This is the twice-weekly hidden open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever.
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For rifles, it’s basically the same problem as with any other innovation we described here. The idea of rifling had been around for a long, long time before it was widely adopted by any army. All else being equal, it makes the weapons more expensive to build, slower to reload, more likely to malfunction and requiring more maintenance. Until manufacturing techniques were good enough to cancel these problems out, equipping the whole army with rifles was simply not a good idea, even if it was technically possible.
Every army has the guns its industry can produce and supply.
This was meant as a reply somewhere in the middle. It seems to forget the intent to reply if you use the “log in to reply” button. Please disregard this post.
Also, where did the option to edit or delete posts go?
Refugee children.
This really is getting ridiculous now. Someone was telling me yesterday how it was racist to insist on age checks for refugee ‘children’ escaping to the UK from France.
What is going on?
I’m inclined to think that intelligent people inclined to ‘open-borders’ are throwing up a sort of anti-aircraft barrage of crap in order to make target approach dangerous. And, the people running with the ‘racism’ stuff are being manipulated.
Having said that, my motivation for opposing mass immigration is basically xenophobic – unknown outsiders may be damaging to society. I think there can be reasonable xenophobia (or caution), though.
X is racist against group Y if it results in people from group Y being excluded from our society, and X was done for the primary purpose of excluding people of group Y from our society. Laws are not to always be interpreted literally since they can’t anticipate every contingency and in many instances a literal interpretation would result in an absurd outcome so what matters is interpreting them in a way that makes society better off so it’s not a defense against racism that the law requires the state to do X.
I would say that in order for X to be racist, Y has to be a race. I mean, it might be discriminatory to insist that children are actually children, but I don’t think it’s racist.
And is it only racism if it results in exclusion from society?
“I would say that in order for X to be racist, Y has to be a race. Agreed.
“And is it only racism if it results in exclusion from society?” Good point. I gave sufficient rather than necessary conditions.
Racism is a superweapon. If you can paint an argument as “racist”, you can prevent it from being considered even if it is correct. This means that if you want something accomplished, you need merely paint all arguments against it as “racist”. Then those arguments may not be made and if made, will not be considered, and the thing you want will carry without (or with very weak) opposition.
It’s not just immigration; it’s everything.
Work to end racism and you’ll defang the superweapon. (N.B. This strategy won’t be any help if racism is your terminal value.)
No, you won’t. Because racism will simply be redefined (as it has been redefined), and the thresholds for detecting it will be lowered to below the noise floor.
There’s still plenty of plain old racism. The microaggression types draw power from association with that deep wellspring of real injustice.
You want to win your little mostly online mostly millennial culture “war” — take that wellspring away from them by getting rid of it.
Or just post frog memes on 4chan, I’m sure that’ll be effective.
Strategy also likely won’t be any help if “ending racism” is a nebulous goal without a single concrete example to follow in all of human history.
Well, as a start we can get a bipartisan consensus against importing dark triad racists from India, Peru, and Russia.
Sounds like one of those whaddayacallit, disparate impact situations. Sheer curiosity: is it that there’s no racism in, say, the Islamic world or that there’s no psychopathy or that there’s a consensus in favor of dark triad racists from the Islamic world?
@Blue Anonymous. We can NEVER end racism. People are visually oriented creatures and so we take note of visual clues. If someone if tall or fat or acne-covered or gorgeous or Black, we will notice. And it will affect us. We can do our best to ignore those visual differences when they are irrelevant, as I try to do. But it can’t be totally eliminated. If I am used to working with a bunch of White people, I will notice when a Black person shows up. That is simply human nature.
Furthermore, “working to end racism” often has the opposite effect to what is intended. Most of those that spend a significant amount of their effort on this endeavor are usually pointing out to others all the disparities that arise between the different races, and how we need to pay more attention to these disparities. Well, the more attention we pay to different races, the more difficult is to ignore racial differences and treat folks the same. Working to end racism will work the best if we simply have a culture that mostly ignores race.
They are aware that there are racists who oppose Muslim immigration. To avoid conflation with aforementioned racists, they will say such things.
It’s arguments as soldiers, and soldiers in a war that, World War I-style, has long since detached from whatever goal it may have had when it was started.
The goal is not to “end racism” or to help refugees; the goal is to stick it to the other side which has already been established to evil. If arguing something transparently idiotic like “it’s racist to insist that child refugees actually be children” helps the great task of opposing The Other, it will be argued.
The Cubs have won the pennant. These must be the end times.
Truly!
Holy Cow!
As medical technology continues to improve (and get more expensive, though that’s another issue…) we are increasingly faced with difficult choices like “should grandpa get this extremely expensive operation with a 40% chance of giving him another year of low-quality life?” “should we bring this baby to term though it will be born without a heart (but maybe that can be fixed by a transplant, hundreds of thousands of dollars, countless hours in the hospital with our young, healthy child, and the likely result is still death a few years in)?” “Do I get Fido the kidney transplant?” and so on.
Do people have any thoughts on the ethics of such situations? As our ability to save people improves should our standard of what constitutes reasonable care continually rise (seems it should?)? At what point, if any, is it morally or personally justifiable to say “this just isn’t worth it?” In the future will refusal to buy great-great-grandpa a new cyborg body constitute elder abuse?
(1) If grandpa’s quality of life is declining and the operation is more stressful than not, don’t. Some people gradually fade quietly towards death and it’s natural, you can see the decline in them mentally and physically and they’re ready to die. If grandpa desperately wants to live that extra year, it’s another thing.
(2) Child born without a heart is likely to die anyway, if it’s that extreme. That being said, I would not take this as an excuse to terminate the pregnancy. Let them be born and die, even if they only have a few moments of life.
(3) Fido’s kidney transplant I would say no, because a dog is not a human. Again, that being said, a lot of people do treat their pets like surrogate children. But putting yourself into thousands of dollars of death for a pet – unless you’re a billionaire and can afford to pay for thirty dogs to have kidney transplants out of your spare change – no, I wouldn’t do it.
I suppose my principle is basically that people shouldn’t die purely for the sake of not being able to afford treatment that makes an appreciable difference. If poor Joe and rich Joseph each have the same basic quality of life, and poor Joe only dies while rich Joseph gets another ten years of life because Joseph can afford the operation/procedure that Joe can’t, that seems to me unethical.
Money is a nice way to keep track of how many favors one person has given others. In general, the more you do for other people in the market, the more money you have. Given that, if Joseph becomes rich because he’s made many people better off, and he wants to cash that in to get a limited procedure that isn’t available to Joe who hasn’t done as much for others, that doesn’t seem wrong to me. On the other hand, if Joseph got rich by making others worse off then him getting the procedure over Joe seems unjust.
That seems idealistic at best. CEOs famously earn massively more than the value that the produce for the company. I don’t think that money is evenly distributed with respect to value added to society.
Some? Most? All? Citation needed.
Money is a good, but imperfect, proxy for value added. Did most of your money come from providing goods or services to others? The vast, vast majority of mine did.
In that case, you’re in trouble. This will always happen, unless you socialize healthcare to the point of outlawing private pracice, and also close your borders so the wealthy sick have to die instead of go to Switzerland for a cure.
When I was an exchange student in Sweden for awhile, a long time ago, a case hit the news there where the state healthcare was cutting off a guy’s medicine he needed to live. He was about 27, he’d been on this medicine for fifteen years after some terribly rare disease made itself known in early puberty, and the medicine cost, I forget if it was the equivalent of $200,000 or $2 million annually. (I can’t remember what the sum was in Swedish money anymore, nor the conversion rate) It wasn’t because of some Shkreliesque parasite, either; the hospital was getting the medicine — some enzyme that he didn’t naturally produce or whatever, I forget the details, and even if I’d hallucinated the whole thing this would still be a useful literary example, so whatever — at cost. They were synthesizing it themselves or one of the big Swedish research hospitals was doing it for them. It just had expensive ingredients, or an expensive process, and he needed several doses daily.
Eventually, like I said, the local healthcare authority told him he couldn’t have it anymore. His parents were obviously upset and outraged, and it made the news, but nothing came of it. Why? Because the authority’s reasons were simple: it cost too much, in other human lives. Each year, the money spent on his medicine could save somewhere between ten and dozens of lives, permanently, or as permanently as it ever gets, while his life would be saved only to need saving again tomorrow. It was a matter of simple triage. They couldn’t defend letting hundreds of people die over the rest of his natural lifespan so that he could live. He and his parents would simply have to accept that he’d gotten fifteen years more than nature had allotted to him, and for that matter, fifteen years more than the hospital should have allotted to him.
Now, obviously, if his parents were rich, they would have been well within their rights to spend their fortune buying him medicine; what better could they do with their money? It seems obvious that saving their son wouldn’t be immoral. But the healthcare provider’s choice doesn’t seem unethical either; in fact, it seems even more obvious to me that they did the right thing, and indeed the only possible right thing. So where’s the unethical part?
It seems to me — maybe I’m off base, but it seems to me like any frustration here must basically be over the fact that money has value, and not just value for obtaining meaningless junk like curtains and prosciutto, but real value. People have been angry over this for a long time, but it’s like yelling at the rain.
In the most general sense – yes, there are circumstances where a treatment will consume limited resources that could be better used in different ways.
But I think in this case, there isn’t any hard constraint preventing us from doing both – $2 million isn’t really a significant amount of money, and I think given how clear the benefits of the treatment are, quite cruel to end it.
More of a political decision.
If the health service has a moral obligation to remove treatment, wouldn’t the parents also have a moral obligation to spend their $2 million on whatever it is that would save many more lives?
(I think that if we give an additional $2 million dollars to a health service, they’d probably be hard pressed to spend the money in a way that would guarantee an additional high quality year of young life.)
Most of the cases like this I read about involve cancer drugs which are incredibly expensive and lead to an average of a few extra months of life. In that case, I think it’s reasonable not to pay for it.
Isn’t this basically what socialists (not Communists, but Bernie-style socialists) object to? Everyone should have as much food, shelter, healthcare, transportation, child care, and ‘dignity’ as they need merely because they exist, and any work they do should just be for upgrading the hamburger ration to steak — after, that is, enough has been taken to pay for their share of everyone else’s hamburger ration.
From Lighting Up the Dark:
> Eventually, like I said, the local healthcare authority told him he couldn’t have it anymore.
For some reason people seem more willing to accept this if it comes from a government than from, say, a private insurance company.
I am opposed to socialized medicine, but I think the U.S. would have been better off if we had adopted it a few decades ago, partly because people would have accepted there were limits on what medical care they could get for free that they’re unwilling to accept now.
(Of course we’d have missed out on a lot of medical progress that way. Maybe that was worth the dreadful mess we’re in now. Might think so if I had a kid with cancer.)
@Matt C:
Well, it’s the government’s job, in a welfare state with public medicine or public insurance, to provide for people. With a private insurance company, regardless of what actually happens to the money, most people are going to think “he’s getting cut off because it hurts their bottom line”.
@TheNybbler
Are you saying that given the choice between a society where everyone has necessities provided for them, and one where not everyone has necessities but some people have bigger swimming pools of money, you would pick the latter? That seems odd to me. I can understand objecting based on the idea that the former isn’t actually possible, would have negative side effects, or would be unethical in some way (violating rights etc.), but I don’t understand why you would consider the outcome less desirable.
@sweeneyrod
I find it difficult to separate the outcome from the costs and side-effects. A world where everyone has all their necessities provided for at no cost to others is just a fairy-tale, not really worth consideration.
The conclusion my family seems to have come to regarding pets is “as long as their quality of life is still good”. Keeping an animal who doesn’t know what’s going on alive and suffering using heroic medicine seems quite cruel.
And yet when I apply the same thinking to humans, my mind kind of rebels. I would rather be taken off life support then kept alive Golden Throne-style (and I mean, all those sacrificial psykers, that really runs up the costs) but I can’t bring myself to demand that of others.
If you have to ask, the answer is almost certainly “No”. Such decisions are generally based on either emotional procrastination or on signaling, at best resulting in grossly inefficient use of resources and at worst in paying for extra suffering.
In the rare case where bignum health care dollars will actually result in many positive QALYs or whatnot, there won’t be any question about it being the right thing do do because you won’t be hedging the question with qualifiers about “low-quality life” and everybody around you will be posturing to show off their virtue by demanding you pay for someone else’s health care.
See, e.g. Scott’s observation here that it isn’t the caregivers or close relatives of the severely ill who demand the expensive treatments, but the “family” members from 2000 miles away who haven’t spoken to Grandpa in years but need to be seen to Care Very Much now that people are paying attention.
“should grandpa get this extremely expensive operation with a 40% chance of giving him another year of low-quality life?”
If grandpa is mentally sound:
– if it’s grandpa’s money, it’s grandpa’s choice.
– if it’s the family money, it’s a family choice that grandpa gets to have an opinion on, and his wishes should be given extra weight. Maybe he wants to see his favorite grandkid graduate medical school. Maybe he wants to see one last spring with his wife. Maybe he’s tired of all the family bickering and of his hip hurting. Maybe he’d rather the money went to pay for favorite grandkid’s med school.
– if it’s other people’s money, they get a say, too, unless they’ve deliberately gifted the money so that the recipient can use as if it were their own. Most tax-payer sourced money is not this (but maybe that is how we should think of it? Maybe not…)
If grandpa is not of sound mind… If grandpa left express wishes, and has sufficient funds to pay for it, the wishes should be followed as best as can. If there are not sufficient funds, then those who would be paying for it get a say.
“should we bring this baby to term though it will be born without a heart (but maybe that can be fixed by a transplant, hundreds of thousands of dollars, countless hours in the hospital with our young, healthy child, and the likely result is still death a few years in)?”
This is how medical progress happens, by people with the funds to do so encouraging doctors to try their best, even if the prognosis is not great. (This applies to old folks, and not so old folks, as well.)
However, the same idea – that if you have the money, you can dictate terms, and if you don’t, those who would provide the funds get a say – still apply.
“Do I get Fido the kidney transplant?”
And same-same again – if this is how you want to spend your money, then do so, but don’t expect (you can *ask*, but not *expect*) others to pay for this.
And ending it here, with animals, helps to highlight what is, for me, the major ethical conflict – that of using euthanasia not because we have run out of other options, but because the benefits of euthanasia to the family are such that it becomes very, very attractive.
It’s bad enough when Aunt Sally grows weary and depressed tending to grandpa, and puts a pillow over his head. Or when the caregiver for the vegitative child just lets the little one’s head slip under the bath water, because the child is never going to gain intelligence or bowel control. Or when Fido is blind and bites the hand (of the eight year old) that feeds him.
But when the family would be $100k richer if grandpa died *before* the operation, or if Walkaway Joe doesn’t want to pay child support, and tells his babymomma to go ahead with the abortion, or if the horse will never race again even with the surgery…
Then we get into what I consider very tricky ground.
One way of looking at it is that struggling through is hard, and stopping is easy, and if the problem is insurmountable, society will condone stopping. So there is a temptation to tell society – and ones self – that the problem is actually insurmountable, so you don’t have to struggle any more.
God knows this. And He knows, when we fail – not fail to win, but fail to struggle. One is tragedy, one is sin.
Anyone else wish Freddie deBoer had come around to political nihilism (“for a long time I still believed in political progress. And one day not too long ago I woke up and realized I just don’t.”) but continued his internet writings? Guess it was necessary for him to stop, for himself, though…
I thought he stopped writing because he got a job.
Somehow I doubt his newfound nihilism would make him any less of a whipping boy for the rest of the internet left. LG&M still gives him shit for his comments on sports blogs, for crying out loud.
I used to be a regular reader of LG&M but now they just come across as belligerent toxoplasma-esque nonsense. Were they always like that?
I seem to recall that those guys were part of the first big blog explosion around 9/11. They weren’t crazy at all then, but like a lot of writers who became prominent in that era they gradually lost their minds over the ensuing years.
I thought he stopped writing because he went off his meds.
Related to voter fraud: I found a story of someone in my county a few years ago getting caught attempting to vote twice. But her incentives were a little different than most, she was on the ballot.
She lost her seat (not a euphemism), the tentative-at-time-time-of-publication loss by 3 votes was certified as the final result.
Have a scenario and theories about nice guys.
I’m going to assume that the typical nice guy has been associating for years with a woman he finds attractive. He like her company, but he would like an actual intimate relationship with her. He’s afraid that if he makes this clear, he’ll lose her company and all chance of a relationship with her. Meanwhile, she keeps telling him about the horrible relationship problems she’s having with obnoxious men while not noticing that he would be a better choice.
This dynamic is bad, though as things going wrong between people go, it’s only middling bad.
It really goes sour when some men start complaining in public about how this proves there’s something wrong with women. Women have a lot of social pressure to be polite to men who want sex with them– I expect you guys have vivid memories of women who were *not* polite, but you’re less likely to notice women being patient and tactful.
Imagine feeling strong internal pressure to be polite to spammers and telemarketers. It would be a strain.
So you’ve got women blowing up about men who expect sex, and men who were in the scenerio I started with are saying, “What! I didn’t even ask, and now I’m being blamed!”
Have some more theories– I think what sets up the scenario is that both of them came from families where the parents were problems. His mother was unhappy in her relationship, and he can’t imagine a woman actually liking him. Her father was a nasty person, and she can’t imagine that a man would be good to her.
It’s not just simple status stuff, it’s people who can’t respond to good people who are attracted to them.
I’m not sure family problems has anything to do with it. If anything it seems to be the opposite where a normal boring guy with a perfectly average life can’t seem to excite women in the same way a “broken” guy can. And women have always seemed to have some kind of attraction to “bad boys”, even those that come from stable homes.
Again, “Radicalizing the Romanceless” and “I am a nicer guy than Henry.”
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/31/radicalizing-the-romanceless/
You know, it sort of saddens me that comment section of that post seems to have more variety (as in number of nicks participating in discussion presenting different but cogent arguments) than our current discussions.
No, no statistics, just my gut feeling.
that comment section of that post seems to have more variety (as in number of nicks participating in discussion presenting different but cogent arguments) than our current discussions
We need new blood. Who’s got a big net and can dig traps? 🙂
I’ll grab a shovel if you get the net. Where are we headed?
Are you comparing frontpage post to frontpage post, though, or frontpage post to super-secret hidden open-thread known-only-to-the-elect?
Hmmmm… far too broad.
“I’m not sure family problems has anything to do with it. If anything it seems to be the opposite where a normal boring guy with a perfectly average life can’t seem to excite women in the same way a “broken” guy can. And women have always seemed to have some kind of attraction to “bad boys”, even those that come from stable homes.”
“Normal boring guy with perfectly average life” might be depressed, which is not a plus. Is he enthusiastic about anything?
“Stable home” isn’t the same thing as not having an asshole father.
Also, I’m bewildered by this bad boy thing. I know enough married people to be pretty sure that a lot of the men aren’t especially bad. Perhaps this is a matter of lack of specificity.
What proportion of women do you think are attracted to bad boys? For how much of the women’s lives? How bad do the bad boys need to be? Is it possible that a lot of men need to show a little badness (how much? what kind?) while courting, but it isn’t really their temperaments?
He’s not depressed because he grew up in a terrible household but because he can’t get a girlfriend. You have your causation backwards. And a woman can have the nicest father in the world and still be attracted to a guy that’s less than wholesome.
As far as bad boys, just look at media. If women didn’t like them then why do they consume book and movies about guys that are terrible? At least one study has shown a third of women admitting to rape fantasies. Of course, they don’t usually want to marry these guys but the attraction is there. That attraction is not a sign of being psychologically broken. It’s just the way many women are.
I’m not saying that fellow is depressed because he grew up in a terrible household. I’m saying he sounds as though he might be depressed because you describe him as not having much going on in his life.
I agree that he might be happier with a relationship.
People do get attracted for some reason– is he fun to be around? Comforting?
As for mass media, this is about fantasy. As far as I can tell, men like to watch contact sports a lot more than they want to play them.
You originally said:
My main dispute is what you said there. There may be a hint of truth there regarding women but it’s certainly not the whole truth and with guys there doesn’t seem to be any truth to it.
At least one study has shown a third of women admitting to rape fantasies.
Fantasy is about fantasy, not reality. Rape fantasies are about transgression and the taboo, not about wanting to be raped. The whole point of a fantasy is that the interaction is scripted and shaped and goes along the way you want it to go, not how it would go in reality, and the moment it gets too much you can snap right out of it. We get told that sex is perfectly natural and normal and we shouldn’t think of it as dirty or something to be ashamed of, but libido is sometimes sparked by the dirty, the shameful, the sense of forbidden fruit, and that’s what fantasy is for.
You need to read you some Nancy Friday, son (though her collections of women’s sexual fantasies are very much of the 70s/early 80s and time, and attitudes, have marched on since) 🙂
@Deisach
I wasn’t trying to imply that one third of women want to be raped, just that one third of women probably did not have terrible fathers. I don’t think the correlation between wanting these guys and family problems is very strong, except maybe in cases where the women were actually sexually abused.
I think you’re on to it in that second paragraph. They don’t need to be Christian Slater in _Heathers_ bad, I just mean did they have some sort of edge? Ride a motorcycle or drive a sports car? Participate in some sport with physical danger? Get into the occasional fistfight? Set off fireworks clandestinely? I think most women (at least most younger women) are looking for some sort of edge. And better (from the perspective of attracting women, though not many others) to overdo it than underdo it; even your total psycho has his hangers on, whereas your nebbish… doesn’t.
Many people are attracted to folks they can “fix” or “help” in some way. People like to feel needed, and the careerist who’s got his life together and is on his way to some grand success just doesn’t need you, or doesn’t appear to. It’s a bad dynamic, often for both parties, but it’s there and not terribly uncommon. I’ve been guilty of it myself in the past.
Of course there’s a sweet spot; excess need is actually unattractive, because people want to date someone who needs them, not someone who needs help but would take it from anyone.
I think we’re back to the idea of what is a nice guy?
That’s not being a nice guy. That is totally unfair.
I am a bit confused about this. If the guy didn’t ask, how does the woman know the man expected sex? Maybe one blowhard does expect sex, but the guy who says nothing gets blamed? But does this really happen? IMO, if someone “expects sex because they are a nice guy,” they are really cads and not a nice guy. But does this actually happen when men and women are together, or is this in Internet conversation? Quite a bit different. I can imagine in my younger days complaining about the dis-interest of women on the Internet (if the Internet existed back then), but that would be my depression talking, not really blaming women.
In my early twenties, I was really desperate for sex, or really just a friendly touch from women. I didn’t know how to achieve this. I never blamed women for this; but it was very depressing that none of them wanted me. As Wrong Species says above, one can’t really blame women for their desires, that’s just the way they are. Just like people shouldn’t blame men for desiring sex all the time and from multiple partners; that’s just the way are. At least the way I am (was).
I am now 60, long married, and my hormonal balance has much changed, so my needs are quite a bit different today. But it was terrible at the time.
He might be signalling attraction without meaning to (or even wanting to, if he thinks it would be wrong to try to sleep with her). If she reads that correctly, she would have reason to be annoyed, especially if she expects him to ask at some point in the future.
(ed – the gender-inverted version of this can also occur, with results that are usually different in kind but similarly bad)
Then take into account the fact that she might misread something innocuous, and you have a recipe for stupid, destructive arguments.
>Women have a lot of social pressure to be polite to men who want sex with them– I expect you guys have vivid memories of women who were *not* polite, but you’re less likely to notice women being patient and tactful.
Do they? I ask this question sincerely. I’ve never seen a woman suffer social scorn for turning someone down, even in a public manner. The closest I’ve seen is some mutual badmouthing by the rejectee and his friends at some later date.
Maybe this is a generational thing, and the world has changed more than I realize.
Would any younger women care to talk about how they feel they ought to treat men?
On the other hand, I’ve never seen (or heard of) a woman turn someone down in a rude way, except possibly when they were struggling to navigate a situation they didn’t know how to handle (and then it was mostly awkward silences and uncomfortable looks at others).
People have a lot of social pressure to be polite in general.
There’s really quite a lot of similarity between the situation you mention about overweight women upthread and nice guys here.
Overweight women are typically not attractive enough that most men will commit to them as an exclusive partner. IME there’s little to no incentive to move past the hookup stage with a fat girl. As such, they are unable to to experience emotional intimacy with men.
Square men are typically not attractive enough that most women will have sex with them. It seems as though here’s little to no incentive to move past the friend stage with a nice guy. As such, they are unable to experience physical intimacy with women.
The solution for both is the same: self improvement to better match what the other side wants. Nice guys need to work out more, dress better and learn how to talk to women. Fat girls need to lose weight. It’s not easy, it sucks, but I know for a fact both are possible because I’ve done both.
Thanks be to the universe I’m asexual. Otherwise, I’d have the choice between men not caring if I had the personality of a Barbie doll as long as I had big tits and a skinny waist, or being perfectly willing to fuck me until something better comes along.
Of all the reasons to lose weight, “So I can be attractive to some lump who would stick his dick in a hole in the ground and thinks of me the same way – as physical relief – but would be persuaded to graciously deign to permit me to be in a ‘relationship’ with him as long as I met his arbitrary standards of ‘wouldn’t be ashamed to be seen with her in public in daylight'” has got to be the worst one. Pinning the tail of satisfaction of your emotional needs to the arse of a donkey who doesn’t give a flying fig about your emotional needs, just do you look acceptable as arm decoration so he can demonstrate his heterosexuality to the world (“look, I can get and keep a woman!”)? That’s going to end in tears and driving your sense of self-respect even lower than before, so all the weight will be regained, and then you’re going to feel even worse than you did at the start.
Note: I am not saying weight doesn’t matter or that there aren’t conventional standards of attractiveness. I understand about if you’re not wiling to change to be more attractive (be that physically or personality) then you haven’t a leg to stand on when it comes to complaining “nobody likes me”.
But if a guy isn’t attracted enough to a woman to even consider her as “potential relationship material”, then he shouldn’t take up with her at all (again, one-night stands and casual sex where both parties know that’s what it is and that’s all it is are different matters). Being “I wouldn’t date her but I’m happy to string her along when I’m horny and can’t find anyone more convenient to fuck, and I’ll drop her like a hot potato if I get a genuine hot chick interested in me” is shitty behaviour, and it says very little for the likelihood that the guy is going to be any better or more willing to be emotionally intimate in his ‘real’ relationship.
@Deiseach
Your rant is rather akin to the stereotypical nice guys rant (the one that boils down to “chicks dig jerks”), in that you can complain all you want about how terrible the standards of the opposite sex are, and even be convincing about it, but at the end of the day they are what they are and there’s nothing you can do about it. If guys like thin women and you’re a fat woman, well, there’s a solution at hand. If chicks dig jerks and you’re a guy who is not a jerk… figure out what it is about the jerks the chicks dig and do that. Just hope like hell it isn’t something you can’t really change, like your height.
Citation needed. Taste and desire are not as immutable as you think they are, and at both the individual and societal level there are things that can be done about it.
That you may not want people to do anything about it, is another matter entirely.
On an individual basis, you can change your own preferences, but you can’t change others’. On a societal basis… well, good luck with that. Even if you could do it (which would require more collaboration than the Hillary Clinton campaign has managed), it would probably take far longer than you would want to do any good for yourself.
Nybbler, why would I want to waste my time on some jerk who’s too cheap to pay a sex worker and thinks he can get it for free from me because I’ll be soooo grateful a man bothered to look at me?
Who needs that kind of denigration? “He’s only with you because you’re easy because you’re desperate”? Being alone is better in that instance. You can make yourself more attractive if that’s what you want, and find someone you like, rather than grabbing onto the first person who talks to you and is only taking advantage of you.
@Deiseach
You presumably wouldn’t; someone more desperate for sex (or perhaps better at fooling herself it’s more than that) would.
I agree that there’s similarity, but there are a lot more solutions than totally rebuilding your life and/or personality in order to share the same. Developing the skill of actually noticing when people are attracted to you can do pretty well. The two sets you mention have more trouble with this than most, due to both a reduced sample size and a culture constantly telling them they’re doomed to be Forever Alone (it usually takes an especially obvious suitor to get through to them that suitors exist, and that suitor has to be of sufficient “quality” that they can’t be dismissed out of hand), but the problem applies to a lot of people who for whatever reason think they can’t succeed at romance.
What about guys that claim they desperately want to get and stay married, and have lots of kids, but just can’t seem to accomplish that?
Surely with such a strong goal would override other considerations?
In all likelihood they spend too much time responding to shitposters on SSC. Plays havoc with the social life as I’m sure you’re aware.
What about guys that claim they desperately want to get and stay married, and have lots of kids, but just can’t seem to accomplish that?
People have standards. Even fat women.
Twenty to thirty years back, I was an overweight young woman (as distinct from being an overweight older woman as I am now), and I got hit on a few times by skeevy guys who plainly were operating under the assumption that, as a fat chick, I would be so desperate for male “company” I’d gladly open my legs for them just because they paid me some attention.
Even though I was and am uninterested, that wasn’t the sole reason I rejected their advances – it was also because they were unattractive. They also plainly didn’t consider that they might be unappealing to women, as distinct from hitting on what they thought were easy targets, or that even fat and ugly women also have standards of who they find attractive and that they might not meet those standards.
“Lower your standards” may be reasonable advice for the desperate, but if it’s a toss-up between “how desperate exactly are you?” and “so lowered as not to exclude a shaved Yeti”, you might decide “I’m desperate, but not that desperate”.
(Some guys, I’d take the Yeti – and not because of looks, but because of their skeeviness).
That’s fine. But high standards are a reason to be skeptical of people’s claims of desperation — whether that’s for sex, or companionship or white babies.
@Dr Dealgood:
There are plenty of fat guys who would be perfectly happy with equivalently fat women. If they think they are somehow deserving of a woman with a lower relative bodyfat % than them, well, that’s just gonna keep them lonely.
Indeed. But no one blames women for this, while they do blame guys for being so superficial as to not want to date fat women.
Some double standards cut one way, some cut the other. I’m sure there are forms of pickiness women get judged for that men don’t. And, even if they’re not judged for it socially, their pickiness still hurts them. That society is more sympathetic towards the woman in her 30s ranting about how shallow men are about age and now that she’s in her 30s where have all the men gone, than they are towards the man ranting that he did not get the hottie the movies promised him, doesn’t change that both are unlikely to escape their loneliness.
In fact, the man might be more likely to do so, because if he makes himself more appealing and adjusts his expectations, he’ll be in a better position on the dating market in his 30s and 40s and so on than a woman of equivalent age. That society judges him perhaps more harshly, and certainly more openly, is in his favour, because he is more likely to get a message that is actually given to him.
EDIT: By “society” above, of course, it varies from bubble to bubble. I know that in my social group, a guy who posted classic Nice Guy ranting on Facebook would be scorned, while plenty of women share articles that are one distaff equivalent or another, and nobody openly disapproves. That’s the only personally experienced frame of reference I have.
Are there really, I wonder? What’s an example of one?
I’d also like to know what those forms are. Do you have a concrete example?
And that in turn doesn’t change in the slightest that double standards are wrong. Are we equal or aren’t we? It’s disgusting and unacceptable that women should be judged more leniently than men, over anything, for any reason, if we’re to be equal (and let me point out, if the double standard went the other way, it would be loudly and justly decried; we both know that).
@Thirteenthletter/Anonymous:
Men with younger women usually seems to be presented more favourably, and as less of an oddity, than women with younger men, and a man in his late 30s who announces a preference for women in their 20s is probably going to be read as considerably more realistic than his distaff counterpart. Even in the social circles that are usually full of pushback against social norms, I’m not sure if I see much pushback against this.
Again, it’s a question of social circles/bubbles. In the popular culture, I think that fat guys get a better rap than fat girls. There’s far more positive archetypes for fat men – funny guy, big ol’ party animal, etc than for fat women. There’s more work for fat actors. A man has to be considerably fatter (relatively speaking, considering that women will usually be carrying more fat without it making them look fatter, due to hormonal differences in fat distribution) than a woman before he starts getting shit for it.
Of course, in the sorts of circles where body positivity and fat acceptance are a thing, because those things are a pushback, they’re aimed entirely at women. There’s very little “fat guys are hot and sexy” messaging. But that’s because there’s less “fat guys are repulsive” messaging in the culture at large.
I don’t think that the body positivity messaging helps fat women get what they want, or at least, most of what they want, to be honest. A fat guy, not getting that “you’re great the way you are, and the onus is on society to change” message – which is completely bogus; if there’s more skinnier guy-fatter girl couples than the other way around, I chalk that up to the overweight and obese %s being higher among women – is more likely to clean up his diet and hit the gym. He’s more likely to end up with the sort of women he’s attracted to, than the hot guys are going to rewire what they find attractive to suit her. Tough love, or even just nastiness that spurs someone on, does actually work sometimes.
Additionally, double standards are only wrong if the groups involved are identical. “It’s OK for secret service agents to tackle the president, but when I do it secret service agents tackle me?!?” is a double standard, but it’s completely acceptable.
I think I might exist on a different plane to most of the ssc commentariat.
High standards are bad. If you can enjoy cheap food as well as expensive, you’re better off.
Bill Gates likes McDonalds. He also likes Melinda Gates. Mark Zuckerberg like Priscilla Chan.
We should all be aiming to eat McDonalds, get married to a person of vaguely the same level of physical attractiveness as us, have a nice time, and stop worrying about being attractive.
Nobody wants to hear people moaning about their sex life socially, but there are lots of things most people don’t want to hear about.
Nobody wants to hear about my eccentric monetary theories, or my views on the simulation argument – or any of the other millions of things they aren’t interested in. That doesn’t mean that there must be a ban on amateur philosophical/economic rambling. It just means that you have to have a bit of a filter.
The Fat Hate threads on /fit/ seem to actually consist to a large part, maybe entirely, of fat or ex-fat guys motivating themselves by wallowing in how gross fat people are.
dndnrsn, I’ve seen a fair number of women say that their lives got better from giving up trying to lose weight. I’ve seen the same for women who decide to pursue their goals (romance, success) now instead of assuming they can’t get anything good unless they’re thin first.
Either path takes more work (this may sound strange, but *not* dieting can take a surprising amount of effort in a strongly pro-diet culture) than just being on the receiving end of body positivity messages.
Yeah, this strikes me as terrible reasoning. I hear you saying, “Your preferences are suboptimal, so you don’t deserve happiness.” Trying to define a “correct” set of preferences doesn’t even make sense to me. I started trying to explain why it doesn’t make sense, but it quickly became clear that that would take more time than I have right now.
I’m pretty sure that the two of us, at least, have some very deep meta-ethical disagreements that make it hard to discuss this claim you’re making, and I’m having a lot of trouble framing just why I find it so crazy without writing an essay on fundamental philosophy. Every time I try to start the argument, I find some position or other that you might just not hold. I can usually start to frame an argument for that position, but that process rapidly grows out of the range of a reasonable response.
“I’m pretty sure that the two of us, at least, have some very deep meta-ethical disagreements that make it hard to discuss this claim you’re making…”
Maybe.
Without getting too much into it, all I’m really saying is that if I have a preference for something cheaper, I am better off than if I have a preference for something expensive.
Let’s say there is a large psychological component to my consumption and the story I tell myself is as important as any physical sensation – well, changing my story might make me better off.
Same principle for ethical frameworks.
And also, focus. We can choose which aspect of an experience to focus on.
If someone has preferences such that he will only be happy if he is a billionaire, does he deserve happiness?
That kind of preference set means you don’t really want to be happy.
I was unclear, I think. TMB’s frame seems to forbid our would-be-billionaire from pursuing their billion dollars, regardless of what they think about the various tradeoffs that might be necessary to get them. “Change your preferences” seems like a pretty extreme response when the alternative is something like, “Given the state of the world, here are things you could do to satisfy your preferences; consider the tradeoffs and decide.”
If they decide that other preferences are more important than their preference to have at least a billion dollars, that’s a perfectly fine decision. But so is the decision that the money really is that important, if that’s the one they want to make.
@TMB:
That’s true as far as it goes, but I don’t think it goes very far. There are a lot of different ways to change the story and still accord with the limited evidence you’ve got. Suppose you’re lactose intolerant. You can do all kinds of things in response to that: you can switch to rice or soy or almond milk, you can decide dairy products never tasted good anyway, you can become a vegan, you can take lactase supplements, …. The different options at your disposal can be easier or harder, but it’s not “worse” to spend more effort on the “hard way” because you’ve decided you prefer those results.
All else being equal, it’s true that someone who likes cheap things is better off than someone who likes expensive things. But all else is not equal, and people are free to make whatever trades they want, even if you wouldn’t make those trades.
(People aren’t generally free to make trades for *other* people, which is where the interesting parts of ethics come from)
@TMB: On the other hand, I would wager that everyone in those marriages thinks they have found someone their intellectual equal. If you’re brilliant but plain, or downright ugly, you would still have high standards if your major criterion is that prospective partners not be significantly less intelligent than you. I would rather be in a relationship with someone of similar intelligence and attractiveness to me than dumber and hotter. Doesn’t mean I’m being wise and lowering my standards, just means I’ve got standards that make sense – I wouldn’t appeal to someone dumber but hotter. My standards would be unrealistic if I wanted someone who was just better than me across the board – why would they be interested in me?
@nancy lebovitz: oh, don’t get me wrong, dieting sucks, and it’s worse for women (who both get more fat hate and generally get worse dieting advice). But if somebody’s problem is that they’re fat and they’re attracted to slimmer people who are not attracted to them … “get slimmer” or “get attracted to people who are less slim” is more realistic advice than “somehow get the entire culture to shift”. And “I can’t do xyz until I’m thinner/stronger/whatever” is a bad way of thinking – I think it’s usually a way of putting something off or avoiding it, knowingly or unknowingly.
Well, if he’s attracted to her, but values the friendship to a degree that he’s willing to put up with hearing about her jerk boyfriend du jour, and never makes a move, that’s his choice. If he’s somehow hoping that she will fall into his arms without him having to make a move, uh, that’s kind of unrealistic. If he actually resents her for telling him about her jerk boyfriend du jour, and/or for not falling into his arms without him doing anything, then why doesn’t he shit or get off the pot? In some of these scenarios he’s more sympathetic. Resenting a woman for not reading his mind is not a good look. Meanwhile, either she’s thinking “boy I’ve got such a good friend!” or she kind of knows what is going on and knows that the possibility she might maybe fall into his arms, possibly, someday, keeps him around, and maybe even kind of enjoys making him jealous. Some people are like that. In the first scenario she’s more sympathetic.
I think there is also a difference between “finds attractive” and “is attractive to”. Someone can find a person attractive without being attracted to them.
I think you’ve got the right schema for young, stereotypical Nice Guys, but I don’t see what exactly the theory is, and I don’t agree with the implication family life is to blame.
Nice Guy personalities are over-run with meekness and submissiveness, whether by nature or nurture or both. For the most part they are deferential, comfort-zone addicted, and conflict-avoidant. This is the same in their interactions among young boys or with teachers or with bosses or with young girls.
This “Nice Guy” is Midwestern Nice, the kind of reserved personality that huddles under a blanket and watches Netflix, or might like Danish hygee. It is not Southern Hospitality and it is not Mormon. I know Nice Guys among both THOSE cultures that do a damn fine job among women, because they have gregarious personalities.
Another great-example is my Brother-In-Law, who is the human incarnation of a puppy dog. He loves everyone and everything and is excited by everyone and everything. He’s also genuinely nice, but not a Nice Guy.
It also helps that he is built, has blue eyes and blond hair, and is 6’2.
Most Nice Guys do not have personalities like that. They are quite timid and won’t really go after what they want. I imagine you could toss a naked Selena Gomez in many of their laps and many would be too afraid to even to speak to her.
So this is really not a personality type that does well.
But that’s a subset.
IME, many, if not most guys present a reserved, boring personality that lacks “edge.” Any initial spark gets smothered beneath several layers of mulch. You have “talk about your job” mulch, “let’s meet for coffee” mulch, “slow moving dinner” mulch, and all this other degraded crap that I am sure was vital, vibrant conversation several years ago, but has degraded into something that could probably smother Hiroshima-level attraction.
This happened a lot to my Architect Friend, who went on something like 60-70 first dates in a year, and only twice got a second date. He was ridiculously infatuated with one girl, the other he started dating, until she dumped him. Probably because he was too boring, she didn’t have much time, and what time she did have she wanted to spend being a young post-college grad in a hip part of the city.
These guys don’t need to be objective jerks, but they could use a good edge, a more cocky personality. A motorcycle might help!
This happened a lot to my close friend “Jenna,” who went on something like 80 Tinder dates in a single year. She had dated so many guys she was embarrassed to show her face in public (she kept running into guys she had dated).
She came across one rather nice guy who has a bit of an edge. His personality is gregarious, he makes a lot of racist jokes, he drives a motorcycle, he is quite cocky.
Actually, I’ll just say he maps closely to “Red Pill.” He works in IT and is a gun-toting libertarian and jokes about mansplaining and eats Paleo and has a Fight Club poster in his apartment and etc.
My friend was immediately smitten. I rolled my eyes and told my Wife she better hope she lucked out with one of the nice Red Pill guys and not the suppressed crazies.
Looks good for her so far.
So: consequentialism.
I find myself pretty much completely on board with consequentialism in an intellectual sense, and in fact most of my intuitions are pretty consequentalist to being with, so I don’t even have to do much in the way of mental gymnastics to maintain a consequentalist position in life.
The one exception to this is certain kinds of dishonesty and deception.
For example: say I have a partner who I’m completely and utterly in love with, and (for whatever reason) I want them to remain faithful to me. And say they cheat on me, but they’re very very good at cheating, and so I go to my grave not knowing that they cheated.
For some reason this really really bothers me, and I’m not entirely sure I can call my reasoning consequentialist.
I mean, okay: at some level, obviously I’m trying to imagine a situation where I don’t know that I’m being cheated on, but to concretely imagine the situation in the first place I of course have to “know” that the cheating is taking place. So I have to both “know” and “not know” that I’m being cheated on in the thought experiment, and that’s probably where some of the weirdness comes in.
But still, argh. It’s like, no, I just don’t want to be cheated on, period. It doesn’t matter whether I know or not, it’s still bad. And this reasoning seems pretty non-consequentialist, at least superficially. I am my brain, and my brain obviously isn’t being affected by things it doesn’t know about. So where, specifically, is the harm in that case? What is the bad consequence, in terms of a sentient being being affected in a way they don’t want to be affected?
You could take a few different routes here. One would be to say that by cheating on someone, even in the case where you know you won’t be found out, you’re making it plausible for a generic person to believe that they will be cheated on, even when they have no direct evidence that they are actually being cheated on. So you’re essentially eroding public trust, which is causing direct material harm to brains that actually exist, because those brains will be less likely to trust their partners who are in fact faithful.
I’m not sure I buy this, though. For one it just seems too vague and nebulous. But more concretely: if I were in some post-apocalyptic scenario where only me and two other people were left alive, and I fell in love with one of those two people, but they cheated on me with the other person, would that suddenly make super-secretive cheating okay? There’s no more public trust left to erode, because there’s no public. But it still seems wrong to me, even if I’m not aware that I’m being cheated on.
The other route you could take would be to say that I just have preferences over the state of the universe, period. And so I could prefer a universe where I’m not cheated on, even if I don’t actually know whether or not I’m being cheated on. This sort of works, I guess, but it still seems a bit non-consequentialist – again, how exactly am I being harmed if I don’t know about the cheating? My brain certainly isn’t affected by it.
The other alternative, of course, would be to just accept that cheating is okay if you’re never found out. I don’t think I want to go down that road, but I can’t rule it out entirely.
So what does everyone else think? Has anyone else struggled with these issues?
I would say that (A) cheating on someone and (B) telling someone you’ve cheated on them are two separate actions. Let’s assume A is harmful. You can separately argue that B is more harmful or not harmful.
I mean–is telling someone you’ve cheated on them *not* harmful because it gives you a chance to morally condemn the cheater, or is it *harmful* because the cheater rubs your broken trust in your face? If you can quantify that, then you can put a value on B without affecting your judgment of A.
I see no reason why a utilitarian has to add A and B to a grand total. Utilitarians can judge actions individually.
I see nothing wrong with having not-being-cheated-on as a terminal value. You prefer all universes where you aren’t cheated on to all universes where you are (possibly modulo having a partner). That’s fine. Minimally, the consequences of your partner’s cheating on you is that they cheated on you. If you think that’s bad, you’re allowed to dislike it. It’s not particularly utilitarian, but consequentialism broadly speaking is not guaranteed to be utilitarian.
The way I see it, consequentialism says, “You may judge an action based only on how it changes the universe, not on how it resembles other acts, or whether or not it falls into some arbitrary category.” Utilitarianism is a framework for consequentially judging actions, but it’s hardly the only one and it involves assumptions you don’t need to make to be consequentialist.
Yes I think this is the answer. I believe you don’t want to be cheated on because it has bad consequences, even if you don’t know about them. The relationship presumably wasn’t as good as it would have been it they hadn’t cheated.
I am definitely a consequentialist, and I don’t believe you’ve found a flaw here.
But what if their cheating makes the relationship better?
Like, take it as a given for some hypothetical relationship, that cheating and not getting caught makes the overall relationship better. A consequentialist should have no problem with that relationship.
I think consequentialism has a “Schrödinger’s cat” problem, personally. That the OKness of the cheating depends on whether it is observed is a flaw in the system, in my mind.
This gets into more complicated things, where kinds of consequentialism start to differentiate themselves. Actions are judged on effects, but what effects? Those that occur? That are intended? That were anticipated? That could (or maybe “should”, in some sense) have been anticipated?
You can stipulate a scenario where cheating is ok under all of these measures, but at a certain point, that scenario is so ludicrous that, at least for me, pragmatism takes over and it’s no longer worth worrying about.
It’s also possible to accept that moral luck is a thing, and say that deliberately relying on moral luck is bad.
If cheating made the relationship better, then the cheater was presumably doing the right thing. But the original poster does believe that cheating made the relationship worse, I think. Or at least I don’t see why he would have such a problem with it otherwise. Besides, it requires unusual circumstances or weird morality to believe that cheating makes a relationship better. So I think HBD’s comments are a red herring. Consequences are what matter.
@Mark V Anderson:
Many people need some space in a relationship. They might need some time in their man-cave or a vacation with their girlfriends. If their partner denies them this, it can cause significant relationship friction.
Swingers and polyamorists take this even further, and many find this works for them.
So it doesn’t strike me as at all implausible to posit a hypothetical relationship where, the infidelity being unknown, the relationship works better than it would otherwise. I’m not saying it’s common. I’m not even saying I predict we can find examples of it. It might be so rare as to be unknown.
But, as a thought exercise, it provides issues for at least some forms of consequentilaism. That’s all I am claiming.
I would sign on to HBC’s statement (from 10:16 today), with the following caveats:
– Instrumental deontology is often a useful tool, and may ban cheating without isolating the negative effects in the cheating itself.
– You may value eg honesty over your partner’s not having sex with other people and still be a consistent consequentialist. (A polyamorous person is perfectly within their rights to be upset about a partner’s secret affair, for example, if openness about sexual partners was part of terms of their relationship)
Maybe consequentialism doesn’t capture the whole situation because we can’t just live by consequences. We also need to make choices before we know outcomes, so we need general priniciples which will improve the odds.
Even if you didn’t find out about a cheating partner, they were still taking a risk the whole time that you would find out.
Agreed.
Object level, it’s possible that any children you have could end up not being yours. Even if it’s not obvious at first, genetic testing is becoming more and more popular so the chances of you not finding out seem less likely by the day. However, I’m assuming this is not what you’re talking about.
I am not a fan of utilitarianism for the most part but I actually am perfectly ok with this. If someone told me they cheated on their spouse but didn’t want to tell them because they were worried that person would leave, I would tell them simply to go to their grave with that knowledge.* Divorce is a bad thing and honesty in this scenario is almost certainly more likely to lead that direction. This is going to be controversial but I think a society filled with secret adulterers is actually less bad than a society where they all get divorced because of “irreconcilable differences”. The family is the last refuge of close relationships we have in our society. It’s emotional devastation is something that should be avoided, especially as people get older and find it difficult to form new close relationships.
*Of course this is not to say that cheating is acceptable or that I would blame someone for wanting to leave someone over the issue, especially if it was more than once.
One way to look at it is from lost opportunity. You made a commitment to devote your available romantic time and energies to her, and instead she gave some of hers to someone else. You were harmed by missing the love, affection and support that she instead gave to another even though she had agreed to support you. You may not have realized you were being harmed, but you were, similar to if someone had robbed you of monies due without your knowledge.
Why do you like consequentialism?
As some others have pointed out, a consequentialist isn’t committed to thinking that an action has no bad consequences (or even doesn’t harm you) if you never find out about it. A life where you have a faithful relationship may be better than a life where your spouse regularly cheats on you and you never find out, even if they are subjectively the same.
But I think examples of cheating still give us counterexamples to consequentialism, because it’s wrong to cheat even when doing so would prevent two other people from cheating. That is, you have reasons not to cheat that are centered on you, and not merely reasons to prevent cheatings from occurring.
I was browsing the wikipedia page concerning the Rus tribe, a prominent Varangian group covered in the writings of Ibn-Fadlun and the namesake of the nation of Russia, when I came across a very interesting passage:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rus%27_people
In all our talks of coordination problems, rogue externatilities and Moloch, here we have an account of several tribes who couldn’t stop squabbling *somehow* coming together, saying “we could all do better if we cooperate, but we can’t make our self cooperate, so let’s get someone stronger than us to be our masters and unite us” , went ahead and pulled just that off successfully. That must be a symbol of hope were there ever one.
Not taking historical sources at face values is the first thing historians are taught not to do, right up there with not making value judgements about the past. Doing so isn’t going to do you much good, either.
Ibn Fadlan says a lot of shit about the Rus, including that they’re the filthiest of God’s creatures, but also that they’re physically perfect (followed by a description by how Aryan they are, which is a bit unsettling).
Oh yeah, and the king of the Rus sits on his throne with forty slave girls, has a basin brought so he can relieve himself without getting off the throne, has his horse brought up the dais so he can get directly on it from the throne, and when he returns, rides into the palace and up the steps so he can unseat himself directly onto it as well.
Then again, he does mention that the Rus capital is named Kyawah and that another famous city is named Crsk.
It is… interesting that you consider willingness to abandon self-government and find oneself a master to be “a symbol of hope”.
Has anyone read the Problem of Political: An Examination of the Right to Coerce and the Duty to Obey, by Michael Huemer, and disagreed with the first half that argues that no one has political authority and that it’s a moral illusion? If so, what are your critiques? I’m convinced by his arguments that state agents don’t have political authority, that is, the right to coerce others in ways that would be considered wrong if done by a non-state agent.
Full disclosure: I haven’t read the book but I read the Cato Unbound discussion and have watched multiple of his youtube videos where he explains most of his arguments, e.g. discussing the psychology of authority and giving a sketch of his views at a bar.
Rights in general are a moral illusion. If you don’t believe in political authority, you’re welcome to challenge the men with guns.
Huemer uses common sense moral premises that the vast majority of people hold, like that it’s wrong to hold your neighbor at gun point to get him to pay for schooling for your kids and to cage him if he refuses. If you don’t think that’s wrong, because you don’t think right and wrong exist, you’re in the minority of people who feel that way and the book is not addressed to that subset of the population. It’s addressed to people who believe some actions are wrong, but hold state agents and non-state agents to different moral standards.
It sounds like you don’t believe political authority exists in the way Huemer defines it, as he defines it as right to coerce and duty to obey. If rights don’t exist, then no right to coerce exists.
The point is that from some perspectives, rights aren’t considered a useful moral tool. For instance, some people would say that the reason it is wrong to threaten your neighbour at gun point isn’t because he has a right not to be coerced (as rights “don’t exist”), but because doing so would have negative consequences. On that basis, it is OK for governments (or indeed anyone) to coerce because/if doing so has positive consequences.
Consequential arguments are covered in the second half of the book after political authority is refuted in the first half. For this particular thread, I’m interested in discussing the argument that state agents have special moral status where they have the right to engage in actions that would be considered wrong if done by you or me. If you don’t think morals exist or you think that they do and state agents actions should be held to the same moral standard as non state agents, then you don’t believe in political authority.
You can not believe in political authority and still attempt to justify government on consequentialist grounds, but I’m interested in discussing with those who believe in political authority for the moment.
I find Huemer’s to be the best ethical justification I’ve read for libertarianism because it rests on the most widely shared premises and also offers convincing evopsych-ish explanations for why so many people are nevertheless reluctant to accept the libertarian implications of those premises (Stanford Prison Experiment, etc.). This makes it superior, imo, to e. g. Rand, whose philosophy rests on less widely-held premises, and to the widely cited yet usually insufficiently justified “non-aggression principle.”
Disclaimer: I haven’t read the book but I used to be an anarcho-capitalist.
He’s right that there is no such as thing a government that is objectively legitimate. But that’s like discovering money is valued subjectively and deciding the whole thing is useless. Political authority comes from perceived legitimacy, which comes from some mix of ideology and government effectiveness. In this sense, a government may be legitimate in one era while being illegitimate in another. The question we should be asking is simply whether there is a system of government that we will see as more legitimate in the future, in the same way that democracy superseded monarchy. Is anarchism going to achieve that? Maybe, but it’s certainly not something that can even happen right now. It could work, in the sense that society may not crash in to chaos but it would still have to face the fundamental challenge in convincing people to like it. Otherwise, it will never gain the legitimacy it needs to succeed.
He’s not arguing that some types of government are legitimate and others not. He’s arguing that the key feature distinguishing what we call “government” today from other entities is a feature called “political authority,” which, as the subtitle explains, means a right to coerce and a duty to obey, and that that feature is largely unjustifiable on ethical grounds.
We feel governments have a right to coerce in cases when no other entity would, and that citizens have a duty to obey governments when they give orders one would otherwise not have a duty to obey. For example, most people would agree I have a right to coerce you at gunpoint if you have broken into my house, but that I wouldn’t have a right to do so if you refused to contribute to my bake sale. This is what distinguishes a government from a neighborhood association, a private defense company, a private arbitrator, etc. The government can have a “mandatory participation bake sale” and it’s seen as legitimate.
The first half of Huemer’s book argues that there shouldn’t be such a thing as political authority: that there’s no good reason to think that e. g., a democratic election confers special rights on certain people and special duties on the rest of us. He argues that the only times government is justified in coercing are the times when anybody else would be justified in coercing and to the extent (but only to the extent) necessary to prevent horrific, Hobbesian consequences, assuming one believes that would be the result of no state authority whatsoever.
The second half of the book is devoted to making an empirical case, essentially, that ancap could work without horrific, Hobbesian consequences, basically leaving one with the conclusion that political authority in general is unjustified.
I have not bothered to read the entire book, but I have read some of his essays and found them to contain the same types of hidden premises that most Libertarian arguments do. One of them is that there is some absolute moral standard that not only is required to confer legitimacy but that also the granter of that legitimacy conveniently thinks the same way as the author about morals (e.g. that avoiding any form of coercion – as narrowly defined by that author – is the meaning of life). Perhaps if we lived in Iain Banks Culture with infinite resources and superpowerful AIs then the only remaining source of progress and happiness would be the elimination of state force, but for now state force is about the only thing that can guarantee progress and happiness for 99.9% of people.
And an argument that would conclude the same rights and obligations of people and society if it were pre-historic, pre-industrial, modern, or uplifted is one that has deliberately chosen to ignore the practical application of its principles. The death penalty was valid in earlier ages because society could not afford to imprison dangerous people who might kill again. Today it is immoral (though less problematic in certain cases where guilt is certain and more problematic in others).
I don’t think I’m making myself clear. I understand the argument and agree with 95% of it. The state is not based on the consent of the people. Democracy doesn’t turn coercion in to consent. There is no objective difference between a state and a mob that does state-like things. But the subjective difference is incredibly important. There are some things we don’t want everyone to be doing but still feel need to be done. Whether we “need” these things to be done is beside the point. Because of this, we give the state that political authority. Not by any formal process but through our lack of resistance.
As far as political authority, you’re actually wrong on the forced bake sale. If the contract in my HOA said I needed to have a bake sale every week then I would need to do so. Yes, the rule is ultimately enforced by the state(in that they can kick you out with violence) but in an an ancap world, they would kick you out themselves or through help of a contractor. This gives them “Propertarian authority”. You can argue that we need property or else society would go to hell but then you’ve los the moral high ground.
Also, Hobbesian war versus contemporary peace is not a dichotomy. We’re less violent than farmers who are less violent than hunter gatherers. If our society became as violent as farming societies I would still consider that a step back and I think most people would agree. The burden of proof is much higher than a step above a war on all against all.
“This gives them “Propertarian authority”.
The “propertarian authority” you describe is different from the “political authority” Huemer describes. Part of Huemer’s definition of “political authority” is content independence: that is, whatever the state decides to pass as a law, it is de facto legitimate if it goes through e. g. the Supreme Court. When I sign up for a HOA, I am agreeing to the terms set out explicitly in that contract and nothing more. They can claim whatever power is stated therein to e. g. kick me out of my house for failure to comply, but they can’t just pass a “mandatory bake sale” law and expect me to follow it if no provisions for such were in the original contract.
The US Constitution is arguably supposed to function like the HOA contract in that it specifies what sorts of laws the government can pass, but that would only be truly analogous if each individual citizen individually consented to the US Constitution. And if a team of experts chosen by the HOA itself were the only authority to which you could appeal in case of a dispute over the terms of the contract with the HOA.
“If our society became as violent as farming societies I would still consider that a step back and I think most people would agree. The burden of proof is much higher than a step above a war on all against all.”
Even with a higher burden of proof, 90% of what most government do today doesn’t qualify as “imminently necessary to prevent society being much more violent than it is now.” “Would make society a somewhat nicer place” (which I think is the tacit standard most people have for a law) clearly isn’t good enough to justify violent coercion, because no one would accept me, say, collecting “donations” at gunpoint for a community garden. Yet using taxes to pay for a library or park is seen as totally legitimate.
Even “would make society somewhat less violent” isn’t good enough, because people wouldn’t tolerate me rounding up vagrants who might commit crimes and locking them in my basement (and charging my neighbors for the service).
“Would make society a whole lot less violent” is arguably good enough justification for vigilantism and, therefore, for government coercive action, but I think most people have a really high bar for tolerance of violent vigilante justice, so they should have a really high bar for tolerance of government coercion. (Pace Scott’s “Be Nice Until You Can Coordinate Meanness,” coordination doesn’t make meanness less suspect, just scarier).
Psychology of the populace also affects perceived legitimacy. The youtube link I posted is a nice talk from Huemer about the psychology of authority. Social experiments conducted in the 60s, such as the Milgram experiment and the Stanford Prison experiment, show how people react and submit to authority given certain sets of conditions. There were variations in the Milgram experiment that illuminate how likely people are to comply to authority:
* Having victims closer in physical proximity made it less likely for people to push the button that shocks them. So the further removed people are from coercion, the more likely they are to be okay with it.
* Wearing a lab coat over normal clothes increased obedience, suggesting that symbols such as uniforms and badges can increase compliance.
* Watching peers administer shocks increased compliance, suggesting conformity effects.
Stockholm Syndrome, where the kidnapped begin to identify with the kidnappers, can also explain obedience to authority. There’s a cognitive dissonance when you’re doing things you don’t want to do, and if this persists, our brains are great at justifying our actions. Reframing kidnappers as the good guys is one way to reduce cognitive dissonance. Reframing taxes as ‘duty to our neighbors’ is another way to reframe something that might otherwise be seen as wrong.
Does anyone have good suggestions on how to start meditating? Given other life constraints, it would be nice to dedicate no more than 5 minutes to it (at least at first). Should I just focus on my thoughts in a detached way, noticing what comes in but trying not to get attached to the thought? Should I always focus on my breath? Should I sit in a quiet room? What do you think I should be getting out of meditation?
What I think I want from it:
* relaxation,
* breaking the flow of my normal routine to reset the brain, and be able to see what’s going on in my life from a new perspective
* to process any unhealthy feelings that might be a bit buried and not obvious to me in a conscious way
* to become present and stop focusing on the past or future
* to better understand the mind and consciousness
Some of my goals seem to conflict, and I’m not sure if one form of meditation can address them all.
Suggestion #1: accept as a hard constraint that you’ll have to dedicate at least 30 minutes to it to have any use of it or even actually meditate in any meaningful sense.
Zen sitting would traditionally last as long as or longer than 24 hours. Meditation isn’t compatible with some sort of zippy modern tech lifestyle, you have to dedicate serious blocks of time to it. There’s a reason all those monks exist entirely outside normal society.
Are there diminished benefits for those who can only dedicate 5 minutes a day? Or no benefits?
I might be able to dedicate 30 minutes for a session once every week or two. Are there benefits to meditating if it’s that spread out?
If you spend five minutes on it it has the effect of closing your eyes for five minutes, i.e. nothing.
I don’t know whether there are benefits to very intermittent meditation, quite honestly. I’d expect anecdotally there are people who feel there are, but also that they’re very distinct in the relevant psychological ways from those who spend an hour sitting every evening (or morning, or afternoon, or whatever: having a daily routine for it is what I’m after), and even moreso from those whose main daily activity is meditation.
There is definitely a gradation in benefits — it’s not like you need an hour before there is any effect. But five minutes may just be too short to constitute enough of a change from “background”.
One of the things under-emphasized in popular descriptions of meditation is that frustration is part of the process, especially earlier on but also in an ongoing way (at least for non-adepts). You probably need to sit for long enough to at least find it difficult to keep doing.
There is one sense in which your goals do seem to conflict. On the one hand you want to make progress on a bunch of fairly fundamental things. On the other your life leaves 5 minutes per day for that process. The “at first” is revealing.
I would say 5 minutes isn’t enough but with 15-20 you’re likely to at least get the idea and probably have a more relaxed attitude towards stuff at other times.
These folks are trying to build a “modular” system of different meditation techniques and some tools to help, forking off from the “Buddhist Geeks” group. Packaging like that might be convenient to your situation.
You might check out One Moment Meditation. There’s a little book that evangelizes this idea, my wife liked it enough to get it, and I’ve tried it out, setting a 60 second timer and trying to focus on my breathing for that time. I only do this occasionally. More often when I’m feeling stressed.
I feel like it does some good. If nothing else, you are getting relaxation and you’re slowing your breathing down, which is supposed to be good for you (studies show! cough cough). I also (sometimes, often) get the “reset” feeling you’re talking about.
Re your #3, I don’t find that it brings any unhappy feelings out, but sometimes I am surprised to find out how agitated my thoughts are. I often have to try 2 or 3 times to get a “good one” in, and sometimes I can’t do it at all.
My favorite resource is aypsite.org. It describes a wide range of practices. Ideally you’d do them all, but any one, two, or three of them will likely produce some improvement which may, in turn, be the positive feedback you need to devote a little more time. I imagine the author, if he could only get you to devote 5 mins. a day, would suggest you start with “deep meditation,” though you would get a lot more benefits if you could devote say, 15 mins. twice a day. In such a case you could do, say, 5 mins pranayama and 10 mins meditation twice a day. If you’re able to get in that habit you can add more, both in terms of time and complexity of practice.
Do you meditate consistently? I have a hard time forming new habits and having a wife and a kid with one on the way makes it really hard to find much time during the week for just me.
I try to do it pretty consistently twice a day, though the amount of time I can devote to it each time varies depending on how busy I am and the consistency of the habit has also varied greatly over the several years I’ve been doing it.
I find the biggest difficulty is not business per se, but having an irregular schedule. Assuming their schedule on e. g. weekdays tends to be roughly similar, most people can find two, or at least one 15-20 minute block to be left alone in quiet. But it’s harder to keep the habit up if your schedule varies a lot day to day, as mine sometimes does.
Two patterns which have worked for me have been: post-breakfast (which for me is very light)-before-starting serious work and post-work-pre-dinner. Post morning work-pre-lunch and post-work-pre-dinner has also worked. Post-morning work-pre-lunch tends to be my most successful meditation because I’m fully awake but not yet too tired, though it also tends to be the hardest to fit into a busy day. Generally before, rather than after, a meal is better, though after morning tea/coffee may be better for alertness’s sake.
At busier times, upon awaking but before doing anything else+right before bed can be easier to sneak in (because who knows you’re even up/not asleep yet?), though probably a little less effective in my experience (sleepy meditation with a tendency to turn into a nap/full night’s sleep is not as good as more focused meditation, but a lot better than nothing).
Big collection of links about the Wells Fargo unwanted account creation scandal, not to mention unduly aggressive upselling
Folks, what changes (to laws and/or social structures) do you think would make this less likely?
On the banking-specific side: Postal banking 🙂
Credit unions tend to be better about these sorts of things because they’re co-ops; shareholders and depositors are one and the same, so there’s no incentive to screw over the latter for benefit of the former. Maybe if they were allowed open membership (as opposed to the current requirement that there be some limit on who can join) they’d take over the retail banking world.
Because shareholders and depositors are the same, Credit unions lack a motive to take over the retail world besides generosity, personal aggrandizement of the leader, and efficiencies of scale. All of which are limited.
There are some credit unions with more-or-less open membership – Seattle-area BECU and Verity are both open to all Washington State residents, for instance. I was in Seattle last year and there were still plenty of commercial banks there.
Above a certain size a co-op becomes too detached from its members and doesn’t offer any benefits over a shareholder-owned corporation. There are a few national-level mutual insurers (Liberty Mutual, Nationwide, Progressive) that are indistinguishable from their for-profit competitors (Allstate, Geico, State Farm), as shown by the fact that you probably didn’t notice I miscategorized two of them.
On the generic management side: hard to say. Misaligned incentives are everywhere, and this is a classic case, where salesfolk were incentivized to do things clearly to the detriment of the company as a whole (even if WFC hadn’t gotten caught, most of these were just signup/cancellation churn, and waiving the fees, so it probably *cost* money overall). This sort of thing is common enough (think managerial empire building, “Battlin’ Business Units”, etc.) in any company big enough to have an HR department.
Business ethics: Businesses *can* be “good” (in a colloquial sense; glossing over the intractability of metaethics) if so driven from the top. I used to think they were forbidden from morality, because I over-applied a model, seeing for-profit businesses as pure amoral profit maximizers. (And “amoral profit maximization” is a very good approximation to “evil”). But businesses are made of people, and people are basically good, so most businesses don’t even come close to approximating amoral profit maximizers.
This makes sense, as the best approximation would “endlessly grasping and obsessed with possession”.
The wool tends to raise from people’s eyes when they see people having motives in business (at all levels) other than “get more stuff”.
Corey +1
I don’t think there’s any way to prevent this sort of thing, it just happens. Classic principal/agent situation + Goodhart’s law. There’s no easy solution to this stuff.
It occurs to me that people who were being pushed into aggressive upselling/creating illegitimate accounts should have gone public a lot earlier, anonymously if necessary.
I’ve spent the past year without Internet access at home. This is my must-have software for offline browsing:
WikiTaxi with a Simple English Wikipedia dump.
DownThemAll, for when I want to download a list of hyperlinks.
iMacros for Firefox, for when I need to write a script to download pages in a complexly structured website.
VideoDownloadHelper, for video download helping.
Anything else I might find useful?
(By the way, I can’t figure out how to use HTTrack to mirror a site for the life of me.)
Wget will crawl and download webpages to some level deep. I don’t know if it is better than the tools you are currently using though.
I just looked it up. I didn’t know wget could do recursive link downloading until now. That does help, thanks.
The Project Gutenberg CDs and DVDs and The Baen CDs can provide provide plentiful offline reading material.
What happened to the new comments dropdown menu?
I restarted my browser and it came back.
Victim of the massive DDoS on github, it appears.
Never went away for mich.
Bluto:
I finally got a chance to shoot my Scorpion (Klobberella). It was so much fun I had to make en effort to stop myself from giggling. Having never shot a sub-machinegun-style weapon I found myself surprised at how easy it was to make accurate follow-up shots. The balance and ergonomics (with one exception) are really great and it was a joy to shoot.
I shot 50 rounds and had one issue, possibly a light primer strike (although possibly it was the cheap ammo). I need to put a lot more rounds downrange to assess reliability, but I feel comfortably attributing the problem to the ammo for now.
The safeties were actually more annoying than I predicted, my index fingers still hurt. I planned to shoot a lot more than fifty rounds but the pain of the safeties outweighed the fun of the gun. I got the replacement safeties from PMM after I went to the range. They were fairly simple to install and they seem to solve the problem, although I have not shot it with them installed.
The trigger was a bit heavy, but it didn’t impact accuracy at pistol ranges (I haven’t shot it at anything >20m). The head of the allen bolt that holds the trigger assembly got stripped to hell on my first attempt to replace the spring (I used the right size and everything!). The trigger isn’t so bad that I feel like dealing with getting the bolt out, but somewhere down the line I probably will.
Easy to disassemble and clean.
The split rails do not seem to have damaged my LaRue QD mount yet.
I had always planned to get a stock/brace, but at any range where that becomes necessary for accuracy the effectiveness of 9mm is probably low. Might still get one down the line.
The safeties were actually more annoying than I predicted, my index fingers still hurt.
Cool! I’ve heard that complaints about the safety more than any other. Glad it was fun otherwise. Thanks for the info! There’s a pretty big CZ dealer that shows up at the local gun show, sounds like I may want to make an inquiry before the next show.
Clickbait article title of the day:
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-37725327
Sounds pretty scary. Then you open it and find out that they’re on their way to Syria.
The Russians always go through the English Channel when going from the Northern or Baltic fleets into the Med. Every time they do, the media starts screaming. Every time, the Russians don’t invade Scotland or whatever else the Daily Fail says they’re going to do.
Oddly enough, everyone else goes around the UK. The Russians don’t because they’re afraid of breaking down. No, I’m not joking.
Too cold for them any more northward?
The UK responded with a great, very British, response:
https://twitter.com/MrTonyMan/status/788830620751364096
Yeah, I looked at that “armada”, or at least the part in the video. It is quite a sad sight. The BBC wrote about Putin demonstrating his military power…Well that diesel aircraft carrier looked like it might not make it to the Mediterranean. The chimney reminded me of 19th century ironclad warships. But maybe Putin is a fan of steampunk.
Well that diesel aircraft carrier looked like it might not make it to the Mediterranean.
She’s not diesel, she’s pressure-fired steam. The pressure-fired part is important, because it means the boilers often don’t work. That’s why there’s a tug along.
Huh? I had no idea there were still steam ships in service nowadays. What engines do the US aircraft carriers have? Nuclear? Maybe it’s stupid but I somehow imagined all modern battleships to be powered by nuclear energy like the nuclear submarines.
Thanks for the correction by the way.
Most modern warships are powered by gas turbine engines, often combined with diesel engines for efficient long-range cruising. The largest submarines and aircraft carriers (including by now all the US ones) are nuclear-powered, but not smaller surface warships. Merchant ships are also typically diesel-powered, with a side order of gas turbines for fast merchant ships.
Steam turbines went out of style in the 1970s and 1980s, mostly because they were too manpower-intensive to operate. There are, however, a lot of 1980s-vintage warships still in service, including Russia’s one fleet aircraft carrier. And their battlecruiser, of the same era, uses a hybrid nuclear- and oil-fired steam plant. The United States still has a few oil-fired steam turbines on amphibious-warfare vessels.
The other niche for maritime steam turbines, and it may last a bit longer, is liquid natural gas carriers. In that application, you get free fuel in the form of unavoidable boiloff from the cargo, but you can’t (yet) run natural gas in a diesel engine. Steam boilers aren’t so picky.
John covered this pretty well, but because I’m a naval geek, I’m going to add more.
There aren’t many, outside of nuclear systems. The only US ones that I know of are on the first 7 Wasp-class LHDs. There’s probably a few auxiliaries, too, but not many.
Nuclear, but they use steam as an intermediary to turn the heat produced in the reactor into motion. That’s the primary use of steam at sea these days.
RRRRRR!
THERE HAVE BEEN NO BATTLESHIPS BUILT SINCE WORLD WAR 2!
Sorry. Force of habit. It’s not really your fault, because the media is really bad about identifying any ship with guns and without a flat top as a battleship, when none are worthy of the name. They lack big guns.
Anyway, there have been a handful of nuclear-powered surface warships. I count about 10 for the US, and the Kirov-class for the Soviets. Most warships use gas turbines, because they’re light, low-maintenance, and don’t require lots of crew. They also give great acceleration.
@John Schilling
I believe that they’ve mostly switched over to gas turbines, actually. Those will run on almost anything, too, and don’t cost nearly as much to run.
Civ VI is out.
Barbarians are wrecking my shit.
I played one domination-only game and I couldn’t make anyone happy except Gilgamesh, who’s really easy to befriend. Trajan hated me for not expanding like crazy, Philip hated me for being Protestant, Gorgo hated me for not warmongering like crazy, Barbarossa hated me for talking to city-states, Gandhi hated me for… peer pressure, I’m guessing.
I don’t think diplomacy works like this
Why not?
I dunno, that’s always been my experience with interpersonal interaction.
How about a nice game of global thermonuclear war?
Nice guys and sex.
First of all, sex.
For most people, ethical sex is sex that facilitates human connection – love – and unethical sex does the opposite. Disagreements about sexual ethics normally involve disagreements on how a sexual act will promote or undermine love, for both the individuals involved, and society more generally.
(People oppose sexual objectification because they feel it undermines our ability to have connected human relations with others. People who aren’t opposed to sexual objectification down-play its importance – “it’s just a bit of fun! It doesn’t undermine our ability to connect with others PLUS you get to have the fun sexual feelings.” Win-win.
I don’t like polyamory because I feel it will lead to the replacement of deeply meaningful connected human relations, with, objectification at worst, friendship at best. I suppose proponents of polyamory believe that you can have the greater connectedness of more sexual relations with more people without endangering the most meaningful ones.
If you could find someone who supported non-consensual sex, I imagine it would be because they didn’t view the victims as human – they simply don’t see the possibility of connection/love.)
Nice guys.
Nice guys are guys who want to be able to have sex (to a greater or lesser extent) as a reward for following the basic rules of society. Being a ‘nice guy’ does not necessarily involve being particularly nice to anyone – it’s often all these young men can do to refrain from killing people. They feel that a social system that does not reward them (in the only currency they value) for pro-social behaviour, is broken.
People who hate nice guys, hate them because they think that the society they want is unethical. Either social pressure is inherently objectifying – you become a means to society’s end – or the society nice guys want, specifically, is unethical, in that the wishes of women are ignored in favour of promoting the desires of men who are inclined to sexual objectification.
My opinion: I think that ethical sexual liberals, who believe that more sex with more people increases human connection and love, would definitely have sex with nice guys if only they didn’t think that doing so would promote objectification.
So, what we need to do is reframe nice-guyness as non-objectifying (and there isn’t anything inherently objectifying about it – “I want to follow the rules of society and be given an opportunity to connect with more people”), to enable sex-positive (and libertine) feminists to have sex with nice guys, without any ethical qualms.
And then, everyone will be happy.
Or not.
Are conservative sexual attitudes unethical? If I believe we should have strong social pressure towards lifelong monogamy – I don’t feel like that’s clearly saying anything about the level of ‘love’ in society. We can imagine those trapped in an unhappy marriage, but likewise, I can imagine those in a sexually liberal society trapped without the ability to make strong connections.
I think this analysis misses on most points.
You never said the word consent and don’t seem to grok it. Much like rugby or football or many other martial sports can be very rewarding if everyone wants to play, sex can also be rewarding if everyone wants to play. But if you just up and tackle someone who doesn’t want to play and isn’t in the game, that’s assault for very obvious reasons.
The problem with “nice guys” is that they aren’t succeeding at persuading people to agree to play the game with them. And frequently when they do persuade someone to play touch football, they start tackling them half-way through the game.
And you have objectification completely wrong as well. The main objection to it has to do with the assumption that the objectified person is on the field of play 100% of the time, when they aren’t even in the stadium. Objectification doesn’t recognize a game clock or even boundary lines and assumes that certain people always and only are in the game, and nothing else, and worse that they are in the game the same way the ball is the game. An object to be played with.
When I was at a school where rugby playing was encouraged, I played rugby. Not so much since.
If we are discussing the social circumstances that inform people’s choices, it really isn’t good enough just to say “consent is enough”. It completely ignores the question, or otherwise assumes that culture only ever represses our natural (and good) instincts. The noble savage, innit.
Anyway, we all agree – we shouldn’t try and start a maul in Sainsbury’s while doing our shopping on a Sunday afternoon.
The question is, how are we to organise our games?
So, you say, “we’re not at school any more, if you want to play rugby, you have to be up to a certain standard.” Well, why? Seems to me it’d be better to have some facility for interested but inept people to have a good game as well.
It feels to me that a sexually liberal society where we base our decision of who to have sex with solely on attractiveness is objectifying and unethical. It makes our sexual partners solely a means to personal gratification.
Free love vs. sex as a commodity vs. traditionalism.
And, I don’t think objectification is about the timing or duration. It’s about the fact that you treat a person as if they are not a person, refuse to acknowledge your shared humanity.
Not sure that what I’m saying about that is all that different to your point.
Because you seem to think that polyamorists and sexual libertines “should” want to have sex with “nice guys”.
That’s not how consent works.
More like, that’s not how “want” works.
Is-ought problem – TMB said that they “would” want to have sex with nice guys if they knew it would not promote objectification. I think s/he’s mistaken, but it’s not the same thing as should.
TMB – I’ll share some thoughts at the main level.
I’m assuming that ethical people want to do whatever it is that they should do.
But, yes. My sense is that people object to what “nice guys” are saying on an ethical level – I assume that’s part of the reason why people won’t have sex with them. Maybe not.
Maybe two separate things.
I’m 8 years old and there is a little boy who wants to come to my party, but he’s really horrible. I’m not space limited, but I refuse him entry.
I think whether or not that is objectionable depends on how horrible he is. Does he just smell slightly funny? Have some mental disability? Throw all the plates up in the air? Bully?
Whichever way, ideally you’d have some institution that would enable him to attend but keep his behaviour under control.
It seems to me that “nice guys” are saying – door policy is too strict. And, other people are then saying “don’t let them in! They want to ruin the party!”, when what they’re actually saying is that they don’t own a suit.
@Randy M:
Eh. I understand what you are saying, but “want to” is wrapped up inside consent, for various meaning of “want to”. I agree that the “nice guy” has a problem inciting desire, but I frankly have no issue with the absence of amorous desire if the “want to” is strictly, say, economic.
But there again, I consent to have a 30 minute sex session with you for economic recompense is just that, and not an agreement to have feelings for you.
The stereotypical objectionable “nice guy” typically wants to “buy” that which is not being offered for sale.
@TMB:
I don’t think the birthday party metaphor works well either. 8 is not 18 is not 28. No 8 year old is allowed full autonomy in decision making, because they are not equipped to do so. 8 years old is a learning process, and we still don’t expect the other 8 year olds to let the trouble maker open their presents or eat their cake and ice-cream just because s/he has decided that is what they want.
If the 28 year old “nice guy” does not have the emotional and social skills to behave properly, it’s better for society to have available the means for them to continue to develop them, if possible. But at that point it becomes a professional question. There isn’t any requirement that polyamorists fulfill that role for free, as it doesn’t satisfy their desires.
I knew if I posted enough, someone was bound to eventually 😉
Anyway, point I was making I guess was that nice guys aren’t trying to get rewarded with sex for decent behavior, but rather that they are trying to woo, and failing due to either trying ineffectual strategies, or shooting above their equal in attractiveness.
I’d be very surprised if ethical arguments about things like consent and objectification played much of a subconscious role in generating desires. My bet is that the ethical arguments are cooked up after the fact to explain the pre-existing lack of inclination (if not outright revulsion).
@Randy M:
“nice guys aren’t trying to get rewarded with sex for decent behavior”
I agree that nice guys aren’t, but “nice guys”, I maintain, are.
“Someone somewhere should be interested in me” is different than “You should be interested in me because I am nice to you (and other guys aren’t nice).”
I guess the question is, “Do they think niceness deserves to be rewarded by women, or that women are seduced by niceness?” Speaking as something of a former nice guy (but too shy to do much) I think it was the latter.
I agree that most people are not thinking ethically most of the time – but I don’t think that ethical arguments are always thought up as a kind of justification for existing inclinations (except to the extent that people have an inclination to treat each other well and are thinking about the best way of achieving this).
Ethical thinking is very important, especially as a limiting force.
It’s tempting to say that women castigating ‘nice guys’ are just telling a story based on their ‘tingles’, and that’s more often than not exactly what the nice guys themselves believe.
But I think it’s possible that people who would otherwise be sympathetic to the ‘nice guys’ are just being put off because they create a link between what they are saying and male-dominated oppression and/or sexual objectification.
I think that you need to reward prosocial behaviour if you want it to continue, and for young men (most likely to exhibit anti-social behaviour) the reward that matters most is sexual.
@Randy M:
Thinking a woman is seduced by niceness isn’t the same thing as being a “nice guy.” There are many ways to seduce, and niceness definitely can be part of the seduction. Just being nice and polite won’t work, as you have a)signal interest, and b) have some chemistry, but that’s a different kind of mistake.
A “nice guy” is someone who asks, with anger, “How can you go out with Mike, I’ve been so nice to you?” And then proceeds to call her a “slut” who is probably having sex with Mike.
I find this extremely implausible. It would require a lot of awareness of cultural trends and/or a lot of modeling the mind of the nice guy along dimensions that we arguably do not instinctively track on the part of the woman before she would find him unattractive.
And young women don’t care about rewarding pro-social behavior, because they neither think of themselves as rewards (I assume) nor are they attempting operant conditioning on the young men. So rewarding prosocial behavior just isn’t on the table.
Furthermore, “nice” doesn’t mean “prosocial”. It has congruence with “prosocial” but it also includes, for lack of a better word, comfort. And comfortable behavior is directly at odds with what you want for sexual attraction.
To a great extent, young women will do as they are told to do. People do what they are supposed to do. We supposedly live in a culture where people are told it is foolish to have sex with stolid, timid bores. That could easily change if people decided it was worthwhile to change it.
I agree – I think there are two different kinds of ‘nice guy’ – you have the individual nice guy, who throws his anorak over a puddle and then gets frustrated when a girl won’t give him a kiss, and the societal nice guy, who doesn’t really do anything in particular but acts like a normal person in his everyday life and wishes it was easier to get a girlfriend.
I think the first is likely contained within the second – the reason the first can’t get a girlfriend is that they are deeply unfashionable. Neither is actually particularly “nice” with regards to being an easy companion.
I’d condition that: young women will generally do as they believe they are expected to do. Peers, authorities, broader society, tradition, urgency, any contributing to a vague sense of propriety or normality.
On that matter, I’ll note that I can’t find a good word to express this concept of “susceptible to expectations”, and reckon a new one may need cobbling together.
It makes our sexual partners solely a means to personal gratification
I am very strongly tempted here to say “Well, what the hell do you think modern sexual mores are about anyway? Of course it’s all about personal gratification – that’s part of the problem with putting all your emotional eggs into one basket, where your partner/spouse is meant to be best friend, lover, co-parent, colleague, primary emotional support and Uncle Tom Cobley and all!”
There seems to also be a lot of tension between “sexually liberate society” and “don’t objectify women”.
Picking up on another thread.
If you want to play rugby past your school days, there may be options as recreational leagues do exist, if not for Rugby, for other sports.
In the U.S., one of the most common team recreational sports is slow-pitch softball. Usually these are organized in such a way that people can form teams and slot themselves into a bracket based on their believed ability. Typically their A, B, C and D level leagues.
Sometimes it strikes me that the “nice guy” has put themselves in the A league, has no desire to play in the D league and sneers at it and would not be happy playing against D league teams, and then is bitter about losing in 10-0 the first inning on technical superiority.
Or, conversely, the team that shows up in pressed uniforms with $1000 bats and a ringer from the A league and wonder why no one is willing to have a beer with them after the league games.
The thing that got me thinking about this was the top comment on this article:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3844094/Tinder-messages-Gable-Tostee-sent-women-trial-tourist-Warriena-Wright.html
To me, a nice guy isn’t someone who is aiming out of his league, he’s someone who is frustrated with the culture. He doesn’t want to be Gable Tostee. He feels that behaviour is wrong – but he can’t see any other way to get a girlfriend.
Or to put it another way, he’s aiming out of his league because of the culture, and therefore wants to change the culture. It’s like if you had a rule in softball that everyone had to close their right eye, but you are blind in your left.
Not unreasonable to seek a change.
I can’t seem to get the comments to load, but I think that person isn’t using the phrase in the way it is meant when women talk about a “nice guy” (that they have a problem with).
If that is the way you meant it originally, your talk about objectification threw we waaaayyyyyyy off. He doesn’t seem to be objectifying women in that comment.
His is an age old lament about superficiality in judging mate attractiveness that cuts across gender lines. The universality of that complaint is what leads to “nice guy” complex.
Polyamory might be help this person, but only if they happen to might one in a non-superficial way, allowing for attraction to develop. Then, of course, said nice guy needs to be amenable to polyamory.
You have an interesting analysis, but I think it’s pushing the problem around rather than solving it.
I disagree that there’s enough of a supply of ‘ethical sexual liberals’ willing to have sex with (reformed) nice guys. I think that ‘nice guys’ don’t have sex because they can’t market themselves as attractive sexual partners. It’s possible that an ethical sexual liberal would have pity sex with a nice guy, but I don’t think this would satisfy the need for closeness and love that the nice guy is looking for.
Even granting this claim, however, ‘reframing nice-guyness as non-objectifying’ changes the statement of the problem rather than resolving it. There’s a couple of possibilities as to why the nice guy is a Nice Guy; he could be sexually unappealing and objectifying, or sexually unappealing and non-objectifying. The problem is that regardless of which category he’s in, he’ll be read as objectifying because sexual frustration is at the core of nice-guyness. The non-objectifying nice guy is sad that he can’t find a mate despite his pro-social behavior; even though he’s (in this hypothetical) non-objectifying and would treat his partner nicely, his admission that he wants sex with a woman but women do not want sex with him gets parsed as objectifying.
Going further, even if the nice guy is sexless and looking primarily for human affection, his plea will be parsed as objectifying. The simple fact of his need combined with the lack of willing partners will lead to the charge of objectification. If the nice guy needs affection and doesn’t care who his girlfriend is, then he can be cast as wanting a trophy.
In the case of the objectifying nice guy, teaching him not to objectify will move him into the non-objectifying nice guy category. In the case of the non-objectifying nice guy, the only thing that will help him achieve his goals is someone else wanting him. I don’t think that this will be achieved by the nice guy adopting feminist positions or signalling his non-objectifying-ness more strongly. It’s my observation that a large sub-population of nice guys profess feminist beliefs without achieving more intimacy than their non-feminist counterparts; these nice guys are colloquially referred to as ‘white knights’.
The ‘reframe nice-guyness as non-objectifying’ solution doesn’t make the nice guy more desirable, and may not even prevent the nice guy from being branded an objectifier. It assumes that the main thing preventing nice guys from having sex is ‘ethical qualms’ in their prospective partners, even though nice guys are unattractive to feminists and antifeminists alike.
“his admission that he wants sex with a woman but women do not want sex with him gets parsed as objectifying.”
I don’t think that this has to be the case, though.
“It assumes that the main thing preventing nice guys from having sex is ‘ethical qualms’ in their prospective partners, even though nice guys are unattractive to feminists and antifeminists alike.”
I dunno – if it’s the case that sexual liberals of whichever political leaning believe that sex is a positive for both partners, believe that it doesn’t have wider social implications, why wouldn’t they have sex with a nice guy?
I’m sure it doesn’t have to. Getting it to the point where people interpret awkward peoples’ actions as they’re meant rather than as they seem on the face of things is a Hard Problem, though.
I don’t think that people actually believe that sex is a positive for both partners regardless of who the partner is. Sex with someone who’s bad at sex can be unpleasant, as can sex if you’re not in the mood, sex with someone you don’t particularly like, sex with someone who’s not hygienic, etc. There’s all sorts of hidden riders on the meaning when people say ‘free love’; it would be a mistake to take that sentiment as an indicator of blanket willingness to sleep with anyone.
Awkwardness itself is a reaction to a problem – it’s the instinctual sense that a social situation is blurring important lines and people’s peace and status is at risk. So what you say is correct, but sort-of tautological. The task is figuring out what the awkward person’s reacting to and clearing up the situation, establishing stable roles and boundaries so that people can work from there.
Obvious takeaway: we need to find the people who have caused this perfectly normal, natural, and unobjectionable admission to be seen by society as “objectifying,” and strand them on an ice floe somewhere.
I think you’re missing on all cylinders. I don’t think most people even think about “facilitating human connection” in the abstract when thinking about sex. They may be thinking about facilitating a connection with the person (or persons) they’re considering sex with, but with neither “casual sex” nor “hookup culture” being considered per-se unethical by most, even that is unnecessary.
Sexual objectification, I think, is not actually opposed as a concept by most people. If it were, we wouldn’t celebrate our (celebrity) sex objects so much. People don’t like being seen as a sex object in the wrong context or by the wrong person, but that’s a different story.
“Nice guys” cover multiple categories, and a lot of the hate towards them is a result of deliberately conflating them. On the one hand you have the douchebag who fakes being nice in order to get sexual access to a woman. On the other you have a person who is genuinely nice but not sexually attractive to the women he’s in contact with, and is frustrated by this. And on the third hand you have the ones who (erroneously) think being nice actually should make them sexually attractive to women. (and on the fourth hand you have those who are nice and have no particular issues, but they’re not very interesting). None of them (not even the third) thinks that sex is some sort of reward for being nice — but there was a whole post about this, “Radicalizing the Romanceless”. The people who hate “nice guys” of the second and third sorts are mostly bullies.
““Nice guys” cover multiple categories, and a lot of the hate towards them is a result of deliberately conflating them”
I think part of the problem was that “nice guy” was fairly tightly defined, but a good many men had the normal human reaction of worrying about whether they might be under attack, and expanded the definition.
My impression is that “nice guy” used to be mostly my second category — guys who were genuinely nice and genuinely confused (and frustrated) when the women they were nice to were not only not attracted to them, but attracted to men who were in no way nice. The fake-nice smarmy jerks were just smarmy jerks. And the third category itself seems fairly recent.
I’m not sure who expanded the definition, but it’s certainly been expanded; you see screeds against your type-2 nice guy claiming they’re actually smarmy jerks.
I don’t think you are taking the textbook definition seriously. The on where the “nice guy” shows that they think if they are nice, it is some formula or incantation they perform, and then the girl gives them what they want: a date, companionship, a relationship. Not sex as a one-night stand, that’s a cad or lothario, not a “nice guy.”
There are definitely guys who fit the textbook definition. I’ve known some of them. Since I am a guy, I assume I have missed out on being the object of this behavior, and therefore would have known more of them were I a girl.
Perhaps it’s not fair, as the Isla Vista killings were clearly by someone who had more profound issues, but that is the spectrum of behavior that “nice guy” is/was describing.
@HBC
Eliot Rodger thought he deserved sex but I don’t see any indication he was a “nice guy” of any sort. I am sure the feminist-textbook definition of a “nice guy” exists but I think they’re entirely non-central.
Someone who acts nice until rejected might be this feminist-textbook nice guy, but IMO they’re more likely just the cad. You can tell the difference mostly because the cad will have a lot more success in the long term.
@HeelbearCub
Did any of those guys tell you at any point that they deserved to have a relationship with these girls because of their niceness? As in they thought it was their right? Or are just assuming their motivations?
“Entitlement” is the part of the definition that bothers me. In my experience (as somewhat “nice guy adjacent” at one point) it’s more like “I’m doing everything I’m supposed to be doing, but it’s not working, and people who are doing supposedly bad things are having success. I am lonely, this sucks”.
This attitude gets turned into “oh, he just thinks women are objects that are supposed to vend sex when he inserts the right coin”. But that’s, I think, very rarely what it feels like from the inside.
Certainly, some people can turn this into bitter or nasty behavior toward the people they are trying to woo, and that’s bad. But it’s hardly universal. Really, “entitlement” is just a bad word for it – ultimately you’re talking about someone who is sad because they are lonely and horny and don’t know how to fix it, and that deserves some sympathy rather than simply “oh you’re such an awful person for wanting really badly the thing that basically every part of society says is the most important wonderful thing in the world“
@gbdub:
See my post below.
There is a big difference between being frustrated that the “assholes” get the girls and you are lonely as a general statement, and engaging in a guilt-trip of someone because they aren’t into you.
@The Nybbler:
I refuse to say/write the name of the person, on grounds that it raises, however slightly, the probability of more events.
From the Wikipedia article, his own words:
@Wrong Species:
In one instance, two work acquaintances, one male and one female, and the female one was expressing frustration that the male was attempting to guilt trip her because she did not want to go out with him even though he was a nice-guy.
In another situation, it was someone who was constantly being nice so as to get as close to, and cross, certain limits. Giving back massages to people who were uncomfortable receiving them, for example. The kind of interactions where you cringe when you see them because one person is clearly uncomfortable and the other one is not oblivious but just ignoring it.
I’ve known guys who would give massages without asking. But they were cads (and yes, that worked for them. Perhaps because it is not nice).
@The Nybbler:
Oh, he asked. But in a situation that made it uncomfortable for the answer to be no. But he wasn’t a cad. He was an awkward guy who had little self-esteem and was therefore constantly boasting about this that or the other.
We’ve all experienced this, I believe. You get asked something and you don’t feel you can politely say no. So you say yes when perhaps it would have been better to say no. And if it’s a sometimes thing, then it’s a “no harm no foul” kind of thing.
But when you see it happen over and over? When it is a pattern of behavior?
But when it happens over and over?
Who are these people who think being nice entitles them to sex with a certain woman? Yes, I’m sure there are some of them but the outrage is completely disproportionate to reality.
Yeah, this to me seems to be a conflating of categories, one that might not be deliberate, but also one that isn’t resisted in any way.
For as long as I’ve known the term and observed it in reality, my perception of the typical “nice guy” was someone who was upset at himself for fooling himself into believing that hanging out and being nice to a girl would be enough to seduce her. There was disappointment and despair at not having his feelings reciprocated, but not a hint of anger or ill will directed at the object of his affections who, after all, is an independent human being who has every right to choose with whom she has relationships, for any reason or no reason at all based on her whims.
Of course, I can’t deny that there exist men who do behave as if they believe they’re entitled to sex with a woman because they were nice to her – I’ve read at least 1 personal anecdote which seems credible to me, and that’s enough. But it certainly wouldn’t fit the definition of “nice guy” as I had been lead to believe. My own perceptions indicate that such guys are a tiny portion of the population compared to “nice guys.” Some people tell me, No, these guys are actually really common and a real problem that need to be addressed. Unfortunately, it’s hard to get accurate stats on something like this, so I don’t know whether that’s true, and furthermore efforts to solve the problem of these guys seem to be quite happy also harming “nice guys.” I’m not really into supporting things that hurt innocent bystanders justified by combating a harm for which there’s questionable evidence.
That’s pretty much my oberservation. I have seen a lot of guys in that mold turn to hardcore bitterness mind, but not of the “let’s all rape women” mold – just “fuck life, fuck everything, fuck this stuff in particular” cynicism.
Feel free to disregard my lack of charity, but I feel like the majority of women who complain “Nice Guys” are just using it as an excuse to complain about socially awkward guys.
Who said anything about a certain woman? I didn’t see that in Nybbler’s post at least.
There is a difference between, “I was nice to Alice, and Alice doesn’t want to have sex with me, what is wrong with her?”, and “I am nice to every woman I interact with, and none of them want to have sex with me, what is wrong with our society?”. The former is clearly unfounded, or at least absurdly narrowminded in that it reduces sexual attractiveness to the single variable of “niceness”. The latter is more plausibly a legitimate observation, particularly if the speaker is accurate in assessing his niceness.
It is not helpful to confuse these two positions. And I’m with lvlln; I think the latter is far more common, and I’ve never seen the former in the wild.
There’s overlap. A non-trivial number of guys may well be generally upset with the society because no one wants to sleep with them, but after a while come to focus on one particular woman that doesn’t want to sleep with him.
You can argue back and forth whether she is taking advantage of him or she is just treating him as the friend he holds himself out to want to be, but this is a real thing that happens.
@ John Schilling
How does it go? If one person has a problem with you, they’re a jerk; if everyone has a problem with you, you’re the jerk. The second one has just as much misplaced blame as the first; if “every woman” you* encounter is uninterested in sex with you, that’s not on society, that’s entirely on you. Society is not to blame for you being unattractive.
*generic “you”, not you, John, specifically.
“If one person has a problem with you, they’re a jerk; if everyone has a problem with you, you’re the jerk.”
But normally if someone is a jerk, there is a clear path to not being a jerk.
i mean, if someone is just inherently jerkish – if they have some mental problem or something – we make an allowance for them. It might not be society’s fault that they are the way they are, but it is a question for society what we should do with them.
If society has been giving you the message that acting nice is the way to find a partner (cf. that old movie cliché about the woman realising that the shy, awkward guy is her soulmate, not the arrogant jock), then I think it is somewhat to blame if you try following society’s advice and are unable to succeed romantically.
But society has resolved what to do about nebbish dinguses who can’t get any. You just don’t like the answer.
It’s not advice, though, it’s a narrative convention, like the hero vanquishing the dragon. It’s as silly to follow it and expect good results as it is to expect that a sword could really kill a living tank. Hell, a sword couldn’t reliably kill another knight in armor, they used halberds and stuff for that. Or again, you watch a heist movie and figure that you can hit a casino if only you make a Rube Goldberg plan and learn to pick pockets. Who does that?
Whenever somebody blames fiction like this, I feel like really they’re saying the troubled person’s real problem is much worse and deeper than it seems, namely that they think for some reason it’s a good idea to “learn” from make-believe; they can’t tell fact from fiction. That doesn’t really strike me as a defense.
Uh huh… but the point is that it is about ‘society’. And we’re allowed to discuss that, right? How society should be?
Or has it all been decided?
Kevin C., I’m going to push back on that.
While there are a lot of fat women in good relationships, it’s also true that there’s a lot of prejudice against fat women, and especially in regards to relationships. This is something wrong with society.
I expect that some of you are thinking “but fat women really are disgusting!”. You were trained to think that. I’ve heard enough accounts from fat women about men who want sex with them but aren’t willing to be seen with them in public. I think that in a society which was sane on the subject, the strongest negative reaction would be “not to my taste”.
I’ve read accounts by fat women in relationships with conventionally good-looking men, and the women get attacked (mostly?) verbally for it.
On the male side, I’ve been told that in Latin American societies, a man being nervous doesn’t put women off. (Anyone have more information on the subject?) I was surprised at the idea, but I can imagine a woman thinking that the nervousness is a tribute, or that it’s just something that will wear off with time.
Interesting. If I can find a way to broach the topic, I’ll ask my Latin American friends about this.
One thing that struck me at some point is that Latin American societies don’t seem to have this idea that women don’t like sex or like it less than men. Things do seem to work differently there.
But when guys are unattractive, that’s on them, going by your other posts in this subthread?
I feel like the ongoing double standard here proves my point pretty well.
Anonymous, could you be specific about what I said?
>It’s not advice, though, it’s a narrative convention, like the hero vanquishing the dragon.
But huge amount of people follow the prevalent narrative convention of the romantic “having sex and getting married for falling in love” ideal. It’s been hugely popular and prominent model for Western romantic relationships about 150 years; I’d wager that’s the reason why there *is* an art period called ‘Romantic’ and then there’s the modern concept of ‘romantic fiction’.
Narratives are also the only advice our society gives us on human relationships, aside from personal experience. And PUA-style self-help guides, I guess.
Some guys are just particularly clueless about what to do when narratives don’t work and their failed attempts don’t provide enough meaningful feedback for learning from personal experience. And media does tell us that the certain behavior (stereotypical not-nice jock) is to be condemned as toxic masculinity, yet it looks like it works.
But unlike picking up HEMA hobby if you really want to learn how to use swords for *real* (to possibly kill large mythological beasts), picking up PUA is generally condemned.
@Nancy:
I must confess that on closer inspection I seem to have confused or conflated you with some of the other posters; I freely admit fault on that point. Mea culpa. I shouldn’t have accused you of a double standard.
Independently of that, though, I do think it’s preposterous to claim that men are just “trained to think fat women are disgusting”, and that men having physical standards of attractiveness for women is something that’s wrong with society. How can you possibly think that unattractiveness is socially constructed?! I have to confess that that blows my mind a bit.
@Nimim:
You would lose this wager. Voicing the idea that the Romantic movement in art had anything to do with what we call romantic love these days is a classic way to drive art teachers spare.
They meant something more like “medievalism and idealizing nature and the emotions in general”, as in opposition to Classicism with its focus on Classical Antiquity, rationality, mind, transcendence of earthly things, and so on. The æsthetics of imperfection vs. those of perfection, one might perhaps say.
“It” being one of the traditional excuses for people who want to behave like jerks en masse and blame it on their victims? Yes, that’s how it usually goes.
It’s not just one guy who sees blacks as subhumans who need to be enslaved, it’s everyone. So the problem must be with the blacks. Or the Jews. Or, well, take your pick.
And take it somewhere else, please.
@John Schilling
There is clearly a difference between an entire society disliking a group of people, and a vastly smaller group of people disliking a single person. Pretending there isn’t is silly and uninteresting.
@ Anon:
People have been using stories to illustrate what is and isn’t proper behaviour since, well, pretty much the invention of stories.
You would deny lonely guys the right to imaginary brethren?
Perhaps most people aren’t ethical when it comes to their sex life – that doesn’t contradict my point about what we might mean by “ethical sex”.
I would also say that where hookup culture is viewed as objectifying, it is normally criticised as unethical.
That’s true – many people don’t think it is damaging.
I think that sex should be a reward for being nice. (By which I mean that societies should go out of their way to ensure that people can have a satisfactory sex life, as long as those people aren’t terrible.)
You’re going to have to normalize prostitution for that. Not just make it legal, but make it socially acceptable without a hint of taint for a person to use a prostitute. (If it’s legal but sleazy, nice people won’t do it) That’s going to be tough. (Limiting it to the nice would be even tougher, but first things first)
I don’t think it needs to be prostitution – you could have some sort of arranged marriage system, with a possibility of divorce, but pressure to remain together.
I believe the standard prescription is to have a society with difficult-to-dissolve marriage, high status for married people, and a stigma against pre-marital sexual relations.
“I think that sex should be a reward for being nice. (By which I mean that societies should go out of their way to ensure that people can have a satisfactory sex life, as long as those people aren’t terrible.)”
What would that look like in practice?
I think, one way or another, lower sexual standards.
Sex robots, duh.
I think that sex should be a reward for being nice.
Why should “behaving to a minimal standard of decency” be something that entitles you to a reward? “I’m not an arsonist, somebody give me a medal!”
See, that is the problem with The Nice Guy: treating women as vending machines – put in the “coin” of “I was nice”, out pops the candy bar of sex! You don’t get your candy bar because a human being is not a vending machine, you feel cheated. That’s not how it works.
Look at it from the other side: would the lonely Nice Guy consider having sex/looking for a romantic relationship with a woman he doesn’t find attractive? No matter how nice and friendly she might be to him? If Nice Guy doesn’t feel obligated to “reward” nice women with sex simply for being nice, why should he feel that women owe him sex for not being an asshole?
Though to be sympathetic, someone who is fed on the diet of romcoms etc where Nerdy Guy wins Object of His Affection by big romantic gestures and by being there as her ‘friend’ up until she realises Asshole Hunk really is an asshole (generally by him cheating on her and/or becoming violent), and that who she really wants is Nerdy But Nice Guy who has been there for her all along – that is very misleading and would genuinely fuel resentment on the level of “I did all the things I was supposed to do just like in the movies and on TV, and she didn’t fall into my arms telling me she realised I was the one for her all along! She’s supposed to like me now, why isn’t she playing the part like she’s supposed to do!”
I think you vastly underestimate the willingness of lonely men to have sex with unattractive but friendly women.
I have actually done this before. It… didn’t turn out well and probably did as much as anything to correct some of my prior views about How Sex Should Work. I suspect that bad experience is more common among women.
It’s actively painful for young men to behave to a minimal standard of decency, which is why they might expect a reward for doing so.
In many areas of my life, I do things, and I expect people to behave in a certain way in response. It’s like, if my neighbour is playing really loud music, at night, and I ask him politely to turn it down, I expect him to do so. And if he doesn’t, I’m annoyed.
Maybe not, but do you think the world might be a happier place if he would consider doing so?
Wait, what?
@Anonymous Bosch
Well, that was my personal experience… and the statement certainly isn’t contradicted by the statistics…
That wasn’t an attempt to argue with you, although it will probably become one. I honestly don’t know what you mean by “painful” or “behave to a minimal standard of decency.” Let alone whether it can be generalized to “young men” as a class.
Men who are labeled “Nice Guys” frequently go way beyond “a minimal standard of decency” toward the person they are attracted to. And their frustration is usually that they see men who behave to a supposedly lower level of decency getting laid.
You can’t possibly see how not being able to find love (or at least sex), and not knowing how to solve this problem, would make someone bitter and frustrated unless they literally believe that women are sex vending machines? I mean, I can be sad and frustrated and jealous that Jessica Alba is married to someone else without thinking she’s a literal object cosmically required to fuck me. I mean, yeah, if I take out my frustration by stalking her and yelling “slut” everytime I see her, that makes me a terrible person – but the problem is my response to feeling frustrated, not necessarily “entitlement” or “believing she’s an object not a person”.
The other problem is gender roles – the big thing now is that we are supposed to believe that all women are beautiful, every shape and every size, they all deserve to be loved, yada yada yada. If a woman can’t get the men she wants it’s because “society has an unfair standard of beauty”. But if an unattractive guy gets frustrated by his lack of success, it’s his own damn fault and he’s “entitled”.
Fair enough –
Young men are far more likely to have a compulsion to act impulsively and violently, which can put them at odds with broader society.
As a young man I felt physical pain at times from the compulsion to just *do* something – to avenge a slight, to show off, to win, to fight – and I never really engaged in anything particularly bad (though I can understand why someone would). Given the statistics, and the massive spike in violent crime at just about the time I started to feel this way, I assume that the majority of young men feel that same compulsion, but that most, like me, are able to control it (at some psychological cost).
Insofar as people like this do actually exist, I suspect part of the problem is that, if you’ve been raised in an environment where patriarchal oppression and that 1-in-5 rubbish are taken as facts, “behaving to a minimal standard of decency” towards women actually does seem like quite an achievement, and the sort of thing that would make you stand out from the herd. This would also explain why the people who complain about “nice guys” tend to be blue tribers.
You, and by extension both Nice Guys and their feminist critics, are confused by framing this as a question of dessert.
Prosocial behavior, being nice, is profoundly unattractive in our current environment. You can’t “solve” that by obligating women to have sex with men they aren’t attracted to. It’s neither ethical nor practical.
But you can change yourself and become more attractive through self-improvement and learning Game. And you can change your environment into a more Traditional one through founding or joining conservative enclaves within the broader society.
This is one of the two things I was going to chime in to say. Nice Guys seem pretty clearly to be a result of our culture framing the female libido as a morality-detector–telling everyone that being nice (and not objectifying women, and generally demonstrating social conformity) will get you laid, rather than that being attractive will get you laid–or, more precisely, lying about what attractiveness is. Some people, on being told this every day, made the mistake of believing it. And then got bitter when they saw that we were all lying to them in order to get them to choose “cooperate” while the rest of us choose “defect.”
I don’t think they see it correctly–I think it’s more a matter of them asking what’s attractive, and being told what behavior women prefer from attractive men–but I don’t doubt them when they say that’s what they saw.
This would be my third type of Nice Guy. I don’t understand them. It should be plainly obvious merely by observation that none of that is true.
The media probably accounts for a lot of that. On TV and in movies you see a lot more instances of a schlubby dude coupling with a starlet than the opposite.
Some people don’t have a lot of opportunity for observation, either of women in general or of who women hook up with.
This was pretty much me in college, not so much looking to get laid, but looking for a girlfriend via romantic gestures, etc.
I once (shudder) gave out roses to twenty girls on Valentines day. Anonymously. Ironically, or likely not, my current wife was not among them, though she was an acquaintance at the time.
Not everyone has normal-or-above levels of observational skills. Which is to say, I don’t think I’ve ever seen an instance of your first or second types. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard of one, either, not counting instances of bullies falsely accusing a Type-3 of being one of the other types.
@The Worst:
I’m sure you’ve met Type-1. They are cads who lie, lie, lie to attain sexual conquest.
But those aren’t actually what is ever referred to as “nice guy”.
Yes. They aren’t on the receiving end of the massive public scorn for “nice guys.” It’s probably not a coincidence that they’re sexually successful, and therefore higher-status. There are a lot of criticisms of low-status people that never target higher-status people, even when it’s the higher-status people who actually engage in the behavior for which the low-status ones get criticized.
I don’t know, even if prosocial behaviour isn’t selected for on the memetic level, surely it will be selected for on the societal level? As for it not being practical or ethical – I disagree. There is nothing fundamentally unethical about saying that people have responsibilities with regards to sex.
Maybe I can form a society filled with disgruntled but hard working bores and find some women for them. Gold mine.
People also have responsibilities with regards to maintaining their neighborhoods. But that doesn’t mean you can press-gang random people into roadwork crews.
It comes down to whether or not you see human nature as an obstacle to design or as a constraint on it. It’s obvious that “freeuse for the sake of incel nerds” is not a solution people will accept. You can either take that as a sign of the depravity of the public or as a sign that you’re approaching the problem the wrong way.
No no, gold plate.
That is, the plan you mock worked pretty well for the Mormons, Mennonites and Hutterites among others. I’d invest in a metal detector or possibly a dowsing stick.
We’ve got better ways of ensuring that people contribute – tax. We don’t press gang random people because it’s impractical, not unethical.
I think that’s because it sounds demeaning and objectifying. If we framed it as love or something, people would accept it. People can accept almost anything if they think something good will come of it. (Somebody) having sex with a somewhat unattractive man, doesn’t even register.
(I wasn’t mocking!)
So what’s the sexual version of taxation? Sacred temple prostitutes?
Yeah, this is getting into the point I made above about human nature and social engineering.
Nobody is going to subsidize prostitutes for the unattractive. It’s just not going to happen. And that goes triple for the marriage lottery idea.
There are ways to change which traits are considered attractive in a culture. Within reasonable limits anyway: we’re living organisms, and most things aren’t socially constructed. Aiming for social change isn’t a crazy idea in itself but you need to meet people half way by keeping your aims realistic.
Lower standards?
@TMB
One popular feminist criticism of fictional media is 100% percent correct – that a lot of stories present “winning the girl” as something accomplished by non-romantic means (eg, saving her life means she loves you now) and sometimes as a side-effect (eg, not even saving her life – she just falls in love with you because you saved the president’s life – consider all the movies where the male lead and female lead fall in love because They Are On A Mission Together).
I think you are overthinking this. “Nice guys” are, at base, just guys who think that stupid trope reflects reality and are upset when it doesn’t. Not that they’re rescuing the object of their affections, or the president, but they think of romance as something achieved by non-romantic means. They believe that their story should have a default romance subplot, dammit! They don’t get that sexual and/or romantic attraction doesn’t work like that, and the stories that told them it was were lying, because books and TV and movies about fighting bad guys and saving the president are generally not going to simultaneously portray a realistic depiction of how attraction works.
“Nice guys” might advance to thinking of it as you do – “society is unfair because it does not work the way I have been told it is/the way I want it to work!” but the core of it is that they believe society works that way, or should, because that’s what the movies told them. When they do advance a little further, it becomes the primary straight male variety of the classic “not being considered more attractive is a sign that society is horribly unfair” rant.
It’s not just the movies; it’s everyone. Every time you see someone describe a despised enemy politician as unattractive, for example, they’re conflating morality with attractiveness. The idea that being a Good (i.e., inoffensive) Person is attractive, and being a Bad Person is unattractive, is essentially omnipresent. It’s wildly offensive to suggest that women are attracted to attractive people rather than to good people; that norm means it’s also compulsory to describe goodness as attractive.
Outside of PUA circles, there basically aren’t places where it’s acceptable to talk about the reality of the situation. And those circles have their own issues, and they’re not exactly public knowledge.
It’s not just that. I think the culture is bad at conveying the idea that romantic attraction has a lot to do with idiosyncratic enthusisam, and that you need to look for a good fit, not just “meets standards of theoretical attractiveness”.
More or less. It’s not a reward for anything. It seems like the culture pushes the idea that you attract women by deserving to be attractive, rather than by being attractive – the “women’s libido as morality detector” meme.
The problem is that women have obvious incentives to push that meme, as do high-status men. Everyone wants low-status men to act nice, and the easiest way to get them to do that is to tell them it’ll get them what they value. Telling the guys on the bottom of the totem pole “Treat women as if they’re all higher-status than you, and eventually women will see you as high status” is useful, but it isn’t true.
It shouldn’t surprise us so much when they get offended when they (eventually?) figure out that we were lying. It’s not that the culture is bad at accurately conveying what attraction is, so much as that basically no one has any incentive to do that.
@TheWorst:
Is it intentional lying? The movies where the hero wins the love of the female lead by saving the president – did the director and producers and scriptwriter sit down and say “let’s snooker nebbish guys into saving the president by telling them they’ll win the girl”?
Or is it just a narrative convention that has had the unfortunate effect of getting a lot of people to think things are other than they are?
It’s not as though there aren’t narrative conventions that harm, say, women – the “there’s an awesome guy waiting for you! Just hold out!” thing you’ll see in some romcoms is perhaps the closest equivalent.
EDIT: It occurs to me – is “Star Wars” one of the rare films of the action-adventure style that bucks this trope? The original films. Luke Skywalker is the “nice guy” compared to cocky jerk Han Solo, but he’s the one who gets Princess Leia. Can’t quite remember how that happens though. Haven’t seen them in ages.
>I think the culture is bad at conveying the idea that romantic attraction has a lot to do with idiosyncratic enthusisam, and that you need to look for a good fit, not just “meets standards of theoretical attractiveness”.
Maybe an instruction manual on what to look for and how to achieve the good fit would be more useful to Nice Guys. That’s why PUA is popular among that crowd, it claims it has that manual.
Some women have tried to compile such manuals, too, but mostly they seem to be taking advantage of anyone foolish enough to believe them, or at least trying to convince them that they’re terrible so they can be taken advantage of by others. (“Read more literature by women!”)
More charitably, they’re generalizing more than they should. Advice manuals with things like “read more literature by women!” tell you how to become a member of a particular culture, not how to get dates with women who are part of your culture. If aimed at members of a culture that is short on women (or thought to be), there’s also usually an explicit “join a culture with more women in it” message, which is good advice, except that such messages usually tell you to join a specific women-heavy culture (which may be entirely unlike the one you come from), rather than identifying some that are similar to yours.
Maybe. I think it’s more that they feel a visceral need that isn’t being satisfied, but I suppose it depends on the individual.
If we were to design an ethical system of sexual relations, what would it look like?
An ethical system of sexual relations? Don’t have sex with anyone who isn’t consenting, do your best to minimize the risks you expose other people to, do your best to minimize the risks you are exposed to, and don’t abandon any children produced along the way.
An ethical system of sexual attraction though I don’t think is possible. Attraction seems pretty amoral and I don’t know how you can change it.
If sexual attraction is amoral, ethical sexual relations should probably not be based solely upon it.
It depends. Some moral systems put high weight on freedom of choice. I believe that a system where people can choose their own sexual partners is ethically superior to a system where everyone has a sexual partner regardless of whether they’d choose to have sex with that partner on their own.
Edit:
Something that could bridge the middle ground between our goals and produce more people having sex while maintaining freedom of choice: a voluntary program wherein unattractive people agree to partner up and go on dates. Unfortunately, I don’t know how well that will do, given that ‘Date unattractive people!’ isn’t a great catchphrase for such a site.
Son, I’m sorry nobody told you this before, but “Nice Guy” is just a euphemism for “uggo”.
Well, “timid uggo”.
I was a scrawny, pimply faced, nerd with poor social skills in high-school.
One day I asked one of the girls in my French class for her number. She gave it to me. I called her that night to ask her on a date.
“I’m busy Friday”, she said. Saturday? Also busy. Next weekend? Busy. Weekend after?
“I’m busy _every weekend_”, she said.
“Oh, OK.” I answered, and hung up.
Now, I was an uggo, as you say, but at no point would anyone have put me in the “nice guy” category.
I think the implication is, if you were not an “uggo” and behaved in ways that would get the “uggo” version of you labeled as a “nice guy”, you probably wouldn’t have been rejected.
I think that’s probably true – behaviors that seem romantic or flattering from someone you are otherwise attracted to feel creepy from someone you’re disgusted by. Of course this is going to be frustrating to the “uggo” who does everything right except the things they can’t change. Up to that point, no one is wrong and nobody is really at fault. It’s only when the rejected starts being nasty to the rejecter (or ignoring the rejection) that they deserve criticism.
Correct! It’s an irresoluble problem, like many of the ones that create long-term lasting emotional pain. And contrary to popular(?) belief, it’s far from restricted only to boys and men — “every woman is beautiful”, “I’m curvy”, and every other contortion fat girls go through to convince themselves they haven’t already lost the race before the starting gun, is a different kind of expression of the same exact problem, which is that you can be born a genetic loser, and nobody can fix that. You got one of the bum tickets, that sucks for you but somebody has to be the loser or the establishment can’t afford prizes. Nobody feels bad about it, please try again only you never get a second shot.
Like you say, being nasty about it is superfluous and should be heavily discouraged, and maybe even sanctioned; and not only on the part of the rejected, for that matter. Calling unattractive men “creeps” for even taking a shot would be the classic example of something that just isn’t at all necessary on the part of the rejecter. But the actual “doing very badly because there’s something fundamentally wrong with you” is not superfluous and cannot be prevented with less than an omnicontrolling totalitarianism that tries to effectively thwart evolutionary selection — which, lest we forget, is heavily based on people dying childless or otherwise having fewer kids if they pulled one of the bum tickets.
Anonymous, I recommend Hot & Heavy: Fierce Fat Girls on Life, Love & Fashion.
In this culture, fat women are less likely to attract men, but there’s a lot of variation. The book has a wide range of experiences, from no men to lots of men, not to mention true love found early. As far as I can tell, the only absolute difference between the experiences of fat women and thin women is that thin women never run afoul of men who want sex with them but aren’t willing to be seen with them in public.
Here’s a weird data point– I knew a fat woman who found that when she lost 60 pounds but was still fat, a lot fewer men were attracted to her. Was the heavier weight a sweet spot? Did she have a better idea of how to dress for the weight she was more accustomed to?
Just in that title there are six words I’d consider buzzwords for trying to cringe oneself out of the hard facts. There’s a lot more evidence of the type “I lost weight and literally everyone treats me better and men look at me in a totally different way which infuriates me now because I would’ve killed for it as a fat girl”(??? I don’t get that last part at all, but I’ve seen it far more times than coincidence could explain).
(I also note that it’s okay to be aware that nice guys are uggos, but not to defend them, whereas it’s not even okay to know that fat girls are uggos, because the expression of the problem is different.)
I’m one of the people who can’t edit, so I’m going to have to throw this one in as a separate post: the mere fact that as that Amazon page shows there’s an entire industry of writing books to tell fat girls that there’s nothing wrong with being fat, that their observed reality totally isn’t reality and that they should cheer up and not feel bad in itself tells a much clearer story than anything actually contained in the book you recommended possibly could.
I think the relevant point for this discussion is that traditionally unattractive women who are frustrated by their lack of dating success are usually afforded greater sympathy / more positive advice (whole books of it!) than similarly placed men, who risk being labeled entitled objectifiers if they “expect” to be loved.
It’s not really an unsoluable problem at all. Plenty of unattractive people getting laid right this second.
The problem are people that have unrealistic expectations. For the men it often comes from knowing that money (status) can make up for attractiveness but wildly overestimating the conversion rate. A lot of men think because they make $200k/year they can date someone much more attractive than they are of the same social class. They are off by a lot.
I don’t know exactly what drives the unrealistic expectations on the unattractive women side of things, but like the men you aren’t talking about a huge number of people.
The best thing that society can do for these people is to help them understand and make peace with their actual choices.
gbdub, on the other hand, it’s women who are under so much social pressure that some of them get serious eating disorders.
@Nancy Lebovitz
That’s true… and there’s a whole industry of medical professionals to help with eating disorders.
What do dateless men get? Further abuse for being in that situation.
Women certainly are more likely to have eating disorders, but it’s not unheard of for men – something like 5-15% of bulimia/anorexia patients are men, and certain male populations (gay men, military) have high prevalence of eating disorders.
But there’s also male skewed body dysmorphia – how many women shoot up steroids and lift weights to the point of self abuse?
Men are also more likely to kill themselves.
I have BED/bulimia, can confirm.
I’m not sure your second example universally counts as male body dysmorphia, though. Steroids are actually one of the safer drugs in the sense that most users don’t “abuse” in the non-legal sense, i.e., they don’t use to the point of getting anything more than mild and tolerable side effects. I assume this is probably why shady T clinics don’t attract the same outrage as shady opioid mills.
And they also make you feel good, so I don’t think you can attribute as much of the population to dysmorphia as you can with eating disorders because there’s also the simple pleasure feedback which I can tell you is not there retching over the toilet.
Gbdub, I don’t deny that male eating/body disorders exist, just that the gender skew suggests that women are under a good bit more pressure.
It’s also true that men with those have much more trouble getting support. I’m not sure how much of that is pro-female prejudice and how much it is that if fewer people have a problem, it’s harder to organize resources.
men look at me in a totally different way which infuriates me now because I would’ve killed for it as a fat girl”(??? I don’t get that last part at all, but I’ve seen it far more times than coincidence could explain).
That’s because the unspoken or unwritten part is “I’m exactly the same person as I was before, only a few stone lighter. So that means the guys now approaching me for a date, and pretending they care about me as a person or that they think I’m funny or smart or good at my job, are all lying liars because all they really care about is my physical looks. I could be a blow-up doll for all the difference it makes as long as they get to have sex with me”.
Very few people feel valued for themselves if they could be a Beanie Baby as long as they are thin with big boobs, as far as the person expressing interest in them is concerned, and that generates a certain amount of resentment – particularly if you don’t have a cynical view of men but would like to think they’re not as shallow as a rain puddle and can be led around by their dick. There’s also the fear that “If he’s only with me because I fit within the conventional parameters of attractiveness, no matter what he says (and I know he’s only with me because of that since he wouldn’t have looked twice at me when I was fat), then he’ll dump me if someone more attractive comes along”.
…Okay, I guess this is where the disconnect comes in. Why would anybody give a shit about your job? In fact, doesn’t that seem just as corrupt as hiring someone because they’re hot, instead of competent?
And conversely, why would it be wrong, surprising or dishonest to care primarily or entirely about the physical appearance of someone as regards their suitability for a physical relationship? It seems to me that this and the (typically unknowable in advance, however) actual prowess of the other person in the sack are the only really honest and relevant parameters for whether you want to sleep with someone, especially over and over, forsaking all others, for the rest of your life. What in the deuce do humor or intelligence have to do with that, and why would I care about them? If someone’s just funny or smart, I can simply be friends with them; I don’t see why I’d want to go further than that, and moreover, it seems like insisting that I should want to go further is literally exactly the Nice Guy Problem except expressed by a woman.
Good in the sack, I’ll give you, but good looking? Sure that matters now, but matter very little for over and over for the rest of your life.
In tens, fifteen at the most, those looks are going to be gone.
Three things about that:
I) Sure, most women peak in looks at age 22 (if I recall the stats correctly), but a hotter woman will still look better than a less hot woman at any given age, all else equal. If she values her looks it’s also reasonable to assume (although perhaps not true? I don’t know if facts bear it out) that she’ll be more diligent in keeping them up, as well.
II) Fifteen years is a sizable portion of the rest of your life, and those particular fifteen are likely to be the ones in which you care the most.
III) Your argument doesn’t really demonstrate that looks don’t matter; at most it can show that you should dump any given woman after fifteen years at most. I certainly wouldn’t go that far myself, I’m just saying: the fact that looks deteriorate doesn’t at all imply that they’re unimportant. In fact I believe the evolutionary argument is that looks matter because they imply youth (and thus reproductive health) among other things.
Go talk to some old guys, I know several that regret marrying for looks.
All you are saying, in a rather elaborate way, is that you have a high time preference.
I’ve seen a suggestion to be selective about voice– it changes less over time than looks do, and you’ll be hearing that voice a lot.
This is interesting, not just because it’s possibly good advice, but because it has a different feel than choosing for looks. It doesn’t seem as tacky, but I’m not sure that distinction is logically defensible.
Pop evo psych types don’t want hear it, but the old advice about personality and values and so on is actually quite good.
You are (hopefully) going to be hearing their stories and their jokes for 40+ years. You are (probably) going to be taking on a task which will be extremely frustrating at times, one where there are no right answers and everyone in the world has strong opinions. Perhaps most importantly this person’s personality is going to change and mold your own, sometimes convergence and sometimes divergence but either way no long marriage leaves either party unscathed.
If you look at what people do, as opposed to what they say, most everyone recognizes this stuff.
Notwithstanding all the just so stories about the plains of Africa, very few men go for the very hottest woman they could conceivably marry. How many look abroad for example? Even domestically, how many look in significantly poorer economic circles than their own? Even huge age gaps aren’t all that common.
The typical 33 year old ivy educated lawyer from a wealthy suburb wants to marry a 25 year old ivy educated woman from a wealthy suburb not a 19 year old girl from the trailer parks working as a waitress even if the latter is a flat out 10 in looks.
@Anonymous, blue this time:
The beauty of pop evo-psych just-so stories is that they can be used to justify anything.
Placing character, sense of humour, agreeableness over sheer hotness? [Evopsych voice] “Well, obviously, a long-lasting marriage that stays together where both people like each other will on average do a better job of raising children, and probably more children, thus maximizing evolutionary fitness.”
33-year old well-off Ivy grad man wants to marry a 25-year old well-off Ivy grad woman instead of a 19-year old poor but very attractive woman? [Evopsych voice] “Well, clearly, he is seeking to have the most intelligent children possible. Further, he seeks to avoid potential resource losses, such as a younger bride who runs off on him, poor in-laws he must help support, or a divorce settlement for a wife with significantly fewer resources versus a wife with equivalent or nearly equivalent resources.”
Proposal: nature-style TV show that just shows footage of people dating while a guy with an educated but not too posh English accent explains everything via evo-psych.
It strike me that one of the issue here is that women who have heard the phrase “But I’m a nice guy” from a certain kind of guy, and the kind of man who has though that phrase to themselves is necessarily describing two different sets of men.
Most men who have ever thought the phrase to themselves haven’t said it out loud to the person they were interested in.
That’s obviously it, isn’t it? The whole Nice Guy concept refers to men who say “why do you date those dashing but caddish chaps [apparently this post will be a period drama] when I’m right here and I’m such an upstanding fellow?” Guilt-tripping someone for not fancying you, in other words. Which is obviously a shitty thing to do, though I don’t think it’s proof of someone being a shitty person.
If someone’s heard that enough times, then they’re understandably going to use that model when they hear a genuinely nice guy say of women in general: “I think I’m a good, respectful person but I still can’t get a date: what am I doing wrong?”
And then everyone ends up being wrong on the internet.
Yeah, it’s like the friendzone thing – and what’s wrong with being friends? If you’re hanging round a woman (or a man) acting as their friend, but your primary motive is wanting a romantic relationship with them, (1) you’re not really being a friend (2) unless you make it clear that you want something more than friendship, you can’t blame them for taking you at face-value as ‘friend’ and not ‘potential romantic partner’.
It’s a big switch to make to go from thinking of someone as a friend to thinking of them as a lover, and simply expecting the ripe fruit to drop from the tree if you just stand there and wait long enough, as it were, is not going to get you anywhere. If you feel cheated, so does the other person; they thought you were a friend, they didn’t know the friendship was only cover for romantic interest. You’re upset because you think they’ve reneged on the bargain; they’re upset because they had no idea there was a bargain in the first place.
(Starting off genuinely as friends and then slowly realising “Holy smokes, I feel something more for this person” is a different thing).
@Deiseach:
“Friend-zoning” frequently (usually?) refers to what happens when you express in interest in romantic involvement, though. “I just want to be friends” being the standard friend zoning response to said expressed interest.
Who is it “on” to prevent an unethical exploitation of the relationship?
I do think it might be a worth while exercise to think of dating in the early years sort of like sparring in a martial arts studio. The more skilled contestant always has more responsibility to make sure injury does not happen, but it doesn’t absolve lower ranking student.
@ HeelBearCub
That is an excellent analogy.
That’s the optimistic response. The other one is “Wait, what? We are no longer friends!”. Though this is often implemented with a polite “I just want to be friends” followed by a lack of actual friendship, so it is hard to tell which version is most common.
A variant is also classic in breakups, although there I believe it’s mostly used by the dumper to soften their guilty conscience at breaking the dumpee’s heart.
It seems to me that in this context “nice guys” doesn’t mean what you think it does. I believe it’s often coopted as codeword for unattractive.
“Nice” is almost semantically empty, quite nearly the least you can say about someone without it being negative (i.e. “well, he isn’t a terrible person”). It is a way for the female to salvage an otherwise awkward situation and save-face for all involved.
Think of it: are archetypically attractive guys not nice? But, would anyone ever choose that adjective to describe them?
> that facilitates human connection – love
Though I strive for romance in my own life, love, at least for most people in most times, largely amounts a wallpapering over of the ugly facts of reality to create a narrative that is more palatable. In short: relationships are in fact transactional.
So none of what you say matters. Nice guys are losers, and people tend to not want to transact with losers.
You must come from a very harsh culture.
I think we’re talking about unattractive guys who play by the rules of society. I mean, I agree – “nice”, used in active conversation is a real slimy slug of a word (I can’t stand “nice” people) – but the thing about nice guys is that they aren’t especially nice. These are people who don’t want to make especial effort to please others, or who are completely unable to do so. But, they make a minimum effort, and think that should be recognised.
I’m not unsympathetic to that view.
I think the major disconnect is that being Nice(TM) is not supposed to be directed at the woman, but at her parents. It used to be that they decided whether a suitor would get to have sex with (marry) her, and being a suitably civilized gentleman was the way to go. It isn’t anymore, and that reproductive strategy has hit a snag.
In irrelevant news, I have discovered that everyone’s gravatar appears as their old version if I use one particular laptop, but no others. Has anyone else discovered this?
No, but it sounds like that computer is caching the old gravatars.
Interesting article from the subreddit: What If We Can’t Make Government Smaller?
As the “smaller government == good” (or rather the perverted version of it, downsizing government in the form “sell all the geese yhsy lay golden eggs to my dear friends and relatives”) has started to creep in to the mainstream right here in Europe, I’d welcome more of this kind of thinking.
Nice article, very good arguments. That being said, I’ve checked out most of the content on the website and whilst I don’t dispute the quality oft heir capacity to argue I don’t think they have any right to call themselves libertarian when they say what they do about social justice.
To copy a comment I made elsewhere on this:
1. If we can’t shrink government, why do we think we can make it more efficient? The two share a lot of obstacles, and if you’ve convinced someone to seriously embrace efficiency, they’re 75% of the way to small government, anyway.
2. The growth of government doesn’t imply that small-government efforts are ineffective. Maybe we’d have a much larger government if opposition to it were weaker. If so, switching from small government to efficiency would weaken the brakes on Leviathan.
@Article
This part resonates with me. People don’t want to stop spending, as much as they want to cut taxes. Wagner’s Law is driven by the desire for services beating out the conservative ideological program to cut spending.
Yet people still hate taxes. Probably in the long run, the best way to reduce taxes is to increase productivity and increase the automation of the economy. Costs for public administration will fall as costs for private business fall. In the future, less tax could be required to fund the welfare state because the price of goods and the cost of doing things is so low.
Pragmatic libertarians should support (an eventual) Basic Income Guarantee, but also increased government funding into artificial intelligence and the subsidization of nanotechnology and additive manufacturing development.
Yeah, no. You want libertarians to bend to the left and accept that people will always want free services. Fine. I’ve been saying this for a while, but I’ve also been saying something else.
Now you need to bend to the right and accept that as of now, liberal migration means inviting the Third World, which means problems with cultural integration, which means crime and fears of replacement of liberalism, which means the rise of far-right parties, which is what we are actually observing in Europe.
If the welfare state is inevitable, and it is, then strong borders are also inevitable. People respond to incentives and if they want free stuff here at home, foreign people with weak governments living with low GDP economies want in on it all the more so, and then trouble brews because those welfare states can’t support all the people who want in on them. Besides, people’s bigotries are as mathematically consistent as their desire for free stuff.
Instead of only libertarians having to “accept things” and everything being all very convinient and concern trollish for left wingers, we should all take account of the necessity to appease the direction of the masses without appeasing the disfunctional extremist ideologies running in those directions.
In a time of extreme political crisis to do with migration, you either have liberal or civic-nationalism and control inflows or you get ethno-nationalism and race based cleansing occurs.
In a time of extreme political crisis to do with poverty, you either have social liberalism and redistribute some wealth or you get socialism and class based cleansing occurs.
Welfare state, borders, and
freecompetitive markets (governments should avoid nationalization, but not be too afraid to go trust busting) should be the new consensus. The era of “liberal migration” is coming to an end one way or another, so let’s make sure it comes to an end in as nice a way as possible.Honestly, that article has a few serious problems. Let’s go through them:
For starters, they miss that lowering taxes, assuming that your government isn’t just taking out debt to do so, does lower spending in and of itself. Moreover, a supply-side surplus, or any boost to the economy theoretical or real, should reduce welfare and the need for welfare more generally (some % of people will independently find new jobs, and another % of people can be nudged or pushed into finding jobs because good jobs are so plentiful).
Plus, every country that follows Wagner’s Law seems to follow a law of massive debt. Which is to say, there’s a natural end to the size of government. Their argument seems to be that the debt should be subverted via reducing government waste and bloat and inefficiency and so forth, but all government systems are purposely designed to produce those things, which is why it makes much more sense to cut them and try and make sure people can provide for themselves in other ways.
It’s the far future of space or whatever.
Hell exists and it’s a massive computer that tortures quadrillions from across the Universe in a speeded up time simulation forever.
The hero of the story is a moral activist who wants to rescue people from Hell because infinite punishment is infinitely more evil than any finite crimes. He ends up being able to rescue a few war criminals, mass murderers, and pedophiles from Hell and give them new bodies. One of them later takes part in a genocide as part of the rebellion against the current galactic government, and the hero of the story who is already hunted for the breakout, is charged for aiding in genocide by releasing the people responsible. At first he agonizes on this, but his fugitive status draws him into the rebellion where he eventually becomes a critical leader.
The story ends with the hero and his war criminal psychopath rapist friends destroying the Galactic Regime, bringing an end to its religion, freeing everyone from Hell and destroying it for good. Everyone lives happily ever after.
Has there ever been a story like this? It’s Star Wars meets…
Minority report?
Iain M. Banks Surface Detail..?
I don’t understand the premise. Or at least, I’m having trouble accepting the protagonist’s logic.
1. Why should Hell be moral? Isn’t it run by the devil?
2. If Hell isn’t run by the devil but by the Galactic Regime, why doesn’t the protagonist just make his case to them to shut down or reform Hell? Sounds easier and less risky. You don’t get to be a Galactic Regime by ignoring good ideas when they’re offered to you, right?
3. The morality of punishment is measured on a different scale than the morality of crime. For example, if you assault me and break my arm, I would consider a fair punishment to be something far more severe than you having your arm broken. There might even be finite crimes for which infinite punishment is totally just. (I guess you’ll just write the Galactic Regime’s religion in a way that this isn’t the case…)
4. I get why a moral activist might decide he needs to rescue evil people from infinite punishment, but I don’t get why a moral activist would then just let those evil people run amok. Putting the evil people into new bodies and then instantly executing those bodies seems like a much more moral idea.
5. If the evil people all get freed from Hell and ransack the good and decent people of the Galactic Regime, why would I believe they’d ever live happily ever after? That doesn’t sound like an outcome even a moral activist would believe possible.
I think it’s potentially a cool story though. Here’s how I’d tweak it so it makes more sense and is easier to relate to:
1. The moral activist tries to get the Galactic Regime to reform Hell so it’s less inhumane. Due to his efforts, the evil people are freed by accident, without anyone being aware of it at first. Then there is a genocide—in one day almost an entire race is wiped out—and people start to figure out what happened.
2. The moral activist realizes he is at fault and agonizes over it. Has he made the universe worse? Before he has time to decide, the Galactic Regime announces it plans to punish him, so he has to go on the run, just like the evil convicts he inadvertently freed from Hell.
3. For a while, morality becomes unclear to the moral activist. The freed evil ones help him, in their own selfish way, to hide from the Galactic Regime, and he starts to sympathize with them more and more until he is almost tempted to become one of them—become their leader, even—and help them bring down all intergalactic civilization.
4. But another evil guy (the antagonist of the story) is giving him a run for his money, and ultimately our hero realizes his true calling once again. He redeems himself by becoming an assassin, rounding up the evil people and executing them before they can destroy everything.
@ Plagiarizing the Amish
I like your version (and your user name) but for extra moral conflict you should have the “villain” should be a lawful good type who’s trying to capture the fugitives / rebuild “hell”. Rich Burlew’s essay on heroes and villains would be relevant here but I can’t seem to find an online copy.
I like that! One freed evil guy–the guy with the worst charges against him–argues very convincingly for his own innocence. The reader should be convinced too. Until he turns out to indeed be the most evil guy ever!
I honestly just assumed “being bonkers” was a major point of the story. The hero isn’t a hero, just the protagonist.
@Plagiarizing the Amish
1. The hero wants to destroy Hell but he fails.
2. The idea would be that the GR is a dictatorship and most people willingly conform to its religion, except all the people who don’t and join the rebellion. This can be glossed over to focus on the important bit. It’s morally weird Star Wars.
3. I don’t agree with this. The entire reason I thought of this concept was reading this short story and thinking that it was trying to be manipulative by having Jolonah’s infinite punishment be justified because he tried to get out of it by sending an alien child to infinite punishment instead. It made me want to read a story where you have a conventional schlocky simplistic heroes vs villains space opera, but you have the bad guys be people trying to sentence criminals to Hell and the good guys be people trying to stop them and destroy Hell. You could have the good guys just inadvertently release people or you could have some moral grayness by having them recruit the criminals on purpose because they believe that the charges against them are lies, which is what I was originally going for.
4. Well, at first I was going for the idea that the hero doesn’t believe the charges against these people and thinks its all a lie because the hero is a naive zealot. You can also have it be instead that he’s trying to kill them and there’s some way he inadvertently releases them from confinement, and then later has to join forces with them, but you’d need to change parts of the setting. Maybe the computer idea needs to be altered.
5. You’re looking at this backwards and from a realistic standpoint. The point of having everything be fine at the end is for the purpose of inducing cognitive dissonance. I need to think of a way to get to that conclusion. The psychopath war criminals shouldn’t be the ones who are in charge afterwards, as they were only military leaders.
I can’t write fiction for shit, so I never intended to create this story just spitball with the idea of the story, based on the core concept. Still I want to read something like this where the heroic thing to do under the situation is to actually fight against the people trying to give genuinely evil people (they need to be really nasty for the right level of cognitive dissonance) infinite punishment and restore finite punishment. I don’t care how many children and puppies you’ve disemboweled, because it never adds up to infinity or makes Hell justified.
If Hell exists it should be destroyed.
@LPSP
I want the protagonist to be portrayed as being “right” from the perspective of the story, so that makes him the hero going from the narrative.
Maybe this is a story only I would want to read.
If Hell is a computer, why would you only be able to “rescue” a few Bad People from it and give them new bodies? If it’s a computer, you don’t actually take the simulations out of it, you either copy them and delete the original, or copy them and don’t delete the original. No productive end is served in any case by making copies, and if you are doing things with the data, delete it.
It doesn’t have to be a computer. I’m looking at this in a soft sci-fi way too.
This “very bad people ally with the hero against even worse” is a pretty common trope, isn’t it? So, this particular story may not have been written, but I don’t think the setup is as outlandish as you think.
Doesn’t ” Guardians of the Galaxy” have this kind of feel to it?
While pretty much everyone but the lead protag in GotG was a crim, Starlord or whatever he was called was at-harshest set-up as rogueish. It’s a sort of fit for the broader concept, but what Tekhno is outlining seems more hardcore villain-lead stuff.
“The Dirty Dozen” is probably a better example. Those guys are set up to be fairly evil.
Some of them more than the others. The Telly Savalas character most of all, and his inability to keep himself from murdering a woman when the opportunity presents itself almost screws up the mission, IIRC.
He ends up being able to rescue a few war criminals, mass murderers, and pedophiles from Hell and give them new bodies.
Why would he do this? If they’re evil enough to warrant punishment in Hell (even a computer version), why would he set them free to continue murdering, raping, torturing, etc? Unless he tweaks their programming so that they no longer want to murder, rape, torture, he’s better off just to delete them anyway – the Annihilationist view.
Everyone? I imagine the victims of murder, rape, torture, survivors of war-torn planets and so forth don’t live “happily ever after”, just the evil-doers who face no limit on pursuing their own goals and certainly no punishment for hurting, stealing, or inflicting misery on others. Again, unless the evil-doers are reformed to some degree, it’s a better choice – if you really think eternal punishment is unethical, unjust and unwarranted – to simply delete the simulations for good. I mean – the hero releases Jack the Ripper from computer Hell, Saucy Jack starts in on his funny little games again, I’m sure the sex workers’ guild would say “fix him so he stops doing this, send him back to Hell, or delete him”. Letting him run around slicing up women would not, in their view, be “everyone lives happily ever after”.
Everyone lives happily ever after, where “everyone” excludes most anyone. 😉
#NPCLivesMatter
I have to agree with everyone else who is confused as to why the hero would choose freeing war criminal psychopath rapists from CyberHell over the “just kill them” option.
I also feel like the scale undermines the dilemma you want to pose. You say that there are quadrillions of people in CyberHell, and when the hero frees “a few” people out of those quadrillions they are all war criminal psychopath rapists. So either he went out of his way to free the worst of the lot or you have E15 (or E24 if you’re British…) villains bottled up in there.
If it’s the former, the hero would seem to have inverted values. He’d be saving the least deserving first and letting the innocent burn in the meantime. If the latter, it makes CyberHell seem like a necessary evil if the alternative is unleashing a quadrillions-strong demonic army.
@Dr Dealgood
There are two available options.
1: He’s a zealot who disbelieves in the government’s charges and is driven by his hatred of Hell. He releases the war criminal psychopaths who he believes to be innocent, only later realizing his mistake, but resigning himself to fighting the regime and restoring a Hell free system anyway. This one is interesting because even in this case, no matter how many horrible things they do in fighting the regime, it’s still less immoral than infinite torture. Moral grayness is encapsulated in moral righteousness leading to cognitive dissonance.
2: He inadvertently releases them.
“It’s the far future of space or whatever.”
This needs to be the opening line of a film called Scott Pilgrim Strikes Back.
Question
I always like to read “Best of” works from peoples most favorite intellectuals, or figures.
So what are yours? Think a collection of essays from Bertrand Russell, and similar works.
Or, even a personal “Best Of” list of figures to read is fine, with a *slight* emphasis on more modern figures.
Some of my favorite essayists: Samuel Johnson, Emerson, Orwell, Chesterton, Santayana, Borges. Pretty sure there are “selected essays” type books for all of them.
Seconding Orwell as hard as I can. He wrote on the sorts of topics that readers of this blog would be interested in (well, not psychiatry), he wrote with great skill and social insight, and he managed to be a socialist without being insane or evil. High school students read his fiction in school but for my money his non-fiction is better.
I’ve always loved this one.
http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit/
As someone who greatly appreciated Orwell’s writing essays in high school, I concurr.
Ditto
Seconding anon and suntzuanime.
For my own part I would also add Kipling, Solzhenitsyn, Montaigne, and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry to the list. With honorable mentions going to Raymond Chandler and Malcolm Muggeridge.
It’s pretty well known and you might have read it before, but I’ve always liked Havel’s “Power of the Powerless“.
Okay, I haven’t watched any of your presidential debates and I’m only getting news at second- and third-hand, but any opinions on this pearl-clutching about (now let me get this right, quotes and all) “Trump’s ‘horrifying’ refusal to say he’ll accept the election’s outcome”. Apparently journalists across the spectrum responded in horror.
Because didn’t you do this dance already? Back in 2000 with the hanging chads and Florida and going to court to demand recounts? And nobody seemed to think Gore was indulging in a horrifying refusal that was the end of democracy, sunshine and everything good in the universe when he was fighting tooth and nail to the last gasp refusing to give in or acknowledge the election result?
I think Trump’s a dreadful blowhard, but honestly, the amount of fits of the vapours people are having makes me half-wish he’d win, simply to see the death toll of people expiring from apoplexy.
I’d have to see an exact quote to know if Trump said something good, bad, or good badly. That it upset someone with some ink to spill (or airtime to fill) doesn’t really provide Beyesian evidence either way.
Nobody thought Gore was indulging in a refusal to acknowledge the democratic system because the candidate is legally entitled to a recount below a certain margin of victory. This is rather different from a bald, evidence-free assertion of large-scale rigging in advance of the actual election (one which you can comfortably predict will continue even if Trump loses beyond the margin of a single state’s recount).
I too think the pearl-clutching is overblown, but I also don’t think Trump’s behavior maps onto Gore’s. It might map onto some of the more fringe lefty theories going around at the time about Diebold machines, but I don’t think those were ever encouraged by Gore himself.
No one expects Trump to agree that if there’s a tie he’ll concede. The people trying to spin the question that way are just making excuses for him.
That’s what happened with Al Gore, there was a tie. Of course you keep going when there is still a chance to win. But when the Supreme Court made its ruling, he conceded and accepted the outcome. While there were plenty of other people marching around during the GWB era saying that the Supreme Court stole the election, Al Gore was never one of them.
That’s exactly what Chris Wallace (Fox News employee) was asking Trump to commit to. That after all is said and done, if there’s a clear winner, and it isn’t him, that he accept the result as legitimate. Not go on and on for the next four years about how how he didn’t actually lose, that Clinton isn’t the real president, and that the election was stolen. And he refused to commit to that.
Transcript via LA Times:
You’ve added a lot of context compared to what Wallace initially asked. And for that, Trump’s response seems reasonable – “I’ll look at it at the time”, i.e. he can’t precommit to knowing that he won’t challenge the result if it looks rigged. The rest of it is just a restatement of his charges against Hillary, the media, and voters that shouldn’t be registered. Spinning that as “Trump definitely won’t concede, even if the result is obvious” is taking it a lot farther Trump’s actual response.
There was a follow-up where Wallace says something closer to your last paragraph (but again, it was a follow-up, not his initial question):
That sounds more like a guy promising to keep his options open rather than a commitment to not accept the results, which is how it’s getting spun. I guess you can focus on “keep you in suspense,” but that comes off as a snark. Because come on, you know the spin, if the result is close, would be how Trump is reneging on his promise to concede if he’d given a flat commitment to “absolutely” accept the results, as he was initially asked to do.
No, I don’t know that at all. If there’s another 2000 situation where the overall outcome depends on a single state, and that state is within the automatic recount or even the permissible recount, I wouldn’t expect any claims of reneging.
Also you seem to be ignoring the most troubling thing about his statements — the references to the media. What exactly does he need to look at it at the time to determine whether or not alleged media bias is going lead him to not accepting the result of the election? He is seemingly already convinced that they are totally biased against him — is or is that not sufficient for him to reject the outcome of the election? Why does he need to wait to answer that question?
The bottom line is that if you agree with Trump that there is a real possibility that the election will be “stolen” then fine, nothing wrong with what he said. But if you don’t think so, then there is plenty to object to.
You’re parsing Trump much more harshly than Wallace. Remember, the initial question was if Trump would “absolutely accept” the result. Which, yeah, it’s a restatement of a quote from Pence. Still, I think Trump is wary of being tied down to an absolute (and to some extent I think he’s right to, that’s a common “gotcha” approach in a hostile interview, and Trump certainly considers any interview to be hostile).
You find his reference to the media “troubling” – to me it looks like Trump saw a chance to vaguely connect to one of his talking points (the media is biased, the voters see through this) and harp on it. Politicians do this all the damn time in debates. Heck, one of his follow-ups was that Hillary “shouldn’t even be in the race” due to her (in Trump’s opinion) serious crimes – that’s less an argument about the vote itself being rigged than about the justice system giving Hillary a pass. That’s another nearly-non-sequitur, except that again it’s standard debate practice.
I don’t think the vote will be stolen, but I do think the media is generally pro-Clinton, and I do think Hillary got off more easily than she should have in the FBI investigation. “There are lots of potential flaws in the voter registration system” is also accurate, though I don’t agree that there’s widespread fraud. That’s mostly what Trump covered in his statement.
And yeah, it’s certainly possible to object to any and all of that. But to spin it as the least-charitable-possible simplification “Trump rejects democracy! HE’S DANGEROUS AND HORRIFYING!” is exaggeration, and that weakens Hillary’s case in my mind. Clearly YMMV.
Oh, sure, when Trump is speaking, the refrain is “Take him seriously, not literally!” But when Wallace is speaking, you need to parse him down to the last syllable in case he’s laying a rhetorical trap for you?
To put that less angrily, the obvious intent of that question was “Are you going to concede gracefully if you lose, or spend the next four years banging on about how the election was stolen?” And, as you noted above, Wallace provided a follow-up to make it really clear that this is a softball question where you can talk about how much you love democracy.
The fact that Trump had to hedge and keep his options open like that, on a softball that any other politician in the country could have answered in his sleep, shows either he’s just completely inept at reading people’s expectations, or that he’s already planning to spend the next four years banging on about election fraud. Neither reflects well on him.
(Also, if the election is actually stolen, and Trump actually has convincing evidence of that, that’s a scandal about seventy billion times bigger than Trump backtracking on one of his statements. Nobody will care whether or not Trump said “absolutely” or not.)
Am I horribly cynical to doubt this?
The way I see it, pretty much all the major networks with the exception of Fox are solidly “in the tank” for Clinton. I don’t think they would treat rigging an election as any more scandalous than mishandling classified material.
Trump can’t lay down working rhetorical traps, because he doesn’t have the media on his side. Wallace can and does.
Don’t they ever…
@Jiro: So, only Trump gets the privilege of having his statements read charitably? Everyone in the media has to speak with the precision of a lawyer? I don’t think that’s how it works.
I wasn’t arguing that Wallace’s words couldn’t be read as a trap. Every question is a trap if you’re paranoid enough. My point was that, since he basically waved a neon sign saying “POLITICIANS ARE SUPPOSED TO SAY THEY RESPECT THE DEMOCRATIC PROCESS,” it would be very uncharitable to read it as a trap instead of a softball question.
Indeed, if I believe gbdub’s analysis, this is exactly why the question hurt him. Trump saw a trap where there wasn’t one, and ended up hedging where he shouldn’t have.
Wallace’s question was scripted, Trump’s response was not. I think it’s perfectly fair to consider that “absolutely” was chosen / included by Wallace carefully – and that’s the extent to which I’m parsing it. I don’t think that’s particularly uncharitable, and I certainly don’t think it was crazy for Trump to read the question that way.
But even taking Trump absolutely literally, all he said was “we’ll see” and then rattled off his key talking points: media is biased, Hillary is a criminal, and Dems are shady (and illegal immigrants might be voting).
There was one other key thing: that his supporters will “see through” the media bias and win.
I’ve said before, this is a turnout election. Trump is basically making the case to his supporters not to give up even though he’s down in the polls. “Hey, everyone is down on me, but you see through that! Show up and keep it close, we have to work harder than those people against us – I’m not giving up and neither should you!” Saying you’ll “absolutely accept” the results does sound like you’re pre-capitulating, and isn’t something that is going to fire up your base.
Anyway really all I’m objecting to is the characterization that Trump’s statement clearly means that he “rejects” the “democratic process”. Far from it – he’s claiming that his opponent has damaged the democratic process, and that he will not precommit to accepting a result obtained unfairly, and reserves the right to challenge any shenanigans that might come up before he accepts defeat. In his mind, he’s defending the democratic process from “rigging”. It’s fair and valid to attack his belief in the “rigging”, but it’s uncharitable to go further than that and say that he rejects democracy / the will of the voters.
@ Gdub
I agree but as you say, this is a turnout election, and telling everyone that Trump is an evil fascist who rejects the democratic process is how the Democrats their supporters to show up and vote despite Clinton being fucking terrible.
>No one expects Trump to agree that if there’s a tie he’ll concede. The people trying to spin the question that way are just making excuses for him.
I guarantee you that if he legally contests the election, people will bring this up, regardless of the merits of his case.
I read it as a “go fuck yourself.”
Yeah this one annoys me, especially when it gets spun as “Trump says he’ll reject the will of the voters!” No, Trump says he doesn’t trust that the reported results will actually reflect the will of the voters. And yeah, as you mention, this argument requires ignoring for the moment that the same / similar claims were made by Bernie supporters in this election and Dems in general (including Hillary and DWS!) after the 2000 election (“Selected not elected!”).
“Trump says the system is rigged!” Well, given the chance to expand, Trump seems to be mostly claiming that there is a lot of voter fraud and that the media is heavily biased in favor of Hillary. There’s also charges of collusion between Hillary and various groups from the Wikileaks stuff. But of course rather than addressing those charges (which have plenty of reasonable arguments to be made against them without resorting to effectively name calling), it’s straight to “oh what a sore loser, that’s what every loser says! He saying he won’t accept the vote!”
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – Trump is ridiculous enough without exaggerating, hyperbolizing, and least-charitable-interpreting the crap he says. Please stop doing that, because it’s giving me sympathy for him I’d rather not have.
agreed
Why should he get calm, detailed refutations of his “charges”? What has he done or said to deserve any benefit of the doubt whatsoever?
He is reaping what he has sowed.
Because don’t claim you’re better and then do exactly what you accuse Trump of doing? “Reaping what you sowed” is exactly the charge Trump supporters are making against Democrats: “You’ve treated all our candidates like racist Nazis, so why should we listen to you now?”
Because Trump’s claims, no matter how badly he states them, do deserve some credence? Mainstream journalists are overwhelmingly in favor of Clinton. Voter registration rolls do have a lot of errors. Hillary Clinton was “extremely careless” with her email in ways that look criminal to a lot of people. None of these mean the system is “rigged” or illegitimate. But if the best you can respond with is “Nothing to see here, you’re just paranoid, shut up!”… that’s not exactly going to build confidence in the system not being rigged for anyone on the fence.
Hillary’s claim is that she’s the cool, rational, experienced choice against the blowhard, hysterical, aggressive, know-nothing Trump. Overreacting to Trump destroys her credibility there. “Well, the Hillary supporters keep saying how awful Trump is, but every time I listen to him, he’s not nearly that bad…” hurts the core message. “Hillary is the only adult in the room” is less convincing if your argument is “well it’s okay, he started it!”
In some sense it doesn’t matter, this is a turnout election and Trump-bashing, no matter how over the top or uncharitable, fires up the Hillary crowd.
But like I said, it makes me have more sympathy for Trump than I want to.
Okay but the thing is when talk about “Democrats”, “liberals”, or even “the media” as if they were a single thing it’s a metaphor. Useful in many ways, but still a metaphor and these particular ones are pretty fuzzy.
Donald Trump is a flesh and blood human being with an actual history. He was a birther until, what, two months ago? Last I heard he still thinks the central park five are guilty.
I don’t see any good reason to give any credence whatsoever to any claims he makes. If that makes you have more sympathy for him, well I don’t love that fact, but it’s ultimately up to you not me.
Fine, but a fact doesn’t become a falsehood just because Trump said it. I have no problem if you don’t believe / agree with Trump – that’s not what gives me sympathy. What gives me (unwanted) sympathy is when Trump says something and people attack the worst dubiously possible interpretation / extrapolation of what he said rather than making an effort to address his actual argument.
To be honest, I think ‘ability to have elections and thus clear/peaceful transition of power’ is more important than having a perfect will of the people reflected. And of course the electoral college doesn’t perfectly reflect the will of the people anyway. I’d be incredibly worried if a party said ‘if we get more of the popular vote but they get more electoral college votes, we will refuse to accept the results’.
The serious prospect of powerful figures refusing to accept the outcome of the (imperfect) election process is very worrying and undermines a lot of the benefit of the system
That argument was definitely made post 2000, and there was a sudden interest in reforming the electoral college. Certainly the lack of “acceptance” didn’t turn into civil war or anything, but it’s not like Trump is saying he’s going to set up a shadow government either.
Very similarly, fears within Labour in the UK that they’re currently unelectable have lead to increased talk about reforming the electoral system entirely to be proportional representation, with the hope of permanently fragmenting the vote and creating a permanent left wing coalition.
Of course, since Labour are unelectable it’s not really like they can make any reforms happen.
I think there’s a big difference for ‘this result demonstrates why we need to reform the system’ and ‘I don’t acknowledge the result of this election’.
It’s really important that people accept where political legitimacy lies. This is one of the things that democracy does well (especially it’s good at doing this while also having transfer of power) and casually undermining it is irresponsible.
I have no idea what Trump means. I don’t expect civil war or anything, but this combined with some bits of Tea Party stuff and other things like his ‘second amendment people’ comment does’t add up to a great prospect for argument, anger and desire for change being channelled into political outlets.
“Where political legitimacy lies” sounds like a nice slogan for democracy.
Lots of people made this and similar statements regarding GWB. “Selected not elected”, “Not my president”, “The election was stolen”, “Bush has no mandate” etc. They mostly didn’t act in a meaningfully damaging way on that sentiment, but it was certainly there. Again, at this point re: Trump all we’re dealing with is rhetoric and implication.
In addition to what has been said, I think it would be perfectly reasonable for Trump to complain a lot if he lost by a similar margin to Gore (and thus possibly despite winning the popular vote). My concern would be that he would complain a lot even if he lost by a good few percent (although on the list of things about Trump that concern me, that comes pretty low).
I don’t care about complaining, whatever. It’s basically saying ‘this is not a legitimate result, this person is not the legitimate President’ that worries me more. Appealing within the constituional systems is different.
Given Trump in the debate was saying that the race was rigged simply because Hilary was allowed to run (as she should be in prison etc.) this doesn’t bode well. I would be willing to bet that he doesn’t accept the results of the election whatever the %.
Yes, and I’m not sure why he didn’t bring up Gore in the debate. It doesn’t matter what Trump says. If he loses the election he has exactly the same options as Gore, and he’ll acquiesce to it in the end like it or not. It’s not required that he simply accept an election that he feels has been stolen; there are in fact remedies within the system for that. Our media (aside from Fox and Breitbart and other openly conservative sources) are basically pulling for Clinton, so acting like Trump has said something horrible is just part of the act.
The act is Republicans pretending that the rigging rhetoric and Trump being coy about accepting election results before the election is conducted is normal US politics. It is an attack on the ability of the US to conduct a fair election.
What ability of the US to conduct a fair election?
The burden of proof for that one is on the accuser, perhaps to at least cite some academic or peer-reviewed publications that buttress their claims or at least show us all where their motte and where their bailey is to save some time.
what brings this vile p.o.s. out its viper hole?
Last cycle we wouldn’t let UN observers into some of our polling places and ballot-counting stations. No one seems to think this is cause for concern.
I am really not sure we actually conduct fair elections.
Paranoids gonna paranoid.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
You could volunteer, and see how it’s done from the inside! Too late this cycle, but it’d be better to start with a slow off-year election anyway. Or, if you’re registered with a political party, ask them to send you to a polling place to observe. You’ll have to have some training (in NC it’s “don’t interact with the voters”, your State may vary, and the deadline may have passed).
You may also be able to observe part of the process. AFAIK everywhere only election officials and voters in the act of voting may be in the polling place, but in NC, after the last voter has left, anyone may observe the reconciliation / results-sending / packing-up process, where everything’s cross-checked, sealed, signed off on by 3 judges representing at least 2 parties, etc.
In total isolation it’s reasonable if you squint right. After his stint of fanning the flames of voter fraud fears, though, he can fuck right off. Those of us who run polling places are going to have to deal with the fallout. I’ve only had one wingnut incident before, and it was resolved peacefully. I’m not looking forward to whatever escalation this cycle brings.
Well gosh, I guess it’s OK if no one raises the alarm about voter fraud so long as you don’t have to personally “deal with the fallout.”
“Voter fraud” is a myth. Their are exceptions, but they prove the rule in their absence of frequency.
“Voter fraud” may be a myth, but “serious potential weaknesses in the voter registration / validation process” isn’t.
I mean, it would appear to be really easy to:
1) Vote in multiple states if you live in both part of the year
2) Send in someone else’s absentee ballot
3) Claim you are a legal resident and cast a ballot even if you aren’t
Not to mention all the potential mistakes like “crossed off a name close to yours instead of yours” and “forgot to purge all the dead people and felons (or re-add the non-felons) from the list” etc.
Basically the only defense we have against these is the voter’s sense of propriety and the fact that single votes are rarely enough to be worth the effort, and a confidence that we’d detect a major concerted effort.
When the response to someone saying, “Maybe we ought to have a more positive way of validating voter eligibility” is “Don’t worry, we haven’t found many people abusing this system so far and if you want to change it it’s because you’re a racist”… well, it might be a little paranoid to just assume that races are being decided by fraud, but not insane
@gbdub:
“confidence that we’d detect a major concerted effort.”
Well, that is the big key. Much like allowing a small amount of insect parts or mouse droppings in a ton of flour, the dose is the poison.
It’s important to distinguish between registration fraud, in person voting fraud, and absentee ballot fraud.
The HAVA act, passed after the debacle in 2000, requires either a state drivers license number or the last four digits of an SSN be provided when registering to vote. That ID number is then required to be verified with the state or federal government. If no ID is provided at registration, or verification fails, the voter will be required to provide ID when they first vote.
So voter registration fraud is already prevented to the extent that ID requirements can do so. In-person fraud is very hard to commit without detection. Absentee ballots also require providing ID in order to receive the ballot.
In the cases where people are caught for substantial voter fraud, it’s usually the absentee ballot process, not in-person. This, uncoincidentally, has received the least amount of attention from Republicans, as the absentee process usually favors Republicans.
If I’m ever elected king I’ll outlaw Jr/Sr-s from living at the same address. Want to live with your parents? Fine, but one of you has to change your name 🙂
#1 and #2 are indeed easy. Though the only office voting in multiple States affects is the President – all other elected offices are single-State or smaller. (Though those local offices gain one extra voter in the “second” jurisdiction).
There’s a philosophical problem in that legal residence (not immigration status, but “where do you live”) is kind of fuzzy. In NC if you’ve lived somewhere less than 30 days, the offices at your “new” address don’t represent you yet, you have to vote using your “old” address. But what’s the exact move date? When you closed/signed a lease? Started sleeping there? etc. Neither statute, regulation, nor case law is particularly helpful on that point so I basically have to shrug at voters when they ask for such clarification and say “move date’s up to you to define”.
For #3, as HBC points out, HAVA has beefed up requirements on registrations, and some States are probably doing that stuff and more. Registrations are public record (except for a very few cases, like Witness Protection Program) and so they can be audited by third parties also.
A national registry of every US citizen along with a One Canonical Address for each of them would solve this problem, but such things are unpopular.
So honest question for former / current poll workers: Most of the “fears” about voter fraud basically revolve around people who aren’t eligible voters being able to register / vote.
And at least from the outside, it doesn’t look like the information you are required to provide to register and vote in most places is sufficient to actually verify your eligibility (or in some cases even your identity). Yet we’ve got poll workers here insisting that no, no way is anyone fraudulently voting, and we can’t find any cases of it… But how would you even detect ineligible voters voting, unless you get a duplicate? Aren’t you just going to see that they have something (not a photo ID necessarily) that matches a name on the registration list?
I worked at a State Board of Elections for five years, doing system engineer work for their computerized registration system.
The number of fraudulent votes cast in order to sway an election would lead to many instances of voters attempting to vote when the impersonator had already cast their ballot. In addition, the number of people required to carry out this in-person fraud would be massive. Somebody would squeal at the point they were being recruited for the effort.
It’s not that it doesn’t happen on an individual level. It does. There are a handful of prosecutions, fines or plea bargains for voter fraud on a regular basis.
They just aren’t consequential.
Edit:
The one case of a serious effort to sway an election I can recall was the owner of a strip club, IIRC, in a dry country submitting absent ballot requests for all their employees. And then filling them out and returning them. The vote was a referendum on allowing liquor-by-the-drink in a dry county. Usually those referenda are set in an off year, sometimes even as a completely separate vote, as a means of preventing the general electorate from actually having their say on the matter.
This means only a few voters actually cast ballots, meaning that a few 100 fraudulent absentee ballots actually can sway the election.
I think the issue is confidence in the system. I’m not saying your argument is bad – it’s probably correct. But you’re basically acknowledging that individual scale fraud is somewhat common and hard to detect. It would be relatively straightforward to make the system somewhat more secure with e.g. voter ID (as many countries do) – and would certainly boost confidence in the system even if it didn’t actually change any outcomes.
So it’s basically a values argument – do you care more about making it as difficult as possible to vote fraudulently, or making it as convenient as possible to vote validly. I just don’t think coming down on either side is all that unreasonable.
“Every vote counts! It’s so important that you go and vote!”
“No a mere few dozen instances of voter fraud don’t matter, what are you some sort of racist?”
I’m certainly open to the idea that democracy is a big joke and it’s not worth worrying about, but it bugs me when people claim to take it seriously but get all offended at the idea of basic steps to keep it honest.
You know what else ruins confidence in the system? Doing everything possible to reduce the minority vote in order to favor your party, and admitting that you do not want blacks to vote because they vote Democratic. (Yes, that is actually the legal argument.)
Voter ID laws are just one example.
Reduction in the number of polling places.
Adoption of electronic voting machines and then failing to provide an adequate number of machines to polling places with higher population causing wait times of six hours or more to vote.
Removal of early voting days utilized most heavily by black voters.
Illegal purging of voter roles based on inadequate evidence.
Unless you are worked up about those kinds of issues, this is an isolated demand for rigor because you aren’t affected. You have an ID so you care not at all for those who would be disenfranchised and have no sense of why or how this might affect them. Your polling place has no wait time. You won’t be fired for taking time off to vote. You aren’t 90 and without the ability to secure your birth certificate.
Far more legal voters would be disenfranchised than fraudulent votes prevented. This is hardly just.
Edit to add:
And again, if you were actually concerned about voter fraud, you would be targeting absentree ballots far more than in-person fraud. Those dead people don’t vote by showing up at the polls. They vote absentee. The fact that this is not the primary concern of the reforms gives the game away completely.
When have I ever advocated for any of this stuff? Rounding sane ideas off to evil because the nasty nasty Republicans support them and so anyone who supports them must be nasty nasty is a really typical obnoxious lefty thing to do.
And you’re making a lot of assumptions about my personal situation which aren’t justified, btw.
Pardon me for assuming that someone going by the moniker suntzuanime on a message board is not a 90 year old black woman birthed at home in the rural south.
So, even though you were just a little child, tell me about your memories of The Great Depression? 😉
@suntzuanime: Nobody ever implements voter ID to increase security, it’s always part of a package to reduce turnout for partisan advantage. If we ever see a State implement, say, automatic registration along with an ID requirement, then you’ll see less pushback.
Hey, fuck you.
At HBC, not you Corey, although I think you miss the point that what I am advocating is voter ID to increase security, which is why I’m pissed at HBC for saying I’m trying to reduce turnout for partisan advantage. Although I’m more pissed at HBC assuming I just got a free cushy job and state ID in my white privilege packet in the mail.
@suntzuanime:
There is a form of rhetoric where the word “you” is used much in the way “one” would be.
Clearly, you, suntzuanime aren’t making legal arguments in court defending state voter ID laws. Clearly, you, suntzuanime, aren’t making policy on polling places and “you” aren’t passing legislation to reduce early voting hours.
So, you might want to read what I said with an eye towards the idea that it is an argument about the actual policies, and the intent and effect behind them, not a screed impugning the honor of your avatar.
I thought a little lite banter would do it, but apparently not.
Nonetheless, the point of my actual argument stands.
Now, I will again say, if you, suntzuanime, aren’t worked up about the other threats to the faith in our system I mentioned, you, suntzuanime, are engaging in something like selective rigor or concern trolling. That does not constitute an argument that you have argued in favor of these other policies, but rather an argument that your concern that an absence of ID requirements for in-person voting represents a unique threat holds no water.
I’m ignoring the uncivil words, as I doubt getting in a flame war would be productive.
Oh, so when you tried to shut down the conversation with that “you aren’t affected so you can’t talk” you meant that as the general you? Nobody’s affected? Seems kind of moot in that case.
Uncivil words are exactly the appropriate response for your sort of smarmy bullshit, because you’ll pull any sort of dishonesty you can get away with, and if people are civil towards you you’ll get away with way too much.
@ gbdub
So it’s basically a values argument – do you care more about making it as difficult as possible to vote fraudulently, or making it as convenient as possible to vote validly. I just don’t think coming down on either side is all that unreasonable.
There is a third way(tm): increase security in ways that do not burden or turn away the innocent voters. If Imposture is a serious problem, treat it as a serious crime. There’s a public record that each vote leaves. Run some checks; when you find a dead person has voted, track down the Imposter who did it, find out who organized the gang, punish them all very publically. Start an awareness campaign: “If you see something suspicious, report it.” Make the risks of Imposter Fraud greater than the pay-off, and the chance of getting caught very large.
Would leaving a fingerprint at the voting site compromise other values? It would be a way to catch people who vote more than once, though not necessarily people who substitute themselves for non-voters.
One method to prevent double voting in Iraq, at least in the first election post Saddam, was finger staining.
No one, to my knowledge, has proposed this as legislation in the U.S.
“Uncivil words are exactly the appropriate response for your sort of smarmy bullshit, because you’ll pull any sort of dishonesty you can get away with, and if people are civil towards you you’ll get away with way too much”
He embarrassed you; caught you special pleading for one (republican advancing) policy reform and no other.
That makes you furious.
And you deny you’re a couch republican.
@ HeelBearCub
One method to prevent double voting in Iraq, at least in the first election post Saddam, was finger staining.
Heh. I’d thought of saying, if you’re briefing an Imposter to visit several polling places, tell him to remember to take off the “I voted” sticker in between.
Actually, finger staining sounds like a good idea. It would fit right in with leaving your fingerprint on the ballot, or the list of voters, when you vote. Ftm, with more white space on the list, a fingerprint of record could be pre-printed right there on the list, with a space to try to match it at voting time.
Of course we wouldn’t ask the poll volunteers to judge the fingerprint. But later, when the government computers have their big reunion, the Imposter’s fingerprint will match with his fingerprint on something that has his name and address; then the police can find him.
@ houseboatonstyxb
I agree,
I’d be a little worried about specific fingerprints getting matched to specific votes, defeating the purpose of having a secret ballot, but I think that’s reasonably solvable by storing the prints and actual ballots separately.
IE when voting in person, you’d put your thumbprint in a ledger to get your ballot, if the number of ballots for a given polling station doesn’t match the number of prints in it’s ledger, or a print shows up in multiple times / ledgers you know something’s fishy.
Absentee voting would still be an issue, but I’d be willing to trade-off the secret ballot issue in that case to ensure “legitimacy”. You want to vote from outside your district, you need to send your thumbprint in with your ballot.
You want to vote from outside your district, you need to send your thumbprint in with your ballot.
I filled out my Vote By Mail ballot yesterday. Somewhere in the packet is a sleeve you sign; the ballot itself remains anonymous. The fingerprint could go with the signature.
I suppose the organizer of the fraud could make rubber stamps of the recorded fingerprints of the registered voters. But that would add expense. As David Friedman mentioned, at some point the organizer really should compare the cost of all this overhead, with the price of legitimate advertising.
If you believe the other side is engaging in fraud, demanding voter ID can simultaneously be for partisan advantage and genuinely for reduction in fraud.
The list of who (people said they were when they) voted is public record. If an eligible voter was impersonated, they’ll be on the list despite not having voted in that election. (Assuming they didn’t get turned away because the real voter already voted, etc.) If an ineligible person registered and voted, they’ll be on the list. Highly motivated people (e.g. losing candidates) have attempted to find this and come up approximately empty-handed.
Requiring ID for voting would be a fine idea in a vacuum, but in practice, aside from the racial and anti-democratic (small and big D) problems, it’s creating a bigger problem than it’s solving.
>I think Trump’s a dreadful blowhard, but honestly, the amount of fits of the vapours people are having makes me half-wish he’d win, simply to see the death toll of people expiring from apoplexy.
I feel precisely the same way, and it annoys me because of how much I dislike Trump. I do not want him to win, but god do I want her to lose.
It may not be obvious if you get your US politics news from reading SSC comments, but it’s almost universally accepted among elites, media, politicians not named Trump, etc. that there is currently no such thing as large-scale US voter fraud of the sort that could tip a presidential election.
Trump has been implying that if he loses it’s because the system is rigged and no election that he loses should be seen as legitimate. This is pretty outrageous if you accept the consensus that there is very little voter fraud (as the people writing the outraged op-eds generally do). If you *do* believe in large-scale fraud, as various commenters seem to, then “we’ll wait and see” becomes a sensible thing to say.
The analogy to Gore makes no sense as many people have pointed out. The fight in 2000 was mainly about the technicalities of determining voter intent from a perhaps-flawed physical ballot (e.g. is a hanging chad sufficient evidence of intent) not about intentional fraud.
Yeah. The big difference between Trump and Gore is a demonstration of respect for the rule of law.
In 2000, the vote in Florida was close enough to legally mandate a recount, and the laws were messy enough that the courts had to get involved. Bush and Gore both started playing the legal game; Bush played it slightly better; as soon as the Supreme Court ruled in favour of Bush, Gore delivered a gracious concession speech in which he repeatedly and explicitly acknowledged the legitimacy of the process and his willingness to abide by the Court’s decision.
Trump, meanwhile, has been going around for weeks complaining that the entire system is rigged against him, and casting aspersions on the legitimacy of the process. The concern is that, after he inevitably loses the election, Trump will continue to spew claims that the result is illegitimate, working his voters into a frenzy and potentially leading to violence. Democracy is a more robust model for the peaceful transfer of power than anything else we’ve tried, but there’s no need to experiment with how well it stands up to one candidate’s deliberate sabotage.
The pearl-clutching might make more sense if you see this as part of an ongoing dialogue between the Trump campaign and the rest of the political system. Trump came into the debate making ambiguous claims that can be interpreted as an intent to try to take the system down with him if he loses. Wallace, speaking on behalf of the system, gave Trump the opportunity to disavow that interpretation of his remarks. Trump refused to do so.
And most of the recounts came out in his favor, iirc.
Some of them definitely did. I know there were at least a few estimates that came out in Gore’s favour. This WSJ article cites Richard Posner as conceding “that more Florida voters probably set out to support Al Gore than George W. Bush, and that the wider availability of user-friendly voting technology would very likely have sent the Democratic candidate to the White House” (before going on to argue that from a procedural standpoint Bush v Gore was nevertheless correctly decided). There were enough recounts available that either side had a plausible claim to win. My point is simply that after the Supreme Court adjudicated those claims, Gore unambiguously accepted the decision without casting aspersions on the legitimacy of the election or the Court. That’s the standard that Trump was asked to abide by, and rejected.
@ Randy M
And most of the recounts came out in [Bush’s] favor, iirc.
You mean when the media got all the ballots and did several counts using different standards about the hanging chads etc? They did ~8 counts and ~5 favored Gore, iirc.
You recall incorrectly.
@ Lumifer
Or perhaps my memory was of an incorrect or incomplete source.
Thank you for the link to the Wikipedia page. The information near the bottom about ‘over-votes’ was all news to me.
Claiming that the system is rigged is totally unprecedented.
So what about the opposite side of the fence? I’ve just seen a warning about alleged online disinformation telling people they can vote online. This is presented as a deliberate campaign to make younger voters waste or lose their vote. This particular version didn’t come out and say it, but there are enough warnings floating around about Republicans deliberately making it harder or even impossible for [name your chosen minority] to vote because they know they’d vote for the Democrat candidate.
Is this true or not? If widescale voter fraud is exaggerated, how about vote-rigging on the “prevent the other side’s voters from voting” scale? Is that factual or fanciful?
As for Gore, do you mean you saw nothing of conspiracy theories about rigged voting machines, duplicate ballots, and deliberately making it so the chads wouldn’t be punched properly? Because I may be decrepit and failing of memory, but back in 2000, and revisited over the intervening decade or two, there was plenty of hysteria in certain quarters about Bush stealing the election – the same quarters that are now frothing over Trump’s “horrific” declaration that maybe he won’t accept a result that goes against him.
I’ve also seen some wistful fantasising from those same quarters about how if Obama simply refused to yield the presidency, just at the end of this term said “No, I’m not giving this up” and instead continues to act as president, wouldn’t that be marvellous, I wish it would happen.
Hurrah for democracy, eh?
There are certainly cases where the Republicans have attempted to reduce voting in Democratic-leaning demographics. I’m not aware of any examples in the opposite direction, although that doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
Various people did make claims that Bush stole the election. Gore, however, was not one of them. That’s important. You’re always going to have hotheads on either side. The question is whether their political leaders will calm them down or rile them up.
Allegations of Democrats suppressing votes from Republican-leaning demographics usually revolve around military absentee voting, and they show up every few years. It was an issue in the 2000 election, for example. From the article:
Edit to add that I never closely examined these allegations, and they may well be overblown, but I do remember it being talked about.
@Reluctant Engineer:
That’s a post hoc “given the election is within 100s of votes” fight using existing rules.
This is very different than an ante hoc attempt to change the rules to discourage and make difficult voting.
Thanks for the example. I hadn’t seen it before. It’s the best example I’ve seen so far, although I think it still falls short.
First, quibbling about which ballots to include in the context of a recount is different from the kinds of pre-election vote suppression measures that (for example) North Carolina tried to put in place. I’m sure Bush did his best to rule out ballots from pro-Gore counties too.
Second, as far as I can tell, the Democrats backed down on this issue and the ballots ended up being counted. You can’t really accuse them of organized suppression of the military vote, if only because they were so clearly disorganized on this issue.
Third, this doesn’t appear to be part of a larger pattern. Based on a quick Google search, although there have been other accusations of suppressing the military vote, none of them seem to have any basis. (See Snopes here and here.)
That doesn’t surprise me. Attacks against the Democrats for suppressing military votes seem like they would be politically effective, if they could be substantiated. The fact that they aren’t being made seems like good evidence that it’s not happening.
there are enough warnings floating around about Republicans deliberately making it harder or even impossible for [name your chosen minority] to vote because they know they’d vote for the Democrat candidate.
Is this true or not?
Well, making it harder for certain populations to vote, e.g. by introducing additional inconveniences to the voting candidate, really does happen. And it is generally legal (unless it is taken too far), and therefore it is not generally called fraud.
Look, randos on the internet will come up with conspiracy theories about anything. The rigged voting machines stories were *absolutely* rejected by the “establishment” on both sides. The partisan Democratic argument is and has always been “reasonable-sounding standard A (which just *happened* to favor Gore) for ballot counting is what we should have used, not reasonable-sounding standard B (which just *happened* favor Bush).”
and just to emphasize:
the same quarters that are now frothing over Trump’s “horrific” declaration that maybe he won’t accept a result that goes against him.
There is NO WAY that people talking about rigged voting machines are the “same quarters” as those outraged now. Maybe it looks that way from across the ocean but it is really, really not.
There are always some shenanigans here and there, e.g. flyers in the “hood” telling people if they have outstanding warrants they’ll be arrested when they show up to vote. As far as I can tell it’s not widespread, and probably doesn’t work well, since when that kind of stuff is found local media tends to jump on it quickly to debunk it.
The voter suppression that bothers me the most is that poll machines and precinct locations are often underfunded, resulting in massive lines in densely populated areas that take hours, while in rural precincts voting is often a 10-minute process.
In North Carolina as another example, in order to discourage early voting which favors Democrats they reduced the hours and also only set up only 1 location in some high-population counties, resulting in ridiculous lines.
To me any wait of longer than 1 hour that is not due to emergency circumstances is a de facto suppression (whether done with malicious intent or not). Election officials can predict turnout and states can afford to deploy extra machines and locations if they really cared about voters waiting for hours. Sure is a strange coincidence that nearly all those long lines are full of black people.
There seems to be an unfounded assumption of intent here. You (and Chalid earlier) say “this made voting less convenient” and then jumping to the implication that the inconvenience and suppression was the intended result. As opposed to “well, we’ve only got enough money for X polling stations, early voting is a convenience item less critical than day-of-election polling, so we’re going to pull more funding from that bucket” which is another plausible explanation.
It’s not unfounded.
Look at the Fourth Circuit’s decision regarding this law. The three judge panel was made up of a Clinton, a GWB, and an Obama appointee. The section I quote below and the pages I reference come from the unanimous part of the decision.
http://www.ca4.uscourts.gov/Opinions/Published/161468.P.pdf
The full discussion is on pages 13-19.
Mea culpa for not remembering that particular one had been adjudicated.
@gbdub
I was the Anonymous there (forgot to log in).
The intent of Republicans in this instance merely provides a focus for any anger I hold over disenfranchisement, it does not make long lines acceptable if the intent was instead to save a few thousand dollars. And as you admitted, in this particular case the intent has been proven in court.
I think what Trump said can be interpreted in two different ways, with the NYTimes et al predictably interpreting it in the more crazy, catastrophic way (though maybe not entirely without reason):
1. “I expect the election to be stolen from me by widespread voter fraud and will demand recounts/investigations if it seems like this may be the case.” (That is, “I will use any legal means available to investigate any possibility of explicit fraud”).
or
2. “This election is already rigged against me by e. g. the biased media, and I may not accept the outcome if I lose even if there’s no clear evidence of explicit voter fraud.” (That is, “if I lose, it will be because the whole system was rigged against me, and I won’t accept the legitimacy of my opponent’s administration even if I exhaust all legal means to challenge it”)
1. would be a fairly natural thing and similar to Gore’s claims about 2000. 2. would, in fact, be pretty unprecedented, with the fear, I imagine, being of something like Trump’s attempting to lead a “government in exile,” provoking a secession crisis, or, in an extreme case a civil war.
Even if Trump means 2, of course, I don’t think any of those outcomes is likely. He has a lot of enthusiastic supporters, and a lot of people will be pissed about President Hillary, but I don’t think either of these sentiments is wide or deep enough (yet?) to provoke such a crisis.
Perhaps more realistically, I think the punditry is worried that Trump, by being a sore loser, will further undermine trust in the government and the media, as well as hamper HRC’s ability to govern by trying to make her seem somehow illegitimate (as he did with Obama, in fact). Moreover, it could weaken the “gentlemen’s agreement,” that, at the end of the day, the two political factions are supposed to be on the same team, work together, etc.
As someone who doesn’t think government is legitimate, any undermining of that perception is fine and dandy by me, though I could understand why this might worry those who want to preserve its air of legitimacy to rule not just 50% of the people, but 100% of the people.
At risk of bringing up the Scott Adams “Trump is secret persuasion genius” meme again, this statement does seem very similar to the game he played during the primaries: subtly implying maybe he’d screw things up for the GOP by running third party if they didn’t nominate him. This fear may have motivated some GOP primary voters to pick him.
Though it’s a different game to play in the general, one could argue he’s making a similar, subtle threat: “elect me or I’m going to undermine the presidency of the person you do elect.”
Growth mindset!
We obviously have very different political positions, but I honestly can’t think of any outcome of this election that would be better than Trump losing but then completely undermining Hillary’s ability to do a damn thing.
(Well, maybe the other way around would be better, it would still irk me if Hillary got to be the first female president like she always wanted. She’s awful enough that she doesn’t deserve any concessions, no more than Trump does.)
Eh, Hillary would be fairly well hamstrung by keeping Congress Republican, which has any benefits of the “Hillary can’t do a thing” scenario without the absurdisms of Trump.
I seriously doubt that. I think the (solidly Democratic) executive bureaucracy has at least as much power to hamstring any President as Congress has.
Well, he made two specific claims about why it was rigged
“Excuse me, Chris, if you look at your voter rolls, you will see millions of people registered to vote. This isn’t coming from me, from fury report and other places. Millions of people that are registered to vote that shouldn’t be registered to vote.
So let me just give you one other thing as I talk about the corrupt media. I talk about the millions of people. I tell you one other thing. She shouldn’t be allowed to run. She’s guilty of a very, very serious crime. She should not be allowed to run. And just in that respect I say it’s rigged”
First that “millions of people” are registered to vote who can’t shouldn’t be and second that it’s rigged because Hilary’s allowed to run against him (though the latter is a bit confused: is he saying she’s the most threatening candidate to him and so people are allowing her to stop him despite the fact she deserves jail , or just that the fact that she’s allowed shows bias/corruption. I assume the latter, though it means ‘rigged’ makes less sense.)
I’m honestly surprised at the other responses here, given the SSC readership. To me it seems somewhat obvious that this is largely about game theory. Since the end of the Civil War, every election in America has been followed by a peaceful transition of power. If you read history, this is really uncommon. Whether it’s the emperor’s sons, different noble families, various tribes within a kingdom, or different branches of the military, the transition of power is often followed by violence. This happens despite the fact that violence is horrible, and it happens because for each actor individually, it makes sense to to resort to violence. Basically, it’s an example of the prisoner’s dilemma.
One solution to the prisoner’s dilemma is to develop a culture or a set of traditions that discourages defecting, which is basically what we have in the US. It may be personally beneficial for whoever loses an election to take control of the army and march on Washington, but it’s not done due to tradition. Part of that tradition is that all actors publicly agree to accept the election results. It’s true that Al Gore fought for a recount or whatever in the courts, but he never went around the country publicly telling people the whole thing was rigged and that the election results were illegitimate.
Basically, a lot of intelligent people who are horrified by Trump aren’t thinking, “oh my, he said nasty words about Mexicans what ever am I to do?” They’re horrified because he’s publicly defecting in several prisoner’s dilemmas, weakening the system that keeps us all from murdering each other. Trump’s rhetoric is (probably) not going to cause a civil war, but Trump’s rhetoric weakens our cultural defenses against civil wars. I also think it’s important to note that political and social systems are never as strong as they seem before collapsing.
Every election has been followed by a peaceful transition of power, and so will this one. And Trump has not said otherwise. He’s simply failed to concede the fairness of the election ahead of time (and such fairness has been contested before, in a Presidential election most recently by Al Gore in Florida in 2000). The idea that claiming the system is rigged is somehow an attack on democracy is just fake shock on the part of the (mostly Clinton-supporting) media. There are allegations of rigging and fraud all the time.
If Hillary wins, Trump will complain about rigging; he may sue. But he won’t march an army to Washington. If Trump wins, the Democrats may complain about rigging (I expect not Hillary personally), there may be lawsuits. And there likely will be an army of protestors (totally grassroots and not at all coordinated with the Democratic Party of course) causing trouble at his inauguration, but either way there will be a reasonably peaceful transition of power.
A few questions, though somewhat free flow thought.
1. What does free trade mean today? A lot of convincing arguments were made in the 1800’s against absurdities like the trade deficit, and how silly it is to place restrictions of trade due to nationalism. Is all that happens in today’s world is that some giant multinational simply moves to an area that won’t enforce environment and labor laws, as I hear? Where does Malthusian logic play into this?
2. How is the world going to deal with the fact that precise replicas of someones voice and image can be created by CGI quite quickly? Entire crimes can now be placed on someones laptop, starring the voice and image of the person themselves.
3.States rights vs federal laws. The drug wars opened up new questions to me on the legalization of drugs. I view myself (vaguely) as a social experimentalist,that tries to hold how societies develop through watching. I don’t like a drug policy that legalizes drugs XYZ throughout the nation, but I also dislike policies that ban them throughout the nation. Perhaps legalizing drugs,easy divorce and prostitution leads to a largely lower crime rate with less powerful gangs, or contributes to simply the town being full of drug addicts no better off with lots of 1 parent households. That leads to questions about state vs federal rights, I suppose.
That’s an interesting thought. I don’t think we’re there yet, but probably will be within a decade or so. Is someone’s image copyright? Can it be? What about voice?
I think ultimately this kind of evidence will come to be about as reliable as handwriting analysis–experts on digital recording will testify if something was altered, psychologists will discuss if the body language matches yours down to personal tics, etc.
I think what might save us is some kind of biometric security on smart phones along with gps creating equally compelling alibis. “This video has to be fake, as the defendant accessed his phone 100 miles away at 9:03 PM.”
Of course the rabbit hole doesn’t really end with technology, does it? That kind of thing can always be hacked as well. Ultimately it will fall down to the trustworthiness of eyewitness testimony! 😉
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohmajJTcpNk
Ah, mimiking the voice and exact image of people after about a quarter of a second delay to account for personal differences in how people move, is the near(and probably now) future.
I mean are people actually worried about this? Well we live in the day and age where its possible for person X to think they are hearing the voice and image of important person Y without any such thing happening….and it can’t be explained away by mental illness.
It does add some evidence that this is all a simulation of history, but meh.
Photographic manipulation has a long history, and forensics has already developed a lot of techniques to detect all but the most sophisticated forgers, and that is in a single still frame that is often fuzzy or even monochrome. Anything done purely in existing modern CGI would almost certainly have tons of artifacts at the pixel level that would be telltales of a generated vs. recorded image. The state of the art in CGI is to simulate an effect that from typical viewing distances does not overly disrupt your willingness to suspend disbelief. The viewer is generous and wants to be fooled and is not looking at the individual pixels. Blending techniques (mixing elements from different footage into a single scene) would make it easier, but as someone with a background in signal and image processing, I can say it is a lot harder than it sounds to simulate a photograph in a computer that would fool a trained and motivated analyst with his own computers into concluding it was real. The battle is conducted at a much lower level than fooling the naked eye.
Creating fake audio (especially if done from true samples that were all recorded in a consistent session) would be technically easier and certain channels are so corrupted and noisy (say cell-phone audio) that dropouts and static bursts can be employed to disguise some seams. If there start to be problems, it will show up first in corrupted audio-only evidence.
This. Part of my work involves looking at North Korean propaganda imagery and figuring out which parts are real, which are photoshopped. I leave the image analysis to the professionals, but I get to look over their shoulders and their tools and techniques are very good.
At this point, most of what you see in the media is manipulated in some respect, but most of the manipulation is harmless aesthetics on the level of making someone’s campaign photo op retroactively happen on a sunny day with just a few poofy white clouds. If someone tries to manipulate the important bits, like putting a rival politician’s face on that stunt double raping a child, that will be discovered and proven in short order.
It is possible that at some point in the future the balance of power in this arms race will shift in favor of the fakers, but that’s not where the current trend is pointing.
Has anybody here looked into the debate around global-greening-vs-global-warming? I just came across this for the first time and it was the most interesting new thing I’ve learned about climate change in the past few years: http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/global-greening-versus-global-warming/.
Ridley is neither a climate scientist nor an economist, and in general, I don’t find him to be a credible secondary source. He’s very prone to cherry-picking and weak-manning (his articles are thick with vague references to what “greens” believe and very little actual quotes) when it accords with his views (being a libertarian whose family made its fortune on coal mining, they aren’t hard to guess).
I found this BBC interview with Richard Tol very revealing. Tol is an economist, and works in the same skeptic think tank (the GWPF) as Ridley, but he’s a bit more intellectually honest when pressed. It’s a very long interview, but I’ll quote one part specifically because it speaks directly to the argument Ridley makes.
I find this admission crucial because Tol is the economic expert most frequently cited by Ridley and other lay journalists who want to make the contrarian case of “actually, AGW is good.” Amusingly, I’ve seen David Friedman cite to his meta-analysis as proof that the cost-benefit sign of AGW is unknown. I suspect DF did not bother to read the paper, as it explicitly deprecates FIG. 1 (which he cites as the updated figure) in favor of FIG. 2 (the actual updated figure), admitting the following:
In fact, in the meta-analysis, Tol’s own study was the only one showing a positive benefit, and even taking Tol’s study as gospel over all the others, 2016 will likely end up 1.1°C above pre-industrial so those initial benefits have already peaked.
Despite the controversy over his meta-analysis having to be revised several times, I find Tol himself to be credible, not least because he actually made the revisions instead of digging in and carping about the grand CAGW conspiracy as skeptic authors often do.
But he’s a good example of how the most intellectually honest and qualified skeptics (e.g., lukewarmers) just end up mostly admitting that the preferred climate policies of Nordhaus, Hansen, etc., (an escalating carbon tax) are correct. This meeting in the middle is then promptly ignored due to tribalism. Tol, an honest economist, gets cited incorrectly by Ridley, a slightly-less-honest journalist, who will get hastily read by not-at-all-honest Politician X, and Politician X then distorts the meme further to his electoral base until Tol’s original position becomes “actually, AGW will probably be good! CO2 is plant food and who doesn’t enjoy a balmy winter?!”
Thank you for quoting that interview. I actually agreed with many of the broader strokes of Ridley’s arguments in the Rational Optimist regarding how the worst case scenarios also involved a world GDP that was fantastic and would be able to cope with population and food production shifts that today’s economy might not. I have not seen a good rebuttal to this point of his yet. But he does seem to be veering towards denialism though by recently selectively megaphoning certain findings, so he is losing credibility with me.
This is an interesting concept, about advantages and disadvantages that balance back and forth. It reminds me about the current bleaching disaster in the Great Barrier Reef. Apparently, when ocean levels rise the increased temperature will level back down at that depth and keep the reef relatively intact overall.
Reminder of my complaint concerning timescales. At best, all of the estimates in those papers are static estimates, holding all politics/economics/ecology constant, changing temperature instantaneously, and computing a damage estimate. From a theoretical perspective on dynamical systems theory, this is the wrong way round.
If fact, if we assume that the fast system is performing some optimization, then we would expect to see this type of analysis produce the same result at every timestep! To continue my aircraft analogy, the idea is that the pilot chooses the optimum altitude at each time to maximize efficiency. So if we look forward and say, “But later in the flight, we’ll have less fuel, and that means we won’t be at the optimum point anymore,” it’s the type of trivially true that is extremely boring. We could also look backward and say, “But earlier in the flight, we had more fuel, which means we couldn’t have been at the optimum altitude.” That’s obviously ridiculous, because we can simply go back to the flight data and see that the pilot chose a different altitude at that time… one that maximized the efficiency of the fast system given the state of the slow system!
The only way we can make meaningful predictions of the difference between intervention and non-intervention in this extremely slow-timescale process is to have a useful model of the fast political/economic/ecological system that is valid at every time step. Unfortunately, I don’t have a link to an interview of Tol being posed this question… but having a terminal degree in dynamics/control theory and having run this reasoning by many of my peers, I can’t imagine anyone with serious credibility on the matter claiming otherwise.
The only model I’m familiar with in that group is Nordhaus’ DICE, but this definitely isn’t true of that, and the fact that you blandly asserted this of all the dozen-plus papers Tol cited makes me question the rest of your post. I also don’t accept your linked reply’s dichotomy between “slow system” and “fast system.” Both economics and climate have both slow and fast components. Price signals are fast. Human migration is slow. CO2 fertilization is fast. Sea level rise is slow.
The internet has no shortage of people with terminal degrees in engineering saying very wrong things about AGW. I respect your terminal degree, but I’m not bound to respect it over the opinions of all the hundreds of other people who have terminal degrees and whose papers I’m reading on the subject. My opinions don’t spring forth ex cathedra, they’re a product of keeping up with the literature.
@ Anonymous Bosch:
Hang on, how did you get from the implied claim:
Unchecked AGW (though currently perhaps beneficial) would be likely to eventually cause some net harm to humanity
to:
…[and therefore] an escalating carbon tax [is] correct
?
There are a LOT of missing steps between those and most of the missing steps are in the realm of economics, not climate. Yes, too much CO2 is harmful, but so is too much global taxation and regulation. Yes, escalating CO2 levels are dangerous, but so are escalating taxation and regulation [and corruption] levels.
A carbon tax might well be the least bad policy option under serious consideration, but that doesn’t make it a good idea, much less correct.
For it to be a good idea, it seems like you would need to assume among other things:
(a) a very low discount rate
(b) a very low chance of humanity collectively continuing to move to lower-carbon energy sources without additional monetary incentive
(c) the existence of incorruptible Bureaucrat-Gods to implement the tax without screwing it up (rather than having the nitwits we’ve actually got write and enforce the relevant regulations).
Loosen any of those assumptions and we’ve got a problem, no?
It’s elsewhere in the interview I linked. Tol talks about how he originally set out to disprove Nordhaus and was unable to do so.
Hmm. How about Hansen? Hansen has advocated a LOT of crazy shit in the way of climate policy. Has his opinion recently moderated to where it’s now similar enough to Nordhaus to justify your grouping their views together as one?
In this interview, Tol advocates “a carbon tax and a carbon tax only”. At least as of 2008 Hansen seemed to be calling for (largeish) carbon taxes that essentially fund a Basic Income…and he also wanted national building codes (to mandate efficiency) and probably dozens of other fine-tuning sort of policies. Just a tax, or a tax that starts out really small to minimize the harm done by the transition, doesn’t really seem like Hansen’s style.
From an AGW standpoint, the disposition of carbon tax revenues is mostly irrelevant. It would be a minor double benefit to use them to fund things like research into sequestration or a French-style crash build of nuclear reactors.
But you could also use them to cut other taxes, or add them to general social welfare programs, or basically anything (except channeling them 100% back into fossil fuel subsidies, I guess). That’s a question of politics and expediency; the presence of a price signal is the important thing. A carbon tax is preferable because it’s a keyhole solution that tells the market what is bad, but lets the market figure out on its own what the next-best solution is. As opposed to cap-and-trade, which requires a far larger bureaucracy and is prone to regulatory capture, or subsidies, which would be rife with Solyndra boondoggles.
Hansen’s loudest and most recent advocacy has been for a fee-and-dividend carbon tax. To the extent he’s also stated that Obama should consider other regulations like boosting efficiency reqs and a coal moratorium, I suspect this is coming from someone who has had enough experience in the US government to know that a carbon tax is a tough sell and doesn’t mind second-best or third-best solutions.
@Anonymous Bosch:
I think what got my hackles up was the tone more than the content. One can easily imagine reversing the polarity to cast snide negative implications at the other side than the one you picked.
Ross McKitrick (of McIntyre/Mckitrick fame) has been advocating some form of carbon tax for 20 years. My favorite feature of his proposal is the idea that the tax rate should be tied to actual measured warming. But most climate activists who have come around to something resembling his approach (as opposed to the more command-and-control notion of outlawing some technologies, mandating or subsidizing others and issuing tradable permits for whatever we can’t yet ban) still don’t seem to grok that a carbon tax has to be a replacement for other taxes and other policies. If you just add an additional carbon tax on top of the mass of existing taxes and climate regulations (as Hansen clearly wants), you miss the whole point and might well worsen economic efficiency compared to not having the tax.
There has been some gradual convergence of views. It’s not all one-sided. It’s not “the alarmists were completely right all along and skeptics have grudgingly admitted it” nor is it “the skeptics were completely right all along and alarmists have grudgingly admitted it”. Picking one of those frames is emotionally satisfying but doesn’t help figure out what’s true.
More than that, we probably want to encourage both testing claims and agreeing with people “on the other side”. If every time somebody says “you know, I think you guys are right about X” we call that out as an example of one of the few “intelligent and honest” people on that side “admitting” something, that would seem to encourage others (who we’ve just implied are less intelligent and honest than those who agree with us) to remain intransigent.
“Has to be” is a political opinion, not an physical or even an economic one. Economically, it would certainly be a good idea for us to repeal other, more inefficient regulations concurrently with a carbon tax. And it would sweeten the political pot to offset the revenue with tax cuts elsewhere. I myself would prefer these approaches. But to pretend they’re mandatory? Sweden implemented an additive carbon tax and has cut its emissions while experiencing plenty of growth. Carbon taxes, like any policy, have perfect and less-perfect versions.
But I think you’re giving skeptics too much credit here because a lot of their carbon tax advocacy is cynical, and I think you’d have to be blind not to spot the obvious enthusiasm gap between people like Hansen and people who come to a carbon tax from the skeptic side.
Let me explain what I mean by “cynical.” Hansen really wants a carbon tax. He doesn’t shut up about it. He lobbies politicians. He writes op-eds. He publishes papers. You can find many many many videos of him singing praises for it to anyone who will listen. He will gladly criticize putative ideological allies who have irrational fears of things like nuclear power and has expressed a desire to work with conservatives.
Who are the skeptics trying to get something done? Is the GWPF lobbying for a carbon tax? Did this McKitrick paper get bullhorned in a dozen British tabloids and WUWT? Has McKitrick himself ever even spoken about it or given a presentation on it to a skeptic audience, or to politicians?
Let’s return momentarily to Tol. Does he go out of his way to correct Ridley? This is the only on-record instance I can find of him gainsaying his ideological ally; and he spends most of his time on Twitter defending his awful op-eds while beating down weak men and engaging in fairy-on-pin debates about whether the “consensus” is “97%” or “the high nineties” rather than talking actual policy.
As far as I can tell the lukewarmers “advocate” a carbon tax in the same sense that Exxon and other oil majors do. If you go looking on certain websites, you’ll find some anodyne statement about how they believe a carbon price is the best policy. But they won’t call attention to it, they won’t lift a finger to implement it, and they’re happy to let their audiences (who for the most part believe rabidly that C(A(GW)) is utterly fraudulent) ignore it. In their world, it exists exclusively as a hypothetical alternative with which to reject second-best solutions.
That the carbon tax should be an instead of rather than an in addition to factor is a purely economic opinion, not a political one. I’m claiming that without clearing away the underbrush we can’t reliably say that, say, Hansen’s version of a carbon tax would substantially improve economic efficiency.
If the reasons for that aren’t clear, I’ll have to either make a more detailed argument or find some links to others doing so later – I’m in a rush at the moment.
GWPF has certainly tried to interest the press but they can’t control what British tabloids find newsworthy. I don’t really follow WUWT so I don’t know their take, but McKitrick-style tax ideas make regular appearances on places like climateaudit and climate-skeptic (eg, here). One refinement of the idea was branded a “T3 Tax” – the T is for Tropical Troposphere Temperature.
Regarding McKitrick speaking about it to politicians, let me quote the GWPF press release:
So, yes. 🙂
Sorry for not responding to this earlier–I’ve been traveling and wanted to wait until I had a little more time to look at what I had posted in the past.
My blog post was discussing Tol’s JEP article as evidence against the idea that there was a scientific consensus on the catastrophic effect of global warming. Figure 1, which I showed, was the result of Tol’s meta-analysis of work that had been done at the time that article was published. Tol had corrected it because he discovered some mistakes in his calculations so I showed the figure with the original and corrected graphs.
Figure 2 shows the same calculations done later with additional data, most of which was not available when the original article was published. As you say, it shows a somewhat more negative effect–the upper end of the range goes negative just below two degrees. I probably should have mentioned that, but either one was consistent with my conclusion:
“Which I think is an adequate response to people who tell me that to deny catastrophic effects of warming is to ignore the scientific consensus.”
What I usually cite in more recent arguments is Figure 10-1 from the current IPCC report, which I believe corresponds to the point estimates on Figure 2 of the updated Tol article. For warming of up to 3°C, it shows an effect equivalent to a reduction in world income of zero to three percent (with one positive estimate below one degree). There is one estimate of about 12% for warming slightly above 3° and one at about 6% for warming of about 5.5°. Compare that to the popular claim that anything above two degrees (in some versions three) is catastrophe and must be stopped.
To put that in scale, the most pessimistic point on the figure is about 12% at about 3.2°. If we interpret that as the result of a century of warming–roughly three times the warming of the past century–it corresponds to a reduction in the rate of growth of world GNP of about a hundredth of a percentage point.
I recently came across a video that I think is very interesting. I don’t know if anyone here has heard of Jordan Peterson but this is him talking on a variety of subjects, especially religion from a Darwinian perspective. His discussion of gods reminds me of Meditations on Moloch in an extended sense. Would anybody be interested in discussing this? It is a long video and is splayed out on a lot of different subjects so it might be hard to focus.
Link
I would buy multiple copies of a book of the best posts of SSC and Jackdaws Ate…
I would help work to make this happen.
Has there been any discussion on this? Is there a reason Scott would be uninterested if other people did the work? (Maybe it would be more likely to have fallback on his irl identity)
I get the impression that our host tries hard to walk the knife-edge between satisfying his enjoyment of writing and avoiding the consequences of becoming too famous, so you may not have much luck there.
The Library of Scott Alexandria already exists. You can make as many copies of the file as you want.
Does it make sense to write stories in a different language than your mother tongue?
I used to write a bit as a kid, won some writing competition when I was 14 or so and I rather enjoy doing it. I am probably no Hemingway but I think I do have some basic talent and with some practice it could get relatively good. So I’ve been thinking about picking it up again, this time with a little more focus.
One thing I am not sure about is what language to use. There are only two sensible options for me – Czech or English. Czech has an obvious advantage in that it is my native language and I’ve read most fiction books in Czech (I think that does not hold for non-fiction books any more). The downside is that there are not all that many people who understand Czech.
Now, I have no grandiose aspirations to world fame – to the contrary, my ambition is just to eventually write relatively decent stuff and publish it online. And since the English speaking readership outnumbers the Czech speaking one by a factor of 100, it means that I’d get more people to read what I write and they could then give me useful feedback to help me improve. On the other hand, talking to people or writing a maths dissertation in English is one thing, writing short stories or even novels is another.
Does anyone here have experience with writing in a language that is not native to him but which he speaks fairly well? Is the result a lot worse than when you write in you mother tongue? Are there any other advantages or disadvantages of writing in one language or the other than I’m missing?
I think one can probably say a lot about the character of each language. English feels different from Czech and both have a different feeling than German or Spanish. Even bilingual (in the strict sense of learning two languages from early childhood and being equally fluent in both) people would write a little differently in each language. But that does not bother me particularly since I think that one has to be a really skilled writer to really put the differences in how the languages feel to a good use.
Well, Joseph Conrad wrote in his third language- he was a native Polish speaker, and had also learned French before learning English.
I know that Milan Kundera has been writing in French for some time, although it is also possible he is more fluent in French by now than he is in Czech.
Conrad may well have been more fluent in English than he was in Polish by the time he started writing- or at least more fluent in the colloquial English spoken by sailors than in its Polish equivalent, having lived outside Poland for a long time, much of which he spent as a seaman and officer on British merchant ships.
Note that he translated other writers’ work from Polish to English but not the other way- though his Polish was good enough to complain about the poor quality of the Polish translations of his work that appeared in his lifetime.
[On the tangent of English translations of writers of Polish origin: Adrian Czajkowski was born in England, writes in English and as far as I know speaks little or no Polish. He spells his name Tchaikovsky on the covers of his books to make it easier for English-speaking readers to remember. While he wanted to use Czajkowski on the Polish translations, they ended up being published under Tchaikovsky.]
But that’s the point. My English fluency is still not on the level of my Czech fluency,* hence I wonder whether it is not completely stupid to write in English.
*Actually, it is complicated. I have forgotten most non-basic (let’s say new than 1930s) terms in maths in Czech and nowadays there are often no equivalents for the English terms in other languages, since English dominates the academia, or at least the maths and sciences. In fact, it is easier for me to talk about maths in English than it is in Czech. There might be a few other areas where my fluency is better in English than in Czech or where they are about the same. But literary language is almost definitely not one of them. I also still make minor errors in English from time to time, although I think can notice almost all of them if I re-read what I write.
In addition to Joseph Conrad, some other famous examples are Vladimir Nabokov and Samuel Beckett. Interestingly, Beckett claimed that writing in French was an advantage because it was less fluid and resonant to him, whereas in English “you couldn’t help writing poetry in it”.
I guess I might give it a try and then decide based on the result. For example I could write a short story in English, translate it to Czech and if it turns out the English version is about equally good then it probably makes sense.
Beckett’s point is quite interesting. If you want to learn to write simply and to the point (which usually works better) then it might be a good idea to start writing in a language in which you don’t know as many fancy literary words.
It worked for Ayn Rand.
It probably depends on how smart you are, how fluently you can interact with (trusted) people of the other tongue you are in, and how well read you are in that other language.
Basic question, basic answer.
Another well-known example is Emil Cioran. But note that all these writers lived in countries where the target language was the language of everyday life, for most of their lives. (Oscar Wilde wrote a little bit in French, but didn’t live in France, and his French works are considered stylistically vastly inferior to his English ones.)
If you’re aiming at artistic value, of which style is an important part, I’d basically say forget it (it being English), given that you live in Germany and have read most of your fiction in Czech. If you want to write something less artistically serious, or in a genre were style is considered to be of subordinate importance (is that true in SF?), then the larger readership you get from English is probably the bigger factor.
Keep in mind, though, that a translated Czech version is most likely going to be inferior to what the story would have been like, had you written the original in Czech.
Good point (with the translation).
I am not sure if living in a country helps as much. Everyday conversation tends to be very simple and repetitive. Reading a lot of novels in English would probably be necessary though.
Hannu Rajaniemi is a native Finnish speaker and writes in English, seems to have worked out for him.
Tibor — you seem to write pretty good English to me. Perhaps full stories in English would inevitably include a few clunky spots because it isn’t your first language, but you just need a good editor for that. I would think the much vaster audience in English would be a slam dunk, unless you wanted to be read more in your home country.
Actually, I’m mostly thinking about my “first readers”. Almost all of my Czech friends speak English, none of my foreign friends do (although for most of them English is a second language). All of those people can provide a lot of valuable comments to help me improve and if I write in Czech some of them won’t understand what I write.
Since I generally find extremely poetic language in prose annoying, not knowing fancy literary words is probably such a big deal. On the other hand, you ideally want each character to be recognizable by the way she speaks. It helps to know a lot of idioms and colloquialisms to do that.
One example is the Good soldier Švejk. Švejk uses a lot of very specific words, a lot of which are not used in Czech anymore, most of which have an origin in the Austrian military of the early 20th century – words like officer’s batman in the thread above. Actually, it is worse than that since the proper words were in German and are not that uncommon but the Czech soldiers would use a “czechized” versions of those words in their banter (marškumpanie, feldkurát, óbrlajtnant,…all of those are basically German words with a Czech spelling). Even a modern Czech reader has to look some of the words up.
I guess Švejk is a very specific example and if I wanted to write something like that, I’d probably have to do some vocabulary research even if I decided to write in Czech. But I think it would still be easier for me to differentiate characters by the way they speak in Czech than in English. Well, I guess the best way to find out is really to try to write something (short) and see if it works.
I have a notion that authors who are good at differentiating characters by the way they talk start by listening attentively to the way people talk. They don’t just listen for meaning (translate what they hear into their own words, which I suspect is what I do), they hear the actual words– the rhythm and the vocabulary choices and probably other things I’m not thinking of.
@ Nancy
They don’t just listen for meaning (translate what they hear into their own words, which I suspect is what I do), they hear the actual words– the rhythm and the vocabulary choices and probably other things I’m not thinking of.
This doesn’t require actual people’s talk to listen to, which is full of ‘er’s and ‘um’s and starting over and talking over each other, etc. Trained speakers or film characters speak more clearly — perhaps unrealistically so. I’d suggest reading aloud some current fiction that has the same target audience you want, to get the swing of how it’s done with nothing but words on paper.
@Nancy, houseboat:
Good points, thanks. I think that Nancy was mostly talking about the different styles of speech. Those are distinct even if everyone adds the “ums”. I remember one professor from my bachelor who would almost always finish his statements with “pretty please”. He would say it a few dozen times each lecture. Of course, this was so overt (and rather strange) that it was really easy to spot it. But by being more attentive to how people speak, you can probably dig up a lot more.
One thing I just remembered about my English – I have a very vague idea about where to write commas, English seems to have a lot less clear rules in this respect than Czech or German (where the rules are pretty much the same). But I guess it this is not a huge obstacle as it should be quite easy to learn the rules (I haven’t bothered to do that so far…actually I am not 100% sure about all punctuation rules in Czech either)
@ Tibor
I have a very vague idea about where to write commas, English seems to have a lot less clear rules
I don’t remember the terms well, but there are two basic approaches to punctuation in English.
One is sound and breath. Our ‘period’, aka ‘full stop’, was a pause long enough to take a full breath. The other marks were mostly pauses of one length or another. Commas were sometimes also used for switch in melodic pitch; used by a Sri Lankan language, some British dialects, and US announcers on classical music FM stations in Mid-Twentieth century). Rand did this a lot (so reading aloud a passage from Atlas in my US Southern drawl was … not successful).
The other approach is textbook rules of grammar, based on the meaning of the words, or their structural placement, in each particular sentence.
Hopefully both approaches will agree on whether, and where, to put the commas in what you’re writing. The textbook grammar rules are disputed, contradictory, and full of epicycles. For some people, sound/rhythm is pretty clear, once you start listening for it in other people’s speech.
For practice in an election year, you might choose a politician whose speech and wriing stye you’d like to learn. Find a transcript of one of zis speeches, in a publication that will do a high qualiry transcription. Play the sound while reading along in the transcript, and notice how the punctuation marks correlate with the pauses and/or pitch changes.
Fwiw, my advice is to omit most commas that don’t have a clear reason. An unnecessary comma slows reading, distracts, and can look gratingly illiterate. (I use too many.) Lack of a comma just looks like a typo.
Though beware: lack of commas (or other punctuation) can result in a long sentence speeding past the reader before they can figure out what it says.
Watched the debate last night – I felt that Trump didn’t really get his points across, and that Clinton’s ‘laugh it off’ strategy seemed pretty effective. I mean, I kind of vaguely know about the scandals surrounding Clinton, and as such felt her strategy of shifting the blame onto Trump and Putin were slightly mad (“It doesn’t matter if I did these things, what matters is how I got found out”)but I’m pretty sure that if I were just a little less informed, or more plugged into the “Trump as devil” meme, I would have thought that Trump was just a complete conspiracy theory nut.
Even beyond that, Trump didn’t come across well to me, someone who tentatively supports many of his policies, especially when he was speaking at length about those policies.
Anyway, it got me thinking – George W Bush became President. And when I watched him speak it always provoked an intense feeling of rage within me. (I think it was the pace at which he spoke, seemingly designed for maximum irritation.)
So, perhaps my sense of what is a good speech or argument is out of tune with many people? Is Trump’s speaking style aimed at the George W Bush contingent? Did some people think it was good?
Speaking of irritation at someone’s speaking style, that’s the same feeling I got listening to Pence during the VP debate. There was something about that guy’s tone and style that came off as unusually sleezy and inauthentic, even more so than usual for “politician I don’t like.” Optimized for maximum irritation would be a good descriptor for it.
I had that reaction to John Edwards, both locally as a Senator and as a Presidential & VP candidate, back in the day, despite largely agreeing with him on policy grounds.
Now I’m trying to think who it was I listened to recently on youtube that struck me as having an ill-optimised speech pattern. They rush and murmur through what needs emphasis and elaboration, and loudly, clearly punctuate irrelevancies. I’ve had this where I’ve agreed with everything on paper prior, and still felt they fudged it.
Nuclear weapons came up at the debate. Maybe it’s just motivated reasoning but the more I think about it, the more I think Trump is actually the safer candidate on foreign policy. Yes, he is proposing a radical departure from the status quo but the status quo seems irrational. We’re agreeing to launch nuclear weapons to defend countries and maybe get blown up ourselves. Why? What is worth that risk? Trump has also identified the most dangerous threat to the United States, which is Russia. A more Russia-friendly policy sounds smart. Liberal commentators say ambiguity about the Baltic states is bad, but there’s ambiguity about the ambiguity. A more charitable interpretation is Trump would just kick the Baltic states out of NATO. I don’t understand what’s coming out of some of these Democratic-leaning think tanks, either. Supposedly, it’s more dangerous if, say, Japan gets nuclear weapons. I don’t see why. The UK has nuclear weapons. That doesn’t mean the UK is going to attack America. Japan using nukes on another country would be awful, but the US agreeing to potentially launch them to defend Japan is also risky. It’s not clear why one is worse than the other. Nuclear proliferation is bad in general but that’s because it’s a proxy for the real problem, the risk of using the nuclear weapons.
I agree with you.
I actually agree with Trump pretty strongly on lots of issues but he has a habit of putting his foot in his mouth and making reasonable stuff sound unreasonable. (This debate was a big example of that.) The media doesn’t help either.
An example: Everyone is kvetching about his “we’ll see” answer about accepting the election results. If he reframed his answer in terms of the 2000 election, I think a lot less people (media excluded) would be angry.
If I was running I would’ve framed my response along the lines of: “The integrity of the electoral process is very important, and when people lose faith in their electoral process, it should be taken very seriously. In 2000, we saw an election won by a very narrow margin, and the Gore campaign rightly raised the issue of the legitimacy of the election. With that in mind, we should take issues of voter fraud very seriously.”
But of course, he answered in a way that could be interpreted as anything from revolution to ignoring his voters.
I don’t think it’s “dangerous” if Japan gets nuclear weapons because I think Japanese leadership is fairly stable, unlike say Pakistan. However it’s likely unhelpful and would aggravate tensions with China and South Korea for no good reason. Perhaps a nuke-sharing agreement like the US has with the EU and Turkey would be somewhat better (but probably not).
And what about Saudi Arabia getting nukes? Most people would be terrified. Trump says “absolutely”.
And Kerry says maybe we’ll give them a nuclear umbrella.
From what I can tell, nuclear umbrella just means a nuclear country using it’s military to protect a non-nuclear state. Provocative to some degree but certainly not outside the status quo and not alarming enough compared to Saudi Arabia actually having nukes. This whole thing where Trump supporters tell me about how much more peaceful Trump is going to be than Clinton is probably the most bizarre aspect of this race.
The point of the nuclear umbrella is to encourage states to not develop nuclear weapons. Extending it to Saudi Arabia is an anti-proliferation move.
How would you stop Saudi Arabia getting nuclear weapons of its own? What pressure could you exert on them? If they said they felt their security depended on it, what could the USA realistically do about it – and what about “we’ll send our troops/drones in if you choose to do this”, is that a possible threat?
I absolutely do not want Saudi Arabia to get nukes, I absolutely think IF Trump is thinking of helping them or not standing in their way it’s a dreadful idea*, but how are you going to stop them, given that American policy to date has been to try every avenue to keep them as an ally? Perhaps what Trump meant was “If they go ahead and get their own nukes, at least if we help them, we’ll have some input and some control over it rather than letting them do it on their own”.
*I’m not at all sure what exactly he meant by the answer to those questions in that interview; it sounded more like he was saying “Yeah, if they get nukes, why not?” rather than “I’m going to give them nukes when I’m president”.
Saudi Arabia isn’t Japan, Germany, or South Korea. Those countries just need to decide they want to build one and having done so it would be near trivial given their scientific, technological, and scientific capacities.
The Saudis are in a position more like Iran where they’d have to import a great deal of the know-how and fiddly parts. That importation process is something that can be slowed down by external powers if probably not stopped altogether.
That importation process is something that can be slowed down by external powers if probably not stopped altogether.
But Saudi Arabia is a Western ally, not a presumed hostile state like Iran. How are you going to meddle in the internal affairs of a sovereign nation that is an ally, by stopping them importing know-how and parts?
That’s where the nitty-gritty of the matter lies, and where things start to unravel: either it’s made explicit that the West sucks up to the Saudis because of oil, influence in the region, and not wanting to piss them off and drive them to something more extreme than merely tolerating and promoting Wahhabism, or the gloves come off and Saudi Arabia is now an enemy or presumed hostile state and sanctions are imposed – have fun with that, the London property market won’t be very happy!
By ending the alliance, among other things. My own expertise is in East Asian nonproliferation rather than Middle Eastern, but it seems to be universally understood that the US alliance with South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan is contingent on their not attempting to build nuclear weapons of their own and vanishes immediately if they do. I cannot imagine that, particularly in this post-frakking world, our alliance with the House of Saud is stronger than that with Japan.
Most nations seem to believe that a strong alliance with the United States is a better defense than whatever sort of nuclear arsenal they can cobble together in isolation.
This is actually really important. There’s a lot more to a nuclear deterrent than just the devices themselves, and to some extent, they are the easy part. The hard part is maintaining security and control when you have them dispersed and ready to respond. Outsourcing that to the US is really sensible, if you can trust the US to respond. Our current administration has damaged that trust badly.
@ John Schilling
Israel certainly doesn’t.
South Korea and Taiwan both have a particular situation where they may be subject to an overwhelming conventional attack and the US (conventional) firepower is a better bet than a suicidal nuking.
Japan has a certain history with nuclear weapons.
UK and France have nuclear arsenals, Germany doesn’t for obvious reasons, and there doesn’t seem to be any point for other Western European countries to have them.
As to the strong alliance with the US, well, Philippines just told the US that it doesn’t need it any more : -/
“Our current administration has damaged that trust badly.”
How so?
@sweeneyrod
Their constant bungling in Syria springs to mind. The fact that they let the Russians move in and run the show despite talking a lot, and specifically the ‘red lines’ on chemical weapon use that didn’t actually get enforced.
@bean
OK, I agree, I thought you were talking specifically about nukes.
Israel got a unique deal where they can have an alliance with the United States and a nuclear arsenal, so long as they never openly test a nuclear weapon.
Britain and France owe their thermonuclear arsenals, at least, to deliberate US assistance as a way of establishing a sort of political triad – even if e.g. the Russians can neutralize the US government by putting a Russian mole in the White House, there are three independent western leaders who can turn any Russian bid for world conquest into a game of Global Thermonuclear War.
Pretty much everybody else signed the nonproliferation treaty, which rules out that sort of favoritism unless the US is willing to see the entire nonproliferation regime collapse.
Even then, it hasn’t always been smooth sailing for them. During McNamara’s tenure at the DoD, he tried to put together the MLF as a political weapon against those forces, because he was concerned that they might fly off the handle and start a nuclear war by themselves. (That makes little sense, I know. Welcome to McNamara’s DoD.)
We’ve been through this. Trump did not say Saudi Arabia should have nuclear weapons. He was asked two questions (one about Saudi Arabia and one about nuclear weapons) in a kind of an interview shorthand, and answered the one about Saudi Arabia with “absolutely”:
http://cnnpressroom.blogs.cnn.com/2016/03/29/full-rush-transcript-donald-trump-cnn-milwaukee-republican-presidential-town-hall/
TRUMP: At some point we have to say, you know what, we’re better off if Japan protects itself against this maniac in North Korea, we’re better off, frankly, if South Korea is going to start to protect itself, we have…
COOPER: Saudi Arabia, nuclear weapons?
TRUMP: Saudi Arabia, absolutely.
COOPER: You would be fine with them having nuclear weapons?
TRUMP: No, not nuclear weapons, but they have to protect themselves or they have to pay us.
Yes, I’m aware that in the previous conversation there was the strange interpretation that the moderator was asking two questions on whether Saudi Arabia should be allowed to protect itself and whether it should have nukes. But since no one is saying Saudi Arabia shouldn’t be able to use conventional military means to protect itself it’s obvious the question was about nukes in particular. The fact that Trump contradicts himself two sentences later isn’t any less terrifying. If you watch the interview it’s obvious Cooper wasn’t asking a new question but restating the previous question. Combine that with his statement about the inevitability of Saudi nukes and it takes a significant contortion of logic to suggest any other interpretation.
This seems more like miscommunication than Trump contradicting himself. “Saudi Arabia, nuclear weapons?” is not even a proper sentence.
There are persistent rumors among those who follow such things that the Saudis bankrolled Pakistan’s nukes, and that if the Saudis want them, they just have to call. It saves them the bother of having their own nuclear program, and keeps the political heat off. And that would make a lot of sense of their ballistic missile program, too. The recent announcement that they’re going for their own nukes is probably a reaction to the global breakdown of the NPT.
Hm – I was thinking “You can’t really stop the Saudis from getting their hands on the tech, after all, they can always call up Pakistan as a fellow Muslim nation for aid”. I hadn’t heard rumours of paying for Pakistan’s programme and that seems a little conspiracy theory to me, but then again, everything we’re hearing sounds like conspiracy theory.
I don’t understand why where the nuclear weapons are matters. Right now, Japan is under the US umbrella, so if Japan gets attacked there is a prospect of the US launching nukes. Does this also aggravate tensions?
The difference is who is deciding whether to launch the nukes. There is a world of difference between how Korea and China see Japan and how they see America, as evidenced by the continuous tensions over WWII memory.
Similarly, imagine the US announcing it would retaliate on Croatia’s behalf if nuclear weapons were used against it, versus giving Croatia a few nukes to hang on to. Which scenario worries Serbia more?
(Another difference can be how secure the country is perceived to be – e.g. the worries about theft of nuclear materials in ex-Soviet countries. This applies less to Japan, probably).
Additionally, on a scale from no provocation to Chinese boots on the ground in Tokyo, Japan launch a nuclear attack before the US do. And given the potentially very high numbers of deaths from nuclear war, even a very small increase in its probability is worth worrying about.
I mean, who cares if Cuba has nukes.
Right now, the expectation is that if Japan gets attacked with nuclear weapons, there is the prospect of the US launching nukes.
If Japan has nuclear weapons, the expectation is that if Japan gets attacked with nuclear weapons, or if Japan gets attacked with conventional weapons, or if Japan decides to recreated the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, there is the prospect of Japan launching nukes. And no matter how silly you might think the prospect of a renewed Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity sphere might be, there are plenty of people in East Asia who take it seriously – some of whom already have nuclear weapons, others who will acquire them in response to such a threat.
This greatly increases the number of potential misunderstandings that could lead someone with a nuclear arsenal to believe “Well, OK, nuclear war is now inevitable, and our last, best hope is to get there first”. So, yes, greatly aggravated tensions.
I admit you folks are right.
That being said, I no longer feel like alliances are the main issue. I don’t get the feeling alliances are the big determinants of whether a nuclear war happens. The main reasons many countries haven’t gotten nuclear weapons are that they’re expensive and we haven’t had much war so they haven’t felt threatened enough to spend the money.
Steven Pinker says war has declined, not because of nuclear deterrence but because of democracy, trade and international organizations. It’s clear Trump is more against those than Clinton, so I concede Trump’s policies would more likely lead to wars.
On the other hand …
Whatever the U.S. might promise, if the Russians were seriously considering an invasion of Germany they might reasonably doubt whether the U.S. would risk nuclear destruction by intervening. They would have less doubt as to whether the Germans, if German was a nuclear power, would.
Also, it’s worth noting that there is, has been for quite a long time, a pair of nuclear armed countries that are enemies of each other outside the U.S./Russian conflict. Neither India nor Pakistan has used nuclear weapons nor, so far as one can tell, threatened to use them.
@David Friedman:
I would think that it’s much harder for Germany to have a credible MAD deterrent to a Russian first strike than the US.
From that standpoint it’s best to have the bulk of the nukes very spread out and far way from each other.
This was a very common sentiment 103 years ago, too. We all know how that worked out.
@bean There were many alliances before WWI also. Obviously it didn’t prevent, and probably it provoked, the war. We haven’t had many wars lately. What’s your theory for why?
Considering the Pinker quote he responded to, presumably his theory is that it’s because of nuclear deterrence.
@AlexS
There were many alliances before WWI also. Obviously it didn’t prevent, and probably it provoked, the war. We haven’t had many wars lately. What’s your theory for why?
Anonymous nailed it. Nuclear weapons raised the cost of war too high for anyone to be willing to pay it. Alliances just meant that a lot of people didn’t have to pay for their own weapons programs. (In the grand scheme of things, this is probably a good thing. The US is really, really good at building and deploying nuclear weapons. Others aren’t, which means they’re more likely to use them.)
It is not just the nuclear deterrent that distinguishes the modern pax from the conditions prior to WWI. Political boundaries are now treated as sacrosanct by the international community, even if it is some backwater African nation. Freezing the borders, and de-legitimizing any conquest of land (including colonization) have eliminated much of the appeal of war. Something like France seizing the Ruhr for debt reparations would be unthinkable today, even though it was condoned between the World Wars.
That is why Russia annexing territory, and Israel forcefully annexing the West Bank, are so unconscionable. If those types of actions are normalized again it undermines peace for everyone. Toppling a country’s leaders and installing a puppet government would be better for international order than brazenly stealing 10% of their territory. The former can be repaired once a legitimate government comes to power. The latter will create feuds that could last for several generations if not centuries.
@bean Maybe Pinker is wrong and nuclear weapons have deterred war but Trump’s foreign policy is more hawkish than Clinton’s, except for Russia policy and maybe alliances. The effect of alliances now seems less important to me. By itself, Russia policy does not seem enough to tip the balance. Trump is the more warlike candidate.
“This was a very common sentiment 103 years ago, too.”
Indeed, Kipling wrote an excellent poem on that theme.
The status quo has kept us alive for over 50 years. Everyone knows the rules. It would be foolish and arrogant to disrupt that equilibrium without expecting negative consequences.
The status quo: it _would_ be foolish to disrupt that equilibrium?
India, Pakistan and Israel posses nuclear weapons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_with_nuclear_weapons
Israel has 200 nuclear weapons “all targeted on Tehran,” so Iran would not dare use a bomb even if it could make one, former Secretary of State Colin Powell said in a 2015 email, which has surfaced as part of a hacking scandal.
https://www.rt.com/usa/359609-israel-nukes-powell-state/
I’m sceptical about N. Korea having real atomic weapons, because my friend a nuclear physicist is very sceptical of it.
Why is your friend skeptical? Nuclear explosives are a 70+ year old technology, and the DPRK has been operating nuclear reactors since the 1960s, so they’re not exactly coming at a nuclear weapons program from complete scratch.
What grounds does he have for skepticism? I will agree that the Norks have exaggerated their progress (they had a couple of fizzles that they claimed full yield on), but it’s hard to sustain the claim that they don’t have a bomb.
Nuclear weapons are at this point an engineering problem; the physics is well understood and within reach of anyone who has either a breeder reactor or an enrichment cascade (the DPRK has both). And, since it seems to be very important to the North Korean government that the rest of the world understand that they have nuclear weapons, what would it take for them to convince you?
They’ve done multiple underground tests whose seismic signatures indicate roughly Hiroshima-sized nuclear explosions. And they’ve openly tested rockets and missiles that could carry nuclear warheads anywhere from a few hundred to ten thousand kilometers. What more do they need to prove? Your position strikes me as roughly equivalent to saying, “I double-dog dare you to put a nuclear weapon onto a rocket and launch it somewhere! Until you do that, everyone will be laughing at you!”
This strikes me as a very bad idea, and I’d rather not encourage it.
I basically agree with this. In a complex system, sudden major shifts are essentially by nature risky. I think you have to make a very strong argument about why the status quo is an active threat to take that sort of risk. And the virtue of charity is very helpful but doesn’t mean ‘give massive power to someone on a v optimistic reading of his statements’ (even if you think deserting the Balkan states is sensible/moral, and that doing so won’t shatter NATO)
Do you mean the Baltic states? Or is Putin now sabre-rattling in the direction of Romania, Serbia, Bulgaria etc as well?
Or is Putin now sabre-rattling in the direction of Romania, Serbia, Bulgaria etc as well?
I know that’s not seriously meant but oh lord, we don’t need the resurgence of Pan-Slavic Nationalism! This is how we got into trouble with the First World War! 🙁
Not entirely meant unseriously – it’s entirely possible that there have been rumblings from the Kremlin in that direction and I just haven’t been watching the news.
Though it might also be a good idea not to give this guy command of an army 🙂
Can confirm for my country. It’s been all over the news recently. The Russian ambassador has been apparently pointlessly (!) antagonizing us every few weeks, there are reports that Crimea* is getting loaded full of armament in excess of what they would need for defense (including maybe stuff that can transport nuclear warheads, I don’t remember exactly), and we’ve been watching the US election like hawks, no pun intended; it always comes up in debates regarding foreign affairs with Russia. They’ve been making a lot of noise regarding our recent defense initiatives such as the Deveselu air base (defensive purpose – anti-missile), or military exercises in the Black Sea. The most chilling news title I’ve seen recently was, “The Romanian Army is recruiting.”
* After annexation, Crimea is the closest Russian territory to us now, a mere 443 km from Constanta (an important port city) and 636 km from Bucharest. I don’t doubt that this particular perk has come up in the decision to invade it.
Romania absolutely depends on its NATO membership for survival and the ability to conduct its own affairs. Our own armed forces are puny, obsolete, and desperately short on manpower. The closest nation that can reasonably count as an ally is Poland; the immediately adjacent nations are emphatically not friends, the least of all Hungary, with its recent hard-right, anti-Western turn. Ukraine is in the mess that we all know it is in. Moldova is, as our foreign policy experts recently claimed, basically a failed state rife with internal divisions and harboring a significant Russian or pro-Russian demographic. Romanian nationalists are clamoring for the reunification of Greater Romania (unification with Moldova), but that’s a whole bag of trouble and conflict with the Kremlin that I don’t think we can afford right now. Unsure about Serbia and Bulgaria, but some suspect they’d be quicker to align with Russia if pressed. Turkey is two national borders removed from us, but since it’s an important NATO southern front that has recently succumbed to dictatorship and a closer relationship with Russia (and an increasingly shaky one with NATO and the West), it comes up in our foreign policy concerns too. If NATO cannot count on the support of Turkey, its geostrategic role within NATO falls partially on us. I hear there’s been talk of moving the nukes from Incirlik on Romanian territory if the situation in Turkey worsens.
If Trump wins and succeeds in his stated intention of withdrawing NATO support from Eastern European nations that Putin is eyeing, we’re over. I live in Bucharest and am reading the NWSS. Come November 9, in the event of a Trump win, I’m torn between fleeing the country and joining the army, so at least I don’t get caught in with the conscripts, if the policy is to be reintroduced, because you can damn well bet that the question of that will be raised. We’re fucking scared. Please don’t fuck us over and elect that imbecile.
I get that people here speak with disdain of foreigners “intruding on our domestic affairs” and, moreover, that there are people here who would gleefully turn us into cannon fodder because we’re far away and don’t matter and anyway it’s to be expected in international relations for there to be losers. There are even folks who can justify that on utilitarian grounds; there are only ~18 million of us at risk of dying in a war or capitulating to a dictatorship, while there are many more tens of millions of Americans who want to put up their middle finger at the establishment. I don’t know what I can say to you. You fancy yourselves a smart and rational bunch and yet want to elect a total troll and buffoon to the highest office, whose foreign policy is just completely out of left field in a matter of life and death for rather reliable allies.
@Romanianon,
Non-rhetorical question:
What do you think would be a better option?
Right now, the West is looking at a slow death by immigration and suppressed native fertility. Clinton is the frog-boiling candidate, much like Merkel in Germany. And we’re approaching the point where the white vote doesn’t add up to enough to reverse that short of a full-blown civil war.
If you’re right, then electing Trump is a fast death. Stopping Trump makes sense if you think his policies are apocalyptically dangerous (even if just for one mostly-Western nation). It doesn’t fix the underlying problem but it buys time for someone else to do it.
But what do you want to do with that bought time? You don’t like Hungary’s answer, since it’s too far-right. And the mainstream sources don’t have an answer, since they’re actively in favor of the problem.
Bulgaria was let into the EU for the literal reason that people feared it drifting towards Russia too much, so it’s not even so much ‘now’ as it is ‘all the time’.
Nonsense.
[citation needed]
DrDealgood: Are you fucking kidding me?
I interpret this just as though someone put a gun to my head, saying, well, death comes for all of us eventually, now’s a good a time as any to die.
What the hell do you mean, what to do with that bought time? How about living, breathing, existing? I don’t care a fig for the white race when the sacrificial victims for its SUPPOSED rescue from the SUPPOSED danger it is in, are me and mine and our way of life. So excuse me if by recoiling from certain death and/or defeat I fail to do my part in securing the existence of [y]our people and a future for white children, although as far as I’m concerned I’m doing exactly that. By the way, not that it should matter, but apparently to you it does, so let me mention that Romania is an overwhelmingly white country (do you know how many black people are there in here? Hundreds of them! Hundreds! and upstanding citizens too) and no US election is able to change that. But look at all the good it does us, to be so white. Behold the grandeur of the master race, in the squalid villages and Molochian Soviet urban landscapes, in the national IQ average of 91 that the HBDer Lynn ascribed to us (you can do the statistical gymnastics yourself, to blame it all on the gypsy minority, go ahead).
As such, in one of the possible Trumpian alternatives, we’d have an invasion war which may or may not involve a nuke over my city, I don’t know, we can’t retaliate, and then whoever will be left is going to be a very white populace in a satellite state ruled by a very white Kremlin, and the women will all be at home barefoot and pregnant with their 13th child by their 31st birthday like in Niger but of course with racially better progeny (if the fallout doesn’t get to them too much) (gotta keep those white birth rates up), and the journalists that badmouth the illiberal government get poisoned with radioactive material. Why on earth would I prefer that? Just how many people do you think my collectivist sensibilities span?
You know, if you just said, “fuck you, it’s our election, you don’t matter, the US is the superpower and it rules as it pleases”, I could have understood that. But to tell me I shouldn’t be weighing my survival heavily in this because White Race is, frankly, bizarre and abhorrent.
tl;dr your white nationalist pipe dream isn’t worth our lives, our nation, and our West-oriented liberalism
@Dr Dealgood
Have you considered that trying to prevent immigration and increase native fertility might be a sucker’s game, and perhaps we should go back to our historical strength of _converting_ the immigrants to western ways?
@Romanianon
Seems to me that war between the US and Russia is a lot more likely (though extremely unlikely still) in a Hillary Clinton administration than a Donald Trump administration)
The racial essentialist love affair with Russia has always mystified me. Western nations are labeled “culturally suicidal” for admitting immigrants based on a highly suspect chain of cause-and-effect that depends on extrapolating current demographic trends across multiple centuries and also assuming no assimilation takes place within that time.
But Russia is committing cultural suicide right now. They have one of the highest HIV/AIDS rates outside of sub-Saharan Africa, suffer from rampant alcoholism, drug abuse, and violent crime, and their state is a paranoid, Chekist kleptocracy with a dwindling economy and no freedom of expression. And even if you want to ooga-booga about Muslims, they already have the same Muslim population (~10%) that Europe is projected to have by 2050.
Even assuming that’s true, it’s cold comfort for Romanianon if Russian tanks roll in and install another Ceaușescu because they are confident Trump won’t intervene.
This applies to everything about Russia. After reading a book on the Russian Revolution, my comment was that God created Russia to keep political scientists humble. This can be generalized to other domains. Russia is a terrible place that should be a third-rate power and ignored by everyone, and yet it somehow continues to be a big deal. It makes a lot more sense if you just assume that Russia is for some reason contrarian-land.
@ Romanianon,
While I think that Dealgood’s doom-saying is premature I honestly can’t tell if whether you are parodying fascist rhetoric or genuinely invoking it.
@ everyone else
I’m in general agreement with Nybbler, unfortunately I think that modern identity politics makes this effectively impossible so sooner or later something will have to give.
Thinking of Russia as weird contrarian-land does indeed simplify things.
TheNybbler: Yeah, but the thing is that the US actually has a chance of winning that one. One report said that there are more Russian tanks concentrated in the Donbass (I think) in Ukraine than all of Western Europe owns together, it utterly blows us out of the water. I’m kind of getting alt-history WWII vibes from this, “what if the US remained uninvolved?” scenario. Suppose America stands passive and lets Putin wave his dick all across Europe, and sure enough, it is itself at shelter from direct involvement in a war, but what does this entail? Does Trump imagine that International Relations are a Buddies4Lyfe kinda deal? Will the tempest not come knocking on America’s doorstep, instead of leaving you folks free to bomb ISIS into glass or whatever their military strategy elsewhere will be?
Foreign and military policy is too high-stakes and complicated to be judged simply in terms of mere forecasts of warmongering, “mushroom cloudy with a 75% chance of missiles”, and sometimes not engaging in military action is worse than the alternative.
hlynkacg: That’s the first time anyone has directed that accusation at me, and I’m sorry if it sounds overly aggressive, and I’m definitely sorry if it borders on fascist, but like I said. Fucking scared. High risk, nothing to do against it. Adrenaline up, hysterics up, rationality down.
Can you tell me precisely how I should tone it down? The rhetoric, I mean. Not the rationality.
@ Romanianon
You sound like you believe you have a right to be protected from the nasty Russian bear by the US power. Why?
For most Americans who even heard of your country, it’s the place where the song Dragostea Din Tei and a lot malware comes from. Why should the US spend its political capital and potentially the lives of its soldiers to protect you?
oh, here we go, this kind of snark did make a late arrival though Lumifer: Oh, well, I don’t know, alliances, treaties, stuff. I wouldn’t even be complaining on the internet if we weren’t in NATO, I’d just quietly pack my bags. How much is the American word worth?
Ask Ukraine.
But the real point is that both NATO and Putin see you as a pawn in a geopolitical game. Your value is being a chunk of land of some strategic usefulness in the sumo wrestling of the giants. So the question is do you see yourself as having some other value to the West? In which way are you useful other than as some real estate to plop down a missile base on?
Remind me again when was it that Ukraine became a full NATO member.
@ Romanianon
If you don’t like the answer, don’t ask the question : -P
Ukraine, as you probably know, has been given certain “security assurances” when it agreed to give up its nuclear weapons in the aftermath of the collapse of the USSR.
And, of course, if you fully believe the NATO guarantees there is absolutely no reason for you to worry, is there?
Those security assurances explicitly and intentionally fell short of a guarantee of military defense. This is not so with NATO.
@hlynkacg
Out of the two people in that conversation, you think the one who isn’t worrying about the destruction of the white race sounds fascist?
@Romanianon,
The reason why I specifed non-rhetorical was to get an actual answer, seems like I did. “Westward Ho!” isn’t a great one imo but conventional in Europe.
I have my own family in Germany, no love lost for Putin or Russia, and no interest in war nuclear or otherwise. That’s why I’m sympathetic to the “Trump is unstable” argument… as long as it’s paired to an actual game plan for the US and EU to stop digging the holes we’re in.
But full steam ahead is not terribly compelling. As much as you want to save Romania, I don’t want to see America and Germany continue to decline.
Anyway, I wish you the best personally. If it makes you feel any better, Trump will very likely lose in November.
This is some pretty good writing.
@ Anonymous Bosch
So what did they mean? What particular kind of security did they assure?
Saddam thought he had the green light to invade Kuwait without US military repercussion, which led to a massive US military presence in Islamic lands that continues to this day.
The signals Russia is getting from the Trump campaign are far more encouraging than what Saddam relied on.
Straight from the text:
Is this guarantee utterly useless in the context of Russia’s veto power? Obviously. But they’ve also provided pretty much every kind of assistance you can think of short of a protective military incursion, including tough economic sanctions of Russia, diplomatic expulsion from the G8, economic aid and intelligence-sharing for Ukraine, etc.
Since the agreement was designed to be just short of a mutual defense guarantee, providing aid just short of military defense seems fair. NATO, on the other hand, is explicitly a mutual defense guarantee. Such half-measures would clearly and unambiguously nullify NATO in a way they didn’t nullify the Budapest Memorandum.
This is no better than the AI monster people. Spending time on SCC with its “rationalists” and “rationalist-adjacents” has made me come to appropriate how lucky I am to have not been born with paranoid tendencies.
The key is bolded. Russia hasn’t used or threatened nukes. I’d agree that we’d be justified giving more help than we have (and we should have given it, too), but there’s at least a plausible escape hatch in the last clause of that sentence.
Does the “nuclear weapons are used” part apply to just the threat clause or the aggression clause as well? I honestly can’t tell from the quote, so if that is verbatim it’s bad phrasing.
Like saying “Call the cops if someone hurts you or threatens you with a gun”–well, they hit me with a baseball bat, should I call the cops?
@Dr Dealgood:
You say “suppressed”. Who exactly is doing this suppressing? The global pattern appears to be that, when people (especially women) have the choice and the means, they tend to have fewer and fewer kids, to below replacement rate usually. No suppression required.
@ Romanianon
I don’t blame you for emotions running high. I sympathize.
That said I think you really need to go back and reread both Dealgood’s initial reply and your response to it.
you say;
and then turn around and say;
Do you see the irony?
Any war between the US and Russia regardless of initial cause, will involve a fair number of casualties, and those casualties are going to come from a certain subset of the US population. The US military, especially the combat arms, is overwhelmingly rural, working class, and Southern. It’s not Clinton or Obama’s kids getting deployed to war zones. It’s the people who are currently rooting for Trump.
You need to convince the coal-miners from Kentucky and the preacher’s kids from Alabama that they ought to throw themselves in front of a Russian tank to save you, but your post reads like someone grabbed an Italian newspaper editorial from the 1930s and ran a simple find/replace script on it.
It’s not helping your cause.
@dndnrsn
If you know anything about Dealgood’s posting history you should know very well who he considers the bad guys (err gals) in this story.
In most cases misogynist isn’t a great word for those that oppose feminism. But in some cases …
@hlynkacg I assume their vision of this does not actually involve war with Russia. The two situations they see before them are, Clinton, NATO respected, Russia does nothing. Trump, USA withdraws from NATO, Russia invades their country. Either way no war with the USA.
In this context, this is saying something more like ‘ sorry if I don’t do my part by dying, to protect you from the race…..race(?)’ thing that Dr Dealgood thinks we are losing in the west. They feel like Dr Dealgood is asking them to die for a made up cause, I understand why they would be upset.
As was pointed out to me recently by John Schilling, we promised Ukraine pretty much nothing in return for giving up their weapons. The “security assurances” were apparently understood by all parties as not imposing any real obligation.
@ 2stupid4SSC
Granted, and as I said above I both sympathize with Romanianon’s position and think that Dr Dealgood is being overly pessimistic.
That said, we do have a problem. I don’t want to rehash the last two election threads but at the same time I don’t think it’s all that controversial to say that a large chunk (if not most) of Trump’s support stems from the fact that the rural working class is sick of being used as scapegoats & cannon fodder and is starting to get uppity about it.
So the question stands.
How do you convince, the coal-miners from Kentucky to make sacrifices for a people not their own?
You’re making a big leap from Trump to to “rural working class is sick of being used as scapegoats & cannon fodder.” If what you are saying is true, I’d expect to see it in military recruiting numbers.
Anything doing there?
I don’t think it’s much of a leap at all. Nor would I expect to see it reflected in recruitment numbers (at least not yet) as the US military generally turns away more applicants than it takes in peace time.
Like I said, I’m not in the mood to rehash the last two election threads but you’re free to check them out yourself. Or alternately read Scott’s Three Great Articles on Poverty and Why I Disagree With Them in conjunction with Cracked’s How Half of America Lost It’s %&^ing Mind!
@Anonymous
The US Army is currently in a massive drawdown, and is now at its smallest size since 1939. They’ll be cutting another 25,000 in headcount within the next two years.
Recruiters ain’t real worried right now, but that’s more a function of the Army not wanting them to find a lot of people.
I’ve seen no evidence, or even a decent argument for the proposition, that they need to be worried in the near or medium term either.
…and?
And you are full of shit. If and when another war happens, pretty much any war, the usual suspects will sign up in droves to prove how macho they are. When that fades they’ll stick around for what is, despite the whining to the contrary, very good compensation.
Billy-Bob isn’t Atlas and he isn’t shrugging.
Ahh yes, I thought I detected your stench in the previous reply.
BillyBob may not be shrugging (yet), but he is voting Trump.
Yes, that’s true. But your extension from that to a larger phenomenon that will dramatically change history is just wishful thinking.
You’re quite prone to confusing what you hope will happen with what is likely to happen. Might want to work on calibration.
If it wouldn’t take to much time away from polluting comment threads with one word comments that is.
In the wake of Romney’s 2012 defeat, myself and quite a few others (most notably the folks at Instapundit) predicted that a populist demagogue would run away with the nomination in 2016 if the GOP leadership didn’t start taking immigration, and the declining rural QOL seriously. I’d say current events have born that out.
What was it you said to me in one of our early encounters? Something to the effect of “I’d gladly see your culture destroyed, and you dead in a ditch if that’s what it takes for me and mine to live in comfort“. If you’re really that eager to fight a class war why don’t you stop sending nasty emails and start sending letter bombs?
If anyone here needs to work on their calibration, it’s you.
Edit: Removed unnecessary insults.
The caned good and ammunition manufacturers appreciate your continued faith.
I can think of far far worse people to be appreciated by.
Beans are delicious, and shooting an excellent way to relieve stress. 😉
how did bay area immigrant hlynkacg get to be the tribune of the redneck people?
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Ingroup-outgroup-fargroup mechanics. Rednecks are being shat on by hlynka’s outgroup, so he defends them.
I would take this more seriously if I thought our alliances were limiting attacks on the US. Trump is proposing a radical change to something but it may not be the biggest reason peace has lasted. This raises the question of what has been preventing nuclear war all this time. Maybe it’s just that many states don’t want nuclear weapons because they don’t face any imminent threats and the weapons are too expensive.
On the Baltics, I agree you need to take into account the pessimistic reading, but the discussion I’ve seen only takes into account the pessimistic reading and ignores the charitable reading. The Baltic states are a liability, so if they can be simply booted from NATO, that’s good.
I don’t think NATO would survive ejecting the Baltics. It’s hard to see a principled formulation that papers over “we’re prepared to extend Article 5 guarantees to any member country not under threat of needing them– though there’s some unspecified subset we’d probably actually fight for rather than withdraw from”. Which countries are the real tripwire and which the pretend ones we’ll throw out if the Russians express interest would be up in the air, whether or not the formal organization persisted.
(Which is exactly the sort of war-courting uncertainty that NATO is designed to avoid by its clear “in or out” criterion.)
You must be American.
The Baltic states are not only model “good neighbors” here in Europe, they work really hard to be because they hated the Soviet yoke. They want and always wanted to be counted as part of Northern Europe like Denmark or whatever, and have that same standard of life. Also they’re members of the EU in good standing. If they were fucked over by NATO, it would destabilize the entire European arrangement and also be the worst kind of betrayal toward people who are strongly turned toward the West, which won’t look good for making friends in that region in the future.
Sure, maybe you think they’d be an acceptable short-term sacrifice to avoid the US getting entangled with Russia, but the amount of fuckery unleashed by anything of that sort would be incalculable and really bad for America as well in the medium to long term. If there’s any real chance of Trump doing anything like that, that’s the best argument I’ve ever heard for voting Hillary.
Are you saying NATO can only expand and never shrink, or it will collapse? Their being in NATO presents a weak spot of uncertainty even under a Clinton presidency, since they are on the Russian border and have a significant Russian population. Also, Russia has apparently been lowering its threshold for using nuclear weapons because a defense of the Baltics could provide cover for attacking the city of Moscow, which Russia’s conventional forces might be too weak to defend. The Baltics are not worth the risk of all-out nuclear war.
It can shrink through something like when France chose to leave, which obviously wasn’t related to a direct threat from an adversary. But no, I don’t think it can unilaterally kick out members it’s agreed to defend (and vice versa) under threat without NATO becoming a paper tiger. At best, we could dissolve it and organize the new, “real” western alliance with whatever countries we’re actually willing to participate in a defense agreement with.
Even there, the brinksmanship threshold necessary proving the new alliance’s bona fides would be substantially higher, since the natural presumption would be that we don’t really mean it if push comes to shove this time either.
What the hell Russian propaganda have you been reading? The Ethnic Russian population of the Baltic states has been almost cut in half since the Soviet Union fell, and they’re the direct product of the Baltic region being forcibly annexed by the Soviets in the first place, so any problems they might have are the fault of Russia, if they’re any existing nation’s fault. Trying to fix it with even more Russian imperialism is as backwards as possible.
As for the border, their sum total border’s something like a quarter of the length of Finland’s. (In fact, Lithuania doesn’t even have a border against Russia except the small Kaliningrad niche — which is admittedly a problem region, but only for the reason that Russia really shouldn’t have that territory.) Does that make Finland fair game too? It’s not even a NATO member.
The simple fact is that the only thing causing any uncertainty in Eastern Europe is Ivan getting uppity again. Yes, it’s regrettable that the bear has nukes. No, that doesn’t mean that caving is the best #1 no-flaws plan. You’re pretty much advocating that if anything should happen, we precommit to a Chamberlainesque appeasement plan. Because that worked so well last time, right? Eventually, that’ll just lead to the other guy consuming everything until he hits something you actually do feel obliged to defend with nuclear force, and by that point you’ll be more likely to have to use them since you’ve already demonstrated weakness extensively.
The alternatives are to defend NATO countries with conventional arms as NATO treaties specify, or to just crumble and let power-hungry dictators use the threat of thermonuclear war to conquer the world — a strategy which in itself won’t likely stop thermonuclear war, since now everyone can see it’s successful AND your own nuclear stockpiles are in the hands of someone who saw how effective the threat strategy was. You don’t like brinksmanship? Maybe don’t act to leave it in the hands of warmongering lunatics.
I suspect the key question relating to that is, did Simo Häyhä have any kids?
Uhh….
How does this square with North Korea being able to afford the things? They have about the same GDP as Afghanistan. They’re politically expensive, not fiscally expensive. Yes, it’s obvious that if anyone could build them in their garage, they’d be more widespread, but the Nork bomb is proof that it’s not actually that expensive if you’re not optimizing for speed. The only nuclear development program that is well-known is the Manhattan Project, which was run with basically no attention paid to cost and every emphasis on speed.
They can’t. There’s no provision for removing countries from NATO outside of a voluntary exit, so in practice it would require unanimous consent. Obviously the Baltics would block any move to eject each other (as would Poland, Romania, etc.)
We could probably expel them de facto by publicly renouncing our obligation to defend them. But that would likely be the end of NATO. I’m not of the opinion that NATO needs to last forever, but triggering an abrupt and ambiguous collapse with an unknown endpoint in the face of a surge in Russian aggression is not a recipe for peace in our time.
As I have said earlier, the best approach for stability would be for NATO to publicly announce an indefinite moratorium on any further enlargement, including a freeze on all current Action Plans with aspiring members like Georgia and BiH. This would give Russia reassurance that we do not have designs on extending NATO’s current border with them or expanding into the Caucasus.
@Anonymous,
The racist stuff I get, but what’s this innuendo about me being a misongynist?
Is it because of the PUA thing or the traditonal gender stuf or what? Because I don’t think I’ve said anything stereotypically bitter / women-blaming.
@Anonymous (sort of a dark lavender?):
If, as you are implying/basically outright stating, Dr Dealgood blamesfeminism for lowered birthrates, that still would not indicate someone actively suppressing it, unless he has one of those “feminism-invented-by-the-CIA” theories. People following incentives and so on isn’t like that. As it turns out, most women will choose not to have more than 2 or maybe 3 kids max, or at the very least make choices that lead to not having more than 2 or maybe 3 kids max, if given that choice. Likewise, most men will choose or make choices that have similar results, and don’t seem particularly peeved that women choose or make those choices.
It turns out that most people (including myself) would rather go to college, party, spend their money on nice things, travel, screw around, or whatever, than settle down in their late teens/early 20s and start having kids.
@Dr Dealgood: Am I mistaken in thinking that that you are saying an intentional actor is doing the suppressing?
Plus, it’s not just “the native population” – there’s no reason to think that the same thing won’t happen to immigrants from wherever. I know plenty of young women of all ethnicities and religions, born of immigrant parents, immigrants themselves, who are extremely unlikely to have more than 2 or 3 children, if that.
I ultimately think that your fear is mistaken: the same factors that ended most “traditional Western cultures” (at least as self-described traditionalists, alt-righters, etc see them) aside from a few holdouts will do the same to everyone else too.
The someone in question are dastardly women. Damn them for not knowing their place. All those empty strollers!
http://cdn.collider.com/wp-content/uploads/planet-of-the-apes-ending.jpg
@Anonymous,
Ah ok, great. Just another random insult thrown at the wall then. Good to know.
Well, there are a couple of reasons it’s better for the US (or Russia or China) to offer to use nuclear weapons on behalf of its allies, off the top of my head:
1. Proliferation: The US credibly offers to nuke an aggressor on behalf of its allies. In return, those allies don’t build nukes. If the US loses credibility, either through saying “lol no of course we’re not starting a nuclear war over freaking Taiwan” or through more subtle ways, now those countries will feel motivated to roll their own.
2. Variance: Sure, maybe Japan is as (or more!) responsible in deciding whether or not to use nuclear weapons than the US. But if e.g. 50 more countries had nukes, that probably wouldn’t be true of all of them. Also, one of those countries might decide to go full retard and open Nuke Mart. Does Brunei give a damn if the Biafrans want two or three bombs? As long as their money’s good…
3. Decision time. Lots of potential nuclear powers are positioned close to their likely targets (think India and Pakistan). If there’s a warning that the Chinese are about to invade Taiwan, or that North Korea is launching missiles at Seoul, these countries might have under a minute to decide whether or not to launch their own nukes, making a false-positive warning far more dangerous. Most status quo nuclear powers are either so large (Russia, China), generally positioned away from likely attackers (UK, France) or both (USA) that even a direct attack against them affords a solid ten or fifteen minutes to decide whether to retaliate, and in the case of allies they also have the option of waiting for the bombs to land before retaliating.
The latter option might sound bad, but it really isn’t. If e.g. North Korea knows that the nuking the South will trigger nuclear retaliation, it doesn’t matter if the US takes a few hours or a day to retaliate — the end result is the same (both countries get nuked). A unilateral South Korean nuclear power doesn’t have that option; they must launch while the Northern warheads are in the air (flight time: <2 minutes) or risk losing their retaliation capability (note that this scenario makes both a pre-emptive strike more attractive and a launch on false positive more likely).
4. Status Quo Bias: Whatever the merits of other arguments, the current status quo hasn't led to nuclear war so far. Is it really a good idea to change it?
My personal opinion is that massive proliferation risks making nuclear weapons the new gunpowder. You see, in pre-gunpowder armies, it seems that casualties on the winning side tended to be relatively low, because the majority of killing actually took place when one side broke and ran. Gunpowder meant that winners sustained higher losses — casualties on both sides of a battle were more likely to be equal. Did that chasten potential aggressors? No (ask Napoleon) — instead, a bunch of new norms developed to the effect that good armies just didn't mind getting their hair mussed a bit:
It’s tempting to think that if everyone had nuclear weapons, nobody would fight each other out of fear of retaliation, but things have happened to ratchet up the slaughter before and war still happened. If “yeah whatever, sometimes you bomb and sometimes you get bombed, suck it up buttercup” becomes a winning formula, it’s going to end up getting a lot of people killed, and I think it’s worth trying to avoid that.
The decision time reason is interesting. The natural reply is that if decision time could lead to frivolous wars, a rational country will price that into their decision to acquire nuclear weapons and maybe will just decide not to. But obviously, as you suggest with your final comments, the world isn’t always a rational place. Somewhere we have to examine the empirical evidence.
The status quo is that we haven’t had any nuclear wars in seventy years, and not much in the way of wars of conquest in general.
That would be the aforementioned status quo. There are nations with nuclear weapons and a propensity to engage in wars of territorial conquest, most notably Putin’s Russia. Against such nations, nuclear weapons are required as a defense. So the alternatives are,
A: Pretty much the entire world outside of the United States surrenders to nuclear-armed aggressors, or
B: Pretty much the entire world outside the United States acquires nuclear arsenals of their own, with N^2 opportunities for nuclear-grade misunderstandings, or
C: Somebody with a lot of nuclear weapons undertakes to guarantee the defense, at least against nuclear attack, of nations with none.
The United States is uniquely qualified to play that last role. We have more to lose than almost anyone from starting a global nuclear war unnecessarily, we have no ambitions of overt territorial conquest, and we have the strategic depth to ride out anyone’s first strike and retaliate only when we know for sure what we are facing, Any plan other than the status quo greatly increases the risk of nuclear war being waged on a global scale.
Which Would Be Bad.
[Citation Not Needed]
“Liberal commentators say ambiguity is bad, but if you this charitable interpretation of the ambiguity, it’s fine” is a non-answer to the criticism of why ambiguity is bad, since obviously you can’t guarantee that every relevant actor (Russia, the Baltics, the remainder of Eastern Europe) will co-sign this interpretation. You don’t even know that it’s Trump’s interpretation, since you yourself label it “charitable.”
Also, removing a state from NATO is not something Trump could do on his own.
The risk of nuclear weapon use is based on the binomial probability of N countries each making the decision to use them in response to a given military event. It is a trivial observation that the higher N is, the higher the risk of their use.
Question in case anyone here would know. I’ve been looking at various sources which say that executives in the triple A gaming industry are irrational and grossly out of touch with what is actually profitable and what gamers actually want, due to being old men inexperienced with actual gaming. And I have seen very odd signs, such as Koonami with Hideo Kojima, the destruction of the Sims brand, Square Enix doubting the profitability of the JRPGs that made them famous etc.
On the other hand, the reasons why microtransactions and DLC are implemented seem to make perfect sense. Further, it seems a good general rule not to assume that the entire industry is run by idiots despite the intelligence necessary to become an executive in the first place without very strong evidence.
Can anyone help me out here? How out of touch are gaming executives, really?
I think they might well be hideously out of touch with what gamers want in many cases — although I’m not on a first-name basis with a majority of them so I won’t try to determine that — and still be very clear on what makes money in a concrete sense, e.g. “charge $60 for the game that took 200 000 man hours to make, then charge another ten bucks for a horse that one of the art guys bashed together in three hours”.
On the economic end the good practice (for making money hand over fist, that is) is much more clear-cut than it is on the artistic end, not to mention that what gamers want often conflicts with the economics (DLC horses being an obvious example: gamers want that shit right in the box, or for free if it’s a downloadable upgrade. But they’ll still fuckin’ pay, at least some of them, so automatically the more profitable route is to fuck the gamers over).
That sounds logically like it makes a lot of sense. That being said, I find it hard to believe that sacking the guy that made Metal Gear Solid and Silent Hill profitable and cancelling the Silent Hill games made any sense. Or that it was a good idea for Square Enix to abandon the JRPG gamers, as proved by the success of Bravely Default. Or that the way EA acted when they bought Maxis regarding the Sims as a franchise made sense.
That’s why I’m not sure. Don’t get me wrong- I’m on the fence on this one.
I feel like a lot of these supposed discrepancies can be explained either by “good art isn’t profitable”, which extends to every entertainment industry, or “the target market for most of the ‘bad’ decisions happens to be significantly larger and less vocal than the target market for the ‘good’ decision”.
Case in point on the second one is Konami. By dropping Kojima and Silent Hills they’ve drawn the ire of a lot of people (and rightly so). But they did this because they were dropping standard video game development altogether to focus on pachinko (think Plinko from The Price is Right turned into a slot machine), which is a far simpler and far more lucrative endeavor. I’m not sure what catalyzed this change, but no matter how much backlash it garners it’s a near certainty that it’ll be profitable. Pachinko is huge in Japan.
How this affects other companies and games I’m not quite so sure. Nowadays I generally just default to the position of “there must be some huge, nebulous fargroup that makes X baffling decision make sense economically”.
Well, maybe the execs have a point in ignoring what gamers want. I have it on good authority that gamers don’t need to be the audience for video games, and in fact gamers are over… right, I’ll get my coat.
I left the industry in 2010, so I’m not up to date on current trends but this stuff didn’t change much over the years I was a code monkey.
My experience was the people who ultimately paid my rent back then have a fair idea of what’s profitable, but not why. As a result, you get a lot of grasping at something that ought to be profitable but then focusing on the wrong aspect. One of the more bizarre bits of my career was working 22 hours straight to change the menus from a pastel cartoonish style that matched the level design to a brushed metal style the night before we shipped. Why? Because a senior exec had seen his nephew playing whatever the FPS of the month was at the time and wanted our game to ‘look like that’. He was right that it sold 20 times as much as we did, but the art style wasn’t the reason.
So, microtransactions and DLC are a straight financial decision that they’ll make pretty accurately. Choosing IP on the basis of previous sales is something that they’ll project fairly well too, barring the unforeseen. (*) When execs meddle in game design though, it’s a cargo cult style of decision making.
* – Don’t be working on a ‘survive the disaster’ game when an identical disaster kills tens of thousands. We canned the game, there was no way to finish it without looking like we were trying to cash in on people’s deaths.
Got it. Thank you. That explains a lot.
http://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/02/02/making-crash-bandicoot-part-1/
^ Andy Gavin, maker of Crash Bandicoot tells his stories from the trenches ^
Its a long read, but contains a lot of stories about clueless and malicious execs. He says that his entire team had to threaten to quit in order to force them to avoid naming the game Willy the Wombat.
Thanks. Will read.
Long time industry veteran here. I would echo what Equinimty said about execs knowing what’s profitable, but not why. I’ve worked for 4 different publishers (two now defunct) over the past decade and a half, and there’s a spectrum of competence and out-of-touch-ness among the execs. Clueless businessmen who think they’re creative and make terrible strategic decisions (“we’re making the next World of Warcraft/GTA/Call of Duty! But with none of the experience and with 1/3rd the budget”) are definitely a real thing. But so are execs that are very clear about being the business end, and the developer being the creative end, and making that relationship function well and profitably.
Two points that are tangential but related to your question. “What gamers want”. It’s pretty common wisdom in game development that the most vocal and hardcore gamers are a tiny percentage of the overall gamer population. Yes, they are a critical demographic, and yes, they can drive the narrative, but conflating what people are screaming about on the most hardcore of the hardcore forums with “what gamers want” will give you disastrous tunnel vision. The devs themselves are prone to this sort of thinking as well (and generally more aware/in touch with the most hardcore viewpoints), and part of the job of the leads is to keep the eye on the big picture.
The “cluelessness” of execs. Even for the savvy execs who generally make smart decisions and allow the devs of a lot of creative freedom, AAA games are essentially a crapshoot. Unless you’re on your 4th iteration of a title with a familiar team and familiar tech, you are investing a HUGE amount of money into a project with a multi-year time horizon and more unknown unknowns than any other media, like say film. The burn rates for large AAA projects can be jaw-dropping, and if the devs start hitting significant roadblocks in terms of tech or quality, you are going to panic unless you have nerves of steel. Even granting that some execs are as clueless as they seem, a lot of stuff that seems incomprehensibly dumb from the outside comes out of this pressure cooker environment.
Thanks. That makes a lot of sense.
Oh boy, one of my old pet topics! The line to draw in the sand here is between business decisions and game decisions. The major powers at the head of video gaming’s triopoly – and that includes legendary veteran designers like Shigeru Miyamoto of Mario and Zelda fame – are almost all criticised as being out of touch with the gaming experiences player’s want. The strongest recent example in the Nintendo camp is the fiasco over a fan-made Metroid game, AM2R, which basically satisfied what everyone wanted from the franchise and has wanted for decades, unlike the games Nintendo actually releases. Similar parralels can be made with Valve’s attitude towards TF2, towards Games Workshop’s attitudes towards its flagship settings in the world of table-top gaming, and the examples listed in your own post et cetera.
The thing people aren’t complaining about are how keen executives are to adapt their business models. No, the criticism there is at the decision-makers for being too sharp. Most executives are old and basically-obviously not in it for the joy of creating a dynamic, trailblazing or even solid product any more. They’re hedging nests for their grandchildren, pouring all their efforts into milking micro-transactions and what-have-you gimmickry without putting a jot of thought into what the games are actually like. This, they delegate to cheap, superficial colour-by-numbers design processes, and low-paid or outsourced groups that plainly got into the business for the money, or certainly at least not to do what they’re presently paid to do. So we get Final Fantasy mobile apps that resemble the games only at the cheapest level, with hordes of spammy soulless artwork collectibles not tied to any meaningful game decisions or compelling story developments, the equivalent of cheap plush collectibles. That’s largely what companies like Nintendo now furnish – they know their name and brand has huge innate pull, that everyone recognises Mario and Yoshi, and that people will fork out for safe nostalgia. The games are just plush toy adverts, or the experiences there-in are just plush-toyism to coin a phrase. All rounded corners and funny squeaky buttons, no meaning.
I could go into many of these points in more detail. It’s a significant problem at the heart of most gaming, video or not, today. Video games as attire is more profitable/stomachable that video games as video games, and the people at the top are just plumping their reputations and lining their wallets now in any case. The best game design these days is done non-for-profit like AM2R, as the indie scene is rife with signally bullshit and SJWism, has been for years (that’s how many people became aware of SJWism, through the disconcerting events in inbred indie game circles and journalism). There’s a paucity of genuine thoughtful design where it counts in the high-powered industry, and perhaps it’s just because all the low-hanging fruit have been taken and no-one cares enough about the fringe cases to fill out of them. But a lot of people, especially people most-centric to “plays games for the depth” crowd, are dissatisfied and spend little on big budget productions, which reinforces the situation as the triopoly focuses on ever more superficial audiences. ‘S a clusterfuck.
It does, however, present a number of opportunities to those who can figure out what that dissatisfied customer base want and – absolutely crucially – somehow cut through the unbelievable noise level to let them know that satisfying options exist.
Unfortunately that latter is made more difficult by essentially every single force in play in gaming right now. Cash-in crap, shovelware, SJW indie shit, AAA loudhailers, media gatekeeping, and even the snarling anger of the dissatisfied core gamers themselves all serve to make it very hard indeed to get attention for your core-pleasing game.
Honestly Zorg (heh, I used to go by a name similar to that many years ago), I don’t see those clusterfuck forces going anywhere, anytime soon. The idea of some snappy startup turning the market upside down is a fantasy. The best thing that can happen – and arguably the source of the best things that have happened recently – is for an already-wealthy entrepeneur to pursue a vision and coordinate all the pieces together without being slaved down by the bullshit. Which raises the question of how to spontaneously generate philanthropic millionaires with gaming interests? Charity? Think of people without good games to play!
(I thought of another item to add to my earlier list of “once-great companies gone completely soggy”, but I’ve forgotten now. Nintendo, Valve and Games Workshop are my typical big three examples, and now I can add Konami and Square-Enix to that list.)
A while back I made the assertion that the revenue neutral carbon taxes (that is, passing carbon taxes but lowering other taxes an equal amount) were a good policy, but they would invariably be blocked by the left. This position was challenged.
As much as I am loathe to have anything nice to say about Vox, this appeared today vindicating my position. The proposal is not purely revenue neutral, but it’s quite close, and the left is trying to defeat it. The article does a good job of showing how little anti-carbon measures motive the organized left when there are going to be no revenues to distribute, and the true venality of an opposition whose proposal is short on details for carbon mitigation, but long on how they’re going to spend all the money their measures raise.
The conclusions to be drawn from this exercise (besides making clear the folly of doubting Cassander) are open for discussion.
Is that why you (almost) chose the name, then?
It’s not a very good joke, but it’s one I enjoy.
Reading the article as of right now. Will edit this post to include a view on the matter.
EDIT: The issue seems rather confusing to me. I would have said the alliance was straight up wrong- after all, there is no reason why you can’t simply start with a revenue neutral carbon tax then attempt something else later.
Yes this means abandoning coalition allies, and I can understand why you’re reluctant to do that. But the more states of America have their own climate taxes the more momentum the environmental movement gains.
What I’m confused by is the fact that the revenue neutral carbon tax didn’t win over Republican voters, who would rather a carbon tax that wasn’t revenue neutral. I simply don’t understand that, meaning I scrap all the above as a position and don’t know what to think.
At a guess, I’d expect that Republican voters are sceptical of punitive taxation in general and supportive of renewable energy subsidies in general.
Republican voters are for the most part not principled capitalists (see: Trump) who can be appealed to with ECON 101 lessons about the efficiency of Pigouvian revenue mechanisms. They are sufficiently dumbed down at this point that they will reject any proposal that includes the term “tax” out of hand, and if a politician steps out of line (as Bob Inglis did) he will get primaried with ads that use the term “tax” (as Bob Inglis was).
So many taxes share the traits that they don’t like that the fact that something is a tax is Bayseian evidence that it is one of that set. Even a non-objectionable-seeming tax is highly likely to be a disguised objectionable tax rather than a really non-objectionable one.
“What I’m confused by is the fact that the revenue neutral carbon tax didn’t win over Republican voters”
Consider all the taxes passed as temporary taxes that are still around fifty or a hundred years later. If someone asks you to support a tax on carbon to be balanced by a reduction in other taxes, one plausible response is “I don’t believe you. Once the tax is passed, the other taxes will come back up again.”
The political system doesn’t have good commitment mechanisms, ways of making promises you can’t break.
Isn’t this a universal argument against all tax reform? Other than abolition, I suppose.
Yep. NJ just passed a massively increased gas tax along with two small reductions in the sales tax. I posted an informal poll on a NJ forum about when the sales tax would return to present levels. A clear majority said we’d never see the second reduction, with a large number saying we’d never see the first.
@Bosch:
It says you can’t reform taxes by adding new ones.
Earlier in that same post you also used an example where two existing taxes were adjusted, so this smells like a motte.
Supposedly temporary taxes being permanent isn’t the same as supposedly permanent tax cuts being transient. Is there a history of the latter?
Wouldn’t any tax hike qualify as this?
As I understand it from a few other article, this is all inside baseball: the person who spearheaded the measure is not liked, and his coalition is not trusted. The opposition is more about denying them a feather in their cap, out of fear that they can leverage demonstrated legislative victories to increased strength inside the movement.
In the same way that health care is not about being healthy, environmental regulation is not about regulating the environment.
I fear regulation much more than taxing and spending. There are many more limits on the taxing power than the regulatory power, and far more attention is paid to taxation. As long as the rates are fixed in law, the carbon tax is no more dangerous than any other.
The thing about the Carbon tax is that while it sounds good, there is simply no way that the left can be trusted to keep their part of the bargain regarding revenue neutrality. If given control of the legislative and executive branch, how long would it take for them to suddenly find new excuses to increase the tax without a reduction in another tax? To some extent, I would actually prefer some of the other regulations proposed. At least they can’t be used as a slush fund for whatever new craze the federal government “needs” to fund.
I fear regulation much more than taxing and spending. There are many more limits on the taxing power than the regulatory power, and far more attention is paid to taxation.
I read that article and the distributing-tax-revenues thing seemed to be only a small part of what seems like an internecine conflict between climate groups, played up for culture-war-ish-ness and clicks.
If it’s culture war, it’s of the blue on blue variety.
That’s what culture wars are going to look like going forward. Red is dead.
It never dies, it just gets a few left wing positions shoved onto it over the course of a generation, then blue moves the goalposts.
The revenue neutrality thing is pretty tied to the core disagreement: a narrow, focused, potentially bipartisan effort to fight climate change versus a big intertwined progressive agenda.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_pricing_in_Australia may be interesting to you.
Initially we had a much more extensive ETS (not revenue neutral in any way if I recall correctly), proposed by a government which had an electoral mandate for it, which was destroyed by fuckery on the left (TL;DR: Green party voted against it as they felt it didn’t go far enough, they had balance of power in the senate, this precipitated a series of events that eventually resulted in a reduction in power of, and finally an electoral defeat of the centre-left government after further term in which for a while we did have an ETS/Carbon Tax).
The second attempt, detailed in the wiki. Was sort of a revenue neutral carbon tax. Not quite though. It’s main step in that direction was made by a massive increase in the income-tax free threshold (5k -> 18k) and a variety of other tax cuts/payments made to lower and middle income earners. Plus also a lot of subsidies and exceptions. No political fuckery on the left, everything seemed to work pretty well in terms of effects and results until its eventual repeal by a new centre-right government.
Probably not so much relevant to your hypothesis because in effect the tax reductions were in accordance with the previously existing tax-reduction aims (i.e. reducing low to middle earners income tax burden) of the left leaning parties who brought it about. However one could make an argument against your hypothesis based on the fact that even the more ‘extreme’ left Green party was pretty damn happy with it (voted for it the second time around after thoroughly learning their lesson about shooting themselves in the foot).
It’d probably be at least interesting to look in to if you want any more data.
Several disclaimers if you do have a look into it:
-I have some fairly strong biases on the issue (member of said Greens party, strong supporter of carbon pricing inc. revenue neutral tax), which probably creep into the above narrative.
-The debate around the introduction and repeal of the Carbon Tax (sorry, ETS with initial fixed price period transitioning to a market based pricing mechanism) is so soaked in populism and weird contradictions on both the left and the right side of politics (both major parties have opposed and supported it and then flipped themselves back again as opportunities to score electoral points occur, and different factions within them gain and lose power) that it’s hard to tell whether it actually worked. The talk page on the wiki is a pretty good example of this.
-Australian politics are generally a bit more left than the US as a whole, and some of our names are inverted (e.g. Liberal party being the ostensibly centre-right party opposed to the ostensibly centre-left Labor party)
I am somewhat ware of the Australian example. My understanding is that the tax that actually passed had a very large rebate program attached to it that they called revenue neutral but which was, in effect, a new entitlement program, and as you say, a lot of other subsidies thrown in. I consider it evidence for my thesis, which is that the organized left (as opposed to the voters) will go along with such programs only if they benefit from the spoils.
The Washington state program referenced by the Vox article also contains a rebate program (specifically a state supplement to the federal EITC). So if Australia isn’t evidence against your thesis, Washington isn’t evidence for it.
The Washington share is small, 15 percent, with no subsidies. The Australian one was larger.
While I fully understand our host’s reluctance to allow them, this blatant goalpost-move really warrants a reply consisting solely of an in-line animated GIF.
And it certainly doesn’t warrant anything more than that.
One example of a thing being opposed by some members of group A does not demonstrate that group A will always oppose all things like it, especially when it’s a group that roughly half of the world belongs to.
(The revenue-neutral carbon taxes that have been passed – which side of politics is responsible for them?)
I am not aware of any that has passed, and, no, the Australian version was not revenue neutral.
I’ve always claimed it’s unclear which side would actually go to the mat to prevent catastrophic global warming, if and when it became apparent.
It is quite likely that the only effective way to prevent significant worldwide emissions is through military force directed at non-compliant blocs of nations. I mean you go tell the House of Saud they’ve had a nice run, but it’s time to leave the rest of their reserves in the ground and figure out a new national revenue source. Or maybe Jill Stein and Banksy can convince with them with street art?
And “bombing the brown people” is just the start: If and when we cut off cheap energy, food prices, transportation costs, and heating, the core of the working family’s budget, are going to be largest drop in real standard of living for the lower middle class in the modern era.
Oh, or we could [just / in addition] do some geo-engineering! Scatter kilotons of *chemicals* into the wind everyday. Cue the pictures of cleft palette children.
Did I mention all these sacrifices and calamities will be incurred while the US, or large regions within the US, remain completely ecologically neutral or even are slightly positively affected by the changes (up to +2C). “We do all this”, they’ll say, “to preserve the albino water buffalo, so some rich guy on the safari can shoot one.”
The more likely scenario to me is that a motivated state actor would just engage in its own climate forcing effects. Seeding algae blooms or sulfur injection into the upper atmosphere at scales expected to have serious climate effects I believe are already within the economic and technical capacity of modern nation states and would fit the psychology of a nation like China (which has shown little concern for ecological devastation).
In the previous discussion I offered the examples of British Columbia’s carbon tax, which was implemented by the Liberals, Australia’s carbon tax, which was implemented by Labour, and several Congressional bills put forward by leftist Democrats.
These examples alone are sufficient to disprove your statement that such proposals would invariably be blocked by the left. The resistance Vox cites to a separate carbon tax proposal in Washington State does not vindicate your proposition. It vindicates a weaker bordering on trivial proposition (that such proposals are not invariably supported by the left) which you did not advance and I would not dispute.
I don’t know about B.C. was it revenue neutral? I doubt it. Australia definitely wasn’t.
Yes.
Hopefully revision 4 of your proposition fares better than revisions 1-3.
I am a bit skeptical of that short article. It says that the BC carbon tax must be revenue neutral by law, but a lot of folks have different ideas on what is revenue neutral. For example, Washington’s proposed law was said to be revenue neutral, but a piece of it included an additional credit related to the EITC. That is part of tax returns, but in substance is welfare and not a reduction of tax.
Although it does appear by the figure on page 7 of this pdf that the offsets are mostly taxes.
According to BC’s budget, about a third to half of the money raised was turned into highly specifc tax credits, not general reductions in taxes. When you pay people to do specific things, it is still spending even if you call the payment a tax credit. So I stand by my original assertion, which remains unaltered.
At this point I’m pretty comfortable leaving veracity of your assertion and the extent to which it is unaltered to the reader; I see nothing to gain from engaging further.
@Anonymous Bosch
No, more engagement would just make you look even sillier. I feel for you though, nothing sucks more than having a lovely theory wrecked by anything as sordid as official budget documents.
“At this point I’m pretty comfortable leaving veracity of your assertion and the extent to which it is unaltered to the reader”
This reader looked at the budget document that your opponent linked to.
Total reduction in revenue due to designated measures 2012/13:
1.323 billion
Tax credits under personal tax measures: 301 million
(Items listed as tax credits or homeowner benefit)
Tax credits under business tax measures: 101 million
So almost a third of the supposed tax reduction consisted of tax credits given to various groups.
Do you disagree?
In case you have not been following the entire conversation, David, the original assertion was “revenue-neutral carbon taxes will invariably by blocked by the left”. It has now been reduced to quibbles about whether or not tax credits really count as revenue-neutral. Nobody disputes that BC used tax credits to offset its carbon tax. The real disagreement appears to be whether we grant cassander the fig leaf of pretending that this was his true argument all along. Given that he demonstrably knew nothing about the BC tax cuts before Anonymous Bosch brought them up, I know which way I lean.
Whether a particular tax disproves a statement about revenue-neutral taxes depends on whether the tax counts as revenue-neutral. Arguing “that isn’t revenue neutral” isn’t a quibble; it’s a relevant factor that if true would make the example inapplicable.
It does, however, depend on a definition of “revenue-neutral” which is different from the standard definition of “no net change in government revenues.” At this point in the discussion, spanning multiple threads, cassander has rejected:
– Targeted tax credits, which do not provide revenue to the government, but are “paying people to do specific things” and therefore the same because Reasons
– Fee-and-dividend rebate systems, because these supposedly create a new entitlement (even though they are based on revenues and not a statutory requirement to $X)
– Actually new rebates are fine as long as they don’t exceed 15% (upthread when I pointed out the WA example wouldn’t fit his proposition under those standards either)
So now the definition of revenue neutral is something like “a tax resulting in no net government revenues where no more than 15% is distributed as flat rebates and the remainder is cut exclusively from general taxes.”
An infinitely malleable definition is not worth debating. I wouldn’t like a carbon tax which was offset exclusively by increases in badly targeted tax credits to various Stuff I Don’t Like. But I would attack it on those grounds, not pretend that bad tax credits means it somehow doesn’t count as revenue neutral.
>Nobody disputes that BC used tax credits to offset its carbon tax. The real disagreement appears to be whether we grant cassander the fig leaf of pretending that this was his true argument all along.
If you use the money from a carbon tax to create a massive hole digging tax subsidy, you’re not doing anything significantly different from taxing the money than paying people to dig holes. Calling the former revenue neutral and the latter not is confuse accounting with reality. the carbon tax expenditures include an 88 billion subsidy for filmmaking, 69 billion for northern and rural homeowners, 63 billion for interactive digital media, and numerous other subsidies. It is not revenue neutral, except in the narrowest possible sense.
>Given that he demonstrably knew nothing about the BC tax cuts before Anonymous Bosch brought them up, I know which way I lean.
I didn’t demonstrably know nothing, I said I knew nothing. Then I investigated and found that it does, in fact, include large targeted subsidies. That it is named the revenue neutral carbon tax does not make it so.
“Targeted tax credits, which do not provide revenue to the government, but are “paying people to do specific things” and therefore the same because Reasons”
You don’t think the reasons are obvious? Do you assume that the reason government collects taxes is to put the money under its mattress? If the idea of government revenue is to give the money to the government to spend, why does it matter whether the expenditure is labeled a payment or a tax credit?
Of course it is.
As an exercise, try to define the classic example, “chair”. When you do this with most people, they’ll end up having to modify their definition with more and more subclauses just so it precisely covers what they want it to mean. A chair is an object which is meant for sitting, or which is designed such that people think of its use for sitting, which is not as long as a bench or as narrow as a horizontal pool, and which has legs but is not a stoool, except for beanbag chairs, etc.
The fact that someone defines “revenue neutral tax” in a similar way is no more of a problem than the fact that they define “chair” that way, and only indicates a problem with the way everyone uses definitions and semantics, not a problem with their understanding of revenue neutral taxes.
One moral is that if you suspect that climate change is being used to push a broad liberal agenda, some environmentalists aren’t doing that and some shamelessly are. Supporting the former might be a way to head off the latter.
The new TV show “Timeless” has time travelers running around with modern guns in (so far) the 1860s, 1930s, and 1960s, and the heroes not necessarily always able to fully clean up after enemy mooks.
Suppose that one of them drops a modern firearm in one of those decades. How much could they reverse engineer, and how far would that advance the state of the art in 2016?
I would suspect surprisingly little, actually. Guns don’t change that much. Aesthetics, minor design elements, etc. sure, but not the major components. Gun technology today is stuff like that Israeli gun that can shoot corners–knowing how to make a semiautomatic earlier wouldn’t have sped up the need to develop rifles for urban warfare. It wouldn’t be anything like dropping a modern car or computer into the 1930s. Guns are extremely simple and quality designs are used for decades and decades; if they’re carrying 1911s–not even that unlikely–someone from the 30s could look at it and say, “oh, yeah, I have one of those right here!”
Maybe if you drop modern automatics in the 1860s, you could advance technology forward, but it honestly hasn’t gone that far in the last few decades.
Now, the effect of having those weapons earlier could be tremendously important. If France has machine guns in 1870, and Prussia doesn’t, and France can stop the German unification, *that* alters all of history since.
edit–I’m not really an expert in this field, just someone with an interest.
There’s also the issue that the biggest advancements in guns in the last 100 years or so are almost all related to manufacturing advancements. You could have the blueprints for a better gun, but if you can’t machine it well, it’s not going to be much better than what you already have.
Obviously, if you go back to the black powder days, then it might make a difference.
*edit* I should have read on, pretty much everyone else had the same thought, only better presented.
Well, the only real advances in handheld firearms since the early 1900s have been materials (e.g. polymers, aluminum, exotic alloys) and manufacturing techniques. The key tech for modern guns, auto-loading and self-contained metallic cartridges, were basically solved by the turn of the 20th century.
I honestly don’t see much changing. I guess the Civil War might be a lot different, but I think it unlikely that they could manufacture advanced firearms in more than novelty numbers. Maybe you end up with WWI being fought with assault rifles, but without a commensurate change in tactics the results are the same (most casualties were from artillery or fixed machine guns – having an assault rifle doesn’t change the equation on those much). By the end of WWII firearms could do basically everything modern versions can (even the assault rifle was limited more by a good idea (fast firing sub-caliber ammo) than tech). Even if you dropped an assault rifle, it’s not clear that they would think it a great idea as a main battle weapon, and even if they did most of the combatant nations would have a hard time cranking them out in sufficient quantity. Consider that the US Marines (and basically every country except the US) were initially opposed in WWII to arming the average soldier with a semi- or fully-auto battle rifle. The thought was they would just waste (expensive and hard to supply) ammunition.
TL;DR version: gun design has not been the limiting factor since basically pre-WWI. Motorized mobility, aircraft, and modern communications have made a much bigger difference to warfare.
Nothing in the 1930s or 1960s. Drop it in the 1860s and maybe 30 years at best. Certainly they could reverse-engineer all the mechanical parts, though they wouldn’t be able to make the plastic parts in a gun which used them. They might be able to advance the development of smokeless powder. Maybe the non-corrosive primer.
The limiting factor would be the manufacturing technology required, I imagine. In the 1860s certainly. The 1930s, less so, and the 1960s not at all.
Honestly not by much.
While things like, material, manufacturing methods and quality control have advanced a great deal, things like ammunition and general operating principals have not. The Browning Model 1911 is named for it’s year of introduction and it’s still in widespread use today. Sure the modern versions are probably lighter, more reliable, and sport some fancy accessories like integrated lights, optics, etc… but the basic gun itself hasn’t changed.
Actually, now that I think about it, things like batteries, radios, and flashlights probably carry a far greater risk of “contamination” at least as far as the late 19th/early 20th century is concerned than the guns do.
Edit: Ninja’d by everyone.
Gun owners are very conservative. One of the most popular pistol designs today was created in 1911 another in 1870! By the 1930s most of the actions we still use were developed and used many still in use today, the aforementioned 1911, Browning Hi-Power (1935), Mauser 1898 (which is the inspiration for many bolt actions still made today. If the setting was before 1934, the designers would probably wonder why modern semi-auto rifle actions are so complicated (the reason is legal to prevent easy modification of semi-auto actions into full automatic actions). They would likely be quite interested in how polymer gun frames can be strong enough to withstand designs, and potentially in bullet/projectile developments. They might also be interested in our steel metallurgy and quality control.
In 1860, a modern example would have the potential to make the Civil War something more like World War I (if both sides develop machine guns), or a much shorter fight (if only one side can produce the technology), rather than the something that only shows the transition to machine gun/trench warfare beginning. It also could pull WWI to an earlier period.
I’m not sure dropping a modern firearm in any times changes the state of the art all that much, gun tech really hasn’t advanced much in the last 70 years (mostly due to the average seems to be over in gun designs at least until someone comes up something better than brass cased cartridges).
I’m not sure conservative is the right word. I think it’s more a matter that material science and manufacturing matter a lot (compare an AR to an AK and you’ll know why the US was going to win the cold war), and that it is rare to find a lot of benefit to new designs.
@bluto
The Heckler & Koch G11 was a rifle using caseless munition, but the advantages (much lower weight, so more ammo could be carried) were mostly offset by the downsides (less reliability as a brass case seals off the chamber, so a caseless rifle need very tight tolerances to achieve that without a case, which makes it very sensitive to fouling).
As part of the OICW program, the US military tried to design a rifle with two barrels: one being a traditional rifle and the other an airburst mini-cannon that allows killing people behind cover. However, this rifle suffered from the same issues as the Joint Strike Fighter: wanting to do to much in 1 package, thus being mediocre at everything.
Personally I think that the next real innovation is not going to be the rifle, but rather, replacing the soldier with a drone, robot or such.
The standard military pistol cartridge of every major military power in the modern world was developed for the armies of the Second, not Third, Reich. In 1902. As others have noted, handgun design is an intensely conservative field – mostly I think because it is rare to win a gunfight by virtue of having a better gun but easy to lose one by having a gun that doesn’t work. And most of the changes that do matter, have followed from materials science. Toss me back in time to Tombstone, AZ, in 1881, and the things that might give me an edge over the Earps would be smokeless powder, advanced polycarbonate plastics, and tritium(*). A 19th-century gunsmith would recognize what had been done and why it was better, but the best 19th-century research labs would have difficulty duplicating it.
Harry Turtledove’s Guns of the South gets this about right. Robert E. Lee can sort of accept an AK-47 as something a very clever 19th-century gunsmith could have invented, but he’s suspicious and inquisitive in ways that don’t bode well for the time travelers. And within two years, the Union is making knockoffs that work OK until they jam due to black-powder fouling.
That said, I noticed the same thing in Timeless, and would have been impressed if the writers had noticed it and thought to insist that Action Hero Dude carry an M1911, customized to his taste. That weapon isn’t horribly out of place or more than slightly outclassed any time in this century or the last, and for half a century before that it can more plausibly be explained as the work of a Very Clever Gunsmith than any modern polymer-framed weapon.
(*) Also the Weaver and other two-handed firing stances, but that’s another issue.
I’ve been reading a book about Samuel Colt. He wasn’t just a pioneering and innovative gunmaker, he was a pioneering and innovative industrialist. Henry Ford was a faint shadow by comparison.
My impression from this is that great technological leaps require great individuals. So, an awful lot depends on where exactly the time travelers left the modern gun and whose hands it fell into.
Assume the 1860s ones fell into the hands of a young John Browning. And that he arranged to have sufficient samples of the ammo sent to Alfred Nobel.
Have you read a book about Henry Ford yet?
(I’m just kidding around, I don’t know enough about the two to have a strong opinion)
The book I’m reading (it’s the first of four I plan to read from this set) provides a brief one.
1930s or later? No effect whatsoever. Pretty much all the relevant technology was already there at the point, it only needed to be put together, and the doctrine adapted to it.
And throwing, say, a Kalashnikov into the 19th century would probably not change much on a large scale, either (even though they could probably copy them – gunsmiths at the Khyber pass are working with even worse equipment). Automatic weapons eat insane amounts of ammunition, which is a logistical nightmare to deal with if you don’t have trucks and only few railway lines. You would not want to give one to every single soldier.
Also, ammunition would probably be a lot more expensive to manufacture back then. And finally, blackpowder and automatics don’t mix well, while smokeless powder requires a solid chemical industry.
Showing them the weapons would not have much effect. The weapons are mostly a function of what your industrial base can keep up with in terms of manufacturing tolerances and supply consumption. They don’t need the guns, they need the machines that are making them and the infrastructure that can supply them.
Not a history expert, but…
1860 – As far as I know, they don’t yet have the machine tooling to build a good automatic weapon (or mass produce the ammo), even if they know the design, so it’ll take a while to advance the state of the art.
1930 – Probably could bump the technology forward a decade or so. Germany’s Sturmgewehr 44, in WWII, is considered the first assault rifle; work started on the project in 1923 and getting a working example in 1930 would probably shave some time off the development time.
1960 – Marginal benefit, but apparently the M14 issued in Vietnam was a bit crap for jungle warfare, so improvements in their design would probably make life a bit easier for American infantry.
The latest improvements have been in optics and electronic enhancements for your gun, like smart grenade launchers or night vision scopes. Those could be a boon to whoever gets them, but I think they’re harder to reverse-engineer than mechanical mechanisms, and they have even less of the necessary industry to manufacture them.
Thanks to everyone for the responses. That was pretty much what I figured, but it’s not an area I have much expertise in, and I was seeing other online discussions where losing a future gun was treated as a potentially destabilizing event.
To compound what Alex said, consider that the Mosin Nagant is considered among the big 3 general purpose combat rifles. It was developed by the Imperial Russian army in 1882.
I think the biggest impact *might* be actual rifles, but they already had those in the 1860s.
IIRC, firearms that rifled a bullet provided a noticeable impact on the USA civil war; the north had them and the south didn’t, which meant that the north had longer range when firing. I was told that when I was a docent at a museum that had some civil war rifles on display.
That sounds doubtful to me – I’m pretty sure both sides had Minie-ball rifled muskets, which is one of the reasons Civil War musketry was so deadly compared to previous wars. The North maybe had more breech-loading rifled weapons, but that was still a fairly minor thing, I’m pretty sure. The next major advance was cartridge rifles, and after that magazine cartridge rifles.
Both sides had some rifled muskets during the American Civil War. The United States Army, after an abortive experience with the Hall breechloading rifle earlier in the century, had adopted its first rifled musket only in 1855, meaning most of the militia armories and reserve stockpiles were still smoothbores.
The Union, with most of the manufacturing capability and control of the seas, was able to fairly quickly replace most of its smoothbores with rifles, and in the cavalry with breechloaders. The Confederates couldn’t, and fought with a mix of rifled and smoothbore muskets to the very end. This probably didn’t matter as much as the Union’s superiority in artillery and railroads, but it did matter.
Source? I’m not doubting you – I’m just intrigued, because I’ve always seen stuff like “the rifle musket made musketry much more accurate at range” etc.
The rifle did make musketry much more accurate at range. This fact does not magically conjure rifles into existence in the hands of every soldier who might benefit from one – and the benefit is somewhat overstated, because most battles are not fought at long range.
Sources here, here, and really any third issue of the NRA’s house magazine, “American Rifleman”.
Thanks. I had thought they were standard-issue, for whatever reason, and no source I’d seen had disabused me of that idea.
The impact of rifles on the ACW is often over-estimated. Because both sides were scrambling to raise mass armies essentially from scratch (the pre-war US army was too small to provide a proper cadre), soldiers didn’t generally have enough training to actually fire accurately. Units opened fire at distances not much greater than their Napoleonic predecessors, and even then were less accurate than contemporary European troops firing over far greater distances.
Possibly amusing to some SSC readers: a Beowulf/Hamilton crossover.
This might be a duplicate, the comment wasn’t showing up before.
A radical reform proposal:
I must admit this idea is not just a deatheater idea, but straight from the pen of Voldemorte himself. . It is typically overlong and over broad. The interesting core of it is thus:
Split the state in two, create part which is a pure libertarian fantasy night watchman state in the traditional fashion. It taxes, enforces the law, adjudicates disputes. It would have one additional role, though, voting funds for the second half, the welfare state.
The welfare state would have no privileged access to state coercion or regulation. It’s sole task would be spending the largess voted to it by the actual state. It would have its own elected legislature and executive completely independent from the state proper.
I see a few benefits from this arrangement. One, it makes costs visible and explicit. There’s one budget for the welfare state that everything comes out of, which makes tradeoffs more visible. Two, it would produce a more coherent institutional culture for each state. Three, it creates strong disincentives to try to do welfare policy by tax or regulation, a practice that should be considered harmful.
I’m curious what people here think.
Seems unwieldy. The welfare branch is still going to have to present a budget to the taxing branch, and presumably the taxing branch can say, “well, we’ll give you the whole budget, but only if you promise not to do X”. This is basically what already happens when the President proposes a budget to Congress, and everyone fights back and forth and threatens to scuttle the whole thing if certain earmarks aren’t added/removed.
You could achieve much the same thing in the current system by basically only allowing Congress to appropriate at the Department level, and make the heads of departments elected rather than appointed (they are already political) positions. But earmarks / logrolling / etc. are a natural outgrowth of that and would need to be fought constantly. I’m not sure there’s the willpower to do that.
>Seems unwieldy. The welfare branch is still going to have to present a budget to the taxing branch, and presumably the taxing branch can say, “well, we’ll give you the whole budget, but only if you promise not to do X”.
I don’t see why. I imagine it functioning along the lines of the way SS functions. the taxes are established, the money is collected then given to the SSA automatically.
I don’t know much about SS but they basically just give people money right?
Is there any reason to assume the Wellfare state, based on the proposed system, would adopt a universal basic income model? If not, then they would have to figure out what to do with all their money, which could create the problems gbdub is talking about.
I already said it would have its own internal systems for spending the money, presumable a legislature and executive. the important thing would be that it has zero control over how much money it gets, just what do do with what it has.
I think the idea is that the other government who controls how much money they get would have motivation to try and control where it went. But I guess if there is no offical way for them to do that it might help? The welfare state does not propose a budget or anything they just get a check in the mail, so to speak. So any control the issuing government has would have to be through back end deals made with welfare government.
The problem is then you have no way to adjust taxes in response to welfare demands. If the economy crashes and you want to pass a stimulus, or if there’s a natural disaster and you’ve got big repair bills, you’d probably want to raise taxes to pay for that, and then lower them once the crisis is gone.
For Social Security, the system works because it has no decisions to make – it pushes out the money it takes in according to a predetermined plan. But the government as a whole, ideally, should only collect enough taxes to pay for what it does, which means that the two branches need to coordinate.
>The problem is then you have no way to adjust taxes in response to welfare demands. If the economy crashes and you want to pass a stimulus, or if there’s a natural disaster and you’ve got big repair bills, you’d probably want to raise taxes to pay for that, and then lower them once the crisis is gone.
there are worse fates in the world. but they can always ask for more money. It’s just that the people who give it don’t have any control over who spends it and vice versa.
>For Social Security, the system works because it has no decisions to make – it pushes out the money it takes in according to a predetermined plan
It’s more complicated than that. the SSA gets money from the treasury to pay for its expenditures these days.
In which sense are you using the word “state”? Your “welfare state” looks just like a large independent agency. Besides, what will enforce the separation between the two? Why wouldn’t these two branches separated by a revolving door be cooperating BFFs?
>In which sense are you using the word “state”?
either, really. doesn’t matter for the purpose of this discussion
>Your “welfare state” looks just like a large independent agency. Besides, what will enforce the separation between the two? Why wouldn’t these two branches separated by a revolving door be cooperating BFFs?
Very different cultures, lack of overlapping responsibilities.
What causes them to have a different culture, other than hoping that the roles are different enough to prevent people from wanting to be in both?
being focused on entirely different missions. Having different internal structures and personnel systems. Hell, you could even bar movement between them if you wanted, might not be a bad idea.
It would seem to me that Congress and the bureaucracies it creates to implement things already have different structure, hiring systems, and missions. So, again, what is the difference between what you’re suggesting and what we have, other than electing heads of bureaucracies.
I’m kind of curious how the “second state” is different from just a normal bureaucracy, other than I guess being run by elected officials instead of bureaucrats appointed by elected officials? It’s already the case that welfare departments within the federal (or state) government(s) do not have the ability to set taxes or regulations like licensing, minimum wage, etc. They don’t set their own budget, either.
I don’t see how it prevents the “first” state from attempting to do welfare via tax policy, since you don’t mention that they must do taxes a particular way. And officials in the “first” state still have the ability to buy votes. If it’s a democratically-elected government with the power to do X, individual politicians will be incentivized to promise that they will use X to benefit marginal voters.
I guess it allows more granularity in the sense that you can choose a primary legislator with one set of beliefs and a secondary legislator with a secondary set, rather than being locked into whomever your primary legislator appoints, but I’m not sure how much that benefit is compared to the cost of increasing the number of elections and candidates each person has to pay attention to. There can also be some benefit to insulating certain positions from the electorate, particularly in technical fields (which may be more of an argument for keeping the government out entirely, but that’s beyond the scope of this question).
You’re just describing the secular state and the Catholic Church.
(And my assumption is Moldemort did that on purpose.)
I don’t recall him making the split explicit, but yes, it’s very much a separation of church and state, and I’m sure the thought occurred to him.
So, is the set of people voting for the two states the same or different?
If they are the same, then I would not expect any big difference from just having one state. It’s like countries with separate elections for parliament and presidency: in practice the same parties run for both positions, with the same policies and elected by the same voters.
Presumably you’d vote for both with the elections alternating by year. That said, the idea of only being able to vote for one or the other appealing.
I assumed that if you were taking the transfers then you can only vote for the government that sorts the transfers out. If you are in the libertarian group, then you get to vote for the libertarian state.
Yeah like others I don’t see how this is different than just a separate agency that handles welfare. But it is true that this in itself is a very good idea. I have argued myself in these comments that welfare should be relegated to just one agency, so that it is accountable for what it does, and so voters know how the government spends on welfare. Currently in the US, we have 78 different means tested programs in just the Federal government, and it seems almost every agency with fees adjusts them for “ability to pay,” which amounts to welfare too. It is a major point in my book “Simplify Government.” Not that I would shill for my book here 🙂
So I think the idea of having separate bureaucracies for welfare and everything else is a good one, but calling them two separate governments doesn’t sound like how you describe their actions.
The difference is that the people in charge of spending the money have absolutely no say over how much gets spent, and vice versa.
This might be a duplicate, the comment wasn’t showing up before.
A radical reform proposal: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2008/05/ol6-lost-theory-of-government.html
I must admit this idea is not just a deatheater idea, but straight from the pen of Voldemorte himself. . It is typically overlong and over broad. The interesting core of it is thus:
Split the state in two, create part which is a pure libertarian fantasy night watchman state in the traditional fashion. It taxes, enforces the law, adjudicates disputes. It would have one additional role, though, voting funds for the second half, the welfare state.
The welfare state would have no privileged access to state coercion or regulation. It’s sole task would be spending the largess voted to it by the actual state. It would have its own elected legislature and executive completely independent from the state proper.
I see a few benefits from this arrangement. One, it makes costs visible and explicit. There’s one budget for the welfare state that everything comes out of, which makes tradeoffs more visible. Two, it would produce a more coherent institutional culture for each state. Three, it creates strong disincentives to try to do welfare policy by tax or regulation, a practice that should be considered harmful.
I’m curious what people here think.
Related to the bullying post above, and inspired by a weeks-old Ozy blog post. Ozy posited that heteronormativity in general (and homophobia in particular) is detrimental to developing deep same-gender friendships (particularly for males). Basically, the theory goes, boys won’t be emotional friends with other boys for fear of being seen as gay (women, being “expected” to be emotional, don’t face quite the same problem). Superficially, this makes a lot of sense.
But then I look around and note that a lot of male institutions famous for being particularly homophobic (e.g. football teams, military units) also seem to feature some of the deepest male bonding. And frankly, some stuff that out of context could look, well, a little gay (e.g. slapping asses after a good play). Could it be that homophobia isn’t preventing deep male friendships, but actually enabling them?
Consider that deep, emotional friendships are more fraught when there’s a possibility of romantic interest. And it’s not just jealousy – unrequited love hurts (often both parties) and so we tend to be more guarded around possible romantic partners than were are with comfortable “just friends”. (Note: I’m straight, so I lack experience with how/whether deep platonic friendships work between gay males).
Perhaps open homophobia among male social groups basically serves as a signal that everything is platonic, so it’s okay to open up? “No homo” is not just a glib joke, but an actual reassurance that feelings can be expressed honestly without needing to consider the possibility of a romantic motive?
Obviously this isn’t an ideal adaptation, since it hurts gay men in mixed gay/straight environments and contributes to actual anti-gay sentiment. But still, it seems that homophobia may be a symptom of / adaptation to gender roles rather than a cause of them, and may be serving an important function in enabling platonic bonding.
And I wonder if even post-homophobia we’ll still need a gay-friendly version of a similar function, basically a way to signal that this is a non-romantic “safe space” for deep platonic relationships.
Note: These are my independent thoughts, but it seems obvious enough to me that it’s likely I’m not the first to think along similar lines – if there is such literature I’d be curious to see it.
Interesting point. I’m not familiar with the male institutions you describe, but I’ve been slightly uncomfortable about similar issue in the popular culture lately: it’s now difficult to portray deep male friendships that are not romantic.
Many works of fiction that were once famous of their portrayal of deep male friendship now either get depictions with erotic undertones or are actively read as so by fans. Some iconic examples would be either the LoTR movies’ portrayal of friendship between Sam and Frodo (and how that is often interpreted by the audience), or the modern BBC Sherlock. Sherlock even lampshades this constantly (everyone assumes Watson is in the closet / denial and that’s why he keeps swapping girlfriends while living with Sherlock; restaurant owner assumes Sherlock and Watson are on date when they go to eat, etc).
Friendship is one kind of love, but today it seems nigh impossible to talk about any love that does not imply romance and sexual relationship.
Yeah, that was one of the things I was thinking of. Sam and Frodo were clearly not intended by Tolkien (a WW1 veteran) to be lovers, but, now that homosexuality is more mainstream, we start to see their relationship through that prism.
Older (e.g. Victorian) literature seems to fairly commonly depict male bonding in a way that might seem gay to our modern sensibilities. But, in not even allowing for the possibility of guy-on-guy romance, their men are freer to express platonic sentiment. Obviously hard to tell from novels, but I don’t get the sense that “no homo” signaling was something that happened much until relatively recently.
So, ironically, as homosexuality got more visible, mainstream, and accepted, it actually became more important to signal straightness between men, and “locker room talk” got more blatantly homophobic.
Additionally, consider that all-male spaces are fewer and fewer: there are fewer and fewer boys’ schools and colleges, fewer people participate in organized amateur sports, the military participation ratio is down in a lot of places (and there are a lot more women in the military), sex-segregated clubs have declined (either by just fading away, or by becoming non-sex-segregated).
Right, you only need to signal against things which are seen as a realistic possibility.
I think that’s a bit too pat. Consider the English public school (i.e. boarding school) which for a hundred plus years had homosexual sex, close platonic male friendships, and varying degrees of homophobia all living side by side.
That’s still consistent. The proposition, I think, is that strong platonic male friendships are facilitated by homophobic social norms, not the actual absence of homosexuality. In this framework, any interaction that could be ambiguous is given the benefit of the doubt and judged to be platonic and heterosexual.
This checks with my own experience in the Navy (DADT-era), a work environment that was all-male, socially homophobic, and highly conducive to strong platonic male bonding. Coupled with submariner culture being additionally focused on relentlessly trolling people and also being generally weird, these norms even gave cover to interactions like “gay chicken,” where one submariner initiates some type of minor but unambiguously homosexual interaction, and the only acceptable action for the counterparty is to escalate in return. This would go back and forth a few steps; first one to recoil in disgust loses.
I had left shortly before Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell ended, but I heard from some friends that once it did, the collision between the existing culture and their now-out gay shipmates was a bit awkward.
Basically, countersignaling creates some really weird effects, which then get compounded when the social ground changes.
I think this is neither good nor bad, in itself, but there probably needs to be an adjustment period where we figure out close male friendships, and maybe close friendships generally – consider all the drama about the “friend zone” and “beta orbiters” in heterosexual nonromantic relationships, vs the relatively drama-free “gay best friend”.
Tolkien is pretty much asexual, but in the books (much less so in the movies) it’s clear that the dynamic of the Frodo-Sam relationship is based on the class difference. Frodo is, basically, a gentle
manhobbit and Sam is very much a servant.With reference to WWI, it’s a sort of officer/officer’s-batman relationship.
For anyone else who was as confused as I was, a batman in this context has nothing to do with the Caped Crusader.
Evidently it refers to the manservant of a military officer.
Presumably WWI would have ended much more quickly if every British officer had a Batman.
I wanted to doublecheck I had it right and of course had to search for “officer’s batman”.
If they had served in a war together, this would make Alfred Batman’s batman.
Because sometimes even Batman needs a batman.
And if Alfred was given a battlefield commission, his soldier-servant would be Batman’s ex-batman’s batman.
So when Alfred takes his turn in front of the stumps in a friendly Gotham cricket match, he becomes Batman’s batman batsman.
And if they took a trip to Venice and Alfred hired a gondola, the gondolier would be Batman’s batman’s boatman.
If Christian Bale confused his roles, and acted like he was going to comfort Alfred but was actually reaching for the ax, it would be Patrick Bateman’s Batman’s batman pat trick.
According to Wikipedia
Of course, today’s officers use a bat-mobile instead.
Hey, I’ve read some of those comics!
Sixties Batman was real corny.
This is phenomenal.
We can do better.
As before, suppose Christian Bale confused his roles, and acted like he was going to comfort Alfred but was actually reaching for the ax. Suppose further that this happened on a fishing trip, wherein Bruce Wayne had declined to do any fishing.
That would Patrick Bateman’s Batman’s batman’s bait man’s pat trick.
I’ve created a monster.
You’ve created a monster with a batman!
Isn’t part of the point that it still is a friendship, not some merely professional master-servant relationship?
Sam might be a servant, but isn’t just a servant. He even becomes a Ringbearer for a non-negligible time (and is the only one relinquish it willingly).
Bilbo gave up the ring willingly too.
Bilbo had to be cajoled. He doesn’t quite accept it until he sees Frodo under the Ring’s power at Rivendell.
I’d expect that master-servant relationships could be quite friendly at times: most servants would spend most of their lives working at a single house, so would most likely have grown up with their masters.
Plus, friendly master-slave relationships weren’t by any means unknown in periods where house slavery was common, and if two people can be friends when one of them literally owns the other as a piece of property, I’d be very surprised if a mere long-term employment contract could stop friendly feelings from developing.
@gbdub
My first thought is that I’ve never actually experienced this lack of deep friendship. I always see this theory coming from the outside, from women observing the male gender from the outside and spinning out theories that are as silly as the ones r/theRedPill comes up with for women.
My second thought is that I’m lucky to have gone to boarding school and had a shared experience in which to gather close friends.
For many people, there are no close friends of any kind in adulthood. I refer back to a discussion we all had in a previous Open Thread on the affects of techno-capitalism on alienation and atomization.
When technology reduces the dependency of people on others, it reduces the need for close knit social groups. People are able to retreat from all the difficult and annoying aspects of friendship, and treat other people as commodities, having fluid and shallow relations instead. However, this deeper level of interaction is still missed by people. There’s a kind of cognitive dissonance created by modern convenience where we retreat from the slightest discomfort, but then complain about having an empty life lacking fulfillment.
Technology has destroyed friendship and deep relations for many people by freeing them from being forced into living situations with others, but at the same time, a small part of the human brain yearns for this kind of interaction. It’s like exercise; being fit feels great, but few people are fit now because it’s so easy to be a fat sack of lard, even with the lack of accomplishment drilling into the back of your brain like a tick. We’re in a pre-wire head stage where all social relations are slowly melting away before the need for sugar and flashing lights on a screen.
So the dissolution of male friendship is just part of the larger dissolution of human relationships.
@nimim. k.m. says:
I would say that it’s difficult to portray deep friendships that are not romantic full stop. It’s hard to portray platonic friendships between men and women now, because we’re altogether cynical about the concept as a society.
>I would say that it’s difficult to portray deep friendships that are not romantic full stop. It’s hard to portray platonic friendships between men and women now, because we’re altogether cynical about the concept as a society.
Oh, I don’t disagree. I’ve just encountered more depictions of same-gender friendships that are so obviously so non-sexual non-romantic that it even does not need to be pointed out than similar friendships between men and women: former were more usual than they nowadays are, the latter have always been rare in comparison.
I don’t think there was much opportunities for male-female friendships, really, in the 19th century Europe, or in any age. On the other hand, maybe some Victorians viewed marriage, especially a “sensible” marriage more like a friendship than we do.
>I don’t think there was much opportunities for male-female friendships, really, in the 19th century Europe, or in any age.
I don’t think I buy that for 19th century Europe, and it certainly doesn’t apply for every age before this one. Just off the top of my head, I think Lucy in the novel Dracula describes someone as a platonic male friend.
Lucy Westenra, the girl whose main trait is that she’s so beautiful and vivacious she has tons of suitors? Maybe she’s just misinterpreting the intentions of a nice guy…
As for 18th and 19th century America…that Harriet Beecher Stowe novel that was quoted in Albion’s Seed (Oldtown Folks, written in 1869 but set in the 1790s, and based largely on her own family’s recollections) also has:
(Tina and the male narrator attend a traditional New England boarding high school together; the narrator says these were in the 1790s, and had long been, coeducational, with only Andover and Exeter as exceptions. The narrator also falls in love with Tina, but knows she wouldn’t be interested, so remains just friends. She falls in love with the novel’s Aaron Burr expy, who is 25 years her senior, and she only learns after marrying him how much worse a person he is than she’d imagined. After he gets himself killed in a duel, ten years after her first marriage, she marries the narrator and they live happily ever after.)
“It’s like exercise; being fit feels great, but few people are fit now because it’s so easy to be a fat sack of lard,”
There are fat people who exercise. Some of them are impressively physically capable.
There are thin people who don’t exercise, but would probably feel better if they did.
The impression I’ve always got is that close platonic female-female friendships were more common than close platonic male-male friendships, so I think there must be some other factor affecting men more than women.
I suspect the LOTR re-read has more to do with an audience demographic (probably especially women but not only):
– wanting to see more women in the story
– wanting to see love as they experience it, or expect/wish to experience it, in their own lives: namely, a couple as two protagonists, rather than a quester and the barely-explored object of a quest, or even worse, prize for the quest)
And this ends up bending the lens of the reader in a way that makes Sam and Frodo a couple. See also why a male-dominated Enterprise attracts this whole phenomenon, but nothing parallel is apparent for, say, Picard and Riker, as far as I can tell.
Picard is bald, which makes him visibly old, which makes him a less attractive target for slash.
That theory seems really stupid to me. You know how MRAs sometimes complain that they can’t understand why so much literature that pathologizes masculinity comes from women who have no idea what it’s actually like to be a man? Something similar comes to mind.
I don’t think deep male friendships are stigmatized as gay; I think they’re fetishized as gay. This is pervasive across popular culture – men get into deep male friendships and see nothing homoerotic about it; women look at these friendships and write slash fiction. I’m not sure heteronormativity is to blame; I have no doubt that circa-2000 BC, Sumerian women were carving Gilgamesh/Enkidu slashfics on cuneiform tablets.
I had a very close male male friendship in highschool and we never got ‘bullied’ for being gay by anyone, but all of our mutual female friends would joke about us being gay and how we should hook up.
I think you have a point there, although it’s not like only women see Sam and Frodo and think, “heh, gayyyyyy”.
Certainly men can and do have deep friendships, but it takes a long time to develop them organically. Straight men can have deep platonic friendships with straight women as well, but those can take even longer for both parties to feel things out and safely enter the “just friends” phase (even then there’s the possibility of the occasional spontaneous hookup).
In the context of something like a sports team or fraternity, where you’re expected to get close with a bunch of guys that you didn’t directly select and start off as strangers, I’m wondering if blatant homophobic signaling short circuits through the “don’t worry, this is all platonic” phase and helps bonds form more quickly.
I’ve observed many progressives doing this and it annoys me a lot. They see emotional intimacy between men and do essentially the same thing that homophobes do, which is to (metaphorically) point at them and yell “Gaaaay!” But they think it’s okay when they do it just because their unspoken subtext is “…and that’s good” rather than “…and that’s bad”. Not seeing that it can be just as damaging to the ability of straight men to enjoy close friendships.
*tinfoil hat mode*
Seeing perfectly well.
Patriarchy Delenda Est.
>Patriarchy Delenda Est.
I was about to say that the Patriarchy would logically be masculine (so delendus), but actually amusingly enough the Latin word for manliness is feminine.
Out of curiosity, what’s that even based on? Going by my vague recollections of high school Latin, don’t third declension masculine and feminine nouns decline the same? So how would they be able to tell that virtus is feminine rather than masculine?
I’m sure there is something, you understand; I’m not questioning it, I know perfectly well what the dictionaries say.
My guess would be seeing the word used in a sentence modified by some adjective that isn’t third declension and thus makes obvious from the ending what gender the noun is.
Gender of virtus is evident in Cicero, Leg. 1.16.45 suā virtute valeat, where the agreeing adjective suā is feminine.
Most abstract nouns in Latin are feminine, so it’s not particularly surprising.
“Patriarchy” comes from the Greek πατριαρχία (patriarchia), so it would be feminine.
Strictly speaking, virtus is courage, valour or virtue, although it does relate etymologically to vir (man). Manliness specifically would be virilitas, which is also feminine.
I woner whether Sumerian women were even allowed to learn to write. Spontaneously I lean toward probably not.
The first author of anything whose name we know was Enheduanna, a Sumerian priestess who composed hymns.
Now, I’m not sure whether Enheduanna could or did physically inscribe anything on a tablet, but there certainly were female scribes. The Sumerian deity associated with writing was female.
That doesn’t necessary mean anything. Athena was the Greek goddess associated with wisdom and warfare, but the Ancient Greeks generally thought that women were rather stupid and irrational, didn’t normally educate them, and certainly didn’t let them fight in war.
You say that, but there certainly were literate Greek women. Assuming AlphaGamma isn’t fooling us all, it would appear the same goes for Sumerian women.
Enki was a woman? First I’ve heard of it.
@Anonymous- I’m talking about Nidaba (Enki’s half-sister) who was specifically the goddess of writing and the scribe of the gods.
And beyond her, there are other attestations of female scribes.
Anonymous, you may be assuming that the Victorian model of maintaining status by incapacitating women is typical. It does happen (see footbinding and Boko Haram), but it’s hardly the only model for relations between men and women, and it doesn’t necessarily get stronger as you go farther into the past.
I wonder if there’s ever been a society that did the Sanderson thing and incapacitated men to show their status. None come to mind, but I wouldn’t be too surprised if someone else here knows of one.
@Nancy
I am assuming that, and my own understanding of history suggests that it doesn’t grow linearly stronger necessarily, but certainly rapidly grows to a high strength as you go backward and then stays there forever the whole way back.
@Gazeboist
I’ve never read Sanderson, so I don’t know what “his thing” is, but maybe you could count the habit of Mandarins of growing their fingernails long to show that they didn’t have to engage in manual labor?
Gazeboist, offhand I can’t think of any societies which incapacitated men to show status– maybe you could count Hasidic subcultures which educate girls more than boys because women are supposed to get jobs and men are supposed to study Talmud.
I know of a moderate number of societies which try to turn women’s bodies into supernormal stimuli, but only one– ours– which does this to men by way of body building.
It’s not a case of “does”, just “did”, but by many accounts Classical Greek men seem to have been much more into bodybuilding than we are now. Socrates notably suggests it’s foolish not to get as ripped as you can, as I recall.
@Anon
In the Stormlight Archive, the dominant civilization has a taboo on male literacy, and a strong bias against male education (except in military arts). It’s a little more complicated than that (male religious devotees are both high status and educated; there’s a simplified ideogram system males are allowed to learn which is about halfway to being a real alphabet; …), but as a general rule the high status men are all fairly ignorant of their own technology, and most can barely read, while the women are the ones developing that technology, not to mention any fashionable literature the society has.
Nancy’s example of Hasidic groups that promote extra education for women are a good example, actually, and match almost perfectly. I wouldn’t count older cultures where being literate was generally frowned upon, but the kings all had scribes, unless all the scribes were women for some reason.
@Nancy
I think that these people value Talmudic study over ‘worldly’ studies though, so they consider the men better educated.
@Anonymous: You recall correctly.
You’ve described ritual combat, duels, sports, contests, the Olympics, and pretty much most forms of male play. That’s why rules make things fun – they test men to see what they can do with limited resources or under highly particular circumstance. This served the purpose of signalling male quality very well, and so has reach fixation and high development across the populace.
One more, possibly. Should brain damage from contact sports count?
Aaapje, women with bound feet were higher status, but they were still crippled. In those Hasidic subcultures, men are less capable of earning a living, and that might turn out to matter.
Gazeboist, if we’re doing fiction there’s Brin’s Glory Season. Men are expected to be able to do a wide range of things. Women get to specialize, and women are in charge. I’ve wondered whether this is a criticizism of Heinlein’s list of what people ought to be able to do.
Anyone remember details about Cherryh’s hani? As I recall, the males were considered too unreliable to be trusted with responsibility, but not actually damaged.
@Nancy,
I think you are conflating different kinds of status.
In general my belief is that gender norms give men more status in some situations and women more in other situations. Whenever I see a declaration that men or women have higher status, that generally is only valid for the situation for which their status is compared.
@Nancy Hani males weren’t physically damaged, but I think the lack of access to education you talk about in other cases might apply. When an ousted male winds up on a starship, he knows less than a newly recruited hand might. Even when he held an estate, IIRC it’s his sister who handled most of the business end, so it’s not necessarily a matter of having comparable knowledge in a different sphere. His job, as I recall, was mostly fighting other males attempting to usurp him. While that involved weapons and tactics I get the impression that it was learned ad hoc rather than intentionally transmitted. (Since the ones who had succeeded have no incentive to pass on the knowledge to someone who would at best only try to unseat him.)
What makes you think that? (Putting aside an argument over whether or not your average Sumerian woman could write or had access to a cuneiform tablet.) The roles and behavior of men and women have changed quite dramatically over times and cultures; it’d be a bit bizarre for Sumerian women in 2000 BC to be sharing the attitudes of American teenage girls posting SuperWhoLock slashfic on Tumblr in 2016.
Check out “Stiffed” by Susan Faludi. It includes a chapter about the forced coed-ization of a military academy. She comes to the conclusion that when women aren’t around, men behave differently towards each other – in many ways, far more tenderly. She also makes it sound quite homoerotic – apparently, the academy’s traditions included such things as on-the-mouth kissing in greeting and wrestling that somehow always ended up with people taking their clothes off. (I might be remembering this a bit fuzzy, since I read it years ago).
As for homophobia, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that some of the most violently homophobic societies feature interactions between men that come off as homoerotic. Take all those photos of Bush holding hands with the Saudi prince. Compare also to the way that female-female relationships that are sexual/romantic are often read as not (witness bemusement/annoyance of some lesbians at being asked about their “friend”, getting referred to as “gal pals”, etc) – while I have no direct experience, my understanding is that non-sexual physical closeness between women is much more common than between men. Is there an equivalent for boys of girls braiding each other’s hair or whatever at a sleep-over? Recognizing relationships that are sexual as sexual leads to relationships that aren’t sexual being seen as sexual, and to some extent squishes them out.
Your hypothesis doesn’t really conflict with Ozy’s, anyway. When they are assured (whether that assurance is real or not) that the absence of women and gay/bisexual men means the space is “non-sexual”, men behave more intimately with each other.
Extra credit assignment: Watch “Top Gun”.
Ah, Top Gun (a perfect 1980s bromance action flick), which inspired the Cards Against Humanity card “A homoerotic beach volleyball scene”.
The frat party version is pantsing a guy after he passes out and drawing a dick on his ass in marker (and not thinking too hard about the irony).
I don’t know, I think we’re still in conflict. My take was that Ozy believes that homophobia makes it harder for men to have deep friendships, and therefore in a non-heteronormative/non-homophobic world male friendships would be easier. I think outward homophobia enables male friendships by signaling that a space is non-sexual, even though gay men are a thing known to exist. In hetero/cis-normative world, it’s easy to immediately see that a space is free of women – but allowing for gay men makes it harder to tell if the space is truly non-sexual.
The pantsing though is a fairly aggressive and adversarial thing to do. If that’s a direct parallel, what does that indicate?
Homophobia makes it harder and easier, in an odd way, I guess is the way to put it. If you could wave a magic wand and just make all the homophobia disappear, presumably men could have intimacy with each other, regardless of sexuality, without being worried about being seen as gay.
Within a society that is homophobic, ramping up the homophobia in male-only spaces allows intimacy that would be otherwise read as homosexual to occur.
The pantsing bit was something of a joke. Still, describing male bonding as more “(physically) aggressive” than typical female bonding would not, I think, be particularly controversial.
It might be easier, in the sense that homophobia makes being seen as gay inherently bad. But intimate platonic relations between straight men and women are difficult in a way that relationships between straight men are not, and that’s obviously not due to negative stereotypes of male-female relationships. That aspect might make between-men relationships become more difficult absent homophobic signaling – you’d be worried about being seen as gay, not because being gay is bad per se, but because being gay creates the possibility of romance and the associated relationship pitfalls.
Not just aggressive, but adversarial – at least in a “play” way. Male bonding certainly is more aggressive and adversarial than female.
I suppose that regarding male-female friendships, I’ve had more of those than most guys have, so I’ve got a different view than most.
Gdub’s hypothesis and Ozy’s appear to be mutually exclusive from where I’m at.
See my response to his response above – if there was no homophobia at all, there would be (fewer) issues than there are.
I disagree, not unless you have some way of removing the questions of sex and physical intimacy/trust completely from the equation. (which granted, is one of the advantages the internet has over meat-space)
if there was no homophobia at all, there would be (fewer) issues than there are
Not necessarily – if closeness, emotional intimacy, and freedom of physical touch are still seen as primarily indicating sexual/romantic intimacy, the fear (though I do think “fear” is a strong word to use here) would not be “Oh no, he’ll think I’m gay” (because nobody cares a bean if you’re gay, straight, ace, bi, pan or something different every second Tuesday) but “Oh no, he’ll think I’m into him romantically”.
There’s enough confusion about mixed signals between men and women who want to be close friends – everything from “leading the other person on” to the kind of jealousy seen about “my boyfriend/girlfriend is still really good friends with their ex and now they want to meet up with them and they say it’s just a friendly thing but is this okay?”
Remember a previous commenter commenting on here before about “Veronica” and “Betty”, and how he was torn about starting up the friendship again because he thought he might want to rekindle the romance with his ex if they got in touch and started meeting again? Getting rid of homophobia is not going to fix that kind of problem if one of the (or both) parties is worried about being mistaken for expressing romantic interest where such is not intended.
@Deiseach:
Then why do women behave so much more comfortably with non-sexual physical intimacy?
@dndnrsn
Do they? I’m hear this a lot and the only examples that come to mind are from popular media and movies, as opposed to anything I’ve seen in my female friends or relatives.
Anecdotally, I’ve seen young women get a lot closer together, just sitting together, than young men. Maybe it’s just that women are socialized to take up less space? I’ve seen three women sit in a space that two men would be cramped in, and it’s not like the sexual dimorphism is that major.
I’ve also seen women holding hands but not acting in a way that was in any other way “coupley”. Mostly East Asian, but given that I’ve seen male-male and male-female East Asian couples acting coupley, as people tend to do regardless of ethnic group, I’m guessing they weren’t couples.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, back up a second. I thought “gal pal” was an established euphemism for “we’re as lesbian as the day is long” used by lesbians who want to distance themselves from the U-Haul dyke stereotype making “girlfriend” mean instant cohabitation?
I may have to revise a few of my ideas about my social circles.
I was under the impression that it was a sort of in-joke on that basis, like how referring to someone as a “confirmed bachelor” or a gay guy talking about his “roommate” is no longer a euphemism where there’s any pretense but rather a sort of pseudo-euphemism used for humourous effect.
EDIT: I might be wrong on this one. Someone with more relevant experience, feel free to correct me.
But I have to assume that’s what’s going on when the guy who is openly gay introduces another guy, with whom he is acting super couply, whom he has brought to a party as his +1, as his “roommate.”
Phew. Change of ideas: aborted!
Based on the example I edited in above, I think we might both be right – it’s used humourously, but is a way of saying “person I am dating/hooking up with” a step or two short of “boyfriend” or “girlfriend” or “partner” or whatever.
Of course, this is amateur hour non-participant-observer anthropology. I could be completely wrong.
Well hell, at least it isn’t auto-ethnography.
That’s an interesting grain around which to wrap a thought. Consider that in heterosexuality, men are the more physical sexual partner. They actively touch the partner’s body more, they visually value the physique more, the parts of the brain responsible for assessing visual stimulae go into overdrive during sex (the same parts diminish in women during sex). You could see why women might think that men touching each other would be seen as sexual, and also why they might be surprised by why people fail to read into hand-holding as lesbianism. But in truth, men are just more physical in general. They’re touchy-feely and visual end-of-story. A bit of rumpus-pumpus thus doesn’t mean as much to men as to women – it takes full on SEX to mean sex to men. But as physicality is much rarer among women, a bit of touching means A LOT to them. Usually women are more action-oriented in their judgement, hence why gifts carry so much valency. Men aren’t very overwhelmed with gifts from each other, unless they’re vast.
But it isn’t. We all perceive that female friends touch each other more frequently. If touch is so deeply meaningful to women, why would this be?
Except for all of us who don’t. I think you’re missing the picture here about how much male touching relative to female touching has changed.
I’m confused now. What does the picture look like to you?
He’s saying physicality isn’t rarer among women now, here, but only because men have been effectively forced to dial their naturally much higher level of physicality down to a level of absolute and unnatural austerity.
I’m far from sure he’s right about it, but the concept as such seems straightforward enough: women remain at their natural low level of physical intimacy, men have been pushed down below that to nil, from a natural baseline (friendly grappling, backslapping, even “getting into serious fights with enemies” might be included) that’s far higher.
Anonymous gets what I’m saying. I’m not asserting 100% definite-this-is-it, just that it aligns with my experience firmly and I see patterns in the discussion to this effect.
Sometimes, you have to try and see a picture.
I’ve had similar thoughts: that the downside of sexual liberation is now that every intimate relationship, or expression of affection, is seen as sexual (whether heterosexual or homosexual). It doesn’t help when you have gay rights people (either LGBT themselves or straight allies) claiming that any depictions of male/male or female/female friendships as “just” good friends is enforced heteronormativity, ignoring the possibility of romantic/sexual interest between same-gender people.
If what formerly was seen as close friendship now gets read as “repressed same-sex desire”, no wonder people – and men in particular – are not willing to engage in the same expressions. It used to be acceptable for two men (or two women) to walk arm-in-arm; try it now and you’d be presumed to be a couple in the romantic sense.
Contrast this, of course, with male/female friendships. It used to be that women and men could not be friends; any relationship between them would be assumed to be romantic. It’s still hard for close male/female friendships to exist without everyone assuming they are romantically involved. (or that one member longs for the other).
This is, from my point of view, a tradeoff along two axis*:
1) Male/female interactions are always coded as (a) romantic vs (b) ambiguously romantic/friendly
2) Same sex interactions are always coded as (a) friendly vs (b) ambiguously romantic/friendly
3) Gay people are (a) shunned vs (b) accepted
Maybe I’m missing some other tradeoff here, but I would select society (b) over (a), even given the downsides mentioned in this thread.
*These are most likely more complex than a simply linear interpolation between two societies, so there’s room for more exploration there, but I think it is a decent approximation for this thread’s purposes.
I think this is a good depiction of the two ends of the axis, and I agree these all will tend to move in tandem. In Roman times for example it was quite normal and accepted to bunghole other men or even young boys, and you were not considered gay for doing so. But if you allowed yourself to be penetrated by another man you were stigmatized and feminized. Reportedly this is also a common social dynamic in modern tribal societies – as long as you are on top fucking anything that moves is ok and it does not impugn your manhood.
That freedom to openly engage in gay sex without being gay is not really present in Western culture, though if Deliverance is accurate it might still persist in Appalachia.
The same thing was true of ancient Norse culture. Honestly, it echoes with my own thoughts on the matter. I’m not a big fan of the idea of anal sex to put it lightly, and whether it’s a man or a women doesn’t seem to have much impact on that decision. But the idea of another man touching me with his penis is consternating.
I reckon this ties in to the point about male circles with a lot of physical friendliness stressing “no homo”; it puts everyone at ease that no-one will whip their chesterton out and start having a go.
I believe you need to strike the “other men” part of that. Literally every time I have followed up on claims that some ancient society considered male homosexuality to be normal or acceptable, and this includes a brief look into Roman customs just now, I find that what was considered normal or acceptable was specifically pederasty, sex between an adult man and a boy at most a few years past puberty.
If there was a society anywhere prior to the 20th century that considered it respectable for an adult man to submit to penetrative sex by another man, I haven’t seen any evidence of it.
My knowledge is most recently based on the books Rubicon and Dynasty, by Tom Holland which I read this year. In them he recounts quite a lot of the sexual practices of the Roman ruling elite, including some of them having close relations with low-social-status adult males in addition to their wives (like Sulla). The shame was only associated with being on bottom, and it would be an insult to a man to suggest he was penetrated. The part about patrons of younger men was also mentioned, but the implication was that, again, the younger man was supposed to play the role of the woman in any sex for it to be socially acceptable as an appropriate dominance relationship.
So I agree with your statement that in those societies it would not be respectable for an adult man to submit to penetrative sex by another man for the one submitting. The one doing the sex may be the subject of tittering and gossip, but he would be accepted in society, could command armies and could even be named dictator.
But Sulla, at least, tried to conceal his sexual relationships with adult men out of fear for his reputation and political career. Are there any examples where this was not the case, where a high-status Roman man retained that status in spite of an open sexual relationship with another
man(*)?
I’d be interested to hear if that were true, but I’m skeptical. The general rule is that ancient societies were OK with pederasty but considered adult male homosexuality shameful or disgusting – more so for the penetratee, but the penetrator doesn’t get off unless maybe there were no women or boys available. Modern liberal societies have reversed that – adult homosexuality Good, pederasty Bad – and modern conservatives don’t much care for either one.
* Of any status but clearly past the “beardless youth” phase.
The impression I got from Holland was that any concealment was similar to that of an extra-marital affair. You could not have a romantic relationship (e.g. boyfriends), but sexual gratification was an open secret (e.g. subject to gossip but not condemnation).
If you are saying it was not allowed to be an open acknowledged relationship, I agree. But you would also not acknowledge a relationship with a prostitute, and that is effectively what Metrobius was considered. There were no co-equal male homosexual relationships, they could only exist in dominance of an inferior of a lower social status. Gay sex was degrading, but far more so to the dominated.
I don’t know enough about South Korea to make a solid argument of this but from what I understand they are not especially sexually liberated or repressive, compared to other similarly developed countries.
That being said, watching Korean E-sports it seems that the young men constantly engage in activity that goes well beyond US standards of platonic friendship. There seems to be lots of touching, holding hands, hugging, and the like between the guys. This does not feel like normal sports touching, as I have seen footage of professional E-sports players just holding hands in their normal life.
I am sure the general take on homosexuality is different there, but it is hard for me to believe that they are different enough for them to mesh with you or ozy’s hypothesis.
Basically, by the respective standards of the two theories, for men to behave the way that these South Korean men behave their culture would either, not care about distinguishing between sexual and platonic relationships, or they are in a state of Victorian style ‘denial’ of male on male sexuality to such an extent that the idea simply does not resonate with them as a realistic concern when two men are very close.
I guess a very large number of South Korean E-sports players could also just be romantically involved with their teammates?
Maybe somebody with a deeper understanding of South Korean culture can comment?
I was born in Korea but spent most of my childhood and all of my adulthood in the USA, so I don’t have the best personal knowledge. The sense that I got from my times going back there was that Korean society was far more homophobic than American society. While I was being taught in American middle and high school how normal and un-noteworthy homosexuals were, in Korea I saw any hints of someone being homosexual as being completely unacceptable and worthy of derision.
On the other hand, the male-male contact was far more intimate in Korea compared to the US. I used to hold hands regularly with my male friends (I’m male) when growing up in Korea, and I would see adult men walk arm in arm. One memory of American elementary school that stayed with me was when I was walking from one room to another with my male friend, and I instinctively tried to hold his hand. He snatched it away and laughed at me, asking me if I was gay. Another data point is that, growing up in Korea, it was normal for boys to go together to public baths to play and hang out fully naked. In the US, even in locker rooms it seemed there was a taboo against exposing yourself to others.
This seems to be somewhat consistent with gbdub’s theory. But it’s just anecdote based on my own personal experiences.
I guess this could work with Gbdud, in the basic terms ‘homophobic group can display male closeness’, but I think part of his idea is that these particular groups are extra homophobic so they can be closer. Maybe all of Korean society is so homophobic all the time so that all the men can be closer? It could work, maybe I was wrong about it conflicting with Gbdud.
I think it doesn’t work with Ozy’s idea that homophobic behavior precludes male closeness though.
I think Ozy is falling for the typical mind fallacy. Ozy concludes based on their own experience that hetero-normativity is an obstacle to forming relationships, but Ozy’s experience is not a representative sample.
If you go to a swimming pool in the US are the individual showers separate? In Europe you have usually one big room with many showers (of course, the dressing rooms and the showers are still separated by sex) and you are usually supposed to take a shower before going to the pool for hygienic reasons.
The same often holds for showers and locker rooms of other sports facilities, although not always (a gym might have separate shower booths).
Group showers in locker rooms used to be the norm but individual stalls are more common in recent construction. Even so, some places don’t bother installing doors or maintaining curtains on the stalls and the changing areas are generally common anyway.
In my experience, we had shared large showers, but no one ever showered naked, always with a swimsuit. We did not look at each other when showering, we just faced the wall and washed off as quickly as possible. When we changed our bottoms at our lockers, we did it as quickly as possible and always facing the lockers. Many of us kept a towel wrapped around our waist through the entire process.
It was quite shocking to me as someone who was used to just romping around buck naked with other buck naked male friends in Korea (a semi-common term in Korea for male childhood friends is “scrotum friends” – 불알친구 – because it’s expected that you’ve seen their scrotum).
This was just my experience. It may not be typical of male locker rooms in general in schools in the USA.
@lvlln: In Europe some people might actually be angry with you for wearing a swimsuit in the showers (I don’t know if that holds for women’s showers too) because you are supposed to enter the pool clean. It would be very bad manners to stare at other men in the showers though, most people also face the wall, but otherwise nobody is too much concerned about being there naked.
In some swimming pools, clothing is actually restricted so that swimming shorts which are too long are not allowed, again for hygienic reasons. The main point, I think, is to make sure that everyone actually wears a swimsuit and not sort of swimsuit-like shorts. And of course now there is that burkini thing going on, at least in France, although those bans do not seem to be motivated by concerns about hygiene.
I’m not sure if it is sensible but I guess that if you make people wash properly you don’t have to use as much chlorine which makes swimming more pleasant and possibly also more healthy.
I was told that, before it went co-ed, the Yale gymnasium was a literal gymnasium in the sense that men walked anywhere in the building naked.
On a similar note, When I first entered active duty there was a lot of casual nakedness in the barracks and berthing areas by the time I got out it was viewed as kind of weird and gay. I think the big integration push and pressure to repeal DADT had a lot to do with that.
@onyomi:
One of the major athletic buildings at the university I went to banned women until some point in the 60s or 70s.
Supposedly one of the objections of men to letting women in was “but now we can’t swim naked!”
In their defense, swimming naked is very pleasant!
Feels good man.
Somewhat counter to your locker room point; I go to a gym a few times a week, and there’s inevitably a ton of middle-aged testicles on display. It does seem less common among younger guys, but my sense of it is that there’s no locker-room nudity taboo for the older cohorts.
Yeah! I noticed when I was at a university gym that the old guys mostly did not have a single fuck to give about walking around fully naked. Not like they didn’t have towels, either – they’d just carry them, while younger guys would wear a towel.
I’ve noticed this in the USA as well as I’ve grown up. And I’ve gone through it as well. Now in my 30s, I just don’t give a shit if someone sees my junk in the locker room. And in general, my perception is that the older someone is, the less they care. I think age might play a factor in this phenomenon which complicates things.
The question about old people always, though, is: did they act like this when they were young, or did they start not caring about walking around nude after they got old and weren’t so self-conscious/had no possibility of unintended erection? Given old pictures like this (may be situational: just no room for privacy in such circumstances), it certainly seems to be something of a generational thing, though I think there’s also a tendency, ironically, to get less self-conscious about your body as you get older.
I think younger people tend to look in the mirror and think “ugh, why aren’t my abs more defined, etc.??” While older people look in the mirror and say “well, haven’t completely fallen apart yet!”
I notice that amoung younger guys there’s a widely varying amount of people being OK with nudity. From the guys who put a towel on, take off their underwear, go to the shower, come out with the towel still on, put on their new underwear under the towel, and only then take the towel off.
Me, I don’t want the nice clean towel I’m going to use coming into contact with my sweat/other people’s sweat (BJJ is disgusting) and I just don’t care that much. I’ll turn away from people if I’m naked because politeness, but it’s not like someone who sees my junk knows my True Name and has sorcerous power over me.
@Dndnrsn
My experience of variability is roughly similar to yours and I feel similarly to you, though I think this level of comfort with nudity among same-sex friends would be weird by any standard today in the US. Like, seriously, what is going on here??
I’m not sure if that’s a matter of cohort or a matter of age/experience. I used to have a greater taboo about such things, now I just don’t give a shit if some other guy sees my balls while I’m changing.
Women have also been less willing to go topless on the beach, so IMO there is a return to more prudish norms.
Perhaps the fact that most people now carry a camera and can easily share pictures with a wide (Internet) audience played a role in that.
Agreed. Nothing stays in Vegas anymore.
The original argument is like that, but the conclusion is opposite. It’s not heteronormativity that causes this. It’s making homosexual relationships acceptable that’s causing this. If homosexuality is acceptable, then emotional relationships with other boys might be mistaken for homosexuality. If homosexuality is unthinkable, emotional relationships with other boys have to be taken at face value.
But if homosexual relationships were ~truly~ acceptable, then there would be no need to worry about the relationships being mistaken for homosexuality. I think dndnrsn has it right–high levels of homophobia enable nonsexual relationships in the way you describe, moderate levels of homophobia inhibit it in the way you describe, but non-existent levels would remove that inhibition.
Is this true? Heterosexual relationships are generally considered truly acceptable in most societies today, but I get the sense that when someone wants to be close to a friend of the opposite sex in a only-friends-not-at-all-sexual way, they do worry that they may be mistaken for heterosexuality. So it seems to me that the worry isn’t just from the stigma of being labeled in a certain way, but also from the social cost of accidentally signalling sexual interest when you don’t actually have it.
If there was really no such thing as homophobia, then simply saying “I’m not gay” would actually be credible. So (for straight people) there wouldn’t need to be any concern about intimate friendship being mistaken for romantic interest.
It’s the existence of homophobia that creates doubt about whether someone is gay – if gays fear stigma then they would have an incentive to lie about their orientation. So no one’s denial can really be believed. The anti-gay macho posturing then is a way to signal “I’m not gay” in a stronger way than just saying so.
@chalid I don’t think “I’m not gay’ would ever be totally credible. Much like a male female close friendship will cause suspicions even if both say they are just friends. I think in general people will have reasons for not wanting others to think they are in a romantic relationship and so will always have reasons to lie about being in romantic relationships and so, such denials will never be credible.
There is also a second concern here, which has nothing to do with how society views the relationship. It seems to me that the biggest ‘risk’ with platonic male female friendship actually comes from one of the people in the relationship thinking there is a chance for a romantic relationship where there is none.
So it is always valuable to be able to signal ‘nothing romantic will happen in this space’.
Also, one may worry about unspoken and unanswered assumptions.
@chalid I don’t think “I’m not gay’ would ever be totally credible. Much like a male female close friendship will cause suspicions even if both say they are just friends. I think in general people will have reasons for not wanting others to think they are in a romantic relationship and so will always have reasons to lie about being in romantic relationships and so, such denials will never be credible.
I don’t think the analogy is right. One can see lots of reasons to deny a particular relationship, sure. But in the absence of homophobia there are not a lot of reasons to hide your sexual orientation.
It’s not that in our hypothetical homophobia-freee society the two men would be saying “haha no, we’re not attracted to each other, we’re straight,” which as you say is not 100% credible. It’s that they would have publicly lived their whole prior lives as straight people, openly telling and demonstrating their straightness in many contexts. In a homophobia-free society that would be a very strong signal of straightness.
@Chalid that is a very good point, as somebody who has often faced ‘accusations’ of being gay, I am sure many of the people assumed that I was closeted and their ‘acceptance’ of my sexuality would be welcomed, or in the case of my family(extended) they just assumed that I was closeted because to them gay=bad. But in a world with zero homophobia it would be considerably weirder for someone to go their whole life without revealing their sexual preference and it being generally taken as true.
Even disregarding the rest of society, it seems to me that people would worry that their intentions would be misinterpreted by their friend. Like, in a friendship between two heterosexual people of opposite sex, I would not try to hold their hand, because it would be interpreted as a romantic overture rather than as a friendly gesture.
I would guess that in a homophobia-free world that there would be significantly more people that are fluid in their sexual preferences, so while you wouldn’t have any reason to hide your homosexuality, there would also be a lot fewer “purely straight” people.
@JayT:
Why would you guess that? None of the actual statistics available seem to bear that out at all. As far as we can tell empirically, most men especially are just straight and that’s it.
It seems to be an article of faith among the gender crowd that tons of people who are so totally comfortable with their sexuality that they helped construct and maintain the strict binary of heterosexuality throughout tens of thousands of years would in fact turn queer at the drop of a hat if only all gender norms were washed away, but why would they? There’s no proof of it. It seems to be just a (fairly odd if you ask me) utopian fantasy.
Because making out, holding hands, and having sex are all in fact different things, for which individual people may or may not have different preferences.
Okay, but as far as we can judge, they don’t, though. The question was why do you guys keep insisting on this “may or may not” when actually studying the real, non-hypothetical situation strongly indicates “not”? It’s like constantly saying that “humans are a species which may or may not have anywhere from 0-18 arms” when in fact, no, human beings always have two arms, barring horrible accidents or severe birth defects. You don’t have any proof or even sturdyish indication of 15-limbed men, why is your instinct to insist on the pretense that they might? They might be giants, okay, but no, they are windmills! They’re windmills, Quijano! You’re wearing a shaving bowl!
@anonymous, my understanding is that Millennials self report as bisexual far more than previous generations. That’s what I was thinking of.
Does anyone have a breakdown by sex of the increased millennial bisexuality?
I expressed this badly:
One individual person may or may not have different preferences about who they hold hands with, who they make out with, and who they have sex with.
For example:
– I want to not have sex with men.
– I am less likely to make out with a man than with a woman, but probably would under some circumstances.
– I want to hold hands with exactly nobody. (Seriously it’s a logistical nightmare) (Also my hands get sweaty)
There is no definition of “romantic activity” (or even “sexual activity”) that properly captures the feelings of all humans in modern Western culture. Elsewhere somebody argued that a man who masturbates is by definition not asexual. I know a man who, when shown the definition of an asexual, said, “Yeah, that’s me,” and who masturbates regularly.
The coding of different things as “romantic” or “sexual” varies with society. Friendship among people who might plausibly be sexually or romantically attracted to each other works fine as long as they don’t insist on communicating entirely by subtext.
(I will admit that this is something of a general reaction to this thread, rather than a response to your post specifically)
I can’t resist the joke, but I’m also genuinely curious: what do asexuals think about when they masturbate? Electric sheep?
If asexuality is a lack of interest in having sex with other people, there are a lot of different ways that can arise. One way someone can wind up homo- or hetero-romantic but “functionally asexual” is by having a fetish that doesn’t involve another person or even something that exists in real life.
In this particular case, he considers sex and romance to be net negative, but would otherwise be heterosexual (I think).
I doubt that.
Heterosexual relationships are acceptable, but close nonsexual opposite-sex friendships are a problem for exact the same reason as close nonsexual same-sex friendships: they can be mistaken for heterosexual relationships.
(Ninjaed)
And certainly in fiction, it’s really hard to keep opposite sex characters’ relationship platonic over a long run. The emergence of homosexuality has conversely helped some there,[1] especially as it’s become less acceptable for characters to be “won over to the other team”, just this once.
(Though the increased visibility of bisexuality and other nonbinary orientations may make it more difficult again.)
[1] The Showtime comedy “Episodes” dealt with the adapation of a standard short-run British TV show to an open-ended US sitcom. Matt LeBlanc, playing himself, convinced the reluctant writers to change a the orientation of a character (the male protagonist’s unrequitable crush) from lesbian to (IIRC) bi. His reasoning: “That whole worship from afar thing is fine for the, what, ten episodes you did over there. But this thing could run for years– there has to be someplace for the story to go!”
@LHN:
I’ve always been under the impression that when a show does will-they-or-won’t-they, it usually kills something for the show to say “yes, they will”.
Again, male-female friendships are entirely acceptable, but the possibility of sexual attraction can make them difficult. Removing homophobia removes the “unacceptable” problem but creates the “possibly romantic” problem.
Remember, I’m positing that in a sufficiently homophobic/exclusively-hetero environment, between-male intimacy is not seen as sexual. In a fully gay-accepting environment, between-male intimacy is seen as possibly/probably sexual.
Fully accepting homosexuality destigmatizes actually sexual behavior between men, but creates the new problem of mistaking nonsexual intimacy as sexual.
(double ninjaed)
“creates the new problem of mistaking nonsexual intimacy as sexual”
But this is not going to be a problem between the individuals in the relationship if they are both confident in their heterosexuality–it’s a totally different situation than male-female platonic relationships.
This requires a degree of closeness and trust that doesn’t exist until you’re already friends. It’s not like a shy straight person never hides or laughs off their sexual interest in an opposite sex friend. You need to be confident not only in your own sexuality, but theirs as well.
In practice, it’s admittedly less of a problem – you can almost always take someone’s word that they aren’t gay, simply because 95% of people aren’t gay. For a randomly selected person, the chances that they both are gay, and are lying about it, are very small, and even smaller if no one has reason to be closeted (of course, social groups are not randomly selected, so YMMV).
@herbert herbertson,
Wouldn’t you also have to be confident in the other guy’s heterosexuality?
Otherwise you’re just ensuring any attraction will be unrequited. For all you know the guy subscribes to gay ladder theory and is trying to get out of the friendzone.
To eliminate the possibility, you need both guys to be assumed straight.
This is just flat out wrong. It’s quite common for heterosexual friends to feel uncomfortable when people mistake their friendship for romance.
@ herbert herbertson
In addition to what gbdub and Dr Dealgood said above you also need to keep in mind that being perceived as gay limits a single straight man’s ability meet women.
hlynkacg:
To the extent there are such limits they’re clearly cultural. There are plenty of pockets of the country in which straight women pine over gay men, and straight guys who hang out with gay men often benefit from the phenomenon.
@ Skef
I’m not saying that the latter does not happen, but I would assert that it is the exception rather than the norm. Most guys don’t have the luxury of looking like Zachary Quinto or Wentworth Miller.
Everyone seems to also be assuming here that our current notions of sexuality are all there is. Does two men having sex make them gay? Does my friend have to be gay to desire a relationship in which we have sex?
@ smocc
Assuming you are using “Gay” as a synonym for “homosexual” yes, that’s pretty much the definition.
What exactly would a non-gendered concept of sex (or non-sexual conception of gender) even look like?
@hlynkacg
I have been told there are cultures (past and present) where men sometimes have sex with each other but do not think of themselves as “gay” or “homosexual.” Homosexuality as phenomenon is distinct from homosexuality as identity.
What do things look like in a culture where there is little stigma against homosexual sex but stigma against being gay in the sense of never having sex with women? Or no stigma against homosexual sex but no concept of “being gay”?
I guess what I am really wondering is whether there are reasons I might not want my male friend to desire me sexually besides the worry that people will think of me and my friend as gay.
The probability that someone is gay, conditional on them being close to someone of the same sex, is greater than the probability that a randomly selected person is gay.
@hlynkacg
This is a really good point that rarely seems to come up in these discussions.
I remember in another forum I was on there was a discussion of a news story in which a guy had his Facebook hacked to make him look gay. The guy in the story claimed he had nothing against gay people but that this accusation had “ruined his life”.
This was taken by most people on the forum as being a homophobic statement, as if no one could have any reason to not want to be perceived as gay outside of hostility to gay people.
I feel that he may have meant that women think he’s gay now, ruining his chances at fulfilling relationships and inducing doubt in his partners. I wonder how much homophobia is not signalling to men but signalling to women. This aspect isn’t discussed enough.
@Skef
There is a subculture of women who fetishize homosexual men, but they are not the majority of women by any means. A typical woman who feels like she’s not attractive to her partner is generally not going to get much out of the experience, and the gay fetishists are generally going to be interested in getting the guy to have devil’s threesomes. There’s also very little basis for a long term relationship there outside of being fetishized by in real life fujoshi.
Does two men having sex make them gay?
According to The Advocate, having sex with other men doesn’t mean you’re gay, it just means you’re a man who has sex with other men. You’re only gay if you have the correct political opinions:
So we’ve gone so far in the direction of progress, we’re back to where we started? You can have sex with people of your own gender but that doesn’t make you homosexual; in order to be “gay”, you have to adopt a certain cultural identity.
I mentioned this in a reply upthread, but in lots of older societies the distinction was not whether you had gay sex or not, but what position you were in. The penetrator was still male/straight/normal. The penetrated was gay.
but non-existent levels would remove that inhibition
But would it? The old model was “man and woman who are not blood relations hold hands in public = romantic couple; man and man or woman and woman who are not blood relations walking arm in arm = good friends” because homosexuality being disapproved of and not talked about meant that only different gender couples were interpreted as romantic relationships.
But if “man and woman/man and man/woman and woman holding hands = romantic couple” because everyone is completely chill with all kinds of sexual orientations, then the inhibition becomes not “don’t be affectionate to each other because it will be interpreted as romantic and that’s a forbidden, perverse, unnatural relationship”, but “don’t be affectionate to each other because it will be interpreted as romantic and you’ll have to spend all your time explaining that no, Joe is not your boyfriend, Tom is”.
There have been cases where tabloid newspapers (at least in Britain) have published photos of celebs with another person and headlines about “Is this So-and-So’s new love?” And then it turns out that “No, this is So-and-So’s sister or cousin”. That’s an exaggerated form of it, but the same general principle: if all expressions of affection or closeness are assumed to be romantic/sexual, regardless of sexual orientation, then the non-sexual/romantic interpretations get driven out and repressed.
It’s not about acceptability or homophobia, it’s about interpreting all non-blood relation/non-parent and child physical closeness as being romantic/sexual. Getting rid of homophobia won’t get rid of “If I take their hand, will they/others think I’m romantically interested in them when I’m not? Will some busybody tell my partner I’m cheating on them because they saw me hugging another person in a way they thought was too intimate for ‘just’ a friend?”
^ All of this ^
Can’t we just … not make these assumptions? Like, what’s wrong with “two people who hold hands are reasonably close”?
I feel like if two people are in a relationship, they’re perfectly capable of telling you if it’s relevant.
No, we can’t. We’re humans and we’re hard-wired to be, well, prurient. What the social world around us looks like is interesting and important to us and we’re not going to leave it to others to tell us what we’re supposed to find relevant.
Hard-wired to be interested, sure. Hard-wired to guess, even. But not hard-wired to always blithely assume that two people who could plausibly be attracted to each other must be boning if they demonstrate some degree of closeness and affection, nor to act on that assumption.
You’re right, I was being sloppy.
I think there is a feedback loop here, in that everybody making these assumptions incentivises people to behave in such a way that these assumptions are warranted. So the problem is, how do we make a whole culture jump to a different equilibrium? I don’t know. Hope for enough random noise to knock us out of the current one?
“The old model was “man and woman who are not blood relations hold hands in public = romantic couple”
And what do people think would happen if sexual relations between blood relatives was not taboo?
Can’t we just … not make these assumptions? Like, what’s wrong with “two people who hold hands are reasonably close”?
Oh, I really wish, but that’s probably the asexuality/aromanticism talking. I have absolutely no interest at all in the gossip rags that endlessly dissect celebs’ private lives, because (a) so what? (b) it’s none of my business (c) I don’t care if they’re in love, having sex, both, neither, see point (b), and little to no interest when it’s closer to home about who is or isn’t going out with whom in a circle of acquaintance or neighbours.
I’d be just as happy if expressions of affection were considered as simply that with no further speculation about what’s ‘really’ going on, but that doesn’t seem to be how the majority of humans are wired. I suppose it makes sense, in a mate-searching, offspring-desiring, is this person available or not sense, to be curious about other people’s sexual status. But it’s annoying for those of us who aren’t playing that particular game.
Tangential to the main topic – that’s never going to happen. Human instinct to not mate with people who we knew and/or knew us as children is way too strong, and siblings etc. seperated and birth is too rare a subset to budge inertia.
@LPSP,
You could have made almost exactly the same argument about transgender two decades ago or homosexuality four decades ago.
The reality is that it’s not clear whether or not the occaisonal feelers about normalizing adult incest or pedophilia are going to pay off in new social movements. It’s entirely possible twenty years from now we’ll be awkwardly shuffling away from our siblings on the couch or (more) hesitant about tickling our kids.
No, no you couldn’t’ve. There is no correspondingly a) strong and/or b) specific reaction to those topics. Certainly transgender is far too abstract a concept for human instinct to have adapted around it.
@ LPSP:
I know several married couples who knew eachother as children (or at least since adolescence). I don’t think this “instinct to not mate with people who we knew and/or knew us as children” you describe is anywhere near as strong or universal as you’re making it out to be.
Are you for real here? Are you seriously saying that you don’t think there’s evidence that (especially) a man wearing women’s clothing or otherwise using effeminate expressions doesn’t provoke an instinctive revulsion reaction in many-to-most people? Why do you suppose trans women who don’t disclose are at risk of getting beaten to death if the guy they’ve been making out with finds out?
My impression is that binary gender sorting is a really damn deep instinct which we’re primed to reinforce as much as possible (segregating clothes, colors, hair styles, on and on and on) and react very harshly to transgressions against.
hlynkacg, LPSP is talking about the Westermarck effect which claims a threshold of about age 6, not adolescence.
Funny that I should post about reverse sexual imprinting on the day that Scott posts about forward sexual imprinting.
…
Are you seriously conflating transgendered or transexual people with transvestitism and general effeminity? This shit is mind-boggling.
Thank you, anon.
@LPSP,
Unless you know the person and have asked it’s genuinely pretty unclear.
It’s not uncommon to see a guy in a dress on the subway and be unable to tell whether or not you’re dealing with a drag queen or a transgendered person passing badly. It doesn’t actually matter either way but the point is that transvestites and the transgendered are for the most part indistinguishable.
For purposes of the human instincts, yes I am. I realize that you have a political movement in modern society which places a great import on these distinctions, but in the human instinctual fabric I don’t think those distinctions exist. It’s all the same. (Consider for instance how, before let’s say the mid-’70s, maybe? gay men, drag queens, and transsexuals were pretty much all considered to be the same type of person with the same disease, just on a sort of sliding scale of how gay they got.)
I think it’s going a bit far to expect the 100ky+-old reptile brain reactions to respect postmodern identity politics.
@ Anonymous
I’d never heard of that before.
@ LPSP
I have quite a few co-workers and ex-military buddies who ended up marrying their “high school sweethearts”, and know at least one who’d known his future (now) wife going all the way back to kindergarten.
Power of anecdote, hlynky. Some parts of the world may vary in this trait from others, incidentally.
At the very least it provides us with strong evidence against the hypothesis that the “Human instinct to not mate with people who we knew and/or knew us as children is way too strong“, bringing us right back to Dr Dealgood’s comment here.
Except for the part where it doesn’t, because it’s a complete and utter anecdote. Not going to repeat that point, your “I knew a guy” line is dead. Just accept it.
Are you really expecting me to post a copy of his marriage certificate along with his class attendance lists from age 5 on, so the fact that he has indeed known his wife that long can be “proven” to some rando on the internet?
@hlynkacg
No, it would achieve nothing, because a sample of size of N=1 is still an anecdote, not enough data to argue how strong Westermarck effect is.
How many times does a hypothesis have to be falsified?
On one hand we have LPSP making blanket declarations about the entirety of humanity while providing very little in the way of examples to back them up.
On the other, we have the fact that Oedipus complexes and incest porn are a thing, coupled with the existence of my friend’s kids (and I hardly think his relationship is a unique one).
I don’t think I’m the one exercising poor epistemological form here.
The Westermarck effect hypothesis suggests that people are not attracted to those they were raised with (siblings, or equivalently close non-relatives in kibbutzim). It does not apply to childhood friends etc. (quite obviously I’d have thought, since relationships between those don’t seem that uncommon). For that matter, it probably doesn’t apply to cousins.
There’s a big difference between “I accept X” and “I am X”. I accepted several uni acquaintances’ consensual BDSM practices, but like-hell am I doing anything that would lead others to think I was one. Hanging out with them was fine – I had a gay roommate in my first year for that matter – but letting the furry guy frisk me with his gloves was another matter.
The reason with these cases is there’s something to lose – if women think a straight guy is gay, they *might not assess him as a mate*, and that’s just a disastrous situation to a man looking for a mate. Similarly, someone who isn’t into a deviant practice wouldn’t want feasible partners turning off from misunderstanding, or unwanted attention either.
The solution to this is to extend the good practice of tolerance a step further. We tolerate homosexuality now where we didn’t used to, and that’s great. Now we need to tolerate “no homo” as a phrase and social ritual as well. We have to tolerate selectiveness about sexual expression, without seeing it as an insult or attack on the deliberately excluded possibilities. Someone can strongly signal “I’m NOT gay” without it being seen as homophobic.
That’s absurd. If you’re living a life of loneliness because someone might see you in conversation in another man and assume that you exchange body fluid, then the problem is you, not society. I’m gay, and I don’t avoid women because I’m scared that people might think I’m heterosexual.
Rather, this seems to be a result of an increasingly atomized and individualized society that makes it difficult to hold onto long-term friendships in general. People move and rent more often, and hold down jobs for shorter periods of time (if they even have formal employment). This isn’t helped by a culture that treats marriage and the resulting nuclear family as the sine qua non of human intimacy. And then there’s the Internet. I mean, just look at us. We could be talking to our real friends, and yet we choose to communicate with faceless screennames on the other side of the planet. The thrill of human communication, without the dreadful risk of intimacy.
(This applies just as much to women as men; the difference is that we are trained culturally to examine men for “problems”, but not to apply that same scrutiny to women. If a man is lonely, that’s because of heteronormativity, or feminism, or toxic masculinity, or lead in the water supply. If a woman is lonely, that’s her problem.)
“If a woman is lonely, that’s her problem.”
No, if a woman is lonely, it’s also the fault of men.
That’s actually a really interesting article. Some takeaways:
* The differences between male and female college graduation rates are chalked up to “well, women are just that awesome”. Somehow, I doubt the interviewee would say the same thing about white college applicants.
* Male abandonment increases when there are more women. With millions of black men languishing in prison, what does this mean for black families? Nothing good, I should think.
* “It’s hugely reassuring, I think.” Because it’s reassuring to learn that your inability to get laid is a result of demographic factors outside your ability to control, and not because you’re overweight.
* The whole article comes off as well, a little bit condescending. Gee, it’s just so hard being a rich, white college-educated women who can’t find her very own Christian Grey to sweep her off her feet! What about the flipside; the implicit hundreds of thousands of non-educated men who have a life of eating ready meals alone in a crummy apartment to look forward to.
A number of contributors to this thread are proposing something like the following explanation:
1) At an earlier time, men could have a close emotional relationship without being concerned that it will be interpreted as sexual or romantic.
2) Now, with more acceptance of homosexuality in culture, these relationships tend to be read as sexual or romantic.
3) 2 offers some degree of explanation for 1.
In my view, 3 is totally nutballs.
1 does seem accurate; there was such a time. That was followed in at least the U.S. and perhaps Great Britain (my info is spotty here) by a time in which policing any possible appearance of homosexuality became one of the primary characteristics of male culture. Like, a driving force of the culture. Older people here may remember a “gay or eurotrash” meme from some years ago. This had to do with fashion of all things. If a guy in Italy found a hat he thought looked good on him he might buy it and wear it. Good god, not in the U.S. You might look like … well you know.
If you add “could this make me look queer?” to “is this pleasant whilst drunk?” and general background knowledge you can deduce around 85% of male heterosexual U.S. culture. (Dubstep: Tolerable and possibly pleasant while plastered!™)
The reason that emotional male bonding was still permissible in certain amped-up situations was because they were sufficiently amp-ed up to put off worries of bad interpretations. “You can hug when your team wins the Superbowl” is a cultural cliche, not some careful anthropological reading.
There was absolutely a time in this country when almost all male intimacy was suspect but before any broad acceptance of homosexuality.
Also: “Note: I’m straight, so I lack experience with how/whether deep platonic friendships work between gay males.” How about deep platonic friendships between straight and gay males?
Anyone?
And BTW to those noting/complaining about the effects of slash readings of relationships: Lesbian “action”, particularly in porn, is a much, much more prominent feature of the culture. Note that close female friends don’t typically obsess about being thought of as lesbians. And yet it seems completely natural to many people here that readings of male closeness as sexual or romantic would discourage closeness. That’s so natural because everyone was already worried about that.
I think the confusion here is between awareness and acceptance.
Of the three periods you mentioned, the first had no awareness and no acceptance. The second period has awareness without acceptance. And the current period has both.
In Ozy’s acceptance-based model, we would predict that the current period would have the most intense male friendships and neither of the past periods would have them. In the comments section awareness-based model, we would predict that period 1 had the most intense male friendships and neither of the later periods would have them. Which is closer to reality?
With regard to the note. My roommate in college and best friend is gay and I am straight* and the friendship is very normal for me, like my high school straight straight friendships in almost every way.
The only thing that was weird for me about my close platonic gay friend was that he constantly used f*g and gay as a synonym for bad, which made me slightly uncomfortable because I grew up in an environment where talking that way was considered totally inappropriate.
*my sexuality might be considered bi by some people, in any case I was not attracted to my roommate*
When? If there was, it seems very short – like, maybe a couple decades in the mid-twentieth century. (I think acceptance is less important as a driving force for this phenomenon, if it is real, than awareness of homosexuality as a common, widespread thing).
“Gay or Eurotrash” is a poor example – the issue there is not between-male intimacy, but seeming effete. Masculine-signaling with fashion is a related but distinct problem.
You seem to be implying that I have a hard time getting along with gay guys. No, I’m just asking if friendships between two gay men have the same difficulties that mixed-gender straight friendships have. It’s impossible for me to experience that first hand for obvious reasons, so I was looking for someone willing to share that experience.
That’s my whole point! Eliminating homophobia doesn’t fully solve the problem, because “platonic intimacy is mistaken as sexual” is a separate issue from “homosexual intimacy is considered bad”.
I would say at least the 1950s through the ’80s, probably increasing through that time period.
I’m not sure where your confidence that “between-male intimacy” can be separated from “seeming effete” comes from. Suppose your close straight relationship were mistaken for a gay relationship. What would be problem with that? What’s the problem with being effete? Aren’t all those vectors kind of pointing to the same general area?
I’m actually more implying that straight men’s individual experiences with such relationships would be more likely to help sort through these questions than speculation.
I thought your point was this:
I’m pointing out that the time-period of “peak homophobia” coincided with the period of least acceptability of behavior that might be mistaken for intimacy and most social monitoring of such behavior. And I still see no explanation on offer for why such mistakes are a big deal in the first place. Is that supposed to be an innate psychological law?
Then we are mostly in agreement. I think I said “a couple of decades” – I’d peg it a bit later than the 50s as a start.
Not all gay men are effete, certainly they don’t all participate in “feminized” fashion / grooming. And being seen as womanly or over concerned with appearance is traditionally a flaw for men separate from orientation. Fops and ninnys were mocked without necessarily the implication that they were gay. Anyway, point there was that that’s part of homophobia but not really the part we’re talking about.
I guess I shouldn’t have said “my whole point”. But that is certainly important to my point – homophobia may act as a signal that any implied intimacy is nonsexual, and that might be useful, such that removing homophobia without replacing the signal is not a complete solution to acceptable platonic male intimacy.
I think I need to explicitly distinguish actual anti-homosexuality and homophobic signaling. I think we can safely say that the Victorian era was more anti-gay than say the (19)90s, yet there was probably more homophobic signaling in the (19)90s.
In my theory, peak homophobic signaling should coincide with declining platonic male intimacy, because you’re signaling to maintain the intimacy (previously, blatant signaling was unneeded because homosexuality was unthinkable). The question is, does the final post-homophobia stage have more or less platonic male intimacy than the initial anti-gay but low-signaling phase?
You’ve never experienced awkwardness with possible unrequited love? Or with an attraction to someone you know you shouldn’t be (e.g. a subordinate coworker, a married friend, etc.)? These are very common feelings. Certainly, overcoming the “is this just friends or something else” stage of getting to know a person is emotionally fraught, and the possibility of mistaking friendship for sexual interest makes it harder.
Yeah it would be great if no one was ever hurt or awkward about such things, but that’s not where most of us live – and the problem is deeper than just anti-gay sentiment.
RE Victorian era: Seems right in relation to England, not sure it was as much on the radar in the U.S. at that time. People can simultaneously object to something categorically when it comes up and not much care about it.
Re: worries about mistaken intentions. Sure, but worrying about that in platonic heterosexual relationships in particular implies an already screwed-up backdrop of relationships. Shouldn’t that come up most often in male/female platonic relationships? Something less than 5% of guys are gay. Of those, a good portion won’t be into you anyway. And actually “no, I’m actually straight/gay” is the best, least hurtful reason for clarifying those problems because it isn’t interpreted as a personal rejection. So it’s about the least problematic or common version of the mistaken intimacy problem. (The numbers are much, much worse for gay people when you think about it.) Why the focus on that possibility in particular?
Because it has a sizeable influence on the rest of the dynamic.
High levels of homophobia may be a counter-attack to increasing/intruding cultural acceptance of homosexuality. “Ignore, laugh, fight, win.”
As far as gay male platonic relationships go, no, they don’t tend to have these issues. If someone wonders you can just clarify. It’s also very common for gay men who were formerly intimate to remain friends.
Actual intimacy is usually fairly easy to interpret correctly, which is another reason I have trouble crediting the idea that a loss of homophobia could be a cause of these problems. Unless there’s some reason to think that people are disguising or “toning down” their relationships, it’s usually not that hard to figure out how people feel about each other.
This is funny because in a different context dndrsn notes he doesn’t think its trivial to tell the difference “scared to death” and “into me”.
The problem I’ve been describing is mostly an issue in the making friends / getting to know you stage, and there – yeah, it is that hard for a lot of people and a lot of situations.
In fairness, contemporary “western” heterosexuality does seem to be a bit of a disaster zone. It doesn’t help that men and women generally hate each other as groups these days, reserving enthusiasm for some individuals. But I hold out hope that these problems aren’t innate and can be sorted out over the next few decades.
gbdub: Hard for the people involved or hard for third parties? Why would third parties even have a strong impression during that stage, regardless of the genders involved, unless one or both people were obviously “mooning” over the other?
@Randy M:
I’m not sure what my opinions about male-female sexual interaction have to do with somebody else’s views of same-sex non-sexual intimacy, but:
There is a difference between a third party observing two people, and those two people observing each other. Especially if motivations are coming in to it.
Surely you’ve seen cases where one person is trying to flirt with another, and it is blatantly obvious to you that person B is not into person A, but apparently not to person A?
And, someone who is trying to get laid (regardless of the gender of the people involved) will probably have a tendency to avoid clues that might get in the way of that.
@ Skef
I would really recommend you try to find yourself a different social group, one where men-women relationships are not so, ahem, fucked up.
@dndnrsn
I know you and skef are different people, but the juxtaposition between “people can usually tell the difference between flirting and friendship” and “people can’t usually not tell the difference between terror and lust” was quite amusing to me.
fwiw, I disagree with both.
@Randy M:
I don’t think it’s a “people can’t usually not”, but some number people can’t, or pretend to not be able to. The percentage of people who unintentionally or intentionally violate other people’s boundaries, personal integrity, etc does not have to be high for a lot of harm to occur.
Sorry about my mistaken double negative.
I guess re-reading your original, you mean something like “based on accounts after the fact?” I haven’t observed much of either case in person, but I do find it hard to believe one could mistake the “frightened into it” with the “into it”–nonetheless, it isn’t relevant to pursue here and you’re right, there wasn’t much good in bringing it into this discussion.
So I started to write a response, but got interrupted and in the mean time this thread has blown up, so I no longer feel quite as motivated to reply.
That said, I think gbdub is on to something and feel inclined to echo Deiseach’s comment above.
I do have experience with several of those “male institutions” gbdub mentions, and there definitely a distinct dynamic to them than does not seem to manifest in more “integrated” groups. The difference is complicated and hard to describe but I am somewhat reminded of a comment Scott made a while back to the effect of “Being asexual, it never occurred to me that others cared that much about sex”. I remember reading that and both wanting to both hug and slap him at the same time. Something similar is happening here.
[Epistemic status: trolling for the most part; conjecture will offer nobody insight here]
Hey, now, if you’re going to reminisce about ‘that time culture was homophobic, and we could have closer male-on-male friendships’, you’re just not looking back far enough. The military may be homophobic now, it may have been so in 1800, but the Spartans’ most humiliating defeat came when they outnumbered a bunch of gay dudes and lost.
Heh, don’t forget that the Spartans would be considered flaming gay by any modern standard as well…
To bend it back to topic, I think the ancient Greek idea of homosexuality being “chic” and almost expected in civilized society might also work as an alternative social norm. Why should you fear being seen as gay when it’s actually the higher-status thing to do?
Anyway, I had deep platonic relationships with both men and women and never found anything weird about that. OTOH, I’m mostly unfazed by what some random schmucks think of me, and while I’m not quite asexual, that’s the cluster I’d be most likely to get rounded off to, so I’m probably not the most representative example here.
I don’t believe this is true, actually:
(Xenophon, Constitution of the Lacedaemonians)
Good point. Note, however, that the quote speaks of this as a new law someone introduced. Which would not be necessary or noteworthy if it wasn’t widely practiced before, and something people would want to do if there wasn’t a law.
Lycurgus was the semi-legendary lawgiver and effectively the founder of classical Lakedaimon (i.e Sparta). It’s not a “new” law in any sense relevant to the concept of “the Spartans”. Before Lycurgus there was a city-state there, sure, but there was no Sparta as anyone understands it.
Lycurgus lived in the ninth century BC, four hundred years or so before the period most people think of when they think of Ancient Greece.
Okay, then I stand corrected on this.
@Autolykos
If homosexual sex can be so popular that the majority of men engaged in it, then that puts paid to “born this way”. It would show that cultural pressure is sufficient to change sexuality.
Yet, this is contradicted by our more recent Christian dominated times in which suppression of the sexuality of gay men proved impossible. Ex-gay was a farce and laws criminalizing gay sex were ineffective at making homosexual men into heterosexual men. All the pressure in the world couldn’t do it.
Still, it remains an established historical fact that homosexual relations were popular among Ancient Greek societies. If it were merely the case that homosexuality was accepted(officially) but a minority activity, as in our time, then there would be no confusion. Would historians looking backwards interpret our official enthusiasm for gay rights and gay pride as proof that most men engaged in homosexual activity? No.
We know that in Greek societies pederasty was a thing and a read of Wikipedia will tell you that it was almost always treat as erotic. For homosexuality to be popular enough to be institutionalized into a right of passage implies either that we’ve got sexuality radically wrong, or that we’ve got Greek primary sources radically wrong. Have people just been running away with a weird interpretation of the word “eros” for hundreds of years?
Or maybe the Hellenes were just weird.
If male homosexuality is a heritable trait, populations could differ in the frequency of that trait. The Gay Uncle hypothesis seems silly but there might be heterozygote advantage or some other handwavey reason why it could remain in the gene pool despite the obvious fitness hit.
Hell, if the Gay Germ hypothesis is right it could have literally been a Greek epidemic.
I’m not sure that it has to be entirely one or the other. Most things are combinations of genetics, random chance, and environment. In the environment where homosexuality is criminalized and suppressed, only the 1-2% who are that way due to genetics or chance (irrelevant for this discussion) would show any interest in men. When it’s socially encouraged, you’d get much higher numbers. The LGBT community has reasons to push ‘born this way’ as the exclusive reason, but I don’t think it’s true. It’s not true of anything else. (Think of polyamory if this doesn’t make sense.)
@ bean
This would imply that as homosexuality became fully socially acceptable in the West over the last few decades, the number of LGBT people should have increased considerably. I do not think this is the case.
It’s not. A couple OTs ago someone brought this up and expressed his dismay that the incidence of homosexuality was apparently an order of magnitude lower than authority figures had always been telling him. These are some of the newest statistics available anywhere and they don’t appear to be, or even have much room to be notably higher than when homosexuality was both criminalized and pathologized.
First, that’s people who identify as LGB, not people who do LGB-type things. I think we can all agree that the Greeks/Romans under discussion didn’t identify as anything other than ‘normal’, which broadly corresponds to ‘straight’ today. Second, in direct contradiction to your point about the rate not increasing, that report has 16-24 year olds as identifying at 3.3%, as opposed 1.7% among 35-49s. That’s nearly doubled in the space of 10-20 years (and well over doubled compared to their parents). Unless we totally reject any effect of social environment on people’s sexual actions (counterexamples are numerous) and assume that young people are just less likely to lie (and that the true rate of LGB is somewhere at or above 3.3%), then the obvious conclusion is that increased acceptance of homosexuality is going to make more people take homosexual actions. Someone who, 100 years ago, would have suppressed urges/curiosity as sinful and repugnant, might now act on them.
Edit:
If this still doesn’t make sense, consider the following:
1. Why do so many people in the Bay Area rationalist sphere practice polyamory? The most likely answer is that the social environment encourages it, and most people are not so inherently monogamous that they’ll resist. Other answers require some amusing logical contortions. Why should homosexual leanings work differently from polyamorus ones?
2. The sexual revolution. It happened way too fast to be genetic, and is universally agreed to be a result of changing social mores, mediated by the invention of birth control, which lead to lots of people having more sex than they previously had. Why wouldn’t we see a similar dynamic in sexual orientation?
Other than the obvious, you mean?
@Randy M
That was slightly phraseology on my part.
Edited to read “work differently”.
I guess being coy doesn’t work too well. The obvious reason why polyamory should work differently than homosexuality is that one should logically have been selected for, and one against, so barring any just-so stories, one expects a high, perhaps nearly unlimited ceiling on polyamorous behavior (under social circumstances that promote it) and a rather low ceiling on homosexual behavior, one which may not be amenable to social control in any sort of analogous fashion.
@Randy M
Ah.
I’ll absolutely agree that selection would have altered the distributions, but claiming that the ‘floor’ and ‘ceiling’ are exactly the same, and totally indifferent to social control seems to both defy what evidence we have on the issue (it’s pretty uncontroversial that women work the way my model predicts) and require homosexuality to work entirely differently from every other remotely similar trait. Everything from propensity to violence or theft to interest in, say, STEM seems to be a combination of heritable distribution and social pressure. The relative size of the effects varies, but you’re setting social to absolutely zero.
Didn’t so claim.
Likewise, not.
My counterpoint to your earlier post is no more than I said–we have an obvious reason why the leanings should work differently, and so one can’t reason from one to the other without showing evidence that they can be treated similarly.
Nope! I’m setting social to “probably something different than polyamory.”
There’s pretty much nothing one can say about gender differences that comes anywhere near “uncontroversial”, is there? 😉
What does ‘the leanings work differently’ mean, though? If you’re just trying to point out that you’d expect fewer people to become gay for a given amount of social pressure than would become polyamorous, I won’t disagree.
Different how? How does a ‘low ceiling immune to social pressure’ even work? Where is the floor? Is it immune to social pressure, too?
Let’s try to simplify this with pseudomath:
S is societal acceptance of homosexuality. High values mean society is more accepting, low values mean it is less.
H is the prevalence of homosexuality in society.
I’d expect that H would look something like a logistic function with a small constant added, said constant being the ‘floor’. How would you expect the model to look?
You’re the only one to say immune in this thread so far. So I don’t feel the need to defend immune. What I said was “not amenable to social control in any sort of analogous fashion.” the latter clause was vital to the meaning (enough that I looked up how to spell analogous correctly!).
Basically, I think constant social pressure is needed to keep human society mostly monogamous. I think constant social pressure would be needed to keep human society mostly homosexual, likely far more than the other. So you don’t get to (convincingly) use one to reason about the other. Beyond that, we’re not really disagreeing, just being disagreeable. (pointing at myself here).
Ah. That makes sense, and I’m a bit annoyed at myself for not considering that as an explanation for what you are writing. I was coming from monogamy and heterosexuality as baseline, and my explanation for your writing was that you had baselined homosexuality instead of polyamory, which didn’t even pass the internal consistency check.
RE polyamory in the Bay Area, I would guess a big reason that people that are attracted to that lifestyle will gravitate towards a place that has more people that are attracted to the lifestyle. The Bay Area has a very large number of residents that weren’t born anywhere near it.
With the Greeks, I wonder if male on male sex was more prevalent because they didn’t have reliable birth control.
Not necessarily. It could also mean that the majority of people is at least somewhat bi, and cultural pressure only affects which parts of it they live out (openly).
Or that they are not bi or gay, but they can only get the physical intimacy and sexual release they need through contact with men, at that stage of their life.
I’ve seen claims that unmarried men often have sex in highly gender-segregated societies, as that is the only option they have.
But that’s still gayer than choosing celibacy because other men are gross and unthinkable as sex partners, though.
@JayT
I was speaking specifically about the LW-sphere, not the Bay Area in general. I’m pretty sure the LW-sphere filters heavily on other things than interest in polyamory, and even if polyamorous leanings are connected to those other things, most people who would fit the normal filters don’t seem to be polyamorous.
Autolykos
How is that different from what he said, though? The whole point of “born this way” seems to be that there’s no choice in the matter, both to keep LGBT people in the movement and reassure those outside that they aren’t trying to spread it.
It would mean that being homo- or heterosexual is a lot more elastic to societal pressure than the stance of “everyone who is gay was born gay, and there is no way to affect this” implies.
It would of course be politically inconvenient if it was that way, and it might not be a good idea to advertise this to people who actually want to affect the ratio of homo- and heterosexuals via societal pressure. But that does not affect its truth value.
Pretty sure I’ve seen exactly this hypothesis put forward somewhere in the not-too-many-clicks-from-this-blog reaches of the Reactosphere. I think it might have been somewhere on The Future Primaeval, or maybe Free Northerner (though I have only skimmed the latter; I can see why someone might be attracted to Death Eaterism and I can see why someone might be attracted to Christianity, but I cannot wrap my head around how someone can be both, and I can only read someone blithely advocating Death Eaterish ideas while simply taking the truth of Christianity for granted for a short time before my brain goes all Y U wtf i literally can’t even)
[Edit: I think this is the one I was thinking of]
It’s fairly common. I think all of the guys at Ascending the Tower are some variety of Catholic or Orthodox, and I suspect the future of deatheating lies in that direction, given how bad atheists are at reproducing.
I am not one myself, but I can see how one would get there. The key step is to let go of the idea that racism is the greatest of the sins.
(Content warning: this is the more snarky reply)
Conservatives work mainly to conserve the mistakes of the left. Deatheaters, in seeking to be more conservative than conservatives, look much further back to find mistakes to conserve, in this case all the way back to 1 Samuel 8.
Racism by what definition? I’ve seen mention of racism in the CCC, but I’ve not unearthed a **definition** of it. I suspect that the CCC means racism being bad for some definition of racism that is divergent from what a modern person means when they say it.
What, a death eater or an atheist? 😛
But seriously, I think my issue is that (based on my probably sketchy understanding of both), mainstream Death Eaterism posits an indifferent universe that does not give a toss if we destroy ourselves, but in which some forms of organising societies are compatible with their long-term survival and others are not, and that something akin to Darwinian selection will weed out the societies that veer away from the forms of organisation that allow for long-term survival, and that while religions can be useful in reinforcing the norms of those societies that have hit upon long-term viable ways of running themselves, as long as those norms are workable, it doesn’t really matter what specific gods or what specific theological claims are involved.
Whereas mainstream Christianity posits a universe presided over by an infinitely loving supernatural sentience who is already on record as being willing to drastically intervene for our benefit, with a set of instructions for organising society that represented a radical break from the past, and that believing the right set of theological claims is anything between above-averagely useful and catastrophically-more-important-to-get-right-than-you-could-possibly-imagine.
Even if in practice the sort of norms that a Death Eater would support may turn out to be quite similar to the sort of norms a traditionalist Christian might support, the routes to getting there are so different that I cannot square them.
[Edit – part-ninja’d by MereComments – yes, the gap between the focus on the maintenance of civilisation on Earth and the triviality of anything that happens on Earth by comparison with getting into Heaven / avoiding Hell, is an important one. I can see why a Death Eater could think that traditional Christian beliefs are instrumentally useful to the maintenance of civilisation, but I can’t see why a Death Eater would think that those beliefs are factually correct.]
Christians don’t usually take all that “radical break” stuff very seriously though, especially not Traditional ones.
The first century Church, the early Protestant sects, Christian Communists and modern Christian Fundamentalists all have something in common. They were zealots and profoundly antisocial.
A Traditionalist understands that esoteric aspects of a religion are not for everyone. Orthodoxy is important internally, but orthopraxy is what matters externally. Demanding that the tides stop coming in because of some obscure bit of scripture is anti-Traditional.
God is willing to intervene on our behalf, but He is also on record as being totally willing to destroy your civilization, especially if it turns wicked. Israel was His chosen people, and God still cursed them with a king, then split the kingdom, and then smashed it several times culminating in the most recent 1800 year exile.
Christianity doesn’t teach that we shouldn’t try to build good societies and lives on earth, and it certainly doesn’t teach that you won’t face consequences for your errors.
I would not say that the 1CC was antisocial. They were very social. Within their own group.
If two people working in isolation were to devise two different mathematical proofs that 1+1 = 2, would you be unable to square that both of their beliefs are true? Speaking as a Death Eater (though obviously not for all Death Eaters), I find it entirely obvious that if the Creator God exists, He would not be in opposition to the rules He Himself had built into Creation. They just are, and we ignore them at our peril and the exasperation of a Parent watching His children eat glue.
Just so.
Furthermore, the existence of God gives meaning and purpose to our struggles. After all, if there is no God, what’s the difference between living well and living poorly, or between a life of hedonism and a life of sacrifice, or living long and putting a bullet through one’s brain cavity? In this scenario, I find no difference in outcomes: it all ends with the cold of entropy consuming us all, and none of our gyrations matter in the slightest.
If I did not believe in God, I would not be a Death Eater – I would find the exercise pointless; far easier, and more pleasant, to simply take to the nearest primitive wireheading substitute and press that button until I starve.
Sorry to be late back to the party; this is mostly a reply to Jaskologist, but also some of the other comments further down the page:
I can sort-of see why someone who was already a Christian could sign up to most core Death Eater beliefs and thus consider themself part of the tribe, but still not vice-versa. Maybe it’s just an artifact of which writers I read first (basically Scott’s accounts here, plus most of the Future Primaeval, plus a smattering of others; I never could sit through a whole Moldbug essay), but it still seems to me that where a lot of it is coming from is that it’s precisely because we live in an indifferent universe that cannot love us that we need to stick to what works if we are to preserve civilisation.
And there’s the idea that ‘The Cathedral’ is just a form of transmogrified Christianity (which implies that keeping your traditionalist Christianity traditional in the long term is unstable; it could presumably degenerate into the Cathedral again).
Plus the embrace of HBD, or race realism or whatever, which, as far as I can tell, is predicated on a strongly Darwinian view of the forces shaping human populations. You can, in a wishy-washy sort of ‘evolution is the method God chose to bring about the current forms of life’ way, kind of fudge the differences between natural selection and divine creation, but surely you cannot deeply grok the sheer awesome/terrifying mindlessness of the force of natural selection while also deeply believing that the universe was deliberately made by a benevolent sentience.
Light blue Anonymous says
Well, if one of those groups started with an axiom that X is true, and the other started with an axiom that X is false, even though both of them came to a correct conclusion, at least one of them must have got there by faulty reasoning. They may be happy to work together against people claiming 1+1=3, but they’d still have some fairly fundamental differences. The example of Trans-Exclusive Radical Feminists and conservative Christians making common cause in favour of the norm that your choice of public toile should be determined by your genitals and not your self-identification comes to mind (though I’m not sure how much that is actually actually happening)
… likewise traditionalist Christians may well be happy to consider themselves allies with the Death Eaters on some policy areas, but when it came to the crunch – some situation where you believed that your choices were preserve civilisation but damn everyone to Hell, or destroy civilisation but get everyone into Heaven, your choice would depend very strongly on whether you believe Heaven and Hell even exist, and what your highest values are.
Several of the Christian commenters here seem to be of the opinion that if they didn’t think their god existed, there’d be no point in even trying to maintain civilisation at all. I have to confess to being deeply baffled by this – just because something won’t matter when the universe winds down, doesn’t make it unimportant to make the parts of the time continuum where we do have an environment capable of sustaining life as good as we can – just because I will have no experience of joy or suffering after I’m dead, doesn’t make me indifferent to joy or suffering now (with all the usual caveats that I’m not just talking about short-term hedonism; short-term suffering for the long-term maintenance of civilisation also counts if I think the people who come after me have greater-than-zero moral worth) – and my model of a mainstream Death Eater would agree.
It compares favorably with most other institutions. Few things make it as far as 1000 years, much less double that. In fact, I don’t know an example of any institution in continuous operation for as long as the Church has been, and the in that perspective, the current upset seems like a localized wobble without major impact on the general trend (to take a page out of Caplan’s betting book).
Or X is irrelevant to the proof.
[tangent] I have this same problem. Even strict, orthodox Catholicism and orthodox Orthodoxy seem ultimately incompatible with death-eaterism, despite having a whole lot of overlap.
Death-eaterism seems to say that the highest good is worldly civilization, whereas orthodox Christianity says the highest good isn’t even of this world. Faced with (admittedly theoretical) choice of committing evil, or having your culture/religion/tribe destroyed, death-eaterism seems to be an obvious “do eeeeiit”, whereas Christianity seems to be an obvious “nah”.
The way I see it, without faith, there is zero point in defending one’s culture/religion/tribe from being destroyed. Faith provides the ‘why’, “deatheaterism” (not all Death Eaters are atheist!), provides the ‘how’.
Sounds like game theory. Do you commit evil (defect), or decline to (cooperate)? Committing evil risks receiving the just desserts for said evil, given how often evil is pudding farming, while cooperating risks failing to do your duty towards that which you are called to defend. I don’t find this scenario different in either the Christian interpretation or the Death Eater interpretation – as in many of these trolley-alikes, you’re fucked whatever you do or don’t.
Perhaps you think that people in your culture in general have better lives because that culture causes improved economic and social conditions, so you fight for everyone to be allowed to benefit from that. Perhaps you believe people of your ethnicity improve the lives of everyone in their country because they are especially industrious or cooperative. If the relevant facts do not obtain, then of course two of these three aren’t good reasons.
Whether humans are psychologically capable of acting on such reasons or require faith in order to be sufficiently motivated is another question. One interpretation would be that some death eaters think the latter is the case and take christianity as the default choice because it happens to be the most wide-spread religion in the west. If you take christianity seriously, that seems rather obviously bonkers to me, so I can never help suspecting that they’re just putting on an act.
Not really, does it? The whole thing doesn’t have the form of a prisoner’s dilemma, that’s for sure. Who’s the second agent even?
But why would you care? These reasons are all object-level, but fail to have any justification just one meta-level up. Why is living a ‘better life’ good in the first place, as opposed to living a miserable one? Why would you care that everyone be allowed to benefit? Why would you care to improve the lives of others, or even yourself?
In the moderately longer run, you’re dead – we’re all dead – anyway. How you lived your life is of no consequence whatsoever. You might as well not have tried; whether you did or not has no meaning or moral value.
Yeah, I can see how you can feel that way.
Everyone who interacts with you, your society and other societies – both full of individuals capable of reasonably observing, making decisions and effectuating them. (Not to mention future-you, who now has to live with the knowledge of having commited evil, and is at least partially habituated in it.)
Bystanders will see your actions, and reasonably infer that you are evil, and start defecting on you at a greater rate than before.
Why would I not care? Or for that matter, once we’re at that fundamental level of doubting whether it’s worth caring about anything at all, why would faith make me care? (Or, what would “faith” be other than the plain restatement of the fact that I do, indeed, care?) I don’t really think this is too productive a line of thought.
To the extent that you can even conceptualise their situation as a prisoner’s dilemma, I think the death eaters would argue that you’re playing against defect-bot. I don’t quite see how one would conceptualise death eater policies as defecting against someone who is playing cooperate – for the reason that I don’t see who that someone is supposed to be. I generally doubt trying to frame this in game-theoretic terms is helpful.
No, it is not productive at all. Neither I, nor you (nor, I suspect, anyone else), have a justification on that level. All we do have is reasonable suspicion that making an effort is, in fact, important. If it is important, what does that imply? The existence of a Creator God is the best explanation* I have found for this. Christianity is the best outcome-producer I’ve found in the domain of monotheism. (I am somewhat torn between Catholicism and Orthodoxy, admittedly. Maybe I should switch churches to one of the Eastern Catholic to split the difference.)
* (In before “evolution made you that way, that you care; what you say is just your adaptation execution”: If you make that argument, you are back at square one, where nothing matters at all.)
Game theory is not just prisoner’s dilemma, the field concerns much more:
Game theory is “the study of mathematical models of conflict and cooperation between intelligent rational decision-makers.”
Committing good/neutral/evil acts definitely involves conflict and cooperation between intelligent rational decision-makers.
Deatheaterism includes strains of nationalism, and they are generally much more ethnocentric than is standard in intellectual circles (not a nationalist myself). The logical conclusion of that line of thought is attempting the complete annihilation of all competing groups. This is an evil. The response to that evil, from everyone else, in the real world, was to band together and destroy the attempters.
This is just an example of a policy that a Death Eater (though obviously a particular kind of Death Eater, given the variety) might take up, that is evil, which purportedly benefits the undertaker’s tribe, and which yields observing rational agents to see where things are going and take appropriate actions, doing more harm than good to everyone, including the tribe that started it.
I know, but “cooperate” and “defect” is prisoner’s dilemma terminology (isn’t it?), so I assumed that’s what you were talking about.
I’m not denying that game theory is very useful for viewing foreign policy. But death eaterism isn’t particulary about foreign policy – at least not the parts that are remotely interesting. Don’t they usually say Hitler was an idiot for trying to conquer Europe? And how to phrase, for example, your attitude towards immigrant populations in game theoretic terms is already less obvious. Perhaps you view the natives as one agent and the immigrants as another – that’s what I had in mind when I said above that death eaters think you’re playing against defect bot, because they basically believe that immigrant populations are defect bot. And when it comes to whether or not we should have democracy – I don’t see how that can be usefully phrased in game-theoretic terms at all.
I think that’s where it originates, but isn’t specific to it (anymore). For example, a tragedy of the commons scenario: bunch of fishermen agree to limit their fishing in a lake in order to preclude their livelihood going extinct (cooperate), but each individual fisherman is incentivized to overfish for personal gain (defect).
They generally do. You probably wouldn’t have to search far, though, before you found one who thinks that it was only wrong because he failed.
I’m not sure what kind of example you’re looking for. What evil-to-save-your-people act do you have in mind?
The tragedy of the commons is just a multi-agent prisoners dilemma. What I mean that in games that have a different payoff structure, the terms “defect” and “cooperate” to describe strategies aren’t readily applied.
Well, two evil ideas to save your people that one sees thrown around: expelling immigrants (from certain cultures of origin) and taking away the vote or reproductive freedom from women. From the point of view of the proponents, you could conceptualise these as PDs, I guess. Cooperate for you: keep the immigrants. Cooperate for the immigrants: assimilate. Cooperate for you: keep women suffrage. Cooperate for women: vote sensibly. They’re just telling you that immigrants and women won’t do this, and that therefore you should defect in order not to be completely screwed over. They would say that what is currently observable is the situation where you cooperate and they defect. So mutual cooperation is, empirically, not on the table. With respect to future generalisability, all that your defection in this scenario will tell anybody else is that you’re an agent who defects against others who observably defect against you. It’s not like you’re demonstrating a general factor of evil; you’re just making clear your unwillingness to be screwed over in the interest of being a saint. (That’s why I, personally, think the tenability of such policy proposal depends on the factual questions of whether the groups in question are, in fact, defect bots.) Which, of course, is unchristian, hence our puzzlement at christian death eaters.
I’m just not sure that any insight is gained by describing the situation in the PD language as above.
Ah, OK, I understand where you’re coming from now. (That is a rather good explanation of the DE arguments concerning immigration and female suffrage, too.)
It’s not so much the insight, as the ideas aren’t difficult to grasp, but the phrasing has the definite utility of not triggering tribal hostility. The way you presented the two problems above does not press berserk buttons that might have been pressed had you described the same things in terms that are getting tossed around on the mainstream political scene. It permits better discussion and analysis of the issues, rather than re-enacting calling one another a Nazi or a Communist. It shows them as ideas a reasonable person can have, rather than strawman drivel of one’s hated enemies.
I don’t think it is un-Christian. After all, Christians are supposed to defect in matters of import. The classical example is declining to offer incense to the Roman Emperor. Self-defense, to the point of slaying the aggressor, being fully permissible is another. Christians are even permitted armed rebellion in certain strict circumstances.
There isn’t a direct mapping between cooperation=sainthood, defection=sin.
And since when is “getting screwed” a core Christian value? Even in the case of martyrs, where they are going above and beyond the call of duty, they are merely choosing a course of action of greater value (going to Heaven), rather than one of lesser value (keeping their life for the moment).
The common responses I see to this are:
1.) You personally are expected to choose sainthood over not-being-screwed-hood, but you don’t have the right to impose that choice on the rest of society.
2.) Not letting in high numbers of immigrants (or whatever it is that’s under discussion) isn’t inherently evil. Whilst you’re not allowed to commit evil in the hopes of achieving a good outcome, you *are* allowed to not do something that is at best supererogatory if not doing it will lead to a better outcome.
3.) Screwing people over is bad. If you let in high numbers of immigrants (or whatever), you will end up screwing over society, i.e., everybody living in the country. So, it’s not actually moral to let in high numbers of immigrants in the first place.
I think the standard belief is that, if the only choices are committing evil and getting screwed, it’s better to let oneself get screwed.
Then again, I *also* think that most Death Eaters wouldn’t view reducing immigration or restricting the franchise to be evil, so for them the question would be moot anyway.
:nod:
@Anonymous: I see your point that there is value in discovering that there is this formulation. I think we’ve reached agreement.
I was being a bit snarky when I equated christianity with sainthood. I do think that the “highest value is civilisation in this world” vs “highest value is not even of this world” formulation captures the clash better.
@The original Mr. X: I intentionally chose the expulsion of immigrants as my example (I was thinking of something like deporting all first and second generation muslim immigrants from France) as an example because that does seem pretty evil. Mere restrictions on future immigration don’t even strike me as particularly death-eatery, to be honest.
I also view a blanket expulsion as evil, but the devil is in the details. Simply declaring legal residents to be unwelcome, dispossessing them and throwing them out – that’s wrong. A better solution would be reinstituting exile as a punishment; indeed, the state is permitted to lay down punishments up to and including the death penalty in service of keeping peace and order. Getting exiled for committing crimes in one’s new home seems lenient, even. (If it needs to be said: immigration would have to be restricted as well.) Over time, this would clear out the number of actual troublemakers among the immigrant population, and the rest, who are not troublemakers, could simply stay. After all, who complains of immigrant groups that have lower criminality than the host population?
Don’t East Asians have lower crime rates than whites in the US? Still, not everybody seems to be okay with them.
This kind of reminds me of Asimov’s zeroth law gambit. Jesus pretty clearly wasn’t a zeroth law kind of guy. The gospels aren’t particularly ambiguous.
Christian morality and Roman morality aren’t compatible. Roman morality won, fine, but don’t pretend there’s any of Jesus in it.
@Creutzer:
Bigotry against Asians in North America mostly seems to be of the “they are so industrious and they are taking over because of that” variety, along with lots of ignorant stereotyping.
Yeah, if the complaint is “they’re better than us”, that’s not much of a complaint. It can become a problem – see: American Indians and European settlers – but it’s unlikely to matter for sufficiently small minority counts, or for sufficiently orderly societies. Some Singapore-style media suppression may be advised in order to nip ethnic unrest in the bud.
You’re going to have to expand that for me.
It’s not much of a complaint, but jealousy/envy/fear of being overtaken is a powerful motivator to bigotry, prejudice, and discrimination.
Of course. It’s part of why large scale migration should be discouraged.
I can see why someone might be attracted to Death Eaterism and I can see why someone might be attracted to Christianity, but I cannot wrap my head around how someone can be both
I don’t know that particular strain, but I think this is the kind of thing that Lewis describes in “The Screwtape Letters”, where your Christianity gets more and more watered down and tacked on as an adjunct to what you really think important and valuable, so it ends up being used as a prop to support and propagate the Real Doctrine, instead of being the primarily important set of beliefs:
This last sub-thread is a good example of why it would worth while to build a glossary of SSC terms. I have no idea what everyone means by Death Eater. I’ve seen it in the comments before, but I haven’t understood it then either. I go to Google for Death Eater but it is exclusively about Harry Potter. I know what those Death Eaters are.
It started as an inside joke where M. Moldbug would be referred to as “he who shall not be named” (because it will probably start a massive flame-war/circle-jerk in the comments). Naturally, HP being really popular at the time, this got shortened to “Voldemort” which made his allies and supporters “Deatheaters”.
Things have since mellowed out, but the name stuck.
Isn’t the word n**r**ct**n*ry still in the list of banned words, as well? I thought the reason for the Death Eater euphemism was partially that, thay you just can’t say the real word here.
Hmm. Seems it is, well I guess that explains how/why the euphemism persisted.
@hlynkacg: You’ve got it backwards. Scott banned the n-word, which led to people referring to the term with various euphemism, including “The-Ideology-That-Must-Not-Be-Named” (an obvious reference to Harry Potter). That evolved into calling the followers of the ideology “Death Eaters”, which further mutated into calling Moldbug “Voldemort” even though his name has never been banned.
Yeah, of course. I mean, of course. This is so obvious to me that I guess it’s one of those “others actually inhabit a totally different world, but… you live in the same one” moments.
There’s an absolute and direct connection between homosexuality being more okay and male friendships becoming less emotional and more generally superficial, I’m genuinely baffled that someone could claim that heteronormativity of all things could be the problem. One of the deep problems of gay acceptance, on the contrary, is that it improved the lives of about 1.5% of men at the expense of making the lives of the remaining 98.5% measurably worse (although in a way where they mostly can’t really tell, so they’re less likely to object to it).
As late as the mid-19th century men would kiss each other on the mouth, call each other “dear beloved X” in letters and so on, safe in the knowledge that since homosexuality was impossibly repugnant and entirely way way out of the remotest realm of possibility, nobody would take innocent protestations of affection for some kind of unmentionable sin. Now, as you say, it’s absolutely requisite for all involved to express deep homophobia as simple signaling if they want to be even a bit closer to their friends than “H.P. Lovecraft would only touch his wife while wearing gloves”, and then of course they get it in the neck from people who DEFINITELY DON’T DISREGARD THE PROBLEMS OF MEN UGH.
This is just crazy talk. All of the social conventions you’re complaining about were already in place by the 1980s before there was any significant acceptance of homosexuality. It makes absolutely no sense to blame the subsequent acceptance since then for those conventions. Blame awareness of the existence of homosexuality if you want to, but straight people screwed this up for themselves long before anyone cared about what gay people thought or even if they had tolerable lives.
Who’s talking crazy here? Stonewall was 1969, after that it’s just been rolling steadily in one direction. Despite AIDS there was a hell of a lot more acceptance in 1985 than in 1895.
You seriously want to date the start of acceptance to the first instance of forceful public push-back?
This wasn’t the exception.
Yet it’s well-documented. It’s not just in older Western society; you can see similar patterns of male behavior in strongly homophobic society in the present day (e.g. Arab countries, India), and you can actually see things change as Western cultural attitudes to homosexuality become more widespread. There are well enough natural experiments to consider the point proven.
In the 1980s there may not have been social acceptance, but there was certainly awareness. In fact, one of the first steps towards acceptance of something seems to be to put it front and center in the culture. Consider how homosexuals are overrepresented amongst TV characters, and how people vastly overestimate the percentage of homosexuals in the general population (as well as that of many other categories, so this is partly a more general problem, but still). The result is that what was unthinkable is suddenly on everyone’s mind all the time.
The only questions is whether this is a permanent state of affairs, of whether it is a feature of the transition to acceptance, and will go away later.
Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality argues that the idea of (some) people being exclusively heterosexual is fairly recent, only about 150 years old.
200 years ago, everyone was open to some homosexual acts now and then? I certainly would find that surprising, were I to be convinced of it.
It’s been a while since I’ve read the book, but I think the idea was that pre-1860 or so, it wasn’t a matter of identity if some people had occasional same-sex sex and other people didn’t.
That could be taken to argue for homosexuality being even rarer as well. Fish don’t notice the water is wet.
After all, fifteen years ago (to be generous) very few people conceived of themselves as “cis-gendered.”
That requires a very, very selective reading of history. There are three metric fuckloads of laws prohibiting male homosexual sex on pain of death from Europe alone.
The claim is that homosexuality was seen as a behavior rather than a personality type.
You wrote “exclusively heterosexual”, not “exclusively homosexual”.
I would agree with the assertion that homosexuality was often seen as a behavior, specifically a Satanic behavior engaged in by people who wanted to deliberately transgress against the laws of God and Man. However, in these societies it was understood that everyone was exclusively heterosexual and that only a corrupt person’s thirst for evil produced homosexual behavior.
You can’t just go “well they thought gay stuff was a behavior so it follows that they thought heterosexuality was a behavior”, that doesn’t follow. The fact is they thought people were exclusively heterosexual much more strongly than we do.
I’ve seen this claim a few times in various threads here. Are you saying that more than 1 in 50 (say) TV characters are gay? Are other people thinking that? Or is it something more specific, like shows that explicitly take a line on diversity include a gay character?
@ Nancy Lebovitz
The claim is that homosexuality was seen as a behavior rather than a personality type.
In some cultures, [adjective] sex is not something you are, it’s something you do.
1982.
The religious right was up in arms about the song at the time.
The phenomenon illustrated in / mocked by the video is also something feminists of the time opposed (as Nancy mentioned). Feminism was a nerd-created movement; back when nerds were still in charge of it, the nerdgirls running it were sympathetic to nerdguys, including the group who were reserved and didn’t like to be touched and were also straight. (Who seem to today get the label “nice guys.” It’s a big change.)
Back in the ’80s one of the points feminists pushed was that being reserved and not liking to be touched, or FTM turning down sex for any other reason, should not cause you to be given a label which was not accurate–if you’re straight, you shouldn’t be labeled gay just because you turned down sex one time. Feminists made a big deal of the issue at that time. As I recall anyway.
Weren’t men at the time also in the habit of kissing female friends on the lips? I’m definitely certain that at the time, it was a platonic gesture to kiss a woman’s hand: I can’t think of any context where that would be read both genuinely and also non-romantically if I did it.
I wonder if there’s an alternative mediator: touch came to be viewed less platonically in the aftermath of the sexual revolution, for both genders. Is it possible that the earlier assumption of platonic male-male contact came from the idea that physical contact wasn’t inherently romantic?
No, I think I’m not overreaching in saying that in 18th- and 19th-century Europe kissing a woman on the mouth was way, way the hell out of line for a man who wasn’t married to her, and would in fact have terrible repercussions on the woman’s reputation if she didn’t react very negatively to it. (Of course men and women who were in love but not married (either because they hadn’t gotten that far yet or because they were having an affair) would kiss anyway, but it would have to be far beyond the reach of witnesses.)
In the 18th century you could probably kiss a woman on the cheek if you were some extent acquainted with her; in the 19th century that was right out as well, at least in Society.
No, I think I’m not overreaching in saying that in 18th- and 19th-century Europe kissing a woman on the mouth was way, way the hell out of line for a man who wasn’t married to her
That was in contrast to the free and easy English custom of women kissing men in greeting of the 15th and 16th centuries, at least as noted by Erasmus in a letter of 1499:
Yes, I plased my cutoff point rather deliberately. Although even in Erasmus’ letter, you can see the seeds of the change in mores: he clearly doesn’t regard the kissing as an entirely innocent and unremarkable habit. Admittedly he’s a foreigner, but still, it’s clear that it’s possible to find something in it which complicates matters — and rather apparently it eventually was found.
The cheek kiss (2 or 3 times, I think it usually goes one side, then the other, then maybe the first side again), with actual contact or air kissing, is a thing I associate with Europe.
In person, I’ve only seen it done male-female or female-female, I think.
You should associate that with France, not with Europe. If you go for a cheek kiss in Sweden, Finland, or Germany, unless they think of you as a delightfully French character with continental airs, you’ll either get angrily rebuffed or shit will properly hit the fan.
Also, yes, if you try to do it to another man, even in the appropriate area, you’re going to look weird. Not gay necessarily, but certainly effete; you’ll be breaking the relevant social norm and people will most likely get a bit uncomfortable.
These guys don’t look all that French to me…
They’re Commies! Those guys will do whatever transgressive shit they want. 😀
No, seriously I have no idea what’s going on there, but speaking as a Western European, it looks well gay from here and now.
These guys are also not kissing (or rather, pretending to kiss) each other on the cheek. It’s a completely different thing which is also a political demonstration (the socialist fraternal kiss), not a simple greeting.
Across genders and between women, the cheek kiss is very common in several European countries (though not Russia). Between men, I’ve only seen it in France (it’s not too common there, either, but not near the level of weirdness it would be in the other countries).
The people I’ve seen do it in real life have been, at most, one party French. It might be a generational thing though.
I can vouch for Italy and Austria besides France, though it may not be as obligatory there as in France. Not sure about Germany.
Kissing the hand was more about status than gender, I think; low-status men kissed the hand of high-status men in greeting, so kissing the hand of women was more for high-status women and as a general sign of respect.
I read an anecdote about Leo X, the 16th century Medici pope, who was the despair of his chamberlain as he loved hunting, spent as much time as he could on a horse, and was nearly constantly in hunting boots “so how are the people supposed to kiss his feet?”
Seems like it’d be easier if he was up on a horse.
Touch being viewed less platonically (I blame Freud, but I’m not sure I’m right) fits with my notion that what counts as sexual is surprisingly varied.
Is seeing a woman’s hair a sexual thing? Her face? Her arm? Her breasts? Not all societies agree on the answers.
There’s pretty obvious desensitization going on. Consider how pornography has gotten more explicit.
How do you explain the fact that touch is more sexually connotated now than it used to be as desensitisation?
Some forms of touch. It’s far more acceptable for a man and a woman, unrelated and not in a relationship, to hug publicly now, isn’t it?
EDIT: Touch between men, more sexual connotations, perhaps, although maybe not in other ways – I do think it’s probably more acceptable for men to hug than it used to be (perhaps there was a dip in acceptability from the olden days when naked hijinks with your bros was A-OK and then an increase in the acceptability, but not to the old levels). But men and women having physical contact is more acceptable.
Another relevant thought – when men talk about friendships with other men … I don’t know. Honestly, it seems to me like the secondhand sense I get of female-female friendships is that they are much closer and more intense.
What men mean when they say “best friend” might be different from what women mean.
When you un-taboo a taboo, everything that could be possibly confused with the former taboo becomes a new taboo. In Saudi Arabia, where being gay gets you executed, straight male friends walk down the street holding hands. In the US, straight male friends might feel just as close, but they don’t want to be mistaken as gay, since that’s a legitimate possibility in a country where gay guys are free to walk down the street holding hands and (in certain places at least) frequently do.
Interesting article about homosexuality in Saudi Arabia.
“But what seems more startling, at least from a Western perspective, is that some of the men having sex with other men don’t consider themselves gay. For many Saudis, the fact that a man has sex with another man has little to do with “gayness.” The act may fulfill a desire or a need, but it doesn’t constitute an identity. Nor does it strip a man of his masculinity, as long as he is in the “top,” or active, role. This attitude gives Saudi men who engage in homosexual behavior a degree of freedom. But as a more Westernized notion of gayness—a notion that stresses orientation over acts—takes hold in the country, will this delicate balance survive? “
I’m always surprised when this notion is “startling, at least from a Western perspective”. Kinsey had categorized MSM (men who have sex with men) as distinct from gay decades ago and even the CDC tracks it as a category for STD rates. It’s as promiscuous as a category as one would expect.
Yeah, it’s as though you classified men who jack off as not being heterosexual. They probably are! It’s just that for the moment, they have failed to procure the real deal (women), and are therefore satisfying their needs with inferior substitute goods (their hands).
I don’t think it’s just that. You’re talking about situational homosexuality: on a ship, in prison. Some place with no access to women.
But historical pederasty among non-desperate men with wives is definitely a Thing. The situation described is exactly the same for premodern China: an act, not an identity, and generally totally fine so long as you are the “top.” Though whether or not they could really be called “straight” or even bisexual by our definition may be questionable. Regardless, “penetrator” and “penetratee” seem to be the more important identities for many premodern cultures. The penetratee could be a woman, but also could be a low-class man, like an actor.
That said, we see many examples in premodern China of, i. e. elite men sleeping in the same bed: Liu Bei and Zhuge Liang in Three Kingdoms “sleeping together” in a way which made Liu’s other “brothers” jealous. I don’t think we are expected to think that Liu and Zhuge are getting it on. Rather that it just wasn’t weird for adult male friends to sleep in the same bed.
There are also cultures like ancient Greece where even elite adolescents sometimes had sexual relationships with older men, in which case it seems to be conceived as more of a “mentorship” kind of thing. Perhaps a bit different from the above. And, again, these older men probably had wives: part of the issue may have been that many educated men’s wives were not educated, so while they were good for sex, they were not good for talking about philosophy, and sometimes you want to have sex with someone who can have a good conversation about philosophy.
I think a similar issue may have partially motivated courtesan culture, at least in the cultures I know relatively well, such as Japan and China: your wife is for having babies and running the household. Want to sleep with someone who’s great at convservation and dancing and singing: go to people who are paid to do such things, i. e. courtesans.
What you describe there is also exactly how it worked in Classical Greece. A hetaira or high-class courtesan had infinitely more freedom than a typical woman and also an elite-man-level education (you can read about Thaïs, Phryne and a few others on Wikipedia most likely). There were also “flute girls” who were just regular whores, however. (The flute thing appears to have been a sort of pretext that you technically hired them to play the flute and dance, especially at parties, but everybody knew what they were really there for.)
The CDC does not distinguish MSM from gay/bisexual. When asking people it asks about the behavior of MSM rather than identification, but when reporting on them it usually labels them gay/bisexual. Of course, the reason it asks MSM is because that gets different (larger) answers than gay/bisexual.
“Nor does it strip a man of his masculinity, as long as he is in the “top,” or active, role.”
I believe this was the normal attitude in classical antiquity. The division was dominant/submissive not male/female. See the relevant volume of A History of Private Life.
I’ve played sports and been in the military. It never seemed like outward homophobia was what enabled deep bonding. You’re just together all the damn time and go through a lot of shared adversity.
Yeah, maybe a big part of it is just that situations in which men are required to work at close quarters together for extended periods are getting fewer as manual labor becomes less common (and increasingly assisted by e. g. forklifts). Though I would say that those complaining about the elimination of all-male spaces may have a point. Homophobia may not be required for close male bonding, but perhaps such spaces are, or, at least, make it easier.
Interestingly, I’ve heard that in the military, women are strongly discouraged/disallowed from making themselves appear more like men a la G. I. Jane by e. g., getting a buzzcut. This seems a desire to keep distinctions clear within a traditionally male space.
It’s not disallowed per se, but as of the late 00s (when I left active duty) there was definitely a cultural taboo against it.
One thing I’ve noticed is that women doing martial arts don’t seem to get short haircuts as much as you would expect – I mean, it’s way more manageable, people can’t grab it intentionally/by accident, etc. If they’re practicing, women with long hair will ponytail it or whatever (which is never really 100% effective). Female MMA fighters with long hair seem mostly to have it put in cornrows (there’s a few male fighters with long hair who do this also) which looks a lot more effective than tying it back.
My guess it’s they’re doing something usually read as masculine, and want to avoid being read as overly masculine. Masculine, rather than speculations about their sexuality – Liz Carmouche is an open lesbian and wears her hair long. Probably relevant: ex-Marine.
Competitive MMA fights are relatively infrequent (fighters seem to do 2-4 fights a year when healthy), which plays a major role in this, I think. I completely understand why they would optimize their looks for the 99% of the year when they are not fighting, when they can change their haircut temporarily for the fight.
But they are training almost year-round.
A lot of training is fitness training and boxing training, where a basic ponytail or bun should work.
In grappling training it would be more of an issue, although there are options.
Of course, short hair is always superior with regard to maintenance, but that also goes for short hair in normal life.
Part of the reason I switched from a fairly normal men’s haircut to shaving my head was grappling-related. Women with long hair seem always to be getting it in their faces, getting it grabbed, losing whatever those hair elastics are called on the mats, etc. I’m honestly surprised that short hair isn’t more common among female grapplers.
It shows the power of gender norms…
Indeed it does. It’s a definite data point showing the importance of socialization.
It varies by branch of service, but a conserative interpretation of the army’s female hair regulations would prohibit shaved heads on women. Seems a little bit of a gray area though, so I suppose it’s probably up to the individual’s chain of command.
And anyway, the above comment about female MMS hair probably applies here too. 99% of the time, a shaved head doesn’t give an advantage over a ponytail/bun/shortish hair, so you probably wouldn’t choose your hairstyle based on that 1% (exception: ranger school, apparently).
I partially disagree.
In my own experience, the group dynamics change a great deal between segregated and mixed company, and former is much more conducive to “deep bonding” than the latter. Allowing open homosexuality, seems to shift the natural dynamic from segregated to mixed.
But having having all-male spaces (or all-female spaces) doesn’t necessarily imply anything about homophobia?
Depends on what the salient feature of “men” and “women” is.
Is it “people choosing this particular socially constructed gender tag?”
Or “people who may be interested in intercourse with others of the group?”
(Not, of course, the only options)
I would argue that it does.
If you’re going to allow same-sex relationships outside said spaces you need to institute a taboo against such relationships within them.
As per the current usage any taboo against homosexual relationships is homophobia so yes homophobia plays a vital role in the creation and maintenance of these spaces.
“If you’re going to allow same-sex relationships outside said spaces you need to institute a taboo against such relationships within them.”
Why?
@onyomi well, I could imagine a desire for the all-one gender spaces to also be non-sexual spaces. In the case of team sports or similar constructs I could see a risk from romantic relationships between members, particularly a danger with break ups.
2stupid4SSC hit the nail on the head, as I said before.
I just don’t see a necessary connection between a single-gender space and a sexuality-free space. There are four possibilities here. I’m just trying to disentangle to what extent the purported benefits of single-gender spaces and sex-free spaces are a result of which aspect.
They gotta be both. It’s impossible in practice to have a mixed-sex space that’s desexualized because animals are heterosexual and the sexual urge is unconquerably powerful unless someone’s shelling you at this very moment.
If it’s single-sex but there might be gay people in the space (and/or gay expression isn’t sanctioned so hard that any gays around are guaranteed to conceal every sign of it), the problem still appears, at least in the form of a suspicion, and that alters the dynamic.
That’s the necessary connection. Your hypothesis that they could possibly be disentangled is not accurate. (I realize, or at any rate read you as saying, that it wasn’t the null hypothesis on your part, just one postulated possibility; nevertheless, it’s wrong.)
@ onyomi
Humans are sexual animals, stressed out, physically fit, 18 – 24 year-olds even more so.
Maintaining that sexuality-free space is the whole point. You loose the benefits of a sexuality-free space when you start injecting sex into it.
Edit:
Ninja’d by anon
I dunno. If sex is ever-present in our minds to the extent that an asexual, mixed gender environment is inherently impossible, then I sort of doubt even a single-gender asexual environment is possible.
But okay, let’s assume, due to the presumption of heterosexuality, that an asexual, mixed environment is impossible, but an asexual, single-sex environment is possible. That still leaves a third possibility: a sexualized or, at least, not strictly asexual, single-sex environment.
My point is just that providing the possibility of an asexual space isn’t necessarily the only benefit, nor even necessarily the primary benefit of a single-sex space. There are certainly other conceivable reasons a single-sex space might be desirable: being around people who share a certain aspect of your life experience, for example.
Sure, if we assume having an asexual space is an end in itself then single-sex spaces seem like as good a way as any to try to achieve that. But I’m not sure a lack of asexual social spaces is the primary thing to blame for the relative lack of male closeness today. Maybe people are just physically less close in general, for example?
I’m not unsympathetic to this idea; I’m just trying to be clear about what we’re looking for: an asexual space or a same-sex space? The latter might conceivably be a prerequisite for the former, but the former may not always follow from the latter, nor, necessarily, be the desired end goal.
There are also cultures where touching among people in general is more permissible/expected than others. Apparently Japan keeps the greatest average difference between conversation partners, but there are other places, e. g. Sri Lanka, a friend tells me, where everyone is totally in your face when talking, and groups of friends (maybe not even always same-sex friends? Though not sure) walk down the street in dogpile masses of intertwined hands and arms. But I’m not sure if there’s any correlation between general distance among people and attitudes about sex or homosexuality.
I think they are unrelated, which is why I imagine close (physical) friendships and homophobia are largely unrelated in general. It seems to me that physical closeness is an orthogonal cultural aspect, it just changes too drastically from country to country where I don’t see equivalently different amounts of homophobia/acceptance.
However this could be conflating concepts, I am willing to entertain the idea that cultures with more physical contact might not have more deep emotional friendships. That deep emotional friendships could be the primary topic of discussion, and physical closeness is just its own thing.
I remember once I was in rural South Africa, sitting on the steps up to the public library. A complete stranger came up to me, put his hands on my legs, leaned forward so his face was a couple of inches from mine, and said, “Do you know what the Wi-Fi password is?”
Well that sounds like pick-pocketing heaven. Remind me not to carry any goods not attached to me by-chain in Sri Lanka.
Yeah, Ozy’s completely cooked the goose there.
One other thought: perhaps the recently problematized “locker room talk” is one way of signalling heterosexuality among men. In fact, I think it highly likely it functions that way at least some of the time. “I love grabbing pussies”=”you can get close to me without worrying I’ll grab your dick.”
No.
It might function that way for people who are actually gay and closeted, as an over-enthusiastic performance, but not anyone else.
Trump’s words tell us specifically what he is claiming. He is claiming high status.
“It might function that way for people who are actually gay and closeted, as an over-enthusiastic performance, but not anyone else.”
This statement is far, far too general. Maybe you’re right about the specific Trump case, but I don’t see how you can possibly claim that no straight man ever makes lewd jokes about women as a means of signalling heterosexuality. Maybe to do so indicates insecurity, but can you claim there exist absolutely no insecure straight men, only closeted gay men?
@onyomi:
I’m saying that anyone who thinks they are signalling heterosexuality via excessive performance of lewd talk is simply mistaken. That isn’t how it will be read.
If I already think you are heterosexual, and you try and oversignal heterosexuality in this way, what am I to make of it? Either that you are claiming high status, and if that is not plausible, that you doubt your own claim to heterosexuality.
Edit: I’m leaving out the idea that your aren’t trying to signal at all. I think most who talk lewdly just enjoy it, much as they might enjoy talking about a great game or movie or book or TV show.
Well, but you are stating this at a time when such “locker room talk” has already become weird and gauche and unacceptable relative to times past. Now it might be interpreted as you say, but this is, in some sense, the complaint.
If the assumption is heteronormativity, then lewd talk about women can be taken as part of that which reinforces that assumption and allows men to be close to one another without fear of being misunderstood. Once that assumption is gone, a stereotypically very “straight” behavior, ironically, can become a “try hard” signal of insecurity.
I think HBC’s edit has it. Most men engage in lewd talk for the same reason they watch pornography. It’s not about signalling.*
*Putting aside the fact that everything is about signalling, of course.
I would agree that the primary function of lewd talk among anyone, first and foremost, is that people enjoy lewd talk. But it’s possible it might also signal as I suggested.
@HBC:
I might be missing this, but it seems like you guys are leaving out the interpretation that seemed most likely to me: The 14-year-old in the locker room who keeps insisting that he’s banged every cheerleader (which is how Trump’s comments read, to me) doesn’t strike me as gay, he strikes me as sexually unsuccessful – and trying to overcompensate for that, not for lack of heterosexuality.
(And I think there are a lot of negative consequences to conflating those two.)
It’s more like the guy (also Trump) who’s constantly telling you he has lots of money. He’s not a closeted communist, he’s a closeted business failure. Or thinks he is.
I’m with onyomi on this one; while it is possible to overshoot the locker-room talk, just saying “I’d have fucked her senseless, n’a mean?” and leaving it there wouldn’t set anyone’s gaydar off. You’d have to go deep into the “Hey everyone, who wants to spank me? I want to be spanked first!” territory.
@TheWorst:
Correct. Over signaling status is easy to understand as a perception of a lack of status.
It’s plausible to read Trump that way even now. Note how seriously he takes even the most immature of slights about penis size, literally holding his hands up to show their size during the introduction at one of the debates.
@LPSP:
That’s not really the kind of over signalling that Trump was engaged in.
If I start to talk about muscle cars, guns, football, baseball or just about any other topic in the locker room or in some other all male gathering, the most likely reason is that I like the subject.
If I’m trying to signal something about myself, rather than actually enjoying the subject, it’s because I don’t feel comfortable that I am perceived as belonging to the group. Frequently this will have the opposite to the intended effect.
Lawdy, this thread is a bit of a dumpster fire:
1) Ah yes, women seem to have the exact same problem with forming deep friendships in spaces where there are lesbians or bisexuals. Oh wait, no they don’t.
2) Ah yes, the gay and lesbian communities seem to have the exact same problem with forming deep friendships in spaces where everyone else in the community could be romantically/sexually into them. Oh wait, no they don’t.
3) Ah yes, bisexuals and pansexuals are DOOMED! DOOMED I SAY! to friendlessness. Oh wait, no they aren’t.
4) Ah yes, clearly the solution is for gay men to form deep emotional friendships with straight women, and for straight men to form deep emotional friendships with lesbians. As per point 3, clearly bi/pan men are DOOMED.
5) Ah yes, asexual men must rule the world and be every charismatic world leader ever, considering that they’re the only people who can form deep emotional bonds nowadays.
6) Conventional attractiveness trumps any slashing. After all, the males most likely to get shipped with each other outside of a fictional character context are boyband members. This has not impacted their ability to get women in any way. Similarly, shipping of internet celebrities is really really rampant (like for Rooster Teeth or TGWTG), and said celebrities are very aware of it, to the point of gleefully reading the smut of themselves, and it has not necessarily tanked their friendships with each other.
And as per when this topic was previous brought up except more targeted on the slashing bit, this is solved by more canon representation of fictional queer relationships that don’t end with one of the people getting killed off. tl;dr a lot of the support for new subtext ships that would have done gangbusters in fandom back in the day have gone fairly ignored in favor of canon queer ships. (Sherlock, Supernatural, Sterek, LotR, etc. got started before canon ships became more common) If you put an actual queer ship in your show and give it its due, people will be much more less likely to slash the friendship characters together. (I mean, it’ll still happen because of Rule 34, but not as a “serious” ship)
So basically, only a subset of men are having this problem, y’all are kinda being special snowflakes about it.
This seems a bit overblown. The theory outlined in the root comment does not entail that ones personal identity would have much effect in the general dynamics of a locker room, but the general perception what kind of male-male interactions are within the realm of possible.
About the fiction, I’m quite ready to grant your explanation credence. But whatever is the actual cause, it makes for some frustrating (internet) discussions about Victorian fiction if you just want to take the relationships as given.
Yeah, there’s definitely a problem where people (honestly, women) refuse to admit that they’re making shit up and pasting it onto the real narratives because they like it better, rather than reading something that’s actually in the work. That can get damn annoying.
It usually takes a certain length of time for something to become this kind of pop culture phenomenon, so it can’t be too recent. If you start saying that only recent shows count, you just end up making your claim unfalsifiable.
Like a case continued for twenty years at the trial court and forgotten by all parties only to spring up and threaten the world of the living anew, the law thread rises once again!
As usual, a selection of vintage cases from the Institute For Justice’s Short Circuit newsletter, available here:
From the DC Circuit – you may have seen this opinion, which strikes down the statutory scheme in which the Director of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau is removable only for-cause as violating the separation of powers. Is this a real, live anti-delegation case?
From the Seventh Circuit – it does not violate the Equal Protection Clause to allow ride-sharing companies like Uber to operate within your city without subjecting them to taxi regulations. This case rubs me the wrong way- not because I think Uber should be subject to those regulations, but because if those regulations weren’t so vital to the safety and health of the city that they needed to be extended, what justification is there for them? Anyway, interesting note for those as-yet unaware: the ancient and venerable franchiser Yellow Cab is re-vamping itself into a ride-sharing company, intended to compete by becoming more convenient to use than Uber.
From the Ninth Circuit – An issue the court will be re-hearing en banc; can the federal government classify chronic drunks as intrinsically lacking “good moral character” and therefore being easily-deportable? The original panel held that there was no rational basis for that finding, over a dissent. I think we need more RCTs measuring the innate goodness of people who are totally sloshed all the time vs. the general population.
Another article about the case I mentioned a while back, in the case where the US Supreme Court will decide whether a cause under the 4th Amendment lies against a border guard who shot and killed a Mexican teenager without cause. Notable in this case- the United States submits an amicus brief arguing that the US shouldn’t decide the case out of respect for the sovereignty of Mexico. Mexico’s government submits an amicus brief assuring the Court that its sovereignty would be totally fine with punishing the border guard in the US. (Presumably the reason is that the US won’t extradite the man to Mexico in any event)
You’ve probably all heard, by now, the claim on CNN that only the media is privileged to possess leaked documents and that they can then give them to you. You’ve all also probably seen the one zillion articles explaining why Chris Cumuo was wrong about that. But here is another, just in case.
The most important fallout of Brexit yet- the possible return of Great Britain’s Royal Yacht. I fully endorse the objection of the learned MP who wanted to clarify the pronouns for the Royal Yacht, although I also suggest re-naming it to Windoc, just to see what happens.
Finally: those not in law school right now may not realize this, but a number of states are going through crises when it comes to the bar exam. To be specific, people keep failing it in larger numbers. Still, even in this declining climate, please think very hard before attending an institution in which 3/4ths of the first-time bar takers fail.
Have a good day!
Bullying
The zeitgeist in schools seems to be that of completely eliminating bullying. Bullying is seen as bad, and bullying based on race/gender/sexual orientation is seen as really bad. This always struck me as strange, not because I think bullying is great, but rather because I was bullied when I was younger, and I think that most bullies, aren’t really homophobic/racist/etc. Instead they find salient things about others to bully them about. E.g. if a kid is fat, then a bully will call him fatso, if a kid is Asian, then probably racial slurs will be involved, redhead, ginger, etc. Also, the excess media focus on sexual orientation/race is silly because it ignores the fact that the majority of bullying is not based on that.** Straight white kids bully straight white kids all the time. Black kids bully black kids, etc.
However, I ask you, does bullying serve a greater purpose? Would the elimination of bullying be an unalloyed good?
I think that mild bullying can have some positive effects. It got me to stop acting in a certain way, and it also made me speak up for myself without having an adult do it for me. I don’t have the evidence for it, but I think that mild bullying might even help kids develop a thicker skin and be more able to function as adults.
Note: I think bullying can and has gone too far in some cases. I’m not advocating for outright abuse; I’m just wondering if there are some benefits to mild bullying.
**I don’t have numbers for this, but I’m betting I’m correct.
To beat an extremely dead horse: zero tolerance policies on bullying are a much bigger threat to bullied kids than bullying itself.
I went to a fairly diverse public school, but I’m huge and inherited a bit of a mean streak so mostly got left alone. My little brother had neither advantage and aspergers to boot. So when he came up through the system he was relentlessly bullied by the black and hispanic kids in his grade.
Going to the administration didn’t work. And when he fought back and won he was the one who got in trouble for it. The policies which are in theory supposed to help vulnerable kids in practice just give cover for burgeoning thugs.
Interesting. When I was at school and ended up hitting a bully, the teacher saw it, came over and told the other guy off, on the grounds that “You’ve just provoked a reaction from Mr. X I wouldn’t expect, so whatever you were doing to provoke him, stop it!” The moral of the story: being a teacher’s pet has its upsides.
Mine were mixed. The one time I can recall responding in kind to provocation from a bully resulted in him crying to a teacher and both of us getting called to the principal’s office. I think I had to write an apology / explanation of some kind.
Still, the other kid was a known agitator so I was really given the bare minimum punishment – I don’t think he faced more for that particular incident but he did receive more scrutiny subsequently.
This was in elementary school – I had something of a bully in middle school but he was such a dumbass that I had a hard time taking his almost exclusively verbal taunting too seriously (also he was huge so fighting back physically would likely end poorly).
I was a bully in elementary/middle school.
Personally, being a bully is one of the things I regret most in my life. While I doubt that anything schools are doing now would have stopped me, or would have stopped me soon enough for it to matter.
I really hope that a proactive treatment might be possible for the future.edit: This is a complicated idea to express in a single sentence. I guess what I am saying is, I don’t think ‘cracking down’ on bullies will work, but it might be possible to make changes to the education system that make it fundamentally harder for bullies to start, discourage bullying, something?
“I was a bully in elementary/middle school.”
It’s interesting how incredibly rarely you hear people say this when bullying is raised as a topic among adults, even though a decent proportion of them must logically have been bullies. I basically just wanted to say kudos to you for being open about it.
The bullies who reformed feel ashamed, and do not wish to admit they were once bad. The ones who didn’t don’t want to admit or don’t recognize their actions are bad.
Paired with the fact that your classical bully is a vanishingly small minority of children.
In fairness, a lot of people with personality types that would facillitate childhood bullying probably have little reason to move among the kind of circles prone to analytic debate, or any meaningful openness whatsoever. There’s a selection against them. Regretful bullies are probably also rare.
@ Artificirius and LPSP
I don’t necessarily mean the archetypal idiot thug beating you up and stealing your lunch money. I mean people who just took pleasure in being cruel to others as children. Jeering at the less fortunate, that sort of thing. I wouldn’t say that group was either vanishingly small or that unlikely to repent. I reckon at least 30% and a lot of those would grow up to be decent enough adults.
If “jeering at the less fortunate” is defined as bullying there are perhaps four or five children in all of human history who were not bullies.
Unexpected.
I think you are probably right about the personality thing, honestly the situations that lead to me being a bully are still something of a mystery to me. I was a fairly shy kid who spent most of my time drawing or playing pokemon with the other ‘nerd’ kids, I went to my first MTG proQ when I was seven.
For reasons I still don’t fully understand I managed, in elementary, middle, and highschool, to end up being very good friends with the most popular boys in my grade (three different people all together). Through those friendship I gained a sort of ‘following’ and social status of my own which I then leveraged for the purpose of bullying a few kids, and honestly I have no idea how or why I picked the kids I bullied. That selection process was so organic or natural or something that I have no memory of it at all.
Since bullies focus on salient points, racial/gender/sexual minorities are low-hanging fruits (pun not intended). They are probably disproportionately bullied. The focus on eliminating bullying along those lines is trying to compensate for that.
I got picked on quite a bit as a kid. It made me pretty miserable. It’s possible that it pushed me to some positive changes, but I think it’s likely those would have happened anyway without the bullying. A lot of minuses for some debatable pluses.
Seems likely that being exposed to a little bit of bullying or unfair treatment is a useful experience, a net positive over the long run. The problem is that the kids that really get picked on get it relentlessly, every day, on and on, over and over. If that teaches anything, it’s nothing good.
As an adult I still feel very out of place and uncomfortable in groups of more than a few people. I sometimes blame this on being a despised outsider as a kid. But I’m aware I was going to be kind of weird no matter what. Social unease is a pretty common thing and maybe it was always in the cards for me.
I’m very skeptical of loudmouth proclamations about ending bullying in the schools. If school officials want to end bullying, they’re in a position to do so without constantly announcing it and congratulating themselves for it. They’ve always been in a position to do it. They didn’t really want to do it before and I doubt they really want to do it now.
Often teachers dislike weak and misfit kids the same as the other students do, and think the misfits kinda have it coming. Sometimes they chip in. I watched (and occasionally suffered) teachers ridiculing and picking on students and enjoying it.
I imagine most, maybe not all, anti bullying initiatives are just noise intoned over the top of whatever the schools would have done anyway.
MattC, that’s pretty much where I stand.
I don’t know what counts as mild bullying. I was relentlessly insulted by a group of girls from fourth grade through high school. Most of it was about my height (I’ve always been short), that my feet turn out, and that I like reading. Nobody seemed to think I was being unfairly mistreated. Many years later, one of the bystanders apologized.
I think I was in my 40s before I more or less calmed down about my height. I think I still have some despair about adults and relationships that I *might* be able to clean up as a result.
Social status is a strong motivator. Bullying just seems like diminished marginal returns.
I don’t think you’re completely wrong. Kids need to learn to stand up for themselves and be able to deal with minor interpersonal problems without running to an authority to take care of it. Consider it an analogy to the theory of how if you aren’t exposed to allergens when you’re young, you’ll have more allergies later on because your body never learned to deal with them. (I have no idea if that’s true, but it sounds true, which is just as good, right?)
However, most of the time this is not how it’s applied in schools: if bullied kids actually do stand up for themselves, as they should be doing, they’re the ones who get punished, and as Dr. Dealgood points out it’s usually the bullies who are the best at working the system to their advantage.
It’s probably also worth pointing out that if bullies are allowed to get their way all the time without worrying about punishment, that’s teaching them bad lessons about life. They’ll eventually act out outside of school and probably end up in the criminal justice system for it. The bullies may benefit in the short term but they, too, suffer in the long run.
Consider the effects of the typical school reaction to bullying. If the bullied child complains, the authority refuses to do anything about it, and allows the child to suffer retribution for being a tattle-tale. If the bullied child retaliates in any way but completely ineffectively, the bullied child is punished for it by the authority. This teaches the bullied child that authority will not protect them and they are not permitted to protect themselves; that is, they fulfill the role of the lowest-status member of society and they had better get used to it.
Society needs people at the lowest status level, and it is better for the order of society if the status hierarchy is stable. Therefore, the schools by enabling bullying are simply doing their job of producing the next generation in a stable society.
“Society needs people at the lowest status level, and it is better for the order of society if the status hierarchy is stable. Therefore, the schools by enabling bullying are simply doing their job of producing the next generation in a stable society.”
That was my situtation in elementary school through high school.
In college, I found (sf convention) fandom. More recently, I found the rationalist community, and I’ve got some moderate status in both of them.
Sorry about upsetting the order of society.
Did it occur to you that you might be talking about real people?
I _know_ I’m talking about real people. I’m saying the real world isn’t as far from Omelas as one would prefer.
It probably wasn’t a good idea for me to claw a little.
Actually, the real world is *worse* than Omelas– more children are sacrificed and the outcome isn’t as good.
However, I don’t think there’s some large goal behind schools facilitating bullying. I think it’s just hard work to prevent bullying, and harder if your heart isn’t in it. Also, if a bully’s parents are also bullies, it can be even more difficult for the school to do something about it.
“Consider the effects of the typical school reaction to bullying. If the bullied child complains, the authority refuses to do anything about it, and allows the child to suffer retribution for being a tattle-tale. If the bullied child retaliates in any way but completely ineffectively, the bullied child is punished for it by the authority. ”
I am very unclear on what that would be typical, unless the school has an overt “ignore bullies, punish the victim” policy. I’m sure it happens – a very mild version has happened to me – but to present this as the standard way schools operate seems way out. It’s incompetence, not malevolence.
Obviously none of the above applies if the bully is the headteacher’s child or something and hence immune from the law.
As Solomon Short put it, sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malevolence. I don’t think it genuinely is the goal of the schools which are like this to indoctrinate certain students that they have no choice but to take their abuse… but if it was, I’m not sure what they’d do differently.
The only possible advantage I can point to is that it got me to pick up martial arts sooner than I would have otherwise. I’m not generally a big fan of Judo any more, but it is very well suited for that purpose. It doesn’t look as brutal as socking someone in the face, and it cuts bullies down to size quite effectively when the small, nerdy kid throws them halfway through the room and then explains that the next time, it will *really* hurt. Never had to fight anyone twice.
Only had a teacher come by once. But he knew that I don’t start shit (and he probably knew the other guy as well), so he just glanced over to make sure I was winning, smiled and went on his way.
I think that the adult world is kind of ridiculous on this (and other kid-related issues).
If a prison didn’t take steps to prevent violence among the inmates or deliberately cultivated it, it would be considered a human rights violation. How often do we hear about that in the context of US prisons?
If you worked in an office and somebody “bullied” you repeatedly, you would do some escalating combination of: telling a superior and expecting them to deal with it, finding a new job and telling them in the exit interview that you left because of a hostile work environment, or even calling the police if the person were violent. Any company nowadays would respond vigorously to this, partly out of threat of being sued, but also just to keep talent. Occasionally a person is so valuable that they get to act like a prima donna and get away with it, but in most hum-drum office life this behavior would be grounds for disciplinary intervention.
You also in daily life should not be “solving your own problems.” Admittedly I live in NY which colors my views here, but if somebody yells at you on the street, you DO NOT ENGAGE. You say nothing and keep walking. If the person follows and harangues you, you run and find a cop ASAP.
My point of all this is to say, I find it strange that we encourage kids to be more mature, and yet when it comes to bullying the mature adult thing to do is the opposite of what kids are encouraged to do. The idea that kids, who have no exit options to leave the school for another one, should just “deal with” abusive behavior because it’ll teach them not to be such dorks who talk about Star Trek all the time, is in my opinion absurd.
Strongly disagree. I agree with almost everything you say about it being ridiculous what a gross double standard adults apply to school and other kid-related institutions, but this reliance on others and the System is truly terrible, a learned helplessness. People shouldn’t be acculturated to solving problems by submitting the correct form to make Authority drop a ton of bricks on the offender.
Really, the loss of tacit or even formal legal acceptance of dueling was one of the gravest wounds to Western culture. The proper response to someone giving you shit at work is to slap him in the face, get your friend to talk to his friend, kill or maim him with a cavalry sabre. It doesn’t take many of those fights to put all of society on a much higher average level of respect and cordiality.
Except for people who are known to be expert duelists, who can bully the less skilled with relative impunity, and maybe corner them into a devil’s choice between being a public coward and a corpse.
That to me is somewhere between “acceptable losses”, “can you demonstrate this having happened historically to any meaningful extent”, and “maybe if you can’t be bothered to learn to fight you kinda deserve being a public coward and a doormat”.
I think maybe the second one most of all; there is to my (I believe relatively considerable) knowledge no great occurrence of this, especially not as done systematically by one bully against whoever’s unfortunate enough to fall foul of him. The reason appears to be twofold: first, there’s always a bigger dog — if you make a name for yourself as an intolerable bully, eventually some guy who’s better than you will figure you need taking down a peg, or a few feet below ground level. Second, every duel is a grave risk. You can always get unlucky. When bullying comes down to constantly waging your life for the privilege of being a huge unlikeable dick, it begins to look really unappetizing even if the risk in each individual instance of hazard is low.
But the same applies if you replace “bullying” with “defending yourself against bullying”. The duels would have to involve the victim as well, after all.
You’re proposing dueling as an alternative to the “System” as a means of solving problems, and indicating a belief that dueling is preferable to our current approach.
But it doesn’t seem like most of the problems addressed by deuling are even things we see as “problems” anymore, much less things we go run and get the cops for. Most duels seem to be over minor disputes, insults, and reputation. Actual crimes were still dealt with through a legal system of some kind.
Nowadays, we’d be expected to blow off half the crap that caused duels. The rest – well, if it’s really egregious, maybe a defamation suit. But most would be handled by telling your mutual acquaintances (or your boss, if it’s at work), “hey, this guy was being an asshole” and he’ll either get shunned / socially punished, or you’ll get laughed at and told to suck it up. Problem resolved, nobody dies.
Duelling strikes me as profoundly unfair in any situation where one party is agreed by all to be in the wrong. Why should the obviously wronged party have to risk death? Like, if Fop A tells Fop B, “verily, sir, your mother ’tis a slatternly whore”, Fop B can demand an apology, and, if he doesn’t get one, the two will fight. But why should Fop A be allowed to either kill B or insult B’s mother? Everyone already agrees that both are bad!
The whole thing revolves around the idea that some sort of cosmic fate will guide the blade or ball of the pure party, but that doesn’t seem to be the way things always turned out.
@Jiro
Not so. It is I think very likely that the average bullying victim has fewer bullies than the average bully has victims, over so to speak the active timespan.
Moreover, the victim has more at stake: he wants to get a dreadful weight off his back. He wants revenge on his tormentor. The bully has only a vague amusement or sense of superiority; he is less emotionally invested, and therefore less desperate.
Dueling is thus more discouraging of bullying than it is of standing up for yourself.
@gbdub
Yes, and all of the above is bad. If I was in a trolling mood I might say the problem isn’t resolved until somebody dies. In a more serious frame of mind, however: blowing off insults is not a healthy habit; bringing them into court is profoundly unwholesome (invoking Authority to solve your problems, in the worst way); counter-gossiping is profoundly repugnant and rather constitutes exacerbating the problem than solving it. There are worse outcomes than a guy dying now and then.
In fact, one of the more common immediate replacements for duels was for everyone to shun any “Fop A” type who started talking shit, on the understanding that it expedited things without anyone dying. But of course then not everyone likes B, so they’ll want to take A’s side, so eventually the social contract disintegrates. In other words, the answer is that the risk of B dying is one that must be put up with in order for A to know that in exchange for the privilege of talking shit, he’s going to have to put his head in a noose, every time.
No it doesn’t. That’s a common assertion, but it’s really not the raison d’être for dueling. It’s the result of a confusion between trial by combat (which I believe was no longer in use by the mid-16th century) and aristocratic gentlemen’s way of settling private disputes. Trial by combat had the idea that God would preserve the righteous and was abolished for the obvious reason; dueling has no more complex or metaphysical justification than “talk shit, get hit”. The latter has an obvious and enduring appeal.
I don’t think that “formal” or “legal” acceptance has that much to do with it. Rather, people in general are less attached to their reputations than in the past; they would prefer to be thought of as a coward than to risk their life (and very few people would think of you as a coward anyway for avoiding a duel). Dueling is all very well for wealthy aristos who have nothing better to do than to play endless social games, but I have work tomorrow morning and I spent my last paycheck catching up on the rent, rather than investing in a cavalry sabre.
> In a more serious frame of mind, however: blowing off insults is not a healthy habit
And duelling is? I’ll take my chances with the insults.
I think most people would find the health consequences of blowing off insults to be preferable to the health consequences of duelling.
Maybe not most, but certainly 50%.
I recall reading somewhere or other that duelling with pistols was actually much less lethal than people usually think – with the caveat that this was old-timey pistols. As technology advanced, duelling got more lethal, and disappeared.
Was duelling with swords usually lethal or severely maiming, or was there some minor level of injury that satisfied all concerned?
See Mark Twain’s “The Great French Duel“.
That came up here, and I remember it being false. Basically, at dueling range, smoothbore pistols were more accurate than the designs that eventually became modern pistols, even though they were crap past about 20 yards (I think), and old lead bullets produced fairly lethal wounds. But one of the actual participants in that discussion would be in a better position to say. Here, though, is Ye Wiki on dueling pistols and their ammunition.
I know sword duels did at least sometimes go to “first blood”, but I don’t know how common that was, relative to duels to the death, and “first blood” doesn’t include any kind of guarantee that the first injury will not be lethal.
Pistols are kinda shit, but as Gazeboist says, the Twainian parody falls well short of the truth — they were good enough to kill Alexander Hamilton, to take a currently-popular example.
Swords, as long as you don’t use the unhelpful and enfeebling first blood standard, are pretty final instruments for the most part. Louis XIII’s edicts against dueling, which are a notable plot point in The Three Musketeers, were passed in response to the fact that his entire officer class was killing itself off in fighting to show their valor. (The Thirty Years’ War-era French did take the sensitivity of their honor a touch too far, perhaps.) In the actual novel people tend to stop once they’ve inflicted a bad enough wound to put the enemy hors de combat, but that was probably an innovation too, either an invention for narrative purposes on Dumas’ part or (if authentic) an attempt to respect the spirit of an edict whose letter couldn’t possibly be respected. The French fencing master François Dancie (1623) makes a particular point of telling the reader to wound the enemy several times and if possible to use it to goad him into committing some folly that will let you stab him in a good and decisive way two or three times; so apparently that was regarded as well within parameters.
And those fights were with rapiers, which make wounds with generally very little stopping power that kill slowly by sepsis. When you start getting into fights with sabres even a first-blood blow might take your hand off or put a deeper gash in your torso than you can really shake off. They’re serious business, not some frippery.
I think how dangerous dueling was depended on the rules as well as the weapons. Some duels were to first blood. One version of the Norse Holmgang involved fighting in vary small area. Whoever drew blood first won, unless he killed his opponent, in which case he lost. An elegant incentive system.
Casanova fought a number of duels. One with guns resulted in the death of his opponent. There is another duel he mentions in which he was not a party, I think also with guns, where one person died. I don’t remember any deaths in duels with swords that he mentions.
“Authorities” are a tool. You can use your own words or actions to deal with a harasser directly, or you can use a cop if that’s more convenient. Why should I waste my time punching out the guy who’s following me around screaming, when I can just call a cop and let them deal with it? That’s what cops are for in the first place.
If the problem is “some asshole is bothering me”, I’d prefer to just summon another asshole to get them out of my way, rather than have to spend time and energy getting rid of them. If I have to work to get rid of someone who’s genuinely a problem, that’s losing, so far as I’m concerned.
When all you have is a cop, everything looks like a robber.
If you’ve read Larry Niven – “My evolution includes a society”.
I think the devil’s in the details. We don’t want adults to be sparring over any irritating tone of voice. But if “call the cops” comes before “use your own words” you have misunderstandings turn into criminal matters on a daily basis; and at the same time you empower aggressors to get away with anything short of illegal.
Adults, like children, have a variety of conflict resolution tools that can solve *some* of their own problems, and for some others seeking authorities are the best choice.
Saying that we adults have ridiculous double standards here is kind of wrong, because the frequent refrain in school settings (& media, etc.) is “Go tell a teacher!” “Sticks and stones etc. but words will never hurt me” is old, old school, and the pendulum has probably swung too far away from the philosophy of resilience, since being able to ignore jerks is a useful skill even if in the perfect world we’d have Navy Seals on speed dial ready to take out the guy who flipped us off over a parking space.
I would agree that the devil is in the details. I was definitely exaggerating in my post up there. Generally, I think the order of escalation should (subject to modification given a specific example, of course) be:
(1) “Do nothing.”
(2) “Apply words.”
(3) “Exit.”
(4) “Apply the relevant authority figure.”
(5) “Apply violence, as minimally as is feasible.”
You escalate as options fail to work, and skip any that aren’t available. In a school setting, we’ve generally removed option (3) from the kids’ toolboxes, which is what creates the double standard. “Sticks and stones” is option (1), or maybe (2). Anon up there seems to believe that (4) isn’t or shouldn’t be an option because … dueling is honorable? Which I found to be nonsensical and worth pushing back on.
Some guy flips you off in the parking lot? Yeah, whatever. Some guy is following you around calling you a pedophile, on the grounds that you look funny? Go find the person in charge and tell them, “Get this fucker out of here,” or at least try that before you shoot the dude.
Option (4) is also often impractical because most teachers either don’t think they can find out who started it, or try to appear “fair and balanced” by punishing both parties, or just don’t give a shit. And then there’s the worst kind of teacher that mostly wants to be popular and thus always sides with the popular kids.
It can work for some (my brother was always small and cute, so it was a viable strategy for him to make sure the bullies always caught him in front of a teacher, preferably female…), but there are plenty of cases where this option fails or backfires predictably.
In civilized society, the police *have* to get involved when you tell them. And while going to courts may be a horrible, soul-sucking process, the main motivation of judges is not to be left alone by those pesky kids so they can continue to chat with their colleague.
But schools (and prisons) are not civilized society. The authority figures there can often do as they damn well please, and the inmates have no option to exit the situation or appeal their judgment.
Yeah, I think school structures need substantial revision for this reason (among others). Students should have these tools available to them, but often don’t. I just think it’s absurd to claim that challenging someone to a duel is the proper way for an adult to respond to an insult, perceived or actual.
And if you happen to be being bullied because you’re in a wheelchair? Blind? Dyspraxic?
You don’t even need to go that far. I once saw a sparring match between a 1st kyu and 3rd dan karateka; the latter was clearly more skilled, but he was barely holding his own because the opponent had a massive size advantage. That’s not “being bothered to learn to fight” – it’s just the luck of the genetic draw.
Making it even easier for physically powerful people to throw their weight around is about the worst possible response to bullying as a social problem.
Also, your solution results in an awful lot more people ending up dead than the current status quo. Being bullied is a profoundly awful experience, but not one meriting death. The cost of a small percentage of the people involved dying at the point of a sword far outweighs the benefit of
the cool factor of duelsthis tenuous link to decreased bullying.Men who are disabled fall into the same category as women and children: persons who cannot fight and cannot be expected to, and thus can absolutely not be treated badly. Part of the whole structure whose loss to us is grievous was that it’s every man’s responsibility to redress such injuries, and also that causing them in the first place makes you an intolerable shitbird. Women would blank you, your friends would abandon you even if you won any fight that resulted, and so on. You’d become an outcast.
Simply put: in a system where you’re allowed and able to fight to redress wrongs against you, picking on someone who can’t do so is the height of infamy, sanctioned so heavily that it’s unappealing even to someone of a bullying bent. (In the case of some bullies, it also helps in an oblique way, by letting them think of themselves as being on a level above people who can’t defend themselves, satisfying their egos without the need for any bad behavior — but that’s incidental and also a bit intuitively distasteful, since it lets douchebags be smug. Still, it works, so…)
Or of course there’s the older mode where if you’re a cripple or a woman you’d better keep your head down and stick close to someone who’ll cover your shit, since you clearly can’t fend for yourself. If you’re weak you’re a second-class citizen and you’ll have to take what you can get. But I expect you’d like that one less. It’s not the way that I’m lamenting the loss of, at any rate.
‘Cause people totally obey zero-tolerance anti-bullying rules, and the people who are supposed to be fair arbiters of the system never use it to shit on people they don’t like.
I think you’re missing the point.
@Anonymous
This seems like a completely arbitrary and unfair distinction, when reality is that there is a spectrum of unfair match ups, not a clear fair vs unfair dichotomy.
“God created men. Sam Colt made them equal.”
I think it’s a reasonable idea that if a huge guy challenges you to a fight you pick pistols, yeah. There’s a reason those old codes involved either the challenged party picking the weapons, or the seconds arranging that between themselves to ensure fairness.
*blink* Really? You should not?
Ya that had me doing a double-take as well.
@Lumifer
That was a euphemism for vigilante justice.
I thought we were talking about self-defense, not about prowling the streets looking for evildoers to mete out punishment to.
I guess I should respond on the pushback to “solve your own problems.”
I put that in scare-quotes which is admittedly not fair. Obviously basic squabbles with friends and family should be handled privately with words. However, in the adult world it’s generally considered unacceptable to escalate violence when it’s not necessary for immediate defense. “He insulted me” is not going to get you off of an assault charge, and slapping a coworker in the face is not an appropriate response to being called a nasty name, even repeatedly.
Maybe that’s not always fair but that’s the modern world. The kid being told to just take it or alternatively to fight back, is not something that would ever fly in adulthood. It’s understood that physical violence is a serious police matter and not just a joke, and turning around, brandishing a knife, and saying “You got somethin to say to me pal?” is the wrong way to deal with a difficult person.
Heartily co-signed. The dramatic reduction in the scope of acceptable violence is one of the great successes of modern civilization, and I’m bemused by the people who think it would be nifty to go back to dueling in the streets instead.
Standing up to bullying does not mean escalating violence. In most cases where there is violence, it is, as you put it, “necessary for immediate defense”. Fighting back is the proper response to aggression.
If the kid cannot handle other kids being mean to him/her, adulthood will be painful as well.
This is exactly what I’m talking about with making excuses when it happens to kids but not adults.
Adults don’t actually tolerate other adults being mean to them. If you have a job where people are mean to you, you’ll look for a new job, barring certain high-pressure industries. If you have friends or acquaintances that are mean to you, or even family a lot of times, you can write them off and stop seeing them. If a stranger gives you a hard time you can walk away, and if he attacks you the police will take that very seriously.
Most adults don’t put up with abuse from other adults, and to the extent that they do, the exit option is still valuable. Kids are pretty much stuck where they are and can’t count on their authority figures to help them. And on top of that people such as yourself trivialize their abuse.
@ Rock Lobster
Oh, you sweet summer child…
*grin* Trivialize? No, hitting back hard is serious business. “If you don’t want to be food, don’t act like it”.
Rock Lobster, workplace bullying can be quite serious.
Adults do have better opportunities for getting away from abuse than children do, but those abilities still might not be adequate– sometimes for practical reasons and sometimes for emotional reasons.
@Lumifer
Not everyone can hit back hard, either due to a lack of ability or because they can’t bring themselves to use violence.
A society where only the strong and/or violent are safe from abuse is not one that I desire.
Nancy,
I don’t mean to imply that workplace bullying doesn’t exist or isn’t serious. I’m just pointing out that this is a problem that does have effective safety valves to mitigate it, most importantly exit, appeals to workplace authority, and appeals to law enforcement in cases of violence. Kids typically have none of these and are expected to just endure or fight back or hope it gets better, often for years at a time.
Rock Lobster
And when the kids engage in vigilante justice beyond what is considered acceptable, like shooting up a school, people are shocked that the kid would consider violence a valid solution to their problems…
Even as the school environment has been teaching the (bullied) kids exactly that.
What the school environment has been trying to teach the bullied kids is to accept that they are there to be bullied. If the bullied kids decide they’d rather break with society than accept their place at the bottom of it, that’s on them and that’s what the SWAT teams are for. And in case such kids have any empathy for others in their position, we’ll apply deterrence by punishing all bullied kids whenever one of them “acts out” that way.
AntiDem makes a similar argument in an Ask.fm response:
Obviously AntiDem hasn’t been in a real employment environment. If you’re verbally bullied and you tell the person bullying you to “fuck off”, you’re going to get in hot water for it. Been there and done that, in exactly those words. Guy started in on me for the way I was driving in the parking lot, when he didn’t give up after I ignored him, I told him to “fuck off”, he went to my boss.
Why didn’t you go to his boss first?
Checks urban dictionary:
“To be intentionally infected with a viral disease, typically Aids. Seen as a “bad beat”, especially in poker circles”
You have one fucked up reading list.
“Pozzed” is used metaphorically in alt-right circles to refer to media or institutions that have been deliberately infected with progressive memes.
You have one fucked up reading list.
I have never heard pozzed be used in such a manner. I used to dig deeply into alt-rightopia, so I’m wondering if it’s brand-new.
Well, Heartiste was using it as early as 2014, but it does seem to have gotten more popular lately (see, for example, the recent “Pozivision” article in The Right Stuff).
That is one swift way to mark yourself as an easy and amusing target. “Hey look, it’s the runs away from everything guy! See if we can get him to flee from literally “boo!”!”
No it’s not….
I’m not even sure what to say to this, frankly. Has that happened to somebody you know? If somebody is crazy or drugged out enough to be yelling at you on the street, this is probably somebody you don’t want to turn around and start trying to lecture or fight, and it’s not somebody where you have to worry about your rapport with the guy, especially in a giant city. Plus, like I said, the police aren’t gonna give you a medal for getting into a fight. Probably they’ll arrest you and you’ll spend X number of months or even years of your life dealing with the legal fallout of that, even if you have a decent case for self-defense.
If somebody is crazy or drugged out enough to be yelling at you on the street
I would love to visit your home planet. It sounds like a fascinating place, where people never get angry or vocal without chemical assistance, and objections are a sign of mental illness.
@ LPSP
People who approve of bullying: what do you think of homeschooling/unschooling, then?
…Nevermind. That was a bad question to ask, and I can imagine a fairly nasty answer.
You know you can delete your comments, right? If you actually regret asking a question, rather than wanting to darkly hint about how terrible all the non-communists are.
I can think of some nasty answers too, but this sort of petty sniping lowers the level of the conversation so either quit beating about the bush or GTFO.
“People who approve of bullying: what do you think of homeschooling/unschooling, then?”
I don’t approve of bullying, but I do have experience with unschooling. Home unschooling, or home schooling in general, I would expect to result in less bullying, since kids are not forced into routine association with other kids they don’t want to associate with.
The case of unschooling in a school is not so clear. One disadvantage of the Sudbury model is that someone, student or staff, who is good enough at small group politics to get effective control over the in school judicial mechanism is in a position to do quite a lot of bullying. That problem was a good deal of the reason we switched from a Sudbury model school to home unschooling.
@David Friedman
As long as they stay in that environment, yes. However, these people generally have to go to regular schools/colleges later in life and I’ve heard stories about them having a lot of trouble fitting in. That may increase the chance of being bullied.
Maybe, but as someone who was bullied a fair amount in middle school and high school and basically never bullied thereafter, I don’t especially credit my experience with bullies then to my ability to avoid bullying now. The reason I’m not bullied now is because, as an adult, I’m not forced into social situations with assholes.
I enjoyed the Haidt lecture recently linked, but I think he thinks too much of “antifragility” as a reason to let children “fight their own battles.” I agree in the sense that sheltering children from the kinds of different opinions, criticisms, failures, demands, etc. they’ll face in “the real world” doesn’t do them any favors and that children today probably don’t get enough unsupervised time.
But the thing is, school isn’t the real world. In the real world you aren’t forced into social interaction with a randomly-selected group of people your own exact age every day. I am therefore skeptical of the “they need to learn to socialize” justification for traditional schooling. The type of socialization I’m called on to engage in as an adult bears little resemblance to the socialization I experienced in high school, and I doubt there’s all that much overlap in terms of skills.
No, but you are forced into social interaction with randomly-selected people every day. And when you’re young, your peer group is fairly narrow. In early elementary school, I recall people two grades above being impressively godlike and people two grades below being sort of like monkeys.
I’ll come down pretty firmly on the side of homeschooling being bad for socialization. I started off in regular school, and was smarter enough than everyone else that I usually had about one friend, and everyone else in the class were peasants. Then I went to the regional gifted program, and it was an amazing difference. There were enough people who were my peers that we started to form actual social dynamics instead of looking on the peasant games with incomprehension. Based on homeschooled kids I’ve met, their experience isn’t that much different from what I did through 3rd grade, except for the lack of peasants.
If you have the option of going to a school with a lot of the sort of people you are apt to form friendships with, then that may be better than homeschooling. But many people don’t have that option.
Re. interacting with strangers: my interactions with random strangers are generally brief. They don’t bear much resemblance to school, where you are forced into close quarters every day with people you may hate. Of course, there may be people you hate at your workplace, too, but you don’t have to eat lunch with them or play on the softball team with them if you don’t want to.
It can be a burden to find enough socialization time for homeschooling children since the responsibility is on them or their parents to arrange things. But this is like adulthood! Many adults gradually lose friends as the decades go on precisely because they’re bad at the skill of keeping in touch, arranging to do things, etc.
People argue that homeschooling is sheltering children from the burden of socialization, but a case could be made for the reverse! As an adult, you don’t automatically go to a place with a bunch of your peers every day, though, again, you may make friends with coworkers depending on your situation; rather, homeschooling more nearly replicates adulthood in this respect.
Anecdotes and all that. You really haven’t given evidence or reasoning to support this. I and probably some others here are happy to debate this.
@onyomi
That’s a good point, actually. I did homeschool for one semester before I went to the gifted program, and probably would have stayed there if I hadn’t gotten in. I’ll agree that homeschooling is probably better than a regular school for the sort of kids that readers here are likely to have, but worse than an appropriate school.
No, but you do have to be polite to them when you’re working on a project together.
Granted. But I don’t think you can assume that the best outcome will result in training in the exact same environment you’ll have to work in. Yes, in adulthood you normally don’t have to deal closely with people you hate. But you do it once in a while, and it’s better to have to do it for the first time when there’s no long-term consequences.
@Randy M
What is the reasoning that it doesn’t? I’ll agree that it’s probably not much worse for socialization than being stuck in a regular classroom, and better in other ways. But pushing it as the best option misses the point.
Isn’t that shifting the goal posts a bit?
Define socialization in a way such that it is a clearly desirable trait. Say, the ability to contribute to society being more pleasant and productive via everyday interactions, and to navigate social situations well enough to accomplish one’s own goals.
Homeschooling children have, as onyomi points out, opportunity for more varied interactions with members of their community of varied demographics.
They can have much more direct observation and feedback on their behavior by someone with a more vested interest in their good behavior. They aren’t expect to pick up norms from the rest of the young savages or the artificial structures of the school environment.
@RandyM
Isn’t that shifting the goal posts a bit?
I’d prefer to call it realizing that my original position was incomplete. I was originally thinking of homeschooling as an alternative to the sort of school I had from 4th grade on, not as an alternative to regular school. This was a mistake. But I do still believe that an appropriate school is better than homeschooling, and object to homeschooling being pushed too strongly because it might dissuade people from looking for appropriate schools.
Define socialization in a way such that it is a clearly desirable trait. Say, the ability to contribute to society being more pleasant and productive via everyday interactions, and to navigate social situations well enough to accomplish one’s own goals.
Homeschooling children have, as onyomi points out, opportunity for more varied interactions with members of their community of varied demographics.
I’d call this a case of theoretical homeschooling beating real-world regular schooling, which is not particularly fair. Yes, I’m sure it is possible for parents to put their kids in a position where they get the kind of socialization that school usually provides. In fact, I suspect that may have been the case for the one set of home-schooled kids I know that came out basically normal. But that’s hard, and most of the families I know of that have homeschooled haven’t managed it. It’s hard to describe, and I can see the same problems being somewhat common among those who were really smart and went to regular schools, which might be skewing our samples.
Shrug. I call it my wife’s schedule.
I’d say the risk of losing the parental lottery, and having to put up with a nasty abuser 24/7 is a far greater threat than any bullying. Similar to being left alone with one tutor, no other kids, who could be in good books with your parents and thus get away with abuses.
I have little problem with the concept of bullying. The anti-bullying material forced down everyone’s throats in school always vaguely embarassed everyone – not only was it based on no real scenario, it was extremely excessive for even a reasonable case and yet narrowly focussed at all times. Racism was a none issue, beyond a few people who liked curries also liking the word “paki” in an appropriate accent, and sexism a myth.
I had maybe one major “bully” during my time in secondary school. He was the smuggest chav in our class, and was just kind of a dick to people (not specifically me) as a rule in order to curry favours. He’d sometimes orbit around me as I provided interesting reactions; I was bothered more by the inherent contradictions in his statements and actions that the intended “attacks”, and I neither realised he wanted me to be unhappy nor that my unusual response was exactly what he kept coming back for.
One day towards the end of compulsory education, at a point where I was coming out of my shell and developing a more cheeky and dominant persona, I poured myself a cup of water from our tutor’s special mug he had printed with his face on it. By this point I, completely oblivious of it, had started some kind of dominance struggle with the chav, as my sect of the form was now the noisier, more interesting and happier of the two. So he waddled over and tipped my cup over my lap. Without a moment’s thought I got up and smacked him in the face. We then proceeded to get into what I thought at the time was an ungainly headlock dance, with me ramming him sideways into desks and trying to gouge an eye out with my middle finger. The class joker – a neutral figure between all the various factions – came in and broke us up before any teacher could intervene, and I sat down, feeling a little shaken. I’d had horror stories about thugs and gangs drilled into me, and so calmly prepared for the worst – an assault by the chav’s horde of chavvy friends and relatives, launched at any point I could be walking home in the next month. See, I believed in honour, consistency and loyalty, and I so reckokend that, had I the ego and nastiness of a chav, I’d round up a posse to strike down whoever stood up me up like that.
But nothing ever came. Everyone who I asked about the incident years later described my act of defiance in (what I believed to be exaggeratedly) epic terms, like I was slaying a dragon. I swear to god, I just punched him once and then headlocked-flailed for a bit. I knew nothing of fighting. But I had no idea how precarious the chav’s social stance was. It turns out, bullies have to continuously maintain the bully facade at all times. They don’t ever rise in the social order from this – bullying merely treads water. The moment it doesn’t work, they sink like stones. Chavvy never, for the remaining 1.5 years of school, made eye contact with me again. Genuinely, he kept his head low whenever he walked past me, had to sit near me or pass me something, and avoided me wherever possible. He lost all his popularity with the boys, and he lost all his popularity with the girls. The chavvy girls started making moves on me! Which was horrific, but I got over it. By the end of it, I could’ve got away with calling the chav any kind of name I wanted. I didn’t, because I’m not puerile and honey catches more flies than ointment.
This isn’t actually the main point of the text here. It’s just to show that even actual, proper bullying largely persists only from a misunderstanding between bully and bullee, and that it is perilously-easily resolved. Bullies walk on a knife’s edge – they put themselves on the line for a tiny bit of rep, and you can topple them so easily.
The main point is – not only do the anti-bullying campaigns fail to capture real, actual bullying behaviour at all – in their over zealousness, they proceed to capture all teasing in the fold. This is the major problem. Teasing is hugely beneficial. I was teased mercilessly throughout my secondary education. And thank fuck for that. I deserved it, and so did my friends. The chav never teased anyone he didn’t like, and us neither. No, in order to tease, you must like the target. My lovely little circle of friends were relentless teasers. I was the moodiest one, the closest thing approximating a leader – so I got the MOST! It’s just like political humour – I came off as dominant, so that meant whenever I was typing something, fucking with my mouse and clicking off into empty space while I wasn’t looking was the gang’s utmost priority. And it worked a fucking treat. I learnt to keep an eye on people in the background, block my keyboard, respond with handslaps sharpish, steal sandwiches as punishment and play impromptu food tennis the moment shit went off. It was the most fun I had in secondary school; I would argue it was the only form of real play I ever experienced in all my compulsory education. And in hindsight, it was the factoring missing the most from a largely-genial, but so very toothless, uni experience.
I can’t think of a neat way to summarise all this. Tl:Dr; Bullying isn’t a big deal, teasing is really good, zealous campaigners are exaggerating things to draw attention to themselves and signal how beneficent they’re being, waddelseznyu. Stuff isn’t that black and white. Most people know when abuse crosses the line and needs an intervention. In my entire time at secondary school, one kid in an older year once planned an attack on a younger student, and he lost his entire life while the victim got payouts. Non-issue.
I think there is a very big difference between teasing/good-natured ribbing and bullying. If you think the bullying you experienced was a good thing, it probably wasn’t bullying.
It’s like saying “rough sex can be great”=”spousal abuse is not a big problem.” The two might share some superficial similarities, but intention is key.
Yeah. If, when you don’t respond correctly to the teasing, the physical abuse starts… well, it probably wasn’t good-natured teasing to begin with.
Frank Gallagher on the advantages of bullying.
I was not expecting William Macy when I read the words “Frank Gallagher”.
Anecdotes aren’t data yet somehow every single one of these discussions devolve into excruciatingly detailed discussions of posters’ own childhood experiences.
It’s just group therapy trying to pretend to be a policy discussion.
And bring back dueling guy must have had one fucked up childhood.
I think it’s mostly that a lot of people seem to have really, really intense fantasies about being The Punisher.
Personally, I’ve managed to avoid that particular fantasy, and I’m glad. The Punisher’s life really sucks, if you’ve read the comics.
While I’d almost certainly say everyone has had that fantasy at least once in a lifetime, the idea that many people continue to have throughout their lives is worryingly possible.
When you stop and examine it, it’s deeply unsatisfies. No-one wins, you have no-one to enjoy the fruits of your miserable wages.
“Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.” – H.L. Mencken
Ace quote, 10/10
an Ace of Spades quote, no less
People think that if you fight back , you will invariably win because everyone sees themselves a s heroes their own stories, and in stories, heroes win….so the other guy isn’t going to beat you to the draw….but the problem is that every one thinks that!
Outcome A: Don’t fight back, get a beating.
Outcome B: Fight back, lose, get a worse beating
Outcome C: Fight back, neither win nor lose, get a same or lesser beating.
Outcome D: Fight back, win, get hurt less.
You don’t have to “invariably” win to prefer the chance of outcome B, C, or D over the certainty of outcome A. You only need some positive probability for outcome C and D.
This changes when B,C, and D come with “and then authority comes down on you like a ton of bricks for fighting back.”
This is a topic where too many people believe their personal experience, often from 20 or 30 years ago, are the right models for modern childhood. The world needs fewer assholes nowadays, especially on the internet where the supply is already ample.
Maybe I was just a bully… 😀
No, actually, I had a very happy childhood. My friends and I ran around outdoors playing Robin Hood and such in the old ruins in the woods. (Not a castle or anything; I think now it had been some kind of 19th century industry, a foundry or something. But to a ten-year-old, any crumbling stone wall is a castle ruin.) I think you’d rather have to try to trace it back to those games, or watching reruns of that old Zorro TV show or something like that.
It just happens that I think there are serious problems now which our ancestors had already solved, and that strikes me as unnecessary and a shame. People can disagree with you, even quite radically, without being fuckups, you know.
Apparently enough people were getting killed in duels (to the point where it threatened military readiness / an effective ruling class) that it became its own problem that needed to be solved by banning it (centuries ago in many cases). The problems that it solved were basically “people being rude”. Doesn’t seem to be a good trade off.
And, rather obviously, it didn’t even solve the problem.
@ Anonymous
Anecdotes aren’t data yet somehow every single one of these discussions devolve into excruciatingly detailed discussions of posters’ own childhood experiences.
How many anecdotes would it take to make a counter-example?
Just one. But outside of math it is rarely a good idea to make statements that can be refuted with a counterexample.
I’m more interested in making the counter-example.
Bingo.
I would expect that if someone started a Holocaust denial discussion, at some point, people would start saying “I’m a Jew, and I have family members who died in the concentration camps”, even though anecdotes about your family members don’t prove anything about how many people died or what the Nazis’ intention was,
The anecdotes are not being offered as proof, they are being offered as a reality check to people who fail to do reality checks.
What can people tell me about sun protection?
I know that I should be putting some kind of sun protection on, but I’ve heard so many different things about the best way to do this. The WHO says a broad-spectrum SPF15+ sunblock, applied every 2 hours – is this excessive?
For reference: Pale skin, I don’t burn easily or tan much, but I don’t spend much time outdoors.
You shouldn’t be using any skin protection.
I’ve heard this before, most notably from some paleo bloggers, but given the fact that, IIRC, the vast majority of skin cancer is caused by UV-radiation, I am skeptical.
Skin cancer is the least dangerous, most easily treatable form of cancer, more a nuisance (like the flu) rather than a significant danger.
The flu kills hundreds of thousands people per year worldwide. Melanoma kills ~10,000 people per year in the US, and I believe is the major source of skin cancer death.
Voracious Observer: Basal cell carcinoma is 99%+, as you say, a nuisance, and squamous cell carcinoma isn’t much worse, but melanoma, while the rarest of the three, is extremely bad news and sunburn is in fact a direct trigger of the mutation cascade involved.
I don’t use sunscreen for the <30 minutes I'm out in mostly shady daylight on a workday but I do recommend it if you're Going Outside and will be in the sun for any length of time to speak of.
All else being equal, don’t get sunburned. More for the short term discomfort than for the cancer. If you can predict your sunburns, use sunscreen. But all else isn’t equal. Sunscreen probably causes more cancer than it prevents, but that’s negligible compared to heart disease.
Which is worse (assume a light-skinned phenotype)?
1. Maintaining enough of a tan to keep you from getting burned.
2. Hiding from the Daystar as much as possible, but getting burned the one or two times you poke your head outside.
Jaskologist, why do you ask? Do you think that there is a tradeoff between two different harms? No! #2 is bad on both counts. It has both limited sun exposure and more sunburns. But the good effects of the sun are more important, so #1 would be better even if it produced more burns in the process of acquiring the tan.
Paleo is basically about replicating your ancestral environment. If you’re a white American, given the fact that New York is at the same latitude as northern Spain (look at a map), you are getting way more UV radiation than the ancestors who experienced selection for paleness, I don’t know why paleo bloggers would oppose protecting your skin from the Sun. Also, I’ve seen many guys who’ve spent their lives outdoors without sunscreen/a broad-brimmed hat, and the skin damage is quite visible and obvious.
I’d tend to say that application every 2 hours is probably intended to cover almost everyone in almost every situation. If you burn easily and are getting sweaty playing sports, then it’s probably the appropriate interval. If you’re not sweating much, then you can go longer. I’ll often use 3-4 hour intervals in such situations, and I don’t get out much except about every other weekend, which is just long enough to not build up immunity.
You should if you expect to get a sunburn. You shouldn’t otherwise. If you don’t spend much time outdoors I don’t see any need to worry about this.
The general trade-off is that people who are religious about sun protection tend to end up vitamin D deficient which is a bigger threat than skin cancer.
People who spend a lot of time outside in the lower latitudes should use sun protection on a regular basis. People who work in the office and see the sun only during their commute have no need for sunblock.
That’s pretty much where I’m at – I’m in AZ so it doesn’t take much time to get burned, but still, you’re average day-to-day office worker is probably more likely to get too little sun than too much (to some degree AZ might be worse, since in the hot summer you stay indoors as much as possible).
If I’m going to be outside for an hour or more, I apply sunscreen at least once, and usually only reapply if I get in/out of water. So far that’s been enough to avoid anything but very superficial burns (as long as I don’t miss a spot).
You don’t need it unless you’re actually going to be outside with exposed skin for enough time that it might be a problem. If you’re only outside for a few minutes to walk from your car to the grocery store doors and back, sun protection is overkill. Sunlight exposure helps you produce vitamin D and it’s good for you in small amounts. With pale skin, you don’t need much – but you do need a little.
I never bother with sunscreen unless I’m going to be outside in minimal clothing for several hours, like a day at the beach/pool. But I’m olive-skinned and very resistant to sunburn, so the point at which sunscreen isn’t worth the hassle and might give fewer benefits than skipping it is different than for someone with much lighter skin.
I also have medium tone skin, and had never gotten a sunburn until last year (in the Andes), so I’m in a similar position of never really wearing sunscreen. But sunburn isn’t the _only_ reason to wear sun protection: sun damage also cosmetically damages your skin, aging you prematurely.
There’s a pretty famous picture of a truck driver who spent 28 years with a disproportionate amount of sun on one side of his face: http://cbsnews3.cbsistatic.com/hub/i/r/2012/06/04/9d138f74-a644-11e2-a3f0-029118418759/resize/620x/624f83bc4bd572c4482a20144ca20e49/trucker-damage-face_web.jpg
The difference is pretty dramatic. Here’s the full article about it: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/trucker-accumulates-skin-damage-on-left-side-of-his-face-after-28-years-on-the-road/
Most people expect sunburn with high temperature. But elevation breaks this connection. The northern Andes get a lot of UV, but the elevation makes this cool and so visitors from other elevations get surprise sunburn.
@Virbie
Yet there are many, many long-time truck drivers who don’t have this, indicating that this person has other issues which contributed to this.
Where do you live and what is the UV index, on average?
As we are the Melanoma and indeed skin-cancer capital of the world, I feel like the Australian cancer council is probably the best positioned to detail the risks. Here is the position statement which I feel is fairly detailed and well referenced: http://wiki.cancer.org.au/policy/Position_statement_-_Risks_and_benefits_of_sun_exposure
The tl;dr is basically if the UV index is below 3, don’t bother with sun protection.
If it is above 3, especially well above 3 (it regularly cracks 12-14 where I live, sometimes touching 16), you should wear sun protection if you’re outside for more than a few minutes – you’ll be quite easily exceeding your required amount of sunlight for Vitamin D synthesis after a few minutes of exposure to the face and hands.
Sunlight may contribute to health by way of nitric acid as well as vitamin D.
http://eurheartj.oxfordjournals.org/content/31/9/1041
Yes, if you live in Australia, you should use sunscreen. Here are forecasts of the UV index in the US (based on forecast cloud and ozone cover). But this is just the noon index – it will be less at other times of the day.
I tend to be worried about such things like sunblock. Exactly how were they tested?
Just build up time in the sun to avoid burns, and don’t stay out for too long.
My impression is that the physical sunblocks like zinc oxide and titanium dioxide are pretty inert and harmless, in addition to being more effective. Only problem is they tend to be thicker, greasier, and more opaque. Have heard that the other, non-physical blocks may achieve some degree of systemic absorption and may possibly have an effect on hormones. Don’t know if that’s correct, but generally I avoid them.
I have considered getting zinc oxide for times when I must be outside in the sun for extended periods of time, for similar “oh no what’s in it” reasons.
I mean, I have only had one sunburn in recent memory. I was so unused to the sensation that I thought it was poison ivy or something.
I am extremely pale and use this stuff on my face when I know I will be in the sun for a while. It contains only zinc oxide but is roughly skin-colored, and so less noticeable than the thick white concoctions you’re likely to find at the drug store. For the rest of my body I tend to figure I’d rather a little burn than have low vitamin D and/or suffer hormone disrupting chemicals.
[This post has been deleted, with the consent of the original author, due to the Unabomber’s lawyers threatening to sue for copyright infringement (which is not a sentence I expected to be writing today). I’m just grateful that the cease-and-desist letter arrived via email – SA]
@The Voracious Observer
Well, I read Industrial Society and Its Future, and what I gleaned from that is that even if you completely accept Ted’s conclusions about what technology does to us, his agenda still has no legs whatsoever.
Okay, so techno-civilization is restricting our freedom and alienating us from our true nature – now what? It’s amazing that someone with such a high IQ could conclude that the solution was sending bombs to Universities and airports. In his new book has Ted come up with a new solution that doesn’t involve such tepid methods?
The only way I can think to stop technological progress is some sort of global luddite dictatorship, since if one country goes luddite it would get its ass kicked by the others. Even then, you are only talking slowing things down a bit, since the government would have to keep ahead of dissidents who try to advance computer technology. It would be really hard to keep track of that. In addition, there would be all the activists trying to get the government to change its mind so as to solve social problems with technological advancement. Technology is driven by the needs of the very mass population it enslaves.
I think you’d need to go further and enact some sort of massive population reduction scheme so as to reduce the population to a level where technological society is hard to maintain and where political activists for technological growth can’t coordinate and push back against the regime, but not so far that the regime can’t control the world.
The problem is that it would be really hard to get to the stage where you can do all this, since out in the open the agenda is politically untenable. You’d literally need to set up one of those illuminati Georgia guidestones secret cults Alex Jones is going on about and run as a regular left wing candidate slowly (but not too slowly or tech growth will outpace you) coordinating to enact global government.
I’ve dabbled with a sci-fi idea of an AI that takes over the world, and then basically nerfs itself in such a way that advanced networks / AI can never be rebuilt on its ashes. The populace had become sufficiently dependent on the AI that they lost the ability to recreate it from scratch, so they carry on as semi-Luddites, in the sense that they can use and to some degree reproduce existing tech but can’t advance it.
Anyway at this point I think that’s the only non apocalyptic way to end up in Ted K’s preferred world, since it basically requires forgetting everything we know about tech (otherwise someone will recreate it for advantage).
: -)
Also see David Weber’s Heirs of Empire.
Why is it hard to believe that somebody could be both extremely intelligent and mentally ill?
Some theorize that Kacyznski’s mental illness and the form it took were due at least in part to his involvement as a subject in some fairly unethical psychology experiments while a student.
All too often, “he’s mentally ill” is just a cop-out. Mental illness is just the codification of types of mind which either cause difficulty in specific functions or simply deviate from the typical person in such ways as to be socially incompatible.
What specific impairment is causing Ted to believe that he can take on technological progress itself with IEDs? He seems perfectly cogent when describing what is wrong with society. I wonder at which part in his agenda his “mental illness” suddenly kicks in.
Perhaps this is willful disbelief. The harsh truth that there’s no way to stop this machine is too much.
ＳＣＩＥＮＣＥ ＣＲＥＡＴＥＤ ＨＩＭ
ＮＯＴ ＨＥ’Ｓ ＯＵＴ ＴＯ ＤＥＳＴＲＯＹ ＳＣＩＥＮＣＥ
ＯＮＥ ＵＮＩＶＥＲＳＩＴＹ ＡＴ Ａ ＴＩＭＥ
ＴＥＤ ＫＡＣＺＹＮＳＫＩ ＩＳ
“ＴＨＥ ＵＮＡＢＯＭＢＥＲ”
ＲＡＴＥＤ Ｒ
(Come on. It sounds like an origin story.)
I believe Kaczynski actually was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic by a court-appointed shrink before his trial. That said, this description of what is wrong with society is not new — Gandhi expressed similar horror over industrial civilization and was the mascot of “burn the cities” before the frogposters got into it — but no one has been able to come up with a way to fix the problem. Even in his own lifetime, nobody in power took Gandhi’s views on the matter seriously.
Wasn’t his intention to get attention through the mail-bombs, with the ultimatum being made that he’d stop sending them if newspapers agreed to print his manifesto?
Technological progress is obviously really hard to stop. What was he supposed to do? Run for President on the platform of stopping technology? Of course that wouldn’t work. The only thing he could do is get the word out on his ideas to a large audience. But if he simply wrote a book, people might simply ignore it. But the manifesto of a terrorist? That would certainly ensure at least some curious people read it. Was it the most effective way to promote his ideas? Maybe, maybe not. But I think it was a rational decision that doesn’t imply any kind of mental impairment.
The impairment where you believe that because you’re really smart, you can succeed where everyone else fails and use violence for positive change well.
Mental illness doesn’t mean impairment. Ted is imbalanced.
> The problem is that it would be really hard to get to the stage where you can do all this, since out in the open the agenda is politically untenable.
If the assumption that technology harms us became widespread and acknowledged as correct, at that point it’s hard to say what is or is not politically untenable.
I hope David Friedman will show up to put in his two cents here, but I think a happy medium between blind enthusiasm for the latest gadgets and Ted K’s subsistence lifestyle is a more widespread creation and use of ordnungs that specify the cultural direction we want to take and how various technologies might help or harm that. These ordnungs could easily exist at the household or family level. Companies should have them too. They might even be doable at the “niche movement” level.
I don’t agree on dismantling modern technology but I do agree with the fundamental point being made here:
Is that quoted from Kaczynski? I like the way the author thinks, in any case. The fact that with each technology adoption we also lose something has been pointed out by other writers (e.g. Neal Stephenson) and people in the tech field (e.g. Kim Goodwin). It would be mantra #1 in my ordnung!
Yes he does make good points that technology becomes other than voluntary and has a lot of drawbacks that often don’t occur to us as we rapidly accept one advance after another. The guy isn’t an idiot.
Not that I buy for a minute that losing all that tech would make the world a better place, even if it were possible. Does he actually want to go back to a hunter gatherer society? There were certainly benefits to such a society, but there were also lots of diseases, tooth decay, periodic famines, childhood deaths, deaths in childbirth, etc. Not to speak of no Internet, travel, or literature.
In this specific case you’re probably wrong. It’s very likely that the move to agriculture and consequent reliance on high-carbohydrate food was the direct cause of tooth decay as a problem, while someone who eats a diet consisting mainly of leafy greens, nuts and various meat doesn’t have that problem at all.
Think about it: it doesn’t make sense for teeth to have evolved to be shit and rot in your mouth before age 20, so it ought to be the product of an evolutionarily recent change; also, when was the last time you heard of a dog getting a cavity, despite them not exactly brushing religiously twice a day?
When your life expectancy was in the 20s it didn’t really matter that your teeth rotted out by then.
As for dogs, they get cavities all the time. Also, they only live to be like 10 years old, so even if they had the exact same tooth life expectancy as human teeth, they would never get old enough for it to be a big problem.
Chimps live to their 30s in the wild. I’d guess prehistoric humans and our bipedal ancestors lived at least that long, maybe a lot longer.
Older dogs do get lots of tooth problems. Mine is thirteen now and at least 1/3rd of his teeth are chipped or broken (and they were all fine until a year or two ago). I’m not sure about cavities, but you’d probably never notice unless it got really bad – dogs tolerate mild pain far better than people, so you’d only notice once it gets bad enough that they stop taking food or treats (which would mean it was really bad), or if the gums became visibly infected. Some breaks are bad enough to need veterinary treatment, or the roots or gums can become infected. Fortunately hasn’t happened to mine yet, but I wish I’d paid more attention to his teeth over the years.
If you have a breed that’s likely to live past 8 or 10, brushing their teeth semi-regularly (or getting a professional cleaning) is probably a good idea.
I have to admit, I genuinely thought there was nobody on this site who would make the “paleolithic man had a very low life expectancy”/”paleolithic man typically only lived into his 20s” mistake. That’s a mixup based on high infant mortality; once you got past age six or so you were likely to survive into your forties, and it’s probable that even in the very ancestralest environment some people survived into their seventies at least, although they’d be exponentially fewer than now, of course.
(Ötzi the Iceman was admittedly neolithic, but he was about 45 when he died and apparently healthy enough to try to cross the Alps, fight an unknown number of attackers, wound or kill three guys, lug a wounded friend around, then flee from his future murderers some way before they shot him in the shoulder, caught up to him, and bludgeoned him to death. Also, as a note on the tooth thing, “Ötzi’s teeth showed considerable internal deterioration from cavities. These oral pathologies may have been brought about by his grain-heavy, high carbohydrate diet“, according to Wiki. Emphasis mine.)
this paper claims that the proportion of people reaching age 30 skyrocketed c 30kya
Aha, but “Here, we examine when changes in longevity occurred by assessing the ratio of older to younger adults in four hominid dental samples from successive time periods, and by determining the significance of differences in these ratios. Younger and older adult status is assessed by wear seriation of each sample”! So it’s just that their teeth started wearing out faster from bad diets! 😉
I don’t imagine that you’re serious, but… I am not aware of a dietary change 30kya. Agriculture is usually dated to 10kya. Also, wear could be calibrated by looking at children, or something, but I don’t think that they did that (nor know that they had enough samples).
Eh, I just grabbed a number out of thin air. It doesn’t really matter if the average hunter-gatherer lived to their twenties or forties, the point still stands. For the most part, if you don’t do anything for your teeth the chances are you aren’t going to die from dental-related issues in your first forty years.
It’s likely that tooth decay would occur at some rate on any diet, but I’ve seen some children with mouths full of silver before they even lose their baby teeth.
Diet plays a big role in the rate of tooth decay.
@mark
Lets say you were the richest man in the world and could afford anything you wanted. But the downside is that no one ever wants to be around and you will die alone. The other option is that you live a lower class existence filled with violence but everyone looks up to you and wants to be your friend. Which option would you pick?
I’m not saying that our choice is exactly that but it’s clear Kaczynski sees a trade-off between technology and social capital and believes the latter is more important than the former.
@Wrong. Yes I have gathered from the comments that TK believes that tech has ruined a lot of human relationships. And I agree in the extreme situation that all the benefits of tech are not worth it if all human to human contact is severed, because it is human contact that is the most important part of being human.
But one only needs to look at this extreme situation if it is remotely plausible, and I don’t think it is. Tech has decreased human contact to some degree, but much of that is because most people don’t like constant human contact, and the paleolithic life probably did require that for survival. And human contact is much less violent than it was in paleolithic times, IMO, so the contact we have now is more satisfying. I think overall tech has slightly increased the value of human contact, not decreased it.
I do want to follow up a bit on the benefits of a hunter gatherer society. I have read theories that in many ways it was a pleasant way to live, and the theories sound correct to me. Generally one worked fewer hours than we do today, hunting with a pack of fellow tribal members was probably exciting and bonding, and gathering food would be a pleasant social event. This all assumes that food was easily available and not constantly at risk from competing tribes, and I suspect that was true most of the time. Of course it is also true that this only worked if population didn’t increase beyond the limit the area could support, so diseases, childhood deaths, and inter-tribal warfare needed to continually do their dirty deeds for it all to work. Overall, I prefer tech.
Hunter-gatherer life seems to me to depend a lot more on luck than farmer life or post-industrial life. If you made it past childhood, didn’t get killed or brutally raped by a local tribe, didn’t ruin into any serious famines or changes in climate, didn’t catch any horrible diseases, etc. etc. it was probably pretty decent while it lasted–maybe a good deal more enjoyable in some ways to be a lucky hunter-gatherer than a lucky farmer. But I feel like the farmer was a little less vulnerable to catastrophic failure, albeit less mobile and also subject to famine and disease, of course (and urbanites maybe even more subject to, though also resistant to, disease, it seems).
@Mark
I do think to some degree we have been conditioned to enjoy our alone time. Maybe conditioned isn’t exactly the right word, but are there any introverts in hunter gatherer societies? Maybe there are some who are less social than others but my bet would be that the majority of them don’t find interacting with others to be mentally draining. It’s just what they are used to. I think we’re also predisposed to fighting and the lack of violent conflict in our lives could contribute to feelings of alienation.
I could be wrong on all of this but I do think there is something that is deeply wrong with contemporary society that bewilders any rational understanding. It seems like the more objectively better society gets, the worse we feel. Assuming that’s true, what do we do about it? I don’t know. I certainly don’t feel like getting rid of everything civilization has accomplished is the right approach but I don’t see what else can be done. Religion may help by giving some transcendental ideology to work towards but as Nietzsche famously said, God is dead. What about other ideologies? They don’t seem to have the same psychological effect and they can also be incredibly destructive. I know communists believe that capitalism is to blame, but when the robots come take our jobs and reduce the majority of people to being economically useless, the average person is going to feel just as lost and aimless as the cog in the machine, even in a theoretical communist society. In the future, we may be able to actually engineer people in to feeling satisfied with their lives but that future isn’t here yet and I’m not sure how desirable that is.
So what other options do we have? I don’t know and while I don’t agree with Kaczynski, I can’t blame him for thinking the way he does.
Someone on SSC, I forget who, introduced me to this guy’s work a while back (yes, “really narrow streets” guy), and it seems relevant here, especially as it seems to offer better options for reclaiming some of the pleasant aspects we associate with premodern life without going full-luddite.
@Wrong Species:
It doesn’t seem like getting rid of all of civilization’s really necessary; I’d say that’s more of a panic overreaction on Kaczynski’s part. Was any of the misery associated with modernity and technology that Ted rails against present in the 16th century? It doesn’t seem like it, going by available sources. Do the Amish suffer from them? That doesn’t seem to be the case either. So apparently the sweet spot’s somewhere between Renaissance Italy and pre-industrial 19th century rural Germany. We could try to narrow it down; or, we could assume that whole span of time’s basically fit for purpose. That’s actually a pretty wide range of cultures and even technologies, and would allow a lot of variation and collective choice between nations, or regions, or groups, or whatever. It’s not exactly utopian but at least it leaves some room for preference, and I think almost everyone in the world would prefer it over a hard-reset to paleolithic conditions. It seems like a voluntary agreement that steam engines, cartridge-loading firearms and everything that comes after is verboten would be a lot more doable politically as well; which isn’t to say it’s remotely doable, of course.
Still, it’s in no way as bad as a strict choice between techno-doom and an eternal stone age.
@Anon
Imagine there’s a leisure-drudgery scale and a social-asocial one. Throughout history, the majority of people were very social. However, farmers also harder work and less pleasant work. In today’s society we may work similar rates but the lack of community pushes us to spare. So maybe we could pick the farmer life and be more happy but overall less satisfied than the hunter gatherer life. I don’t think is completely speculative. Apparently many new Wørld settlers defected to Native American society.
Yes, regardless of the rest of this discussion, that was an established problem in early America: Indians that the colonists attempted to forcibly civilize would run off to the woods at the first opportunity, while colonists kidnapped by Indians would refuse to come back under any circumstances (and if forced to return via counter-kidnapping or an exchange of captives or something, would run off to the woods at the first opportunity).
So clearly there’s something about civilized life that sucks to an staggering degree compared to even fairly squalid hunter-gathering, such that once someone learns there’s another option, they take that option. And yeah, that should probably alarm all of us a lot more than it does, or seems to do.
(I think Scott might have written a post about this, even?)
Do we have any idea if this was at all prevalent, or just sensation enough to warrant disproportionate attention?
Yeah, “Book Review: Empire of the Summer Moon” which gets a little mention in “Meditations on Moloch”.
Yes, he was basically describing Moloch in 1996.
In other words, technological advances inherently create externality traps that people are too recklessly acquisitive to coordinate in avoiding.
All those episodes of the power rangers where it’s stressed that they can’t use the giant robot all the time, but just when the baddies grow huge – we should’ve listened.
“well, you can’t eat your cake and have it too”
I have to give TK props for this one – IMHO, it makes the point much better than “have your cake and eat it too”, because the phrase suggests sequential operations. As a kid, I always asked “how can you possibly have cake if you don’t have it first?”
He probably should have stuck with the more common formulation — his unusual phrasing helped the FBI identify him.
use of ordnungs that specify the cultural direction we want to take and how various technologies might help or harm that
Good luck with that; see all the disapproving harrumphing from the science side when non-scientists such as ethicists, even worse those hick religious types, dared propose that stem cell research maybe should be subject to some constraints. “You can’t hobble progress” and “science is neither moral nor immoral, it is simply factually true” were some of the attitudes on display. “Only scientists have the right to opinions on this subject” was another one. And of course the old favourite “If we don’t do it, someone else will, and then we’ll fall behind and they’ll have all the benefits and profits”.
I think you possibly overestimate the amount of harrumphing in this case if you sympathise with the harrumphers. The belief that non-scientists shouldn’t have opinions on the ethics of certain types of research is a pretty obscure one; how many people think that only scientists should hold opinions on animal testing? Some people in favour of stem cell research might put forward general arguments about the amorality of science, but I think they would mostly withdraw them if they realised that they implied they couldn’t call the Tuskegee syphilis experiment unethical.
These guys sounded pretty upset; granted, it was in the context of a court case:
An ordnung is inward-facing. It says “This is the technology we will not adopt because we value too highly what we would have to give up as a result.” You just have to draw the line around “we” correctly. (The Amish draw theirs around their particular local community.) If it’s going to be practical, this means the line probably has to be drawn around small groups of people who have a lot in common, at least to start with.
Ah, good old Ted Kaz’, the ultimate in educated paranoid. Nice to hear he’s still updating his content for newer concerns.
As an author of a book on the future of technology, I greatly resent that a competing author, with a competing vision has a publicity advantage over me because I’ve never tried to kill.
So what you’re saying is, you think Ted K’s publicity drive worked?
His ideas certainly have far more publicity than if he didn’t bomb anyone, and this might well have been the driving motivation behind his terrorist campaign. We create horrible incentives when we give the ideas of terrorists serious attention.
But do they really? This is the first time I actually read anything by him with any attention. I recall a long time ago him getting some sort of manifesto published in a paper due to a bomb threat or something. I was probably a bit young, but I don’t think it even occurred to me to read it, because I was expecting something like Time Cube at best. Ideas about how to make the world a better place coming from a bomber are prima facie highly suspect. Being a terrorist might, in some ways, increase the probability of getting your ideas into print, but it greatly decreases the probability of them being taken seriously.
Of course, nowadays he could just write a blog, but that would be a bit ironic…
He made the cover of Time Magazine at a time when this mattered:
http://content.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19960415,00.html
Well, he got publicity, but for his ideas or himself?
That said, I do think I myself may be underestimating how hard it was to get an idea out there at all in the pre-internet era.
The Time Cover reads “Mad Genius” implying his ideas are worth taking seriously. Certainly Time would never describe an ISIS leader as a mad genius.
It’s definitely possible I was just too young at the time to realize the extent to which his ideas got somewhat of a serious hearing as a result of his terrorism, though I certainly don’t remember him mentioned in any other context than “did you hear they caught the unabomber?”