have been lying.
I’m more willing to bet that a guy who’s a skirt-chaser is liable to lie about “C’mon, honey, I can’t get you pregnant, so why not sleep with me?” when trying to talk someone into bed than that he’s really confessing infertility (given that men seem to find it very embarrassing to talk about), but then that’s only my jaundiced view of the matter.
RE: the Webb Hubble photos, yeah, in some of them they look similar. But mainly that’s the nose, and Chelsea has the same nose as Hillary. You can cherry-pick photos of people in particular angles and particular lighting to make them look similar; Private Eye magazine has a regular lookalike running joke on its letters page, where the photos of supposed similarities are printed side-by-side with the captions identifying them swapped around.
I think I put my finger on another aspect of what bothers me about sex scandal stuff in general, and these competing sex scandals, in particular:
Imagine you are someone with red hair and an election is coming up. Candidate A, is, so far as anyone knows, a moral exemplar in his personal life, but his public platform calls for “exterminate all red haired people.” Candidate B is a well-known philanderer, in and out of prison, a drug user, and a known cheat in his own business dealings currently being sued by his former partners. But his public policy platform looks really good, and definitely does not include “exterminate all red heads.” Who are you going to vote for? Who should you vote for?
Of course, the policy platform differences in real life are not usually so stark (though if you take some of Trump’s more extreme statements about deportation and wall building literally, one could make an argument they are in this case), so one can afford to pick the person who’s just a better person in general, who is honest and trustworthy and not corrupt. Even if his policy views differ from yours a little more than the corrupt candidate, maybe you can pick the honest one just because he’s more likely to be reliable and keep his promises.
But when it’s “exterminate all red heads” on one side and “don’t exterminate anybody” on the other, you probably have to support mister “no genocide” even if he’s a moral monster in his personal life.
In other words, I think what bothers me is this: both campaigns keep telling us how this particular election is SOOOO consequential. How it makes SUCH a big difference whether we get Trump or Hillary. Yet at the same time they both spend a ton of time attacking each other on issues of personal virtue (because it works). But doing that is an implicit acknowledgment that maybe the difference between the two really isn’t so big in policy terms, since voters should be able to afford to choose on character rather than policy.
I can understand criticizing Trump on policy: you say “this wall idea is terrible and unjust and will be a disaster, and Hillary’s approach to the problem will be significantly different.” But it doesn’t make sense to say “the political ramifications for electing my opponent instead of me are SOOO big, so vote for me. Because I’m not a philanderer.”
That is, trying to win on personal virtue seems to be a tacit admission that your policy differences aren’t that significant, since, if they were, they would be much, much more consequential for the nation’s 300 million people than the personal failings of one person.
Well, it’s the old “would you rather support a vegetarian non-smoker, or a notorious alcoholic” thing, in part. With Trump, his behaviour towards women is being presented as indicative of his views towards women in general. This is legitimate, to some degree: someone who doesn’t respect women individually can hardly be expected to respect them as a group.
It’s also a “people are irrational, so if you’re trying to convince people, it’s irrational to be rational” situation – which you recognize. Pointing out that The Experts say her plan is better isn’t what won the first debate for Clinton: it was Trump constantly interrupting her that won it for her. It isn’t necessarily evidence that there’s less daylight between them that you might think that the Clinton campaign is pushing this. It’s evidence that the Clinton campaign knows that “you don’t make friends with salad”.
Well, but if you have to guess what someone might do on the basis of personal failings, then that kind of implies you don’t see that huge a difference in what they’ve explicitly said they will do (assuming, of course, that what someone explicitly says they will do is a better indicator of future action than what you can guess they might do*).
*In terms of guessing likely future behavior in personal life, past personal life behavior probably is a better indicator than anything else; but in terms of which policy agenda someone will pursue, what they explicitly say about their policy agenda is probably a better indicator than subtle hints gleaned from their personal life.
This prioritization also assumes, of course, that the president’s primary function is to set a policy agenda, as opposed to being a moral exemplar, and I will say that the conservative right in the US both has more reason to use, and is correspondingly more vulnerable to, such attacks, because they seem more likely to believe in the idea of politicians as moral leaders needing moral authority to lead.
I do agree with you here – it would be ideal to focus on the issues (as people say, before proceeding to not focus on the issues) but it’s understandable why people are focusing on this. Most people do want their President to be someone they look up to. This is part of the reason that I think it’s a bad idea to have the heads of government and state be the same person, and also kind of a bad idea to have an elected head of state at all. Powerless constitutional monarch who owns dogs and waves is clearly the ideal solution. When you’re saying “this person will be the representative of the country as a whole”, yeah, you might want them to be a little bit of a moral exemplar.
Also, to some extent this is one of the issues. To me, it shows their general inclinations and trustworthiness that, respectively, Trump has boasted about groping women without their consent*, lied about it, etc, and that Clinton has covered for her husband’s behaviour, which is predatory to some extent or another, while simultaneously painting herself/letting herself be painted as the feminist candidate. He comes across worse because of the direct lies of commission about his own personal behaviour, in my mind at least.
Especially with Trump, where he has no record in government, sometimes things like this are all you have to go on. He’s shown himself to be disrespectful of others’ boundaries, impulsive, and dishonest.
*I feel like it is a good idea to ask at least before the first time you grope, kiss, etc someone, regardless of the genders of those involved.
“Powerless constitutional monarch who owns dogs and waves is clearly the ideal solution.”
+1
Clarification: she owns dogs. The waving is an action she does. She does not own waves. Nor did King Canute.
This idea’s been growing on me, too, for a while. POTUS seems to clearly have two jobs, country-management and being-presentable-on-TV. It’s kind of silly to expect one person to be good at both, and we seem to prefer to select based on presentable-on-TV.
Further advantage is that elected non-head-of-government heads of state just end up being “we have a chancellor and a president – what does the latter do anyway? Why did we elect somebody to stand on balconies and wave? The position has become politically polarized! There aren’t even any corgis!“
If this refers to Germany (are there other heads of government tht call themselves chancellor?) I’d like to point out that the German president is not subject to public election.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Convention_%28Germany%29
I was thinking of Austria, actually, where the president has been a role involving controversy most recently, but good point. The elected head of state isn’t necessarily elected by the public.
I still think that hereditary head of state is the way to go, as the least bad choice. Plus, the politically powerless royal families of Europe tend to be better behaved and more socially responsible than similarly wealthy commoners.
(Although the “unofficial aristocracy” from countries that got rid of their aristocracies can misbehave quite wildly).
I can’t find it, but Scott once posted a link about how monarchies are so much better than republics. The best part was that it used Australia both an as example of a monarchy and as an example of a republic.
Was it this?
Yes, it probably was popular coverage of the work of Schleiter and Morgan-Jones, though not necessarily that paper and definitely not that popular coverage, which doesn’t mention Australia.
Unelected constitutional monarch who owns dogs and waves.
The Thai monarchy actually has some real power, though, doesn’t it? People who criticize the monarchy in Commonwealth countries tend not to die under mysterious circumstances, or get charged under lese majeste laws. And none of the Queen’s corgis have been promoted to senior military rank.
He is still “constitutional” though—that term covers many different levels of powers. (For that matter, I guess Queen Elizabeth is not completely powerless either. Both Canada and Australia had constitutional crises involving the Governor-General. Wouldn’t it be fun if something similar happened in the UK?)
I think the first sentence disproves the second one. It works, because salacious details are sexier. Doing that is an implicit acknowledgment that they know sex scandals get more clicks, and they want to win; it doesn’t tell us anything about whether the candidates think that’s the only relevant difference.
When I say “acknowledge” or “tacitly admit,” I mean not that the candidates or campaigns actually believe the policy-level difference with their opponent is insignificant, but rather that they are treating voters as if they are not significant. That is they are making an irrational, contradictory argument to voters because voters are irrational and don’t notice the contradiction and so it works. As a voter, that bothers me–both about voters and those who pander to us in this way.
Oh. Yeah, that makes sense. I don’t see it as any kind of proof that the policy differences aren’t there, just that they’re not significant for the election because almost nobody bases their voting preferences on policy.
I think that’s mostly about us, the voters, rather than about the panderers , for Molochian reasons – we’ve demonstrated that a politician who won’t pander to us with dumb soap-opera stuff will be replaced with someone who will.
TheWorst:
“salacious details are sexier.”
Was that an intentional pun?
In any case, I believe that people in general would rather talk about sex.
Not so much a pun as a redundancy. But I agree; basically everyone would rather talk about sex than about trade regulations. Sex is a hell of a lot sexier, to almost everybody.
“When a psychiatrist wants to get his audience’s attention, he talks about sex. Economists talk about the income distribution. ”
(quoting myself from Hidden Order)
In this election, both are much on display.
So… income distribution via sex is going to be the winning topic? X -)
Someone should run on a pro-prostitution ticket! They’d be a shoe-in!
This is the same sort of reasoning I went through when Bill Clinton’s sex scandal was blowing up in the late 90s (I was in middle school and even more simple & naive in politics than I am now, mind you). Sure, he was both an adulterer and a liar, but hey, those were both in relation to his personal life, and in the realm of policy, he was virtuous in my eyes. Therefore I saw the whole scandal as much ado about nothing, at least in terms of my opinion about his performance as POTUS.
This is roughly what I think about Trump as well. I find his politics to be stupid and sometimes vile, and I find some details about his personality to be vile, but those are separate things. The recent scandal doesn’t move the needle at all in terms of how much I’d want him to be POTUS. I find the implication that this indicates something about his character which would affect his politics to be spurious at best, since people have an incredible ability to compartmentalize and to be wildly inconsistent in different fields of life.
To me there is a difference between someone who engages in salacious activity but attempts to hide it, is suitably ashamed and embarrassed afterwards and attempts to reconcile with those he was damaged (indicating some recognition that the social mores of society matter and that he recognizes right from wrong), and someone who boasts of salacious activity to those around him, can never seem to genuinely apologize to anyone for fear of looking weak, and seems to feel entitled to behave that way and expects others to recognize that entitlement.
So I agree Bill Clinton has done vile things in his personal sexual life, but he has not tried to normalize sexual aggression to justify his behavior or attack people who challenged him by trying to drag them down into the gutter with him and claim everyone should feel fine acting as he does.
By this way of thinking, though, hypocrisy becomes the morally superior choice.
Where hypocrisy may be taken as an indicator of regret, moral confusion or even just self-awareness, I will take that over inveterate venality. An unrepentant asshole gets no brownie points from me other than my gratitude for making him easier to identify.
Acknowledging one’s inconsistency might show any of those things, but isn’t implicit in the term “hypocrisy” the bit where it’s hidden, to some degree?
Hypocrisy is the morally superior choice! Assuming the public moral standards are correct, upholding them in public while breaking them privately is better than publicly denigrating them. Scandal is a sin!
I approve of hiding vices if the alternative is to celebrate them or defend them.
It’s not, of course, the only alternative, but it is a common one.
@ caethan
Assuming the public moral standards are correct, upholding them in public while breaking them privately is better than publicly denigrating them.
Seriously, yes. That’s what I’ve been saying about torture.
Despite the avowing of it in the intro, I’m not sure if you are serious or not.
I guess I place a greater value on consistency than most. To me, being accused of being inconsistent would really hurt.
The problem for Hillary with attacking Trump on e.g. the wall, is that a lot of people agree with Trump about the wall or at least on the general thrust of “stronger measures against illegal immigration. So it’s not a winning issue that’s going to swing a lot of voters.
She’s wagering that it’s easier to convince an on-the-fence Trump supporter that Trump is a monster due to personal foibles than to change their mind on the policy positions that made them a Trump supporter in the first place.
The other issue is that, for Hillary, this is very much a turnout election. Finding new and creative ways to remind her supporters that Trump is nasty has a bigger payoff in voter enthusiasm than reiterating her policy positions.
The point is when Trump says ‘build a wall’, some people think ‘he can’t possibly mean that, I wonder what he means, perhaps he means _this_’.
Where _this_ is of course exactly what the listener wants, perfect in every detail without compromise. Trump must be a great man indeed to have come up with such a good idea.
The point of the tapes is that they are causing some people to break the identity they have established between their thoughts and his. ‘I am not like that, I would not say that, thereor I am not him, and so my ideas are not his’.
Others, of course, double down.
That’s not fundamentally a new situation with Trump. Barack Obama benefited substantially from being seen as a blank slate on which people projected their own visions; there’s even a famous interview where he states as much.
Of course, Obama ended up setting half the planet on fire during his administration, so perhaps this is another argument against voting for blank slates like him and Trump.
I have no reason to think adultery tells much about people’s character (have there been any research about whether adulterers are less honest in general? any good studies*?)
I do think Trump’s financial behavior (Trump university, not paying contractors) says some very bad things about whether he’s trustworthy.
*That is, any studies which have a good measure for dishonesty rather than some itty bitty simulation.
Larger question: is “dishonesty” a universal characteristic, or could someone be highly dishonest in one way, but very honest in another? Similarly, willpower? Bravery?
My view is that the policy differences between the candidates in this election are dramatic enough to justify the Clinton campaign totally ignoring them if that’s what’s necessary to win.
@ onyomi
Yet at the same time they both spend a ton of time attacking each other on issues of personal virtue (because it works). But doing that is an implicit acknowledgment that maybe the difference between the two really isn’t so big in policy terms, since voters should be able to afford to choose on character rather than policy.
Perhaps the medium shapes the message.
With the Internet, each candidate (or zis supporters) can post any amount of information in any degree of detail. Each voter can find all they want. So there is no point in trying to fit detailed policy into soundbytes, tv ads, mass rallies — or debates.
So what debates are good for, is showing how the candidate behaves under realtime pressure, unscripted. Temperament, response time and quality … and stamina. That is, character and competence, demonstrated.
People say they want policy debates.
When politicians actually explain policy in-depth, no one* pays attention.
This is not a politician problem. This is a humanity problem. Humanity likes simple answers and policy is rarely simple.
*Not literally no one, but definitely a tiny percentage.
I think part of the problem is that actually clearly stating a policy idea tends to be disadvantageous. You don’t win many people who over who wouldn’t be won by vague platitudes, but you badly upset anyone who stands to lose by the proposal.
It’s not actually that hard to say “I want to eliminate departments x, y, and z, and cut the corporate income tax by 10%,” but those kinds of details open you up to all kind of attack and still don’t mean that much to voters.
As for policy ideas big enough to stick in the minds of voters and simple enough to express in a sentence or two, they do tend to be radical: it’s easier to remember “let’s build a wall,” than “let’s tweak immigration policy in ways x, y, and z.” But I still think the risk of stating things simply is as much a problem as any inherent difficulty in stating policy proposals simply.
Better strategy (and what we actually see now): “I have a very detailed economic plan on my website which you can look up (confident 99% of listeners won’t) and which a team of independent experts have said will lower the deficit by 80% in five years (confident 99% of listeners won’t look into this claim). As for my opponent’s plan, independent experts say it will increase the debt by 200% and unemployment by 2%! (confident 99% of listeners won’t look into this claim, either).”
Is that really that effective? Most people don’t give a lot of heed to the experts, whether it’s a good idea to or not.
(I was very unimpressed with Clinton’s repeated insistence that she had run her plan and Trump’s past The Experts, and they said hers was better – these would be the economic experts who are really good at predicting the past, right? The ones who keep their jobs regardless of whether they get it right or wrong?)
My thought on that was I’m sure Trump could find experts to say the opposite.
Doesn’t matter, though, this election is a little about one issue (immigration) and a lot about “gross orange haired misogynist” vs “horribly corrupt scold”.
@The Nybbler
I was surprised he didn’t just riff on “yeah, the experts, how have ORDINARY REAL AMERICANS done by the experts, eh? You’ve done great by the experts, Secretary Clinton, but I’m going to make tremendous beautiful jobs and we’re going to bring the jobs back from CHYNER” for a while.
Similarly, his response to charges about his taxes and business behaviour should have been “hey, I just played in the system, you made it, don’t blame me”. Instead he interrupted her with stuff like “that’s called being smart”.
Does anyone know an added value to society of options trading ?
I work in trading and, as far as I can see, any hedging anyone could ever want to do (for price-guarantee or business-cycle reasons etc.) can be accomplished by trading futures (linear payoff). Of course, options (nonlinear payoff) are great for making highly leveraged bets, making money if you are smarter than everyone else etc. But for example, if binary options weren’t traded, I don’t think worldwide QALYs would be any lower. And similarly, I can’t think of an example where options are an essential or superior risk management strategy or otherwise make a contribution to the well-running of societal institutions or the economy. Whereas CDOs or CDSs have fairly clear use in my opinion (just to calibrate your estimation of my bias towards financial services).
Hell, you can replicate an option with a risk-free asset + the underlying.
Of course people actually trade options, and they wouldn’t if they could just use futures instead, so…
No, you can’t: a trivial proof is that both a risk-free asset and the underlying have a differentiable-everywhere (in fact linear) value as a function of the underlying’s price at expiration; therefore so does any combination of the two. An option (put or call) has a non-differentiable value.
You’re probably thinking about put-call parity; with a risk free asset, the underlying, and one of a put and a call option at a given strike, we can replicate the other. But we need a widget whose price has at least one “kink” in it. (Futures don’t give us this.)
He’s probably thinking about dynamic replication which *does* allow you to replicate the option (under certain assumptions).
That’s not the point. I am not here to distinguish between an abstract thing called “options” or a portfolio of contracts with the same payoff. One of the services options desks provide is exactly the creation of options from futures by dynamic replication. Yes the existence of options and other derivatives is natural/achievable from a financial engineering approach.
I am asking if there is a non-zero-sum benefit is achieved by options trading that is not available by trading futures. Maybe that is not a well-defined question, but either way I think this comment sidesteps it entirely.
Some suggestions:
1. We often don’t want a linear payoff, because the event we are hedging against has a non-linear payoff.
2. Options contracts have no effect on the underlying asset, which may be important for control/legal/tax/liquidity/etc reasons.
3. The leverage of options allow me to create a synthetic product which mirrors something genuinely desirable but which I cannot easily directly invest in.
1. Do you have a concrete example?
2. I don’t understand what you mean. Of course they have an effect on the underlying asset: just buy a lot of at-the-money calls or puts and watch the stock price move up or down accordingly. You are right that, while owning the option, you do not have the legal implications of owning a share, and hence a different set of regulations affects you, but this is also true when you buy a future, so that cannot be the source of usefulness for options. Besides, it would be unsatisfying if the only benefit to using options rather than futures is a regulatory advantage.
3. Options are highly leveraged, yes. But an arbitrary portfolio can be made highly-leveraged. What are you thinking of here ?
Let’s take some concrete examples, yes.
1. Suppose I own 1 million voting shares in ACME Plc, trading at £100 each. This is a large proportion of my net wealth. I am concerned that my exposure to the share price is excessive, but I do not wish to diversify my holdings, because this would mean giving up control of the company. If I buy put options at £90, I have substantially reduced my exposure, in the direction I care about.
Why are ordinary futures not appropriate?
A. I have paid a premium for control of the company precisely because I think I can use it to generate extra value.
B. If the company share price increases substantially, then I would be forced to liquidate much of my shareholding – precisely what I don’t want to do!
C. The futures may impinge on my ability to exercise control in the here and now.
2. I want to buy a house, but I won’t have the money until I get my annual bonus. I can:
A. Hope that the house is still available and available at a price I can afford in 3 months’ time.
B. Agree with the vendor a price X at which I must buy and he must sell the house in 3 months’ time.
C. Pay the vendor Z to agree a price Y at which he must sell the house in 3 months’ time, if I still wish to proceed.
Can’t you see that for suitable X, Y, Z and risk profiles, that option C is welfare-improving over B? (Suppose I get no bonus this year…)
On your specific points:
I meant that a futures contract may change your relation to an asset in a way that an option doesn’t. Obviously options and futures dealing affects the price of the asset, at least in any liquid market.
Whether using options to get around liquidity/regulatory/etc issues is “unsatisfying” is a matter of taste.
Suppose you want to gain exposure to ACME Limited, but can’t buy shares (perhaps because of the nature of my control of the company). Maybe options are a good idea.
You treat this as a law of nature, where in reality the “winning” party of the deal will be willing to let it go if the other party compensates it for the difference of the then spot price and X.
No this is not something one can just “see”. It has to be shown that the two instruments are or are not equivalent under sensible assumptions. Since this is a very basic problem I’m sure it has been done. Unfortunately this is not my area of expertise so I cannot point to a source, but I am sure someone can.
@Alex:
There isn’t a spot price for houses, it’s an illiquid market. It’s far from clear that the winning party will be willing to let it go, and the transaction costs to escape might be considerable. Sure, that’s how futures contracts can (and do) work in highly liquid markets as discussed in example (1).
As already stated, in scenario B the vendor is assuming counterparty risk. In scenario C he is not. Suppose my financial situation deteriorates over the next 3 months, so that I am unable to buy the house, or compensate the vendor for adverse moves in the value of the house. In scenario B, the vendor loses out, whereas in scenario C he does not. Additionally, note that the vendor has little knowledge or control of my financial circumstances, so it’s not efficient for him to bear this risk. By contrast, in scenario C I assume all the counterparty risk, but as the vendor has a house against which his liability can be secured, this is more efficient than B.
Assuming this is a very basic question and just shows my ignorance of the field, can you point out, why we can assume that there is a price at which both parties would be willing to trade the option in question.
When did I assume any such thing?
What are you trying to achieve here?
I thought you were arguing the point that option trading produces welfare?! For that to happen we need a price that both parties agree upon?!
Admittedly to develop a vague understanding of option pricing without doing the heavy lifting of actually reading up on the topic. Maybe it cannot be done, if so, I’m sorry.
@ Alex
An option is a contract which gives one party the right (but not the obligation) to buy or sell something at a particular price at some specified time. The other party to the contract takes the opposite side, that is, assumes the obligation to buy or sell. The party which has the right is known as the buyer of the option (since the right is valuable, the buyer pays for this right) and the party which has the obligation is known as the writer of the option (and gets some money upfront when it enters the contract).
The options are priced as any other financial instrument — by supply and demand. Option prices have certain relationships to prices of similar options and to the price of the underlying (that which the option gives you the right to buy or sell), so if the price deviates too far away from what it “should” be, arbitrageurs will step in and buy/sell till the price comes back.
If there is no price at which two parties can agree, then the contract does not get written and the option does not exist.
It would be a good bit more difficult to hedge risks on implied options (mortgage prepayment is the big one) without options.
That’s interesting. I didn’t realise options were used for this, I thought that usually the statistical effects of pooling mortgages were the first-order hedge to prepayment, and I don’t see why interest rate swaps cannot be used to hedge the possibility that everyone takes early repayment if rates drop. Do you have a source that shows that/how they are used in this case?
How well do you understand the concept of convexity for bonds?
http://www.analystnotes.com/graph/bond/callable_bond.jpg
Swaps have positive convexity meaning their relationship to interest rates is like the solid line very similar to non-callable bonds. Callable loans have negative convexity (when rates fall their relationship to interest rates follows the dotted line) so you would need to have a dynamic swap hedge (constantly buy and sell swaps as interest rates change to make your net exposure match the dotted line). While options on bonds (or swaptions) have negative convexity so they make a natural hedge for the negative convexity of a callable bond.
Here’s a more technical discussion.
Futures trading produces two benefits. One, allowing individuals to hedge, is a private good. The other, generating information about future prices, is a public good produced as a side effect.
Options let people produce the public good more cheaply. At the same time, not only is the benefit not private, so is the cost. Even if my accurate prediction of wheat prices a year from now was worth nothing to anyone, I could still make money from it at the expense of whoever sold me the options.
This is a point that Jack Hirschleifer made a long time ago. Speculation in general makes money (for good speculators) and produces benefits. But, unlike most market activities, there is no direct connection between how profitable it is and how large a social benefit it produces.
100% agree that futures trading is the bee’s knees, and that risk management/price discovery are public goods.
How is the price discovery mechanism is improved by the existence of options? Buying 1 option can be cheaper than buying 1 future, but I am not sure that it makes price discovery more accessible/more accurate. For this argument, I think there would have to be statistical evidence, something along the lines of showing that futures on which options can be traded have less realised volatility (more ex-ante prediction accuracy) than futures without options.
In addition to the above I’d emphasize the insurance function of options; insurance surely has value to many people.
I’d imagine that the upfront payment, with no further possibility of loss (unlike a future), also has some appeal to some buyers.
It’s easy to imagine a business case for something like a commodity swaption, right? e.g. airline hedging its fuel costs that doesn’t actually know yet how much fuel it will use.
Option prices tell us the implied volatility of the underlying which is surely a useful thing to know (for policymakers, corporate management, academics, etc.)
Also options can be used to circumvent certain regulations, e.g. reporting requirements or short sale restrictions. I suppose that whether that’s “good” depends on your opinion of the regulations.
1. Insurance is bloody wonderful, but what is the insurance value of options? While options can be used to hedge, they are very far away from forming insurance products except in a loose, colloquial sense of the word. But in that loose sense, futures also provide insurance.
2. Of course options have appeal, they are widely traded. That doesn’t show their net societal benefit.
3. Fuel costs is *the* classic hedge. But in practice, airlines use futures to hedge their fuel exposure. The unknown-quantity problem does not seem relevant.
4. That’s an interesting line of thought. To whom specifically is it useful to know implied volatility? I can’t think of a concrete scenario. Would it increase productivity or QALYs?
5. If the benefit of options is that they fall under a different regulatory regime, it doesn’t seem terribly interesting.
1) I don’t see why you don’t think options can be insurance? e.g. the classic example is that a far out of the money put gives you protection against a market collapse, right?
2) You’re kind of saying that just because investors *want* some feature of an option, e.g. the limited downside risk, it doesn’t mean they benefit from it? Are you solely interested in external benefits?
3) I haven’t done anything with options outside of the classroom so airline fuel hedges were the first thing that came to mind, since, as you say, it’s the classic example. Maybe the unknown-quantity problem isn’t a big deal in airlines, but surely it must be in some industries? “We want to build a factory which will require N tons of steel, but we have to wait for an uncertain EPA approval process which will complete in one year at which point we find out if we can proceed.” Now of course I just made that up but I’d be surprised if nothing like that ever happened.
4) Off the top of my head:
a) I’m sure the Fed watches VIX, and I’d expect that it watches implied vol for the financial sector generally and probably for specific important banks too. (I haven’t researched this though.)
b) Any institutional buy-side investor with a halfway decent risk model needs to account for stock-specific risk in addition to the usual risk factors. In a proper model, option-implied volatility would be incorporated into that estimate of specific risk. There are commercial risk models that do this. (I’m not sure if this is “industry standard” or not – I just know I’ve seen some places that use implied vol and some that just use realized, and that the people who use implied tend to brag about it.)
c) I’d expect that implied volatility must be an ingredient in pricing other things that you and I would agree to be useful, e.g. CDS spreads, (though this is not my field either).
1. Options are not part of insurance in the strict sense of “pooled premia, payed out to any individual contributor when a pre-defined event (catastrophe) happens to that contributor”. In the weak sense of “providing protection against some outcome” they are. The use of options in weak insurance can be achieved also by futures. Neither options nor futures are useful for strict insurance.
2. Yes, exactly. Without wanting to open a different can of worms, off the top of my head lots of people want cocaine but I don’t see the societal benefit. (I really don’t want to argue about cocaine — just trying to say that, for the purposes of this discussion, I see individual agents’ desires as separate to public good.)
3. I know, I had the same feeling, but I work in the industry, have asked around, and no-one I know has heard of cases where commodity supplies are actually hedged by options.
4. a) I haven’t heard that, can’t immediately think why FED would care
b) Agreed, investors do model their risk and for that purpose implied is superior to realised, but their risks could be (and often are) futures-hedged
c) Good point, I like this, will think about it
The use of options in weak insurance can be achieved also by futures
But with a different payout profile. Dynamic hedging isn’t for everyone.
can’t immediately think why FED would care
Searched “fed minutes full text”, searched “VIX” within the first result, and found VIX was mentioned. I don’t have time to go deeper than that.
Also the financial press widely cites it, which means it’s interesting to investors in other asset classes which you find socially beneficial. (I’m assuming you find equities and bonds socially beneficial).
investors do model their risk and for that purpose implied is superior to realised, but their risks could be (and often are) futures-hedged
Actually your typical institutional manager is probably not futures-hedging (or options-hedging), and especially not on their idiosyncratic risk. If the idiosyncratic risk you assign to a particular stock increases you almost always just choose to own less of it. (Generally this is by choice, but for mutual funds, which are the biggest money managers, their ability to do hedging through derivatives is also constrained by the 1940 Securities Act.)
But anyway, however you manage the risk, the amount of risk you assign to a particular portfolio is probably informed by the options market.
The same as of any trading: both parties to a trade benefit. If you want something like a specific public good, options trading discovers volatility in the same way regular trading discovers prices.
This is not true at all. First, optionality is a feature of real life (mortgage prepayment is a simple financial example). Second, no, you cannot use dynamic replication to replace options because when prices gap (that’s when you *really* want your hedge to work, by the way) they behave differently.
Since options are a very popular type of financial instrument, I think your imagination is deficient.
Gambling: Also a very popular type of financial instrument.
1. I haven’t thought of “discovering volatility” as a public good before. I see price discovery as a public good, but please can you elaborate why volatility discovery is interesting?
2.a Hedging mortgage prepayment is the first contender for added value of options that I have seen in this thread, thank you
2.b The point is not about replicating options with futures, the point is about abandoning nonlinear payoffs entirely
3. That’s a rather unkindly made remark, and completely superfluous. Obviously I have come with this question to this public forum precisely to check whether or not my imagination is deficient
Because one of the interpretations of risk is volatility and risk is not only interesting, but important.
What do you expect to gain by forbidding non-linear payoffs? Why linear is good and non-linear is bad?
Consider a simple situation: you want to buy a used car and found the one you want, but you’re a bit short of cash. However you might have money coming your way in about a month. So you say to the seller: I’ll give you $100 to hold this car for me for a month. If I get my money I’ll buy it at the price we agreed to, and if I don’t you will be free to sell it to someone else. The seller says OK.
Congratulations, you just bought a call option.
Again, isn’t the popularity and the trading volume of options sufficient to “check”? You think that you can replace options by portfolios of other financial instruments but, very clearly, a great deal of people, professionals most of them, do not agree with you and use options every day. Isn’t that enough?
Allowing people with superior information more leverage could, in theory, make prices converge more quickly.
In practice, many people think they have superior information, but don’t, which is bound to destabilize everything. They will go bust eventually, but there’s a constant supply of new monkeys to take their place. But at least this mechanism keeps their population somewhat under control.
TL;DR: High-risk options are useful to weed out reckless idiots.
Sports thread!
So, it’s the baseball playoffs. I’m a fairly casual baseball fan – I get what’s going on, and I can enjoy a game, but I’m not obsessed to the level of others in my family – but I’ve been getting into checking FiveThirtyEight for playoffs predictions. Usually I check the election then the MLB section.
Anyone here who’s got a head for statistics have any opinions on how they’re forecasting ballgames? More, or less, reliable than their elections forecasts? Why?
Here’s their methodology page:
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-our-2016-mlb-predictions-work/
They’re using Elo ratings system with adjustments for rest days, starting pitcher, and home field advantage as the basis for Monte Carlo simulations. Baseball is one of the US sports with enough head to head match ups between teams that one could do a simple backtest of their method.
That’s the general impression I’ve gotten of baseball – it’s one sport where each team will face each other team enough in a season that sample sizes are large. Compare to, say, boxing, where if two boxers face each other three times over ten years that’s a storied rivalry.
Do you think this is likely to give them better numbers than their political polling? Of course, that’s just politics. Baseball is important.
EDIT: One way I think these numbers would probably be better than election stuff is there’s no “shy pitcher” effect – all the stats about the games are equally available to everyone. Information that wouldn’t be equally available would be stuff like whether players are injured, etc.
The thing about the MLB playoffs is that it is rare that you will be playing a team from your own division in the playoffs, and since the MLB schedule is an unbalanced one (ie, you play teams in your division more than teams in other divisions), then you really don’t end up with a very large sample size.
For example, last night the Cubs beat the Giants in that series, and they had only faced each other seven times during the regular season. Seven games really isn’t much of a sample size in baseball because teams change so much throughout the season that there’s no guarantee that the players in these games faced each other in the regular season. Before last night, the Giants’ starting pitcher had only ever faced one of the Cubs’ batters before in his career.
Even if they had faced each other, in seven games a player would get like eight plate appearances at most versus any of the opposing pitchers, which is far too small a sample size to draw any conclusions.
I was mostly thinking you could use the 2430 predictions to evaluate their percentages. Elo ratings should be decent given that teams in the same league have a lot of opponents in common (even if they’re not in the same division).
Baseball is both super easy to measure and more or less impossible to consistently predict in a small sample size.
Baseball is an extremely simple sport with a ruleset that makes it easy to measure everything that happens on the field. We have very accurate measurements about how good baseball players are. In addition, strategy doesn’t have a big impact on baseball games the way it does for say, football. In baseball, players just take turns batting. That’s it. A good batter is going to be a good batter against just about anyone, and a bad batter is going to be a bad batter against just about anyone. Teams are largely just the sum of their parts, and a given team can be expected to be about as good against any given other team as they would be against the average.
It’s easy to measure how good a team is, but the spread between good and bad teams in baseball is tiny — in a given year, the very best teams will win about 60% of their games, while the very worst teams will win about 40% of their games. In the playoffs, where every team is at least pretty good, the margin will be even slimmer. So, you can predict with a decent amount of confidence that Team A has a 55% chance of winning a game against Team B. And that’s about the best you can do — valid from a statistical standpoint, close to worthless when it comes to making actual predictions about the future.
Supposedly fielding is hard to quantify – but that’s changing.
If you want to add one complication some hitters have a large difference between their skill in hitting same handed pitching vs opposite handed pitching. Usually this is most pronounced in left handed hitters who have trouble with left handed pitching.
If a particular team’s best hitters all happen to have this weakness it can make some match ups quite bad for a team if the opposing team has a high quality starter who throws from the correct side.
Hey everyone, lets have a thread about race!
So a couple of years ago, scientists sequenced DNA from a 7,000 year-old Spanish skeleton that was revealed to have the gene for blue eyes along with dark hair and skin.
I recall reading another article about this gene that mentions it works by diluting the effect of the melanin-producing gene it’s adjacent to, and that if it switched that gene off instead, albinism would result.
Q1) Has the gene that similarly produces blond hair been sequenced from any prehistoric humans?
Q2) What’s the current scientific consensus on red hair? I remember when they were saying we redheads got it from Neanderthals.
Q3) What do we know about the genes that dilute the production of skin melanin? Do Northern Europeans and Northern Asians have different ones?
Q3 – We know a lot about the origins of fair skin in Eurasian populations, comparatively little about it in East Asian populations. There’s a single nucleotide mutation, SLC24A5 Thr111Ala that explains about a third of the difference in skin color between Europeans and Africans. The gene’s an ion-channel transporter in the Golgi. Mutate it and you disrupt melanocyte differentiation, hence less melanin in the skin.
It’s basically fixated in European populations and near fixated in North Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia. It’s been under extreme selection for a long time, and looks to be identical by descent (i.e., not the product of convergent evolution). That’s interesting because if what was being selected was purely fair skin, you’d expect to see lots of different mutations there in different regions. We know the gene knockout causes fair skin in animals, so any number of ways of mutating it to be non-functional should cause the fair skin. That suggests that this particular mutation is doing something important other than just the fair skin – it doesn’t destroy the protein, but it changes differentiation pathways somehow, so presumably it’s altering protein function in some useful manner.
There are other variants in specifically Northern European populations that are also associated with fairer skin that aren’t as common in other populations that help explain why, e.g., Scandinavians are so pale, but they haven’t been as widely studied.
Same deal with East Asians – they don’t share the same SLC24A5 mutation Eurasians have, they’ve got the same ancestral allele that Africans have. We’ve identified a couple of genes of interest, but none which explain as much of the variation as the one variant in Eurasians.
My understanding is that 10 variants are known that explain maybe 90% of the difference between European and African skin color and none of them appear in East Asians. You don’t need to know anything positive about East Asians to answer Chat’s Q3.
Yeah, that sounds about right. I’d expect us to get a better understanding of the East Asian phenotype in the near future as the Chinese keep ramping up their genetics research.
Good summary from Razib: http://www.unz.com/gnxp/the-genetic-architecture-natural-history-of-pigmentation/
Thanks that is a useful summary.
So La Brana 1 (our blue-eyed Spanish hunter) had the same alleles as are fixed in sub-Saharan Africans at SLC24A5 and SLC45A2, but the derived TYR for light skin. There’s also a Luxembourg skeleton carbon dated to 8,000 BP that has the ancestral rather than derived European alleles at all three locations. So it looks like there was selection pressure for lighter skin at higher altitudes (per Douglas Knight, northerly East Asians evolved it from a whole different group of mutations!), yet at 49o45′ North, typical Europeans of 8,000 BP were “black”? What’s up with that? What about selection pressure between H. sapiens first arriving there from Africa and the end of the Pleistocene? Was that “race” displaced by a dark-skinned one with superior Mesolithic tools who came under the same selection pressure much later?
It’s not at all clear (in my opinion anyway) that the selection pressure was for fair skin. These genes are all pleiotropic – they impact a ton of different phenotypes, many of which probably aren’t even known yet. Note again that the most strongly selected for variant is identical by descent! It’s got to be some pleiotropic effect causing the huge selective pressure, otherwise we’d see de novo mutations in that gene that confer fairer skin showing up.
Evolution of non-East Asian light skin, Part 2:
DNA sequenced from Yamna people (east Ukraine, Kazakhstan directly N of the Black Sea, and adjacent parts of Russia, 5500-4300 BP), who are identified with proto-Indo-Europeans in the Kurgan hypothesis, were fixed for SLC24A5 but had lower frequency of the skin-lightening SLC45A2 allele than any living European population and very low frequency of blue eyes. Haak 2015, alluded to in this blog entry, also showed that Yamna people were genetically indistinguishable from their eastern neighbors the Afanasevo culture. The Afanasevo genetics are noteworthy as their range included the Altai mountains where Russia and formerly Iranian-speaking now Turkic Kazakhstan border formerly Tocharian now Turkic Xinjiang and also Mongolia.
The genetics of Turkic-speaking populations are diverse, but the Central Asian groups are very much Northeast Asian. The first Turkic inscriptions come from the Orkohon valley, in the middle of Mongolia. So it looks like steppe peoples were very West Asian up to the Altai mountains and East Asian only eastward from the middle of Mongolia, probably with a mixed population in western Mongolia. Northeast Asian genes would have spread west all through Kazakhstan through demic diffusion of Turkic-speakers, with a sharp drop-off of population replacement in favor of intermarriage and acculturation as Turkic spread further.